But then, one morning, she had a disquieting thought: what if the unicorn was waiting for her, alone, perhaps afraid, wondering what had become of her, why she had not kept their appointment. And in that moment, in that thought, everything was changed irrevocably.
~~~~~
Amanda Peterson was born in the Bronx in the summer of 1947, the third and youngest surviving of five children born to Lydia and Martin Peterson. Amanda had a brother, Tom, who was eight years older than her (and whom she considered to be a god) and a sister, Carole, ten years older whom she also worshipped, but with considerably less fervor. Tom, after all, was the family god - brilliant, handsome, male - all that was good. Amanda and Carole, were girls. They did not count. Not in any way that was important. The best they could hope for was to be "cute" or "nice." Lydia definitely favored nice. Lydia did not believe in attracting attention, particularly with something like cuteness or beauty. Lydia's paramount skill as a mother was disapproval. And she was very good at it. She could judge her children in her sleep, with one hand tied behind her back.. Lydia was the queen of all the judges that ever were, particularly with her daughters, and particularly, for some reason, with Amanda.
Maybe because Amanda was a dreamer, maybe because she could not conceal, despite Lydia's disapproval, her zest for life, her sense of joy and wonder. It is highly possible that Lydia envied her young daughter, resented her good fortune in not being poor, not being beaten and shamed, as she, Lydia had been. No question that Lydia's life had been a very hard one.
Lydia's mother, Augusta was a cold, remote woman who did not love or want the eight children to whom she had given birth. At some point in Lydia's childhood her mother had joined a "Free Methodist Church," removed her wedding ring and "married Christ," despite which nuptials, she managed to give birth to several more children. And then there was Lydia's father, George, an angry bitter man whose pain lashed out at those around him. With only a third grade education, he had worked at a paper mill until a drunken co-worker turned on a saw while he was cleaning it, costing him the thumb and second finger of his right hand and his job. These were the days before unions, before compassion for the working man was forced upon the ruling classes. No fingers, no job. In the end, George taught himself to repair clocks and watches and do odd jobs for people. He had a special gift with clocks and people came from long distances for his services. But it did not make him any less angry or unhappy.
Amanda knew all these things, because Lydia told her all about them, about how hard and cruel her own life had been and how lucky Amanda was, how grateful she should be for her good fortune. And Amanda soaked in Lydia's pain and tried to comfort it, tried to be a salve for all that sorrow and anger and neglect. Lydia told Amanda all her unhappiness and Amanda listened with her wide, tender blue eyes and her gentle, open heart and wished that she could make her mother happy, that she could make her feel loved now even if she had not been loved then.
It was hard for Amanda to understand how her grandfather could be the person her mother described, although everyone seemed to be afraid of him. Her cousins, her brother and sister avoided him, but not Amanda. They seemed to think he was mean, but she looked at him and saw only a deep, sad, loneliness in his eyes. He seemed so sad to her, sadder than her mother, who seemed, if she had thought about it, more angry than sad. Grandpa seemed so alone. She like to watch him work on his watches and he must have sensed her sympathy, because of all the children, all the grown-ups, only she was allowed to go into the small silver trailer where he did his work. She would stand there silently and watch him work, not asking questions, not touching anything, just watching. She had no motive in this, no desire to please him. She just like to watch him work, liked the quietness of him, liked being away from the others who were wild and sure of themselves, who ran and laughed and played in a way she was not able to do.
She could not imagine this strange sad man, beating her mother one Sunday morning while a friend looked on because he thought she should have gone to church. Her mother explained that he had mellowed with age. She was lucky here too, that she knew him now and not when he was young and full of fury. Oh, the stories Lydia told were so sad and terrible. How she had been working in a hotel making beds by the time she was eight years old, how she had had to clean the house and take care of her six younger brothers and sisters, how she had been stoned during the First World War, because her mother was a German, how her father had called her a whore because she laughed with a friend of her brother and had refused to speak with her for weeks and weeks, until his workshop needed cleaning and he once again uttered her name. How she had had to plead and beg and insist on finishing high school because the family thought it unnecessary. How she had had only one dress (Amanda had many). How her father had called her "Handsome" because she was so ugly, because she had two sets of teeth growing over each other and they did not want to spend money on a dentist, how she had almost died because no one had taken her to the doctor and her tonsils had rotted inside her and the poison in her body had swelled it up to twice her normal size. Over and over and over Amanda heard these and other stories and carried them in her heart like precious gems that her mother shared with her and her alone. No one else knew these things, not her father, not anyone. These were gifts Lydia gave only to Amanda and Amanda felt the depth of responsibility that such an honor carried with it. She took her job very seriously. She did not let her conscious mind hear the implied criticism: This did not happen to you. Selfish, ungrateful child, you have so much and still you dare to want more. No, Amanda did not let herself hear this, but focused her full attention on how brave and strong and wonderful her mother was to have survived these terrible things which had been done to her. Mother's pain was so big that she needed Amanda's help carrying it. There was no room or time for Amanda to have pain - and how could she - she was not her mother. She was cared for and she was very grateful.
Now almost 50, Amanda had finally begun to understand the true nature of her childhood. She could get her mind around the truth, but her heart was another story. Her heart did not want to recognize its own woundedness, as though to acknowledge the truth, depth and length of her pain would break it into a million pieces. Already Amanda felt a bit like she and her heart were the badly glued together remnants of someone she had once been. The past nine years had been a strange process of groping blindly for the shattered fragments of her identity, trying to glue herself back together into a whole person. She would never again be who she had thought she was and the question now was who had she become? Because no matter how artfully one reassembled the pieces of a broken teapot, whether the restoration was visually flawless or clumsily done, once smashed it could never again truly be a teapot. It might become a lovely decorative object, a planter, a sentimental treasure, but never again would it hold hot liquid tea. And, more complicated still, in the crashing fall from her former "reality," Amanda discovered that she had never been who she thought she was, so she was starting over with no guidelines at all, building a totally new creation from the ashes of a past which barely existed in her memory.
There had been so much to deal with in such a short span of time: estrangement from her brother, Lydia's journey into madness and her gradual fading away, confronting her father's alcoholism and the harsh truths of its impact on her. But all of that paled in the face of two other things: her memories - vague as they were - of having been violently molested, and the murder of her older sister.
Everyone had marveled at her strength after Carole died, but she did not feel strong, only numb. And angry and sad and tired. So very tired. It was Carole's children who were strong - amazing young beings - who carried their grief, sometimes dealing with it, sometimes not, but continuing on with their lives, each in their own way. At 19, Carole's son Martin had been the oldest, followed by Samantha, 16 and Karla, 13. Amanda was awed by them, as she always had been. Since their infancy, she had watched them grow with such a sense of wonder. Each one unique and miraculous, full of life and curiosity. She had always wanted children, and even before Carole's death had experienced a fierce, joyful, profoundly maternal love for these three incredible beings her sister had created. Amanda wondered if Carole could see them from Heaven. Whether she could or not, she should be proud. What an extraordinary mother she must have been to have grown these amazing people. In losing her sister, Amanda had slowly awakened to how much she herself owed to the gentle self-effacing person whom her sister had been. Only now it was too late to thank her. She had loved her sister, but she had not truly appreciated her.
Amanda wished sometimes that she could talk to her mother, could encounter her again after years of therapy and the beginning acknowledgment of her own anger. Maybe seeing her mother would help her find the truth of her love -- and her hate. Or maybe she was hoping that somehow, finally, from the new perspective of the afterlife, her mother would really see her, would finally tell her that she was ok. She had tried in the last days of Lydia's life, to make her look, had begged, even, for her approval. In movies and novels, there was always an epiphany; death brought wisdom to the dying and peace to the pain of the parent/child relationship. But not for Amanda and Lydia.
One grey, dreary day in late January, shortly before Lydia died, Amanda had entered the hospital to find her mother resting on a guerney in an open lobby area. The chill dampness of the wind's breath still clung to her and she felt exposed in her grief and loneliness out of the confined privacy of her mother's room. Although it had been months since her mother had spoken, Amanda felt sure that her intelligence was intact, that she understood what was going on around her. She responded at times in subtle ways, an eyebrow, a look, a barely visible nod, but ultimately talking to her was like talking to yourself. It was lonely, frustrating, and Amanda was engaged in a desperate race against time to please her mother before Death finally took her. Lydia had been dying in slow pieces for 12 years, each setback replacing the original Lydia with a shadow look-alike, each shadow a bit less real. The early shadows had been surprisingly sweet, but over time, all that remained was Lydia's darkness, her coldness, especially towards Amanda.
She was mostly skin and bones, silent, staring. The doctors and nurses tended to talk about Lydia as though she wasn't there and although she knew they had no way of knowing the brilliant, witty woman Lydia had once been, it bothered Amanda deeply, yet despite all that Lydia's withdrawal was so complete that she herself sometimes fell into the trap. But she tried always to be gentle and loving, never to patronize the 80-year old remnant of who her mother had once been.
Mostly, she seemed to bring more comfort to the parade of elderly ladies who passed through her mother's room. Once, she had decided to put her shyness aside and sing for Lydia. It was one of the few things her mother had approved of about her and Amanda thought perhaps it would please her. If it did, Lydia gave no sign, but the frail 90-year old in the other bed was over-joyed, singing along in a hearty, quavering voice, on old gospel hymns which she requested, harking back to younger, happier days. Amanda was glad to bring such pleasure, but she worried, too, that Lydia would hold it against her, this attention to others.
One time there was an old lady crying in the hall, ignored by doctors and nurses alike. On impulse, Amanda had taken one of the daisies she had brought for her mother, and, although she felt disloyal, somehow, she could not help delighting in the miracle that simple daisy had produced. The wailing cry had ceased and light had come into the old lady's face as she talked about her garden and her loneliness and her love of flowers.
But on this cold January day, there had been no diversions. Amanda felt the shadow of death moving towards them, still holding back, but moving in, closer, ever closer. She did not resent Death's coming, wished for it, because Lydia was no longer really living, because she believed that her mother had long craved death but had not known how to give in to it. Shortly after Carole's death, she had visited Lydia's dreams, radiant and glowing in a beautiful white dress and had invited her to a party. She had tried to go, Lydia said, but had fallen off the ship into dark, cold water. Amanda's found that dream comforting. It confirmed her belief in an afterlife, and confirmed also what she had already sensed - that Lydia wanted to die but simply did not know how. Amanda thought she was probably afraid, having been saturated in her youth with promises of hell-fire and damnation and tried to share her own belief about death - that it was not an end but a doorway to something beautiful, a place of angels and love and peace.
But back to that day in January. Amazing how her mind kept skipping away from the raw pain of it, from the shame and the pride and the disappointment. Lydia had lain, unmoving on her guerney and Amanda had chatted briefly about the weather and other trivia. Her plan had been to read to her mother as her father had often done, and she had brought a book of short stories by Willa Cather, one of her mother's favorite writers. She had picked one at random, partly because it was short, but as she got into it, she realized that it was a horrible mistake. It was some grim tale of loneliness and death and whether her discomfort was for her mother or herself she did not know, but she could not continue reading. Lydia did not seem to care. And then as the sense of failure and ineptitude swelled over her, so too did her own need for comfort and before she could stop them, or edit or control them, the words came pouring out: "Mother, I know that in your own way you love me, but I have never felt approved of, have always felt wrong in your eyes and it hurts so much. I love you so much and I try so hard. I just wish you could approve of me." Something like that.
Now what should have happened, what would have happened in a proper world, in the world of great literature, was perhaps a small tear would trickle from her mother's eye and she would manage somehow to speak or to convey with her eyes, her sorrow at Amanda's pain, her love and, yes, her approval, her pride in this good and gentle woman who was her daughter. But, of course, that is not what happened. What happened instead was that Lydia glared briefly at Amanda and then turned her head away. Death was not going to scare Lydia into reaching out for love or exhibiting even a hint of tenderness. She might be afraid of death, but she was not that scared. And a few days later she was dead and the door on that acceptance was closed irrevocably.
Amanda later tried to reinterpret her mother's look - it was not rejection, but sorrow and shame for her daughter's pain - but, she could not fool herself into believing that and used the event to heap another level of blame upon herself. Why did she persist in so cruelly tormenting this woman who was her mother? She was dying and she could not help it that she did not feel what her daughter wanted from her. Why could she not have left it alone? Why burden a dying old woman with her selfish needs? But she had also felt the first tickling threat of her own rage. Why could her mother not have given her even a token kindness? Why could she not receive the love that Amanda heaped on her?
Her mother had made some progress over the years, had learned, to say "I love you," though she was never terribly comfortable with it and in the end had been willing to say it to everyone but Amanda. Amanda remembered the first time, twelve years earlier, when she had said "I love you," to her parents. Her father had handled it reasonably well, but her mother, already in the first stages of illness, had responded with the painful and endearing words: "Well, I don't mind you too much either." It was something. And Amanda kept after her, never let a conversation go by without saying those words: "I love you, Mother." And eventually her mother would, on occasion, respond in kind. But towards the end, she slid backwards from that bold statement and the last time she had actually spoken to her daughter it had been to refuse even the words.
It was shortly after Amanda's father died, three short month's before her own death. Carole's children had come with her to visit Lydia and Lydia was in fine spirits. Her husband's death had set her free in some way. His love, his loyalty - like her own, Amanda realized - had pushed at Lydia. She distrusted love. She did not love or even like herself and suspected the motives of anyone who seemed to care too much- or that was what Amanda believed was the problem. Anyway, on this day, each of the children had said "I love you, Grandma," and she had responded with "I love you too." But to Amanda's love she had not responded, and Amanda, half-joking had called her on it. "What about me?" "You say it too much," her mother had responded, "I don't believe you." And that had been the end of it.