Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

The virtual bitch slap
A new game, Sissyfight 2000, lets me be the playground bully I never was.
By Amy Silverman
[04/27/00]

The other side of the closet
After 10 years and two children, my husband told me he is gay.
By Janet Nicolazzo
[04/26/00]

Sleeping with the enemy
While I'm planning security for the IMF demonstrations, my husband is getting thrown in jail. He better not ask me for bail.
By Lisa Guide
[04/24/00]

Born to pop pills
I have a well-chosen capsule for every occasion.
By Elissa Schappell
[04/20/00]

Our town
The place I share with Timothy McVeigh.
By Mark Phillips
[04/19/00]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

MotherKind By Jayne Anne Phillips Knopf, 295 pages Fiction Also Today The flower of cities all In Zadie Smith's remarkable debut novel, London is a merry capital of mismatched lovers. By Maria Russo Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

Standing there, observing Phillips, I was struck by contradictions, as readers of her work have always been. Here was the originator of characters who marched straight out of the dark side and spoke: "Jamaica, you black doll, wobbling like a dead girl sewn of old socks ..." Here was the author of tender reminiscence: "My mother's ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water." Here was the teacher -- at Brandeis, at Harvard, at Boston University, elsewhere -- with the reputation for being obsessed with the minuscule, the line edit, the word and its hyphen, the punctuation mark.

"Have you been to the Castle?" She came toward me.

I shook my head no.

"Well, tomorrow," she said. "Tomorrow we'll go. Your family. My family. Here's my number. Call by 10."

We spent the next day jostled by the summer crowds of Prague, in the darkened corridors of St. Vituvius Cathedral, beside the violet drapes of burnished confessionals. We spent it beneath the pinched-up height of vaulted roofs, before the ardent depictions in colored glass. Outside there was summer heat and triangulated gardens, a clan of singers in velvet green and ochre frocks. Phillips was there with her husband and two sons. My little boy and husband were with me. We made our way out of one knot and penetrated another.

We finally crossed the Charles Bridge. It was hot; morning was done. We bought postcards, jewelry, architectural miniatures. Then, saying little to one another, we parted in Mala Strana. I turned to watch her go. I saw how it was. Jayne Anne in the center. Her two sons on either side, her husband nearby. Jayne Anne Phillips: a mother and a wife.

"Black Tickets," the 1979 short-story collection that catapulted Phillips to fame at 26, is best remembered for its explicit fractions of lascivious lives, for the teenage whores and drifters who erupt from stories like "Stripper," "Lechery," "Country" and "Gemcrack" and deliver their inimitable street poetics. And yet it's the book's familial stories that seem most haunting and mysterious, even prophetic.

It's the daughters narrating these stories who stand out, the young, between-places women who come home and don't belong. They talk to their mothers about sex and orgasms. They offer their naked mothers a towel after a bath. Between these mothers and their daughters there is telepathy and disagreement. Perpetually a sickness lingers, a fear, rumbling near the surface, of loss.

In the story called "Home," a daughter remembers a cycle of care. Phillips was in her early 20s when she wrote these lines:

My mother doesn't forget her mother.

Never one bedsore, she says. I turned her every fifteen minutes. I kept her skin soft and kept her clean, even to the end.

I imagine my mother at twenty-three; her black hair, her dark eyes, her olive skin and that red lipstick. She is growing lines of tension in her mother. Her teeth press into her lower lip as she lifts the woman in the bed. The woman weighs no more than a child. She has a smell ... .

I did all I could, she sighs. And I was glad to do it. I'm glad I don't have to feel guilty.

No one has to feel guilty, I tell her.

And why not? says my mother. There's nothing wrong with guilt. If you are guilty, you should feel guilty.

My mother has often told me that I will be sorry when she is gone.

Next page | Fragments of near pornography, lines gorgeously twisted