10: Harriet's life
Originally emailed on Feb. 8, 1998
Hello.
Harriet is here for the weekend, having vacated her house because Nona's daughter Mira and her kid are there. "I'm glad to have you, " I said as we lounged in my living room on Friday evening, "but isn't there room for you all at home?"
"Oh, there's room," she said. "But Mira isn't just here for a visit. She's fleeing domestic strife. I figured she'd want to be alone with her mother. Besides, she doesn't like me."
"Why not?" I asked. "Is it because you're white?"
"You know, that's always the easiest answer," Harriet said, "and Nona and I have noticed that we tend to use it a lot when we disagree about something. But we figure we have a lot of differences other than the black/white thing. She's twelve years older than me, a mother and a grandmother. She's a Christian and I'm not. She thinks I don't keep a tidy enough house. I like action movies and sci-fi and she likes art films. There are a hundred different ways any two people are different. We've made a pact not to let race be the easy answer for us. So why doesn't Mira like me? Well, I'm her mother's partner but I'm only a few years older than she is. I live in the house she grew up in, and it's because I needed the space that all her leftover childhood stuff is in boxes in the attic instead of still in 'her' room. I don't attend church. And maybe she just plain doesn't like me; it's been known to happen."
"Have you tried to make her like you?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah," Harriet said. "Maybe I tried too hard to show her I meant to be part of the family, and it felt intrusive to her. Anyway, I pretty much leave her and her mother to themselves anymore."
"Do you like her?" I asked.
Harriet grinned. "She's Nona's daughter. How can I not like her?"
I said, "A-ha! You don't like her. Why not?"
"It's not her I don't like," Harriet said. "It's the way Nona acts around her--Nona's reaction to Mira's marriage problems, for instance."
I said, "This sounds juicy. Let me make some coffee and you can tell me all about it."
"First," Harriet said, when we were settled with our cups, "you know Nona was only sixteen when she had Mira."
"And her mom had been a teenage mother, too, right?"
"Yeah, but they both prided themselves on having done all right despite it. Nona's theory is that they managed pretty well because neither of them had any more children right away, and Nona kept on living with her mom. But neither she nor her mother had any support from their kid's father. Early on, Nona set as her main goal in motherhood to see her daughter grown up before she had children--in a position to choose to have a kid."
"And that's what happened, right? Mira was grown and married before she had the baby."
"Right. So Mira's a grown woman with a husband who is an active father. That's all Nona ever wanted for her. And now she won't see that the marriage might have flaws, or even that Mira might. It's like, for Nona, the measure of a good husband and father is that he pays his share of the bills, and the measure of maturity for a woman is that she be old enough to vote before she's a mother, and since Mira managed that, she must be a responsible adult. In Nona's eyes, because Ben and Mira got married, decided to have a baby before they got pregnant, and are still married, they can do no wrong."
"Are they doing wrong?"
"Well--they fight all the time, and respond to fights in these outrageous ways. One or the other of them is always taking off for awhile to 'cool down,' usually taking the baby along, and usually with no notice of where they've gone. I'm surprised Mira came to her mother's this weekend; he's likely to find her. And once when he left, Mira went to his office with a big bruise on her forehead and told his boss he'd beaten her. Later, when they made up, she claimed she had given herself the bruise bumping into one of the kitchen cupboards, and just decided to use it against him since she was mad."
"Do you think he really hit her?" I asked.
"I don't know," Harriet said. "I think he's capable of it, but Mira tells a lot of tales. She told him once in a fight that the baby isn't his, and that there's no telling who the father is because she was having sex with so many men at the time. She says whatever suits her at the time, and takes it back when the wind changes. And Nona just goes along with it, and makes excuses for her. She won't see that Mira manipulates her with lies, and she won't tell Mira that maybe getting out of this marriage would be the best thing. I hate watching Mira put Nona through the wringer."
"And that's why you're here this weekend."
"Yeah," Harriet said. " And because Mira doesn't like me. I've tried to tell Nona what I think is going on with Mira, and Mira knows it."
"Has it helped?" I asked.
"No. It's only caused fights. So I don't try anymore. But I don't have to hang around and watch the dysfunctional family drama, either. So here I am."
"Here you are," I said. "How are things otherwise?"
"Things are good, when Nona's daughter isn't turning our lives topsy-turvy."
I said, "I mean, how are things with you. How's work going?"
"Oh, all right," she said. She smelled, as she always does, of printing chemicals and the orange-scented hand cleaner she uses to scrub the ink off at the end of the day. Her hands and forearms always look pink and scrubbed, and there is ink under her fingernails. Harriet had been printing in blue, I could see.
I worry about her working as a printer. Nona worries about it, too, and I think Harriet does but she doesn't talk about it much. The chemicals are hard on her skin and once she had a sty in her eye that wouldn't go away for a long time and the doctor said it might be from the chemicals. And she's on her feet all day on a thin rug laid over a cement floor; she runs two presses at once and the noise is incredible. I took the boys to visit her once and we couldn't talk to her it was so loud. She just kept smiling and pointing to her ears, and then she pulled her earplugs out to show us. She wore a big denim apron but her jeans and T-shirt were splattered with different colors. The boys thought it was cool; they liked to see the printed pages come shooting out into a big pile at one end of the press, and Harriet let them stir the ink, which is thick like peanut butter. They loved the way Harriet could grab a big stack of messy paper, fan it quickly, rap it on the countertop, and turn it into a neat pile. The boys think Harriet has the best job in the world. But I smelled the smells and heard the noise and I thought, "This is no place to be for thirty years."
When I first knew Harriet, she took a couple of classes at the community college; she was thinking of getting her B.A. But she hasn't talked about that in a long time. I think it was hard for her to come up with the money for tuition, and she's often tired after a day's work and just wants to bum around her house with Nona. I understand that, but I hate to see her inertia keep her in a job that's bad for her. How many years can a person work with those chemicals and not get sick (even if the chemicals are getting less toxic thanks to the environmentalists)? How many years can a person work standing on a cement floor and not do damage to her knees and hips? Harriet's the printshop manager now, which means she gets to sit down sometimes as much as two hours out of eight, but even so. There's no place to advance at that shop. What's her future?
I have long wanted to talk with her about it but haven't known how. But Friday night, perhaps because I'd had too much caffeine, I said, "You don't like your job. How long are you going to stay there?"
Harriet said, "Where could I go? I look in the paper, but there's nothing I'm qualified for that pays better than I'm making now. I've been at the shop almost four years."
I said, "Whatever happened to the idea of going to college?"
"I couldn't afford it," Harriet said.
I said, "That's no excuse. Can I afford it? I've got two kids."
"You don't have a mortgage," Harriet said. "You've said yourself that saves you a lot of money."
"I happen to know that Nona doesn't have a mortgage either, because she and I were talking once about how hard it is to set aside the property tax money. She can't be charging you much to live there."
"Well," Harriet said, "maybe I don't want to go to school. Not everybody does, you know."
"No, but I thought you did."
"I thought, " Harriet said, "we were going to have a pleasant relaxing evening. Shouldn't we be watching the Olympic preview or something?"
I said, "We don't have to talk about it if you don't want. But you know I just want you to be happy in your life."
Harriet said, "I think there are lots of things I could have done, if I hadn't messed up when I was younger. But past a certain age, a person is pretty much stuck."
"Stuck!" I said. "Harriet, you're thirty-one years old! If there's something you want to do, you're much too young to have given up on it."
"But Nona's forty-five," she said.
I said, "And that means, what, exactly?"
"Well, Nona and I have this in common, you know, that we made choices when we were young--or things happened to us--that got us off the track we would maybe have preferred to take. Do you think locksmithing was Nona's dream career? She needed something she could learn at community college in not too much time that paid pretty well, because of the baby. But she wanted to go to college."
"And?" I said.
"And she's done pretty well, you know. She owns her own business and everything. But she still regrets some things. And she absolutely feels she is too old to make a change--she's been in her business twenty-five years, she hopes to retire in another ten years. She doesn't want to make a change now that would mess with her early retirement."
"And you can't go to college or change jobs or do whatever it is you want to do because--" I prompted.
"Because I'd feel guilty if Nona's twenty-five successful years in a business that wasn't her first choice, and the financial security that's given her, so that my living expenses while I live with her are very low, made it possible for me to go to school or something."
"Harriet," I said, "that is the lamest thing I've ever heard. Has Nona heard this idiotic line of reasoning?"
"No," Harriet said. "I figured it out all by myself."
"Will you talk to Nona about it? Jesus, Harriet, I'd bet you dollars to donuts that Nona would be glad if she could help you get out of a crappy dead-end job."
"I don't want to talk to Nona about it, Louella. I've made up my mind."
"Harriet, I know Miss Munn would say I'm overstepping my bounds, but if you don't talk to Nona about this, I will."
Harriet sulked off to bed. By Saturday morning, we were able to be pretty much normal with each other, and we've had a good visit. But I'm mad at her for throwing away an opportunity, and she's mad at me for telling her that's what she's doing. Well, if there's one thing I've learned from being a mother, it's that sometimes the people you love get mad when you do something that's for their own good. I can take her being pissy with me if I can only help to get her out of that print shop.
© Copyright 1997-2001 Su Penn. Design by David Dierauer.
