Mothers and Daughters

The scene was a particularly difficult one, and David’s absence wasn’t making it any easier. Gillian kept alternating her attention between the open script in her lap and the clock on the wall. He’ll call, she told herself. As soon as he knows anything, he’ll call. Now think of the girl in the play.

She looked at the clock, and then turned her attention back to the script, gathering the shreds of her concentration, seeking in herself a key to the girl’s character. She loves her husband, Gillian thought, that much we know. All right, so why did Igor ask me to work with an actor I despise? Just because of that, I suppose. The effectiveness of the scene depends entirely on how convincing the girl’s love is. Igor’s given me something that will be especially difficult for me. All right, I’ll be deeply in love with my husband. I’ll be charming and warm and sympathetic to him from the moment we step onto that stage. Oh brother, she thought.

She looked again at the clock, and then turned back to the script and began drumming an attitude into her mind. She told herself she liked him, no, better than that, she absolutely adored this simple, untalented jerk, she worshiped the ground he walked on, the last thing she wanted from him was an argument. The girl she was playing had been raised strictly, and on the premise that marriage was a sacrament, that marriage and obedience, and duty to one’s husband, the bearing and raising of children, were a woman’s only real goals. She was somewhat shy and reticent, a good wife and a good mother. In the scene, she was supposed to discover that her husband had been unfaithful to her, had indeed withdrawn a thousand dollars from their joint bank account and given the money to his paramour. Faced with this moment of truth, the girl was supposed to explode in a complete reversal of character, expressing whatever hostilities had been repressed during the years of her childhood and the eight years of her even-keeled marriage. Gillian made a face. She found the scene and the character difficult to believe, but she supposed this meant only that the character was someone beyond the scope of her own personality. Nonetheless, a good actress was supposed to create believable experience in terms of related, if seemingly obscure, experiences of her own, wasn’t she? Gillian sighed heavily, closed her eyes against the clock, and began to probe.

She could understand the girl’s upbringing because it was faintly reminiscent of her own, possibly reminiscent of every girl’s upbringing, but the similarity ended right there. As any of the embryo actors in Igor’s class might have put it, Gillian had “never done the marriage bit.” But she had certainly been subjected to the interminable pounding of a marriage-oriented mother, perhaps even a marriage-oriented society. Her own training was not unique. She recognized that possibly every son and daughter in the world were exposed to a childhood of propaganda, the word-of-mouth advertising passed from generation to generation, the key words of which were “when you get married.” She thought it interesting that this was the transmitted prophecy, an allegation that left no real room for choice. She could not imagine any mother, except in the novels of Colette, saying to her daughter, “When you grow up and become someone’s mistress,” no, she could not imagine it. Nor would anyone say to her son, “When you grow up and become a bachelor.” The word came down with unflinching adult authority, camouflaged in various guises, but always essentially the same: