I nearly choked on my tea. It’s not that I haven’t wished many times that Grace was my real mother. It’s just that our relationship — ever since its tumultuous beginning when I was a teenager and she married my father — has always been based on the most scrupulous honesty. We two are the survivors in a family of catastrophes.

“Sure,” I said. But already I was lying. I knew I couldn’t do it.

The fact is, I already have a mother. She and I are not particularly close, and actually I am more likely to call Grace when I have a problem to discuss or am in need of some old-fashioned mothering. But still, it is my mother whom I think of as Mom. Yet, for as long as I’ve been alive, it’s been Grace’s contention that if life had been truly fair, my mother would never have gotten into our cozy family picture. She was the understudy who somehow landed the big part.

You see, my father was in love with Grace from the time he was a kid in junior high. It wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion that they would someday grow up and marry, because she was also wildly flirtatious with his younger brother. In fact, to hear the family legend, Grace frankly was one of those women who couldn’t make up her mind and was having a good time weighing her options.

But by college things were definitely going my father’s way. He and Grace carried on the standard 1940s courtship: cotillion dances, trips to the countryside, church picnics. I’ve seen the pictures: Grace, with her shoulder-length blond pageboy and creamy white dresses, smiling; my father, tall and strong, gazing down at her, lost in love.

There wasn’t even a disapproving family to contend with. Everything was in place for them to marry and begin their happily ever after together when, right after graduation, they had a lovers’ quarrel, and my father was coincidentally offered a job elsewhere. He left town in anger. Maybe he thought the change of territory would do him good and help Grace see how much she missed him. Those were the days when playing hard to get was considered a worthy solution to any kind of romantic problem.

Instead, when he went to rent a room in a boarding house on his first day away from home, it was my mother who answered the door and let him in. “This,” he told me once, “is how you know God has a sense of humor.”

Grace would be mortified to know how often my mother and I discussed this story as I was growing up. She and I would sit on her bed, usually late at night, my mother’s speech slurred by the Valium she’d taken. She was never well. She was prone to migraines and anxiety attacks, unexplained fits of hysteria where she’d throw things and scream at my father and then collapse in a heap on the kitchen floor. Several times a year, she went away to what she called the “nut ward” to get better.

But she loved the story of her triumph over Grace. “I threw open that door, and there was the most unbelievably handsome man I’d ever seen in my life,” she’d say. “And he took one look at me, with my little white sandals and my toenails painted Kiss Me Pink, and I knew I had him. He was like a fish caught in the net.”

Then at other times she’d say, “Grace thought she could continue to treat him mean, and that he’d always stick around. Ha! She didn’t figure on him running to somebody like me. I knew just the cure for her kind of nonsense!”

She and my father were married three months from the day they met, and I was born 11 months after that. Grace wants to think that it was a dismal marriage. But it had its perky moments, as I have told her. There were lots of laughs, games of Parcheesi and Go Fish, dancing in the living room after dinner. My mother kept her figure, and her toenails were always Kiss Me Pink, and her hair whipped up into a blond bouffant. She liked parties and playing the ukulele and staying up late and playing the stereo loud. My father always seemed to be smiling — but in all honesty I can tell Grace it was the kind of smile people give when they’re shaking their heads at the same time, as if thinking, “What an unholy mess.”

I saw all this. I saw my mother trying too hard, grabbing my father’s hand to get him to jitterbug in the living room. I saw his pained but smiling expression, and the way her gaze always lingered on him longer than his did on her. Sometimes watching them made my heart hurt.

When I was 12, I came home one day and found another man sitting in the living room with my mother. He was “Uncle Jack,” she said, in a tone of voice that was all wrong. Later that night she came into my room and said it would be best if we didn’t mention Uncle Jack to Daddy.

“He knows him,” she said, “but they aren’t really friends. I think Daddy might get the wrong idea if he knew Uncle Jack was here.”

“So, if he’s my uncle, how come I never heard of him?” I said.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she told me.

A year later, when I was 13, it had all been accomplished. My father had moved across town into a furnished apartment and the divorce papers were signed and filed away. My mother and Uncle Jack had married — we were now to call him Dad — and we were moving across the country to California. She probably wouldn’t have to go to the nut ward anymore, my mother said, gripping my arm and imploring me with her eyes to be overjoyed with the news. “I am planning to be wildly, wildly happy for the rest of my life,” she said to me. “You can’t deny me that, not even if you mope for the whole rest of your life.” It was a whole, fresh start.

“You broke up our family because you wanted to be married to another man,” I told her flatly. “It wasn’t a question of not going to the nut ward anymore. You were bored with Daddy and wanted someone else.”

“Your father,” she informed me coldly, “has been seeing Grace for years.”

We have had 30 years now to let this sift down. And it has, as family legends always do.

My mother and Uncle Dad Jack divorced some time ago when he discovered her with another man. But Jack was an alcoholic, so she said no one should blame her for bailing out. The trouble was that the other man didn’t stick around either, and now she lives alone, taking medications for the migraines and the crying fits. She’s still got the bright pink toenails and the blonde bouffant, but she doesn’t play the ukulele anymore. And she doesn’t ask me if I see Grace.

My father died several years ago, after being married to Grace for 20 years. He wrote me the year before he died that he had found the happiness with her he had sought for his whole life. “I feel with her like every day is my birthday,” he said. “I just want to spend the rest of my life saying thank you to her.”

I have wanted to thank her too, because of the life she made for my father and because of her tough honesty over the years — but mostly for her willingness to reach out to me, even though I am that epitome of social catastrophes: The Daughter of the First Wife. These days Grace no longer resembles the lithe blonde she was in those dreamy 1940s pictures; she is what my husband calls “a tough old bird,” with her piercing brown eyes and her honesty-at-any-cost appraisal of her life.

“I don’t want the bullshit anymore,” she once told me. “All that fakery and insincerity people dish out to each other. Just tell me the truth. Always the truth.”

But my father’s death has made her fragile. She winces now when I talk about my childhood, and I see it and think, ah, it’s because my mother was there.

Today, reaching across the table, her eyes filled with mischief, she says, “It’s not so far from the way it was supposed to be — you belonging to me, I mean. Suppose you really were one of my eggs really that somehow just got mixed up and lost and landed in this other woman’s uterus?”

I am the one mixed up? I want to say to her. It was me, in egg form, who somehow landed in the wrong place?

We have all seen it from our own perspectives. There have been times, thinking about this huge complicated family romance, that I have seen Grace’s fickleness as the root of the problem, the cause that drove a wedge between my father and her and prevented their early happiness. Then, at other times, I have thought life could have been so happy had my mother not been such a spatula-throwing screamer, waking the family up in the night with her howls of regret. I don’t see it this way now, but there were years when I thought that my father could have loved her if only she could have settled herself down just a bit, developed some Grace-like serenity.

Today, though, I think of my father taking a three-month vacation from his intended life and finding himself on a 13-year train that derailed all his future plans. Has he no responsibility here, marrying a woman he knew he did not love and leaving behind the one he knew that he did? Did he think he could really get away with that, just tucking that feeling away somewhere and basing a whole life on the hope that it would never resurface?

Then I remember that these three were merely 20-year-olds when all these momentous decisions were made: 20-year-olds raised on jitterbug and hard-to-get games, with no consciousness at all of what it was to live by one’s own truth. Grace’s eyes remind me of my mother’s, when she’d look at my father across the rolled-up living room rug, as though she were saying, “Let’s pretend you are mine. Let’s pretend she never even crossed your mind.”

I reach over and squeeze Grace’s hand. “I love you,” I say to her. Because it is true and because maybe that is all any of us has ever needed.

She won’t talk about going.

I say, “I’m going to miss you,” and she gives me one of her looks and
finds a reason to leave the room.

Another time I say, in a voice so friendly it surprises even me: “Do you
think you’ll take down your posters and pictures and take them with
you, or will you get new ones at college?”

She answers, in a voice filled with annoyance, “How should I know?”

I was
also 18 when I left home in 1970, but instead of moving to college, I was
leaving to live with my boyfriend. I had been angry with my mother for
months before I left. I flung my belongings in cardboard boxes, taking
everything with me because I was never, never coming back home
again. My mother stood in the doorway, her arms folded, and said I was
making a huge mistake. “If what you’re hoping for is marriage,
this isn’t the way to get it,” she said. “He’ll just live with you and then toss you
away when something better comes along. I know that type.”
“I’m not looking for marriage,” I responded. “I’m just looking for a
chance to get out of here.”

My daughter is off with friends most of the time. Yesterday was the
last day she’d have until Christmas with her friend Katharine, whom
she’d known since kindergarten. Soon, very soon, it will be her last day
with Sarah, Claire, Heather and Lauren.

And then it will be her last day with me. My friend Karen told me, “The
August before I left for college, I screamed at my mother the whole
month. Be prepared.”

We in our 40s have mostly learned to forgive our mothers for the
crimes they committed in raising us. We have paid therapists thousands
of dollars and spent endless hours talking with friends, going over and
over the mistakes that were our legacy, and we have figured out how
not to make the same errors with our daughters. We know just what
kind of support girls need.

In the cooperative day-care center my daughter attended, the young
mothers sat down with story books and patiently crossed out all sexist
references. We told them they could be anything they wanted to be. We
said, “Don’t let the boys win. You’re as big and strong and capable as
they are!”

So they simply can’t be as angry with us as we were with our own
mothers.

Yet I stand here in the kitchen, watching my daughter make a glass of
iced tea. Her face, once so open and trusting, is closed to me. I struggle
to think of something to say to her, something friendly and warm. I
would like her to know that I admire her, that I am excited about the
college she has chosen, that I know the adventure of her life is just
about to get started and that I am so proud of how she’s handling
everything.

But here’s the thing: The look on her face is so mad that I think she
might slug me if I opened my mouth.

I can’t think what I have done. One night not long ago — after a
particularly long period of silence between us — I asked what I might
have done or said to make her angry with me. I felt foolish saying it. My
own mother, who ruled the house with such authoritative majesty,
would never have deigned to find out what I thought or felt about
anything she did. But there I was, obviously having offended my
daughter, and I wanted to know. I felt vulnerable asking the question,
but it was important.

She sighed, as though this question were more evidence of a problem so
vast and fundamental that it could never be explained, and she said,
“Mom, you haven’t done anything. It’s fine.”

It is fine. It’s just distant, that’s all. May I tell you how close we once
were? When she was two years old, my husband and I divorced — one of
those modern, amiable divorces that was just great for all parties
involved, except that I had to quit my part-time job and take a full-time
position. When I would come to the day-care center to pick Allie up after
work, she and I would sit on the reading mattress together, and she
would nurse. For a whole year after that divorce, we would sit every day
at 5 o’clock, our eyes locked together, concentrating on and
reconnecting with each other at the end of our public day.

In middle school, when other mothers were already lamenting the
estrangement they felt with their adolescent daughters, I hit upon what
seemed the perfect solution: rescue raids. I would simply show up
occasionally at the school, sign her out of class and take her
somewhere — out to lunch, off to the movies, once to take a long walk on
the beach. It may sound irresponsible, unsupportive of education, but it
worked. It kept us close when around us other mothers and daughters
were floundering. We talked about everything on those outings, outings
we kept secret from the rest of the family or even from friends.

Sometimes, blow-drying her hair in the bathroom while I brushed my
teeth, she’d say, “Mom, I really could use a rescue raid soon.” And so I
would arrange my work schedule to make one possible.

Anyone will tell you that high school is hard on the mother-daughter
bond, and so it was for us, too. I’d get up with her in the early mornings
to make her sandwich for school, and we’d silently drink a cup of tea
together before the 6:40 school bus came. But then she decided she’d
rather buy her lunch at school, and she came right out and said she’d
prefer to be alone in the mornings while she got ready. It was hard to
concentrate on everything she needed to do, with someone else
standing there, she said.

We didn’t have the typical fights that the media leads us to expect with
teen-agers: She didn’t go in for tattoos and body piercings; she was
mostly good about curfews; she didn’t drink or do drugs. Her friends
seemed nice, and the boys she occasionally brought home were polite
and acceptable.

But what happened? More and more often, I’d feel her eyes boring into
me when I was living my regular life, doing my usual things: talking on
the phone with friends, disciplining her younger sister, cleaning the
bathroom. And the look on her face was a look of frozen disapproval,
disappointment … even rage.

A couple of times during her senior year I went into her room at night,
when the light was off but before she went to sleep. I sat on the edge
of her bed and managed to find things to say that didn’t enrage or
disappoint her. She told me, sometimes, about problems she was having
at school: a teacher who lowered her grade because she was too shy to
talk in class, a boy who teased her between classes, a friend who had
started smoking. Her disembodied voice, coming out of the darkness,
sounded young and questioning. She listened when I said things. A few
days later, I’d hear her on the phone, repeating some of the things I had
said, things she had adopted for her own, and I felt glad to have been
there with her that night.

I said to myself, “Somehow I can be the right kind of mother. Somehow
we will find our way back to closeness again.”

We haven’t found our way back. And now we are having two different
kinds of Augusts. I want a romantic August, where we stock up together
on things she will need in her dormitory. I want to go to lunch and lean
across the tables toward each other, the way we’ve all seen mothers
and daughters do, and say how much we will miss each other. I want
smiles through tears, bittersweet moments of reminiscence of
childhood and the chance to offer the last little bits of wisdom I might
be able to summon for her.

But she is having an August where her feelings have gone underground,
where to reach over and touch her arm seems an act of war. She
pulls away, eyes hard. She turns down every invitation I extend, no
matter how lightly I offer them; instead of coming out with me, she lies
on her bed, reading Emily Dickinson until I say I have always loved Emily
Dickinson, and then — but is this just a coincidence? — she closes the book.

Books I have read about surviving adolescence say that the closer your
bond with your child, the more violent is the child’s need to break away
from you, to establish her own identity in the world. The more it will
hurt, they say.

My husband says, “She’s missing you so much already that she can’t
bear it.”

A friend of mine, an editor in New York who went through a difficult
adolescence with her daughter but now has become close to her again,
tells me, “You’re a wonderful mother. Your daughter will be back to you.”

“I don’t know,” I say to them. I sometimes feel so angry around her
that I want to go over and shake her. I want to say, “Talk to me! Either
you talk to me — or you’re grounded!” I can actually feel myself wanting
to say that most horrible of all mother phrases: “Think of everything
I’ve done for you. Don’t you appreciate how I’ve suffered and struggled
to give you what you need?”

I can see how the mother-daughter relationship could turn primitive
and ugly. One night I go into the den and watch “Fiddler on the Roof” with
my younger daughter. She’s 9, and she cuddles up next to me on the
couch. We weep over the daughters saying goodbye. “It’s a
little like Allie leaving,” she says. I hug her to me ferociously, as though I could
hug all daughters trying to break away. I am not unaware that I am
hugging my long-ago self, standing there so furiously, glaring at my
mother, unable to forgive her.

Late at night, when I’m exhausted with the effort of trying not to mind
the loneliness I’ve felt all day around her, I am getting ready for bed.
She shows up at the door of the bathroom, watches me brush my teeth.
For a moment, I think wildly that I must be brushing my teeth in a way
she doesn’t approve of, and I’ll be upbraided for it.

But then she says, “I want to read you something.” She’s holding a
handbook sent by her college. “These are tips for parents,” she says.

I watch her face as she reads the advice aloud. “‘Don’t ask your
student if she is homesick,’ it says. ‘She might feel bad the first few
weeks, but don’t let it worry you. This is a natural time of transition.
Write her letters and call her a lot. Send a package of goodies …’”

Her voice breaks, and she comes over to me and buries her head in my
shoulder. I stroke her hair, lightly, afraid she’ll bolt if I say a word. We
stand there together for long moments, swaying.

I know it will be hard again. We probably won’t have sentimental
lunches in restaurants before she leaves, and most likely there will be a
fight about something. But I am grateful to be standing in the bathroom
at midnight, both of us tired and sad, toothpaste smeared on my chin,
holding tight — while at the same time letting go — of this daughter who
is trying to say goodbye.