Love Invents Us Read Online Free PDF

she delivered them with great force, sometimes digging her hand into my shoulder until I nodded. Only beauty gives life meaning, she said. Good manners are more important, and more durable, than feelings. Natural fibers and a flattering cut are all that matter in clothing. Also, men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them. These ideas were held by my mother’s friends, too: “progressive,” apparently romantic, sixth-generation upper-class daughters of twits and earls. Everyone who knew our family knew that my mother was the daughter of a barrister and his landed-gentry wife, both tragically killed in the Blitz; in some stories they were buried in each other’s arms, in my favorite they were overcome by smoke after pulling their servants out of the burning rubble.
    What everyone knew was a lie, except the English part. My mother was the illegitimate daughter of a London prostitutewho had just enough feeling for her newborn baby to bundle her up in a stained sheet and deliver her, clots of blood still clinging to her little scalp, to Great-aunt Lil in Putney. My mother left school and Putney (and Aunt Lil and Cousin Harriet) at sixteen. World War Two gave her the opportunity to re-create herself. She took off for Liverpool and ran goods for black-marketeers and did other things that the poor and resourceful do in major ports.
    When I read
The Little Princess
I saw my mother, not myself, as the forlorn, aristocratic little girl, befriended and heaped with presents by the very kind and very rich Indian Gentleman. I identified with her starving, dim-witted companion, roll crammed into her mouth, eyes darting in terror as she muttered thanks in dreadful yowling tones. If I had met the brave, lying girl Cousin Harriet knew, I think I would have liked her. I could have admired her improvised and perfected self; the pinched, pasty face turned into fashionable slenderness, terrible abandonment replayed as well-bred self-sufficiency. We both knew I was not the daughter she’d planned for, was not at all the necessary, dimpled denial of Aunt Lil’s boardinghouse, of night bicycle rides, two pints of gin strapped under her jacket, butter sweating through waxed paper in her book bag; of head lice and chopped-off hair. Cousin Harriet visited when I was eight and spent our only weekend together setting my straight hair on hot metal rollers until my scalp blistered and telling me the truth about my mother. As she unrolled one stiff, stupid ringlet after another, I saw the nuns sweeping my mother’s blonde curls across the room and into the dustbin and my mother turning her back to the class.
    “No blubbing, mind you, like the other little girls, just wet eyes. And only cried a bit when we walked home.”
    Margaret was brought to the States by Stan Muslic, an army captain, who married her somewhere near the family’s dairy farm in Ithaca. (Cousin Harriet was not sure about Ithaca, but was very sure about the farm part.) For all I know, she loved Captain Muslic madly, and his absurd death, skewered by his ski pole three days into their honeymoon, nearly finished her off just when she thought she was safe at last. After Cousin Harriet left, I searched my mother’s nightstand and her drawers, understanding that she had a past and had a self that came before me, but I never found a picture of Stan Muslic, nor one of Margaret Brown Muslic before she married my father.
    I pressed my mother for details of Life Before Sol and found out only that she left Ithaca after a few years and studied art. This is what I made up: She sketched at night while lying on her pallet in the chicken coop and lived on the table scraps of the large and vile Muslic family. She sent away for art books with her egg money. Unable to endure their harshness, their obesity, their utter lack of manners, she fled to New York City, where she fell in love with garmentos, labor union organizers, knock-off Dior suits, and anonymity. She supported