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Authors: Georgie Anne Geyer
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someone for not giving you something he didn't have to give? I reacted with his same stubbornness and determination, by turning to work and accomplishment in order to "earn" love. I dealt with everything by going my own way; by doing, doing, doing. Later in my life it took me a long, painful time to figure out why my accomplishments didn't bring me love from other men, either, but instead only competitive resentment and rage of a new sort.
I guess I realize most poignantly what I missed when I was sixteen, already graduated from high school with highest honors, and we were out in Palm Springs visiting relatives. On a particularly pleasant starry night, after visiting relatives whom my father especially liked, we were walking across the moon-baked desert and my now more relaxed father put his arms around Mother and me. It was a singular, transcendent experience, just having my father put his arm around me. Although no one ever knew it, tears filled my eyes. It was the first time I could ever remember his touching me.
That a man as rough in manner and as remote in emotions as my father should have married my mother, a beautiful and refined young "lady" from the North Side, was still another curiosity. She was just as refined as he was rough; she was just as needing and giving of love and emotional expression as he was incapable of giving it. He was a "good provider," she always stressed, and he was certainly a good man; but he was a damned hard man to live with.
When I was born, for instance (and the birth took some forty- eight hours), my father used the time to put in the cement driveway beside the house, never once calling the hospital. He wasn't being intentionally cruel at all; he just thought that was a good time to put in the cement driveway.
It was my mother, Georgie Hazel, named after her grandfather, who taught me to read and write when I was four, sitting at a little table out in the sunlight at our lake house; it was my mother from whom I got affection and, generally, approval for my work. We traveled together. She laid the foundation for the curiosity that drove me to Siberia, up the Tapajoz, and down to Abu Dhabi (perhaps I did overreact a bit). And while the Geyers gave me their stubbornness and determination, I think it was her far more cultured family of Rhineland Germans who gave me whatever sensitivities I had.
But it was my mother, too, I think, who quite unknowingly instilled in me a deep dissatisfaction with the "woman's role." She always insisted she wanted nothing except a family; yet she always complained bitterly about "all the work" at home. I realized much, much later that this tall, graceful, lovely woman was complaining not about "all the work" but about the fact that she was not rewarded by my father with the outward shows of affection that she, a tender and affectionate woman who would have bloomed under the lifelong gaze of a man capable of tenderness, so needed. In turn she became somewhat possessive of her children, wanting us always by her side and wanting, I am certain, me to replace her in her position, as unhappy as she had often been with it. My choosing a profession, I am sure, struck her as a betrayal until late in life, when she came to understand and even prize it.
The third great influence on my life was my brother, Glen. Ten years older than me, tall, handsome, charming, and far too generous, Glen was in many ways a young, surrogate father to me. When I was just a baby, he took me under the long wing of his long arms and unwittingly prepared me for a world that would be a stage.
Glen, later to become a leading dress designer, had a genuine artistic sense that I never even approached; everything he touched turned to beauty. For me he created a marvelous fantasy world. He turned everything into a kind of theater for me, and so I learned early how to move in the kind of world of half-reality and half-fantasy that I eventually created for myself. I could have done little that I
I guess I realize most poignantly what I missed when I was sixteen, already graduated from high school with highest honors, and we were out in Palm Springs visiting relatives. On a particularly pleasant starry night, after visiting relatives whom my father especially liked, we were walking across the moon-baked desert and my now more relaxed father put his arms around Mother and me. It was a singular, transcendent experience, just having my father put his arm around me. Although no one ever knew it, tears filled my eyes. It was the first time I could ever remember his touching me.
That a man as rough in manner and as remote in emotions as my father should have married my mother, a beautiful and refined young "lady" from the North Side, was still another curiosity. She was just as refined as he was rough; she was just as needing and giving of love and emotional expression as he was incapable of giving it. He was a "good provider," she always stressed, and he was certainly a good man; but he was a damned hard man to live with.
When I was born, for instance (and the birth took some forty- eight hours), my father used the time to put in the cement driveway beside the house, never once calling the hospital. He wasn't being intentionally cruel at all; he just thought that was a good time to put in the cement driveway.
It was my mother, Georgie Hazel, named after her grandfather, who taught me to read and write when I was four, sitting at a little table out in the sunlight at our lake house; it was my mother from whom I got affection and, generally, approval for my work. We traveled together. She laid the foundation for the curiosity that drove me to Siberia, up the Tapajoz, and down to Abu Dhabi (perhaps I did overreact a bit). And while the Geyers gave me their stubbornness and determination, I think it was her far more cultured family of Rhineland Germans who gave me whatever sensitivities I had.
But it was my mother, too, I think, who quite unknowingly instilled in me a deep dissatisfaction with the "woman's role." She always insisted she wanted nothing except a family; yet she always complained bitterly about "all the work" at home. I realized much, much later that this tall, graceful, lovely woman was complaining not about "all the work" but about the fact that she was not rewarded by my father with the outward shows of affection that she, a tender and affectionate woman who would have bloomed under the lifelong gaze of a man capable of tenderness, so needed. In turn she became somewhat possessive of her children, wanting us always by her side and wanting, I am certain, me to replace her in her position, as unhappy as she had often been with it. My choosing a profession, I am sure, struck her as a betrayal until late in life, when she came to understand and even prize it.
The third great influence on my life was my brother, Glen. Ten years older than me, tall, handsome, charming, and far too generous, Glen was in many ways a young, surrogate father to me. When I was just a baby, he took me under the long wing of his long arms and unwittingly prepared me for a world that would be a stage.
Glen, later to become a leading dress designer, had a genuine artistic sense that I never even approached; everything he touched turned to beauty. For me he created a marvelous fantasy world. He turned everything into a kind of theater for me, and so I learned early how to move in the kind of world of half-reality and half-fantasy that I eventually created for myself. I could have done little that I
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