Links

MY MOTHER, I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING 

ABOUT HER

I’ve have just ordered a chicken salad sandwich and black coffee in the Hide-A-Way coffee shop. It is a delightfully warm, sunny day and I’m seated at a white Formica table in the back, thinking how glad I am that I decided to take the afternoon off to go to the beach. The restaurant is crowded. At the next table there is a burly man, black curly hair, sleeves of his shirt rolled up showing thick forearms. Across from him sits a woman, thin, pale, in a blue sweater, fingernails bitten and a little boy about five, huddled in the corner holding a stuffed brown bear. No one speaks; the adults look off, each in a different direction, their menus still in front of them. The little boy plays with the bear, wiggling his ears, clapping his paws together. Soon the man, his jaw clinched, leans forward toward the woman and spits out, “If you weren’t so stupid we’d have had it by now.” She looks down, mumbles, “I told you, it wasn’t my fault.” The man sits up, purses his lips, puts his hands on his hips, mimics her in a high voice, “It wasn’t my fault,” and then leaning forward again, points his finger at her and in his own voice accuses, “That’s what you always say.” She looks down and slumps as if she is shrinking. The man turns to the little boy, and while keeping his eye on the woman, lowers his voice, “Your mother is an idiot—it’s time you knew it.” The mother turns red, wipes her eyes. The boy retreats farther back into the corner, holds his bear tighter. The man gets up, “That’s it. We’re getting out of here,” grabs his wife’s wrist and pulls her up; she covers her face with her free hand. The father calls to the little boy to follow. I watch them straggle out, the boy complaining that he is hungry. When they are through the door I lean back. My shirt is soaked with sweat. I can feel my heart pounding in my ears. I drink some water trying to calm down and swallow hard as if I could swallow memories. My father, my mother and I.  We just went out the door.

The waitress brings my sandwich and coffee. She smiles, “Anything else I can get you—you look like you could use a cold drink.”

“No,” I try to smile back, “I’m fine thanks.”

I’m five. I am sitting in a restaurant with white table cloths. My mother is wearing her diamond earrings, the ones my father gave her when they were married. My father is wearing his gray suit and he has unbuttoned the jacket, a sign that he is relaxed. The light glints off his steel-gray eyeglass frames. My mother is smiling. My father is smiling and asking me about school and what I did after school. I tell him that mom took me to Macy’s to buy a new winter coat. My father is suddenly quiet and distant; his eyes narrow and his lips are tight together. I am frightened. I’m covering the spoon with my napkin, saying “abracadabra,” and pulling it off pretending that I’ve turned it into a shiny racing car. I push the spoon making “vroom-vroom” sounds. I was trying to drown out my father’s anger, magically make it go away but it didn’t work. He hisses, “I told you that my cousin, Irv, had a perfectly good coat from his son, hardly ever worn. Coats are expensive, why did you go out and buy a new one—he’ll only outgrow it in no time?” My mother tells him, “The boy should have something new.” “That’s nice for you to say but damn it, I’m not made of money.” I wanted to say that she should return the coat but I was afraid to say anything. I was afraid that my father blamed me and that my mother got into trouble because of me but I don’t think that was true. They continue talking in a low voice. My father points his finger at her and says that she doesn’t know what she is talking about. She is quiet. The food arrives. I have peas, French fries and some meat. My mother turns and cuts the meat without looking at me. I want her to say something but she doesn’t. They eat in silence. I remember concentrating on scooping up peas with my spoon and trying not to spill any to distract myself from the tension between them, and at the same time hoping one of them would say something nice, maybe even laugh. I hear them talking again in a low voice. Then my mother is crying. She is holding her napkin to her face. I concentrate on not crying. My father gets up, reaches into his pocket, takes out his wallet, throws money on the table and walks out. She follows. I follow her. I want her to take my hand but she doesn’t. I can still feel the emptiness in my out-stretched hand, the yearning to feel my small hand inside her large, soft, reassuring hand.

Truth is, I could never reach her. She was too busy devoting her life to serving and surviving my father—like his refusal to carry keys, making sure that she would be home when he arrived. At one time I thought that this was his way to imprison her. I wondered later if he was just afraid to be alone in the house and I imagined him turning the key in the lock, opening the door, coming into the hall and calling out knowing no one was there and then plunging ahead into the kitchen pouring a glass of water from the bottle in the fridge then gulping it down, pretending that he really felt at ease but actually feeling alone and lost. But, from when I was old enough, my mother always reminded me to carry my key.

Once when I am too little to carry them, I come home from my friend’s house and knock. I can see my mother through the window making dinner and listening to the radio; I can hear the murmur of her soap operas even from outside. It is winter and very cold. I knock harder but she pays no attention. My hand becomes raw, my knuckles start to bleed. I am shivering. I go to the back door and knock, then bang on the door. I call out. I can see her but she is lost in the voices on the radio and in her thoughts. I now wonder if she was thinking about cooking the vegetables. When she put my father’s dinner plate in front of him and he saw any steam coming up from the vegetables he would curse and demand that she take it away until they cooled down. Sometimes she would cry. When that happened I would clutch Buddy, my stuffed beagle and best friend, quietly slide under the table and play with him. I’d peek out and see her wipe her eyes and blow her nose. I’d wait until my father pushed back his chair and I’d watch his polished black shoes walk out of the kitchen. Then I would clamber up and eat my dinner if she hadn’t taken it away. Years later I wondered what happened that she would be willing to marry him.

I think of that photograph of my mother which sat on the mahogany table in our living room, the table which my mother used to dust daily and polish weekly. My mother is about eight years old, hair in braids, wearing a dress with flowers on it. She is standing next to her father who she adored. They are on the roof of the tenement on Ludlow Street where they lived. They are holding hands and looking at one another, laughing as if sharing a private joke. A few years later he will fall from the roof of that building. No one in the family will tell me about it but when I am sixteen I insist. My mother tells me he was a union organizer and was pushed off by the boss’s goons. Years later, I ask my Aunt Anna, older by six years, who pins up her gray hair in a bun and wears “sensible” shoes. She says he was depressed and jumped. She shows me a yellow and brittle newspaper article: “Max Birnbaum, union organizer, jumps to death…” My aunt is still angry at him. She tells me, “Your mother worshipped him and could never believe he killed himself; she said the police were paid off to call it a suicide but actually she was always afraid to face the truth; she always had the ability to fool herself,

about our parents, about your father, about everyone—she lived in a fantasy world--that’s how she got through life.” Her old friend, Alice , a bottle blond who favors red and purple dresses, says, “Your mother had everyone’s number; she was a realist if there ever was one.” I don’t know who is right. I once thought I understood my mother. I am a grown man and the truth is, I don’t know much about my mother at all.

My mother is in her slip spending a Saturday taking dresses out of her closet and laying them on the bed, holding them in front of her trying to decide what to wear. I am lying on the floor. I have some crayons and paper and I’m drawing pictures of houses with smiling parents and a little boy riding a bicycle in front of them. The little boy is smiling too. In between drawing I look at her in different outfits. My mother liked musicals and my father had gotten tickets to, “Man of La Mancha.” She is humming, “To Dream the Impossible Dream,” and looking into the mirror on the back of her closet door and asking me over her shoulder, “Do you think your father would like this? Do you think he’ll like this?” and saying, “Wasn’t it wonderful of your father to get those tickets—he knows it is my favorite and they must have been very expensive too.” I was only little then; did she really want my opinion? Maybe, but, what she desperately wanted was any affirmation that she was attractive and to see the tickets as a caring gesture even though I certainly didn’t know those words then. She finally chooses a black dress and asks, “How do I look?” I tell her, “You smell good.” She laughs. It is a cloudy, raw November day and the windows are closed but I can hear a delivery truck rumble up our street and stop at another house. It is already dark. The street lights are on. At six o’clock my father calls up, “It’s late honey, I think we should go.” That was one of the few times I heard him use any words of endearment. Finally, she comes down the stairs with a smile on her face and her eyes wide. Then I think she is glad to see him. Now I know that the look on her face was hope—hope that if he thought she was beautiful or even pretty enough, then maybe he would love her or at least be nice to her. My mother was 33 then and I, a little boy, gave no thought to whether she was pretty or not. All I cared about was that she should be my mother. My father barely looks at her but checks his watch, “Good, this should leave us with enough time for dinner at Figaro’s.” My parents leave without saying good-by to me and I remain alone with Lenore, the usual sitter, who I don’t like. My mother used her because she lived across the street and they wouldn’t have to go far to take her home. When Lenore wasn’t talking on the phone to her friends, which was most of the time, she told me she couldn’t play with me because she had homework to do.

I love to imagine my mother as a teenager—tall and thin, carefree, tossing her long chestnut hair, flirting with the boys in her high school but never letting any of them near her. What child can really imagine his mother kissing some pimply faced high school boy let alone having sex with his own father? I imagine that she wore long skirts those days which twirled around like the skirt on the ballerina on the music box at my Aunt Anna’s house which I loved to watch. I like to think of my mother, dancing barefoot on the lawn, turning around and around, smiling with pleasure and freedom, her arms out as if to embrace the world, her skirt rippling, making  it go higher to show off her trim legs. I imagine that some days my mother wore her hair swept to the side and over one eye—Veronica Lake style, and that she is so friendly and attentive that everyone likes her.

Most likely, when my mother is a teenager, she is the tall gawky girl with deep-set brown eyes and a too-large angular nose, the girl who doesn’t fit in, the loner, the girl who waits away from the other kids at the bus stop, but who nevertheless has a good friend with whom she eats lunch every day. I imagine her as the girl down the street who longs for more friends but when someone from school asks her to a party she usually says that she has something else she has to do even though she doesn’t know what it is.

I see her as a high school student walking up her street. Her mother has remarried and my mother is hesitant to go into the house because she never knows if her step-father is in one of his nasty moods. I want my mother to fight back if he is nasty to her but know she can’t, instead she passes her house and goes to the library six blocks away where she hides out. I imagine her sitting in a corner behind the stacks reading, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” holding it close to hide her face, holding it in both hands the way she would hold a precious and fragile glass bowl; her face moving slightly down the page as her eyes capture the letters and words, smiling, frowning, sighing, biting her lip depending on the turn of events, feeling the texture of the pages as she turns them in awe of the independence and impossible life of Holly Golightly. My mother stumbles on the wonder of stories in her attempt to escape from her step-father and her younger sister, Lorraine, who throws tantrums if she doesn’t get her way, the beautiful curvaceous sister with the blond curls who the boys adore and who, it was whispered, lets them do all the things my mother would never let them do even if they would bother to look at her. I am glad for that.

She leaves the library only when it closes at nine o’clock . No one except her younger brother Harry, just twelve, who has managed to put aside some leftovers, even realizes she was gone. He takes out a cold chicken leg, some bread, warms up corn on the stove and takes out a bottle of Hires Root Beer which he has hidden for her because he knows it is her favorite. He spoons out a peach half from the green Del Monte can and puts it in a little bowl then sits with her at the gray Formica kitchen table with the chrome legs while she eats. The kitchen is lighted with a round fluorescent bulb in the middle of the ceiling which casts a cold light on everything. Water drips from the sink faucet. The black and white checked linoleum floor has a few chipped tiles. They talk about the songs on the Hit Parade. She likes, “Little Things Mean a Lot ,” but he thinks, “Hernando’s Hidaway” better. She gets up and hums her next favorite, “Stranger in Paradise ,” motioning for him to get up and dance with her, but he is embarrassed and blushes. She urges him, “Come on, I’m your sister, I won’t hurt you.” Harry gets up and holds her at a distance to avoid her breasts which are at his eye level, while he looks at his feet concentrating on the box step. “That’s it, you’ve got it,” she says, “Now relax and move to the music.” Encouraged, he looks up for a moment but steps on her foot and pulls away saying, “I can’t dance,” then sits down, “Why don’t you eat your peaches?” 

I imagine my mother taking night courses in Greek mythology at Brooklyn College . I see her listening to the professor, taking notes, not wanting to miss a word, a thought, turning the dog-eared pages of her Margaret Hamilton’s, “Mythology” with its picture of Perseus holding the head of Medusa on the cover; but, after only one semester she reluctantly gives up because her step-father insists that a girl needs a husband and not an education. Years later, long after she is married and I am about ten years old, I hear her sigh, a sigh I recognize as loss and yearning, as she picks up that book, closes her eyes and caresses its cover. She then brightens and tells me she has a wonderful idea. She makes me hot chocolate and puts out some Mallomars, which are my favorite, on the coffee table in the living room. Then she invites me to sit close to her on the couch, puts her arm around me to draw me closer so I feel the warmth of her body and the smell of her perfume. She reads me stories of Artemis and Venus, and even though I don’t understand most of it, I still love being there with her. Later she tells me, “Make sure you get an education—the more you have, the more opportunities you will have and the freer you will be.” She looks at me with great urgency and insists that I promise. It was an urgency that I later know is born of her own regrets.

I imagine her as a young woman, working as a secretary in a company which makes steel shelving. She takes dictation on a small pad; she types letters on a heavy black Underwood typewriter; she files papers in a gray four-drawer steel file cabinet whose drawers clank and scrape when she opens them; she answers the black phone with the rotary dial on the front, the one with the curved steel finger stop. Once in a while a salesman or a customer will want to take her out to lunch. Sometimes she accepts. They usually go to Chumley’s Coffee Shop where they make small talk at a Formica table with a gray paper placemat on it, the silverware wrapped in a white paper napkin. She always orders a chicken salad sandwich and coffee.

One of those men has a well paying, secure job as a buyer for a large office supply company. Unfortunately, he becomes her husband and my father--she says that she fell in love with his brown eyes.

When I am ten or eleven my parents have a fight. They are standing in the living room. They didn’t seem to realize or care that I was able to see them through the half-open kitchen door. My father is shouting; his face is red. She speaks back to him in a loud voice. He raises his hand to hit her, something I never saw him do before, “Don’t you dare speak back to me ever again!” His right hand is in a fist and he is shaking it at her. I want to go out and tell him to stop; I want to protect her but I am afraid and I feel like a coward. I slowly close the door to hide myself from them but peak out through a small crack. I hear him yell, “Is that clear? Is that clear?” as he holds his fist a few inches from her face, until she bites her lip and looks hard at him, finally whimpering, “Yes,” and he lowers his hand. I see her walking toward the kitchen and I rush over to sit down at the table with the glass of milk I had been drinking to pretend that I don’t know what just happened. She comes into the kitchen and sits at the other end of the table holding coffee in a cup with a crack in it, staring into it as if it would provide some answers. I get up from my seat, go over and slide down next to her. I want to tell her that I am sorry that I didn’t protect her. She doesn’t look up. I put my hand on her arm. She lets it rest for a moment and then moves her’s away. When I am older and think about this time, I know she didn’t expect me to protect her but I feel guilty anyway. For the next three days when she doesn’t talk to me or anyone, I try to go to my friend’s house as much as possible otherwise I stay in my room. I try to think of ways I might talk to her, I try to think of what I could say but I am afraid I will only upset her more. I am afraid she will be angry at me. If I ask about dinner or tell her I’m going to my friend’s house she doesn’t look at me or answer me but I want her to pay attention to me. I want us to run away from him but I don’t know how to approach her.  I later wondered if she was so devastated that I should see her humiliated in that way that she couldn’t look at me, but I don’t know if that is right.  I never really knew what to do.

When I am sixteen, her eyes glisten as she tells me how, when they were dating, he brought her flowers and took her to La Aubergine and how he held the door for her and pushed in her chair and how a violinist came over and serenaded them with love songs like, “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To,” and “People Will Say We’re In Love,” and how there were no prices on her menu. She smiles reliving her rosy memory of that time before they were married. I can’t recognize that romantic, attentive man she said was my father; all I see is how he invites his family over and how she spends the day making a grand dinner of her special squash soup, roast beef and her homemade peach pie and then he ignores her and if she ventures an opinion about something he tells her she is stupid, right there in front of everyone. I hate him. There are times like that when I wish my father would commit suicide like my grandfather did. I later wondered about those thoughts, sometimes embarrassed by them and sometimes just sorry he never did and sometimes just sad about it all.

I am thirteen and one summer day when my father is out fishing with some friends, Uncle Harry comes over and takes my mother and me to the beach. Mom and Uncle Harry are in the front seat talking and laughing, my uncle pointing out a restaurant with “the best burgers in the world” where he’d promised to take us for dinner and then talking to me over his shoulder about the Yankees’ prospects for winning the pennant. As soon as we spread our blankets on the warm sand my Uncle takes my mother’s hand and grabs mine and leads us into the ocean to ride the waves. My mother is smiling and laughing with him and we all go in together splashing and joking, my uncle diving under the waves and swimming out beyond the breakers where he calls on us to join him. We come out of the ocean all out of breath, exhilarated by the brisk water and walk back to our blanket and towels. Soon Uncle Harry gets us involved in building a sand castle and some of the kids from near-by blankets join us. He even gets my mother to pitch in—she digs moats with a plastic spoon and in a half hour we have a city with turrets and walls surrounded by elaborate moats. I remember thinking that I wished my uncle had been my father and that my mother had married a man like him. Later when we are relaxing in the sun, I go up to the bathroom and when I come back they are seated next to one another on the blanket facing the water and don’t realize that I’ve returned. “Look,” I hear Uncle Harry say, “you’ve been married to him for fifteen years now and you are miserable. You’ve got to leave him.” My mother is wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and saying, “It isn’t so simple; where would I go and don’t forget I’ve got a son. Who is going to pay for his education?” He tells her we could stay with him. But when they realize I’ve come back, they stop speaking and push their faces into smiles. My uncle teases, “I was worried about you, a good looking fellow like you must have had all those pretty girls running after you! I was tentative about ogling the girls so I was both pleased and embarrassed by his banter. He gets up and puts his arm around me, “How about the two of us getting a beer?” He nods to me, raises his eyebrows conspiratorially and looks at my mother who predictably says, “Come on Harry, he’s only thirteen.” “Don’t worry. I’m going to take good care of my young nephew.” We go up to the concession stand where I think he’ll get me a root beer but he orders a large beer and we walk over to a bench where he takes a sip and hands me the cup, “Here we’ll share it. Just don’t tell your mother.”

Several years after that my father gives my mother a birthday card and she dances around the room clutching it to her, smiling with pleasure. Later that day I tell her that I’ve made the high school baseball team, but I don’t think she heard me. I never was able to understand why. Or, maybe even then, I really did understand a truth about her that I just couldn’t admit.

I come home from college for the weekend. It is late on Friday afternoon when I open the door and call out, “Hi, Mom, I’m home.” No one answers. I go upstairs and find her laying on her bed, her skirt and blouse rumpled. She is crying. The blinds are closed and the room is very dim even though it is still sunny outside. When I ask if I can turn on the light she mumbles, “Okay.” I pull the chain on the cut-glass lamp near her bed. She sits up blinking, pushes her hair off her face, wipes her eyes. The floral wallpaper looks dull. I am surprised to see her dresser drawers open and the clothes in a jumble. The sound of someone honking his horn impatiently comes through the window. I sit down at the foot of the bed and ask her what happened. She pulls herself up clasping the pillow in front of her. She tells me my father pushed her hard the night before and that she fell down and then ran out of the house. I feel myself getting angry, my hands becoming fists and I want to beat up my father. She looks down, not wanting to look at me. She tells me that she was afraid to go back so she spent the night hiding in the back booth of an all-night diner. She snivels, cries, wipes her eyes and blows her nose. I can feel myself redden, my jaw tighten. She says that in the morning when she knew he’d have left for work she went home. She reaches over to the night table and picks up a folded and rumpled piece of paper, smoothes it, says, “You father left this note,” and passes it to me: “I am sorry—I promise that it will never happen again. I tried to find you but I couldn’t, please call me.” When I ask her if she called, she answers by saying that she changed her clothes and went to a divorce lawyer. She weeps, “I’ve been such a fool, I’ve got to stop kidding myself about him and face the truth.” She says that the lawyer told her she wouldn’t get alimony. “After all these years of not working, what kind of job could I get?” She squeezes her eyes closed, shakes her head, swallows hard trying not to cry and whispers, “I’m afraid to do anything.” I remember the look of despair or was it resignation on her face and I want to hug her or at least hold her hand or do something but I’m unable to. I offer to quit school and get a job, but she says no, cries and then her demeanor changes and she smiles, “But I still really love him…and strange as it seems, he needs me and I am sure he loves me in his own way.” I jump up and blurt out, “But what about you? I thought you just said you’ve got to stop fooling yourself?” She looks at me, and sobs, “You just don’t understand! You don’t understand!” She covers her face with her hands. I want to make it right, but I don’t push it further; I’m afraid I’ll only upset her more. Looking back, I think I finally realized that she was in a trap from which she either didn’t want to escape or thought she couldn’t escape—I never understood which.

Years later when the two of them are in their 70s, I see her helping him walk after he broke his hip—she smiles and speaks softly encouraging him and he at least is silent, a silence I take as appreciation. At first I can’t imagine how after all that had happened, she could still be so kind to him, but then realize that her smile is one of acceptance that that is the best he can do. I wonder if how she was with me was just the best she could do.

After he dies she calls me to fix the TV antenna, take down the storm windows, take her to the doctor, pick up her prescriptions. I recall her telling me how thrilled she was that father took her to dinner at La Aubergine when they were dating, so for her 80^th birthday I buy her an orchid corsage and take her to The Ritz Carlton for dinner. I hold the door for her and push in her chair. I tip the pianist to play a medley of Sinatra songs and her favorite, “People Will Say We’re In Love…” I order a bottle of too-expensive merlot and toast her 80^th birthday. She reaches over, takes my hand in both of hers, and tells me how wonderful it is of me to do this for her. At first I am embarrassed like I was a little boy again and then the next moment somehow angry that I didn’t feel her touch when I was a child and needed it so badly but soon I am able to feel the wonderful  warmth and softness of her hands enveloping mine. I bring my other hand over to hold her’s--I want her to keep holding my hands and I concentrate on how it feels wanting always to remember how her hands felt on mine.

As we are finishing our meal and the bottle is nearly empty I’m feeling mellow and she, who rarely drinks, seems slightly tipsy and says, “I want to tell you something which mothers usually don’t tell sons but you are grown and I’m old. You know why I married your father?” I shake my head, “No.” “Sex,” she says, “After we’d gone out for a couple of months we had sex—my first time. And in those days I thought that meant he loved me and since I was a good girl having sex meant marriage.” She pauses for a moment, hums a few bars then sings, “Sex and marriage, sex and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage…” I don’t correct her on the lyrics. She looks wistfully, “And I suppose we did too…I mean love one another...” She shrugs, “And despite…he was a good man—look he was a good provider and he put you through college.” She looks down, her wrinkled hands fiddling with the silverware, smiling weakly, “He could be very gallant too, like when we were dating and he took me to La Aubergine.” Then she smiles broadly and raises her glass in a toast: “To my son who is just like his father.” I’d just taken a sip of wine and I’m afraid I’ll fucking choke on it until I swallow hard and then gulp down some water. I’m about to protest that I am not at all like him—that was my greatest fear; I knew I looked like him and am occasionally moody like he was all the time, yet I’d spent my life trying to be different from him—but just as I open my mouth to insist that I am not like him, I see that she has such a sweet smile on her face that I let it pass. I smile and nod taking it as the best possible complement from an old woman who is still determined to believe all her fantasies about her husband.

I finish my sandwich and the last of the coffee, now cold, pay the bill and continue on my way to the beach where I limp across the sand on my bum leg and spend the afternoon in the soothing warmth of the sun.