Any Place I Hang My Hat (35 page)

Between my therapy at Ivey-Rush and the library of self-help books I’d read over the years, I recognized I was being a tad mean-spirited, especially about the pumpkin heads, a.k.a. my half brothers.

So I called Tatty, figuring she could do the mean-spirited stuff, thus permitting me to be benevolent, if not objective. Also, if I started looking at the pictures not as photographs, but as a Rorschach test, she would have no hesitation in telling me I was going off the deep end. We had a five-minute debate about who would come to whose apartment. I don’t know which one of us won, but I got to go to Tatty’s and she got to order in sushi and Japanese beer.

Luckily, Preshie and Four had gone someplace else to drink for the evening, so we had the apartment to ourselves. We knocked off the sushi in less than fifteen minutes and went into her bedroom, the place where we’d had most of our serious talks since 1987, when we were fourteen.

The room was the same as it had been back then, with a white, six-armed chandelier decorated with hanging crystals and porcelain roses. Her bed was a family heirloom—an odd size, as if custom-made for one very fat person. It was covered with a pink, red, and white quilt, the mostly floral patches sewn into a pattern of wreaths. When we first became best friends, we’d sit on the bed cross-legged, facing each other. But by the time we were sixteen, we developed a simultaneous, unspoken embarrassment about being on the same bed at the same time, as if that would propel us into a lifelong lesbian relationship. So during Christmas vacation of our third year, Tatty had stretched out on the bed. I’d taken to pulling up a Windsor chair with a red-and-white cushion that always reminded me of the pot holder I’d made at a Police Athletic League after-school program when I was about eight.

“Find the one where she’s leaning against what’s his name, the husband, with the background that looks kind of Tuscan, although it could be Toledo,” Tatty ordered.

“If you’re talking about the city in Spain, it’s To-lay-do. Toledo’s in Ohio.”

“It so happens there is a famous painting by El Greco that’s called View of Toleeedo.”

I said: “No. The painting is called—”

“Shut up,” Tatty suggested politely. She turned onto her side, unscrewed the finial of her bedside lamp, and removed the shade. I handed her the photograph of my mother and Ira Hochberg, which she studied in the harsh light of the bulb. “I think I’m getting her style,” she said. “Suburban gypsy. Or maybe suburban artiste. Long Island Moulin Rouge! Her jacket’s Dries Van Noten. Those sandals are Manolos from five or six years ago.” I leaned forward to check out the picture again. I could barely see the sandals, much less identify them, but I had no doubt Tatty was right. “But you see all those long chains she’s wearing,” she continued, “with all those shitty little charms hanging from them?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“I’m not saying she didn’t pay a reasonable amount for them, but it looks like she went out and bought a handful at one time.

See? They’re all the same length and different textures.” I nodded. “I never really trust people who pay a fortune for clothes and then scrimp on accessories. Either you love beautiful things and are willing to pay for them, or don’t bother. Wear one really great chain, not four or five mediocre ones. You don’t think in those terms because you deeply don’t care whether you’re wearing Manolos or a seventy-five-dollar copy. It’s not that you don’t have a sense of style, well, a vague sense of style, but you could live happily ever after with an entire wardrobe in which nothing is hand-stitched.”

“Sad, but true.”

“See, what Phyllis-Véronique does is pick stuff that’s blatantly recognizable. I mean, even you’d recognize that her jacket is a Dries.”

“Sure.” No.

“So.” Tatty took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was about to deliver her analysis. “She wants to be seen as artistic or having flair, but even more she wants to be seen as having money. But whether she’s in your Toledo or my Toledo or in Siena or wherever, she will never look either chic or genuinely artistic. She looks like what she probably is, a suburban woman married to someone who can afford to keep her in Manolos, but who can’t or won’t keep her in great, antique gold chains. Or even great, new gold chains.”

I went through the photos quickly, the way someone would search for a certain card in a deck. “Okay,” I said, “let me give you my analysis. It sort of complements yours. There isn’t a single picture in all of these in which she’s smiling.” I handed over a photo of my mother and a man standing in the middle of a bunch of cactus and desert flowers, the flora so balanced in color and size that it screamed Landscaped! rather than murmured Nature. The two were holding hands in the way that suggested the photographer had said, Hold hands. To their left was a three-tiered fountain with an ostentatious display of water.

“Who’s this again?” Tatty asked.

“He’s the husband between Chicky and Ira. Look. You can’t see her features all that well, but there’s a slight upturn in her lips.” Tatty held it up to the lightbulb, squinted, then nodded her agreement. “In all those pictures, from girlhood to the very recent ones—with Ira and the kids at Disney World—this is the closest she comes to a smile. Did you notice that?”

“I bet she has lousy teeth.”

“She doesn’t have lousy teeth.”

“How do you know?”

“Because her parents would have seen to it that she got braces or caps.”

Tatty opened the door of her nightstand, took out a buffer, and began to shine up her nails. “Then she can’t smile. She’s Botoxed.”

“She wasn’t Botoxed when she was twelve. There is a real sad look about her throughout her life.” It must have sounded like a compassionate statement, because Tatty gave me one of her slit-eyed looks. “I’m not getting sentimental about her, and don’t tell me I’m reading stuff into the picture.”

“You’re reading stuff into the picture.”

“I don’t think I am, Tat. It’s not sentimental to come to the conclusion that somebody’s a depressed person and probably has been all her life.”

Tatty shook her buffer at me as though it were her finger: no-no-no. “It’s sentimental to make her the victim of some psychological thing. There’s just as much chance that she’s a born malcontent. Nothing she has pleases her.”

“Maybe she thinks she’s somehow unworthy, so instead of being happy about what she has—”

“She was a bitch to run away from home and never tell her parents that she was alive for years. She was a double bitch, if it’s true what your father said, about lifting that ring and letting him take the rap for it. And she’s a bitch cubed for taking off and leaving you. I mean, I know I found Grandma Lil more amusing than you did, but I would never in a million years consider leaving her in charge of a child.”

“I think my mother hurt so much that she could never face coming back. I think the enormity of what she did hit her at some point, and it was so unforgivable in her own eyes that she couldn’t imagine me being able to forgive her.”

“You’re looking for trouble, Amy.” Tatty, right or wrong, was never uncertain.

“I’m looking to understand.”

“You’re looking for a mother. And you know what? You found her. She’s alive. Leave it at that.”

Back at home, getting undressed, I played the There have been worse days in my life game, remembering Chicky going off to prison for the third time, glancing back at me. His lips made a big smile, while his eyes filled with torment. I remember trying to break away from the social worker and a bailiff to reassure my father. They each grabbed an arm and held me back, so I screamed, “Don’t worry, Chicky, I’ll be fine.” But my voice went from scream to screech. His strong, handsome features collapsed into grief.

Worse days. Toward the end of her life, whenever I visited Grandma Lil, she showed no recognition that there was another human being in the room. An aide helped me get her into a wheelchair and I took her into a dayroom. It was filled with winter light and pathetically cheerful people trying to be magnetic enough to keep a parent or a spouse with dementia in this world. They dreaded the inevitable, their turning into dehumanized lumps of human tissue like my grandma.

She’d sat in that bright room, the woman who’d coached me on the only proper way to blow one’s nose in public. Now she was in public, grunting and turning bright red with constipation. Grandma? Want me to take you to the bathroom? But she didn’t hear my voice. All she heard was the inner command ordering her to shit.

Worse days? There’d been all those nights of sleeping with guys so bad I didn’t even want to be promiscuous with them. But I did because they got a little too demanding, a little nasty. For that particular week or month, being an assertive, don’t-fuck-with-me woman was too much of an effort for me.

I recalled being at Harvard and trying for the dean’s list while working three part-time jobs, and being so nauseated with fatigue that on many nights, my final thought was I hope I don’t vomit in my sleep and choke to death.

But if this day, which had begun with the hope of hearing John’s voice, was not the worst, it was a real stinker. The Can’t we be friends? business indicated there was a woman in his life with whom he was more than friends. And I sensed he’d called me in the first place because his colossal curiosity, the quality that made him such a good documentary maker, had to be satisfied, not because of any profound desire to hear my voice.

And then there was the Freddy conversation, hearing him so elated about being a son, yet sensing something wasn’t right. Except maybe it was jealousy: Why had he had the guts to confront a lost parent and I hadn’t?

And my work. The left’s cozying up to anti-Semitism was upsetting. More than upsetting. Scary. The day had gone from bad to terrible talking to Happy Bob. God knows I was not one of his pets, like Gloria, but this had been the first time in all my years at In Depth I’d understood that if I didn’t play the game better, I could be one of those print media journalists who wound up in the public relations office of some not-for-profit organization calling former colleagues who’d phone back at seven-thirty in the morning or nine at night praying to get her voice mail.

Having to be happy in front of Happy Bob not only made me angry, it outraged my sense of fairness. Why couldn’t ideas fly on their own? Why did they have to be accompanied by a smile or a tada! of charisma announcing their importance? What burned me was that at least one out of three suggestions of mine that he’d quashed wound up as cover lines on Time or Newsweek within six months. Alas, even I knew I couldn’t wave them in front of his face saying, I told you so, asshole. Suddenly it was clearer than it ever had been that my livelihood was dependent on someone who did not like me.

All right, the day hadn’t been a complete washout. There had been the nice note signed Love, and the photographs from Rose. And I had an old friend like Tatty to rely on. I should be grateful.

But who knew if Rose would be around for the long haul? And even when someone turns out to be a treasure, if she’s in her upper seventies, how long could the haul be? And Tatty: I was aware that our long conversations in her flower-chandeliered bedroom wouldn’t go on forever. She would remarry. She was one of those women to whom men liked to give engagement rings. She’d find somebody else, create a third wedding cake for herself, then throw herself into being Mrs. Whoever with just enough time off from marital togetherness, baking, and social responsibilities to fit in a biweekly girls’ night out. Or lunch. How about lunch next Tuesday? she’d ask when I called to say, Hey, I really need to talk to you.

Now, though, she had been available, and I needed to take her warning seriously. Okay, she wasn’t thoughtful, never had been, but one of the reasons I loved her was for her ridiculous conviction that she knew all that needed to be known. Thinking never got in her way. Nevertheless, Tatty’s talking off the top of her head had always been informed by a gut understanding of what made people act the way they do. She’s alive, she’d said about my mother. Leave it at that.

I finished the worse-days game but still, all I could offer God was a précis instead of a prayer. I figured I’d be up all night, turning my pillow over and over for a new cool spot, breathing in, then out to the count of seven as I willed different parts of my body to relax, trying not to think about the day I’d had.

Instead, I thought about what I’d said to John that morning: I loved you. I lost you. I ruminated on the words, hearing them echoing like dialogue from an early John Cusack movie. Now they were an epitaph. I felt my nose filling up the way noses do before a good cry, but before I could reach for the corner of my blanket to dab my eyes, I was asleep.

A good night’s sleep, it turned out. When I woke up, I brushed my teeth, pulled on my running clothes, and got into the elevator deciding that I would not suck up to Happy Bob. I would, however, attempt more than civility. I would be courteous and maybe work my way up to being cordial. Hiya, Bob! I’d say the next time he clomped into my cubicle without asking if he could come in. I wouldn’t smile because he’d know I was faking it. But I would show no fear. The only problem was, I was afraid.

FROM THE COMPUTER monitor, the three sentences I’d typed of the article I didn’t want to write stared me down, daring me to try for a fourth. That’s when I realized my anger with Happy Bob was getting in the way of my work. Unfortunately, I knew what I had to do: clear the air. To remain employed at In Depth, I needed to be viewed as what I was, a better-than-competent journalist and political analyst, not as a perpetual pain in Happy Bob’s undoubtedly hairy ass.

I picked up the phone, but didn’t press nine for an outside line. This was a rehearsal. “Bob,” I addressed the dial tone, quieter than a whisper, “I’d like to clear the air.” Good opening, I congratulated myself. The only problem was that I needed a middle and an end. All that came to mind was dialogue like Go fuck yourself, you flatulent, faux-macho jerk. I tried harder, but the only words I could get out were: “Since you’re paying me not just for writing skills but my expertise, why the hell do you say X is Y, or X is no big deal, when I tell you X is significant?” Just as I added “You egomaniacal cocksucker,” my second line rang.