I Can't Complain (5 page)

One of the great joys of the grown-up child is seeing how the essential him or her was always there. Baby versions of likes and dislikes, talents, interests, and personality traits come home to roost in fascinating ways. True then and true now: Ben had a keen interest in anything electronic, in the pushbuttons of telephones, remote controls, computer keyboards, calculators, VCRs; in dashboards, in menus, in dining out. Nothing bothered him that couldn’t be cured by nursing or eating. Years passed. The only demerits levied against him in high school were meted out for leaving campus to get sushi. Every article he wrote for his college newspaper was a restaurant review.

I’m not pointing out in grandparently fashion that time flies, that your little ones grow up in the blink of an eye, so cherish every moment. You’ve heard that. This is me saying you have a lot to look forward to—not just the tuition-free, post-orthodontic, babysitterless side of parenthood, but the company it keeps: your grown-up child. My friends with small children have asked me, “What’s it like when they no longer crawl into your lap? When the hugging and kissing get shrugged away? Don’t you miss the baby?”

Yes, we do. My husband frequently gazes at baby pictures and says, “My boy was cute, wasn’t he?”

But then the big boy calls, and the rosy glow changes direction to the here and now. Lovely surprises will await you, too: A big strapping guy! A witty friend! A voter! A licensed driver! A tech-support hotline! An adviser, a guide, a conscience.

A pride and joy.

W
HEN MY FATHER DIED
in 1991, I coped by bringing my mother the hundred-plus miles closer to where I lived in western Massachusetts. Grief over the loss of my father worked its way into a relocation project: finding the right condo for my mother and talking her into moving away from the city where she’d lived for seventy-six years. Even as I told my son, then nine, that Papa Lou had died, I rushed to add, “But I think we can get Nana to move to Northampton, and you can see her whenever you want to.” My mother was eighty-one. She left Lowell, her home since 1914, as if she were being transferred out of boot camp, with a grim obedience. She who didn’t like change astonished my sister and me by getting the house spruced up, selling it, selling my father’s car, and buying a condo in a Northampton retirement community. On moving day she announced, “I want to say something: I don’t want this to change your life. You don’t have to babysit me. I can take care of myself.”

She loved Northampton, found it beautiful, even the modest houses on the side streets on the route between our respective homes. She volunteered at the community office once a week, baked poppy seed cake for all bake sales, and knitted beautiful pastel caps for the newborns at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. As elderly mothers go, she was undemanding.

But parents at a distance are a little more charming than they are close-up. Our first outing, a welcome of sorts, was a book group luncheon. I tried to be winning and entertaining so she could see me in action and be proud. I talked my heart out. She smiled and nodded regally from her chair at the head table, as befitting the mother of the local author. As soon as we got in my car, I asked, “So? What’d you think?”

She smiled, patted her own shoulder pads. “I think this suit was a very good choice for this event, don’t you?”

She was eighty-one then, relatively strong, reasonably healthy, able to hear and stay up on her feet for the length of a mother-daughter shopping expedition. We picked out wallpaper, a couch, curtain fabric, new dishes, and, every May, Big Girl tomato plants and flats of maroon pansies. We went to see a lawyer and signed things that I knew, vaguely, we’d have to invoke someday, a power of attorney and a health proxy, formalizing her wishes that we, her daughters, make no heroic efforts to keep her alive. She had left her dour Lowell doctor behind and started seeing a family practice doctor in the country who found her witty and sharp, and pronounced her healthy—thereby making her so for many years. She found him adorable and reassuring, with his full beard and easy smile.

It was he who called me last March to say, “I think the most we can do is make her comfortable,” and in the end, it was he who prescribed the morphine that calmed her and eased her way. She had suffered a stroke that left her with cortical blindness, but the day before she died, I was sure she could see me and my now teenage son, who’d said the night before, “Don’t go to the nursing home without me tomorrow. Wake me up, okay?” I’d smiled and she’d returned it, a smile that said, “I’m in pain, and dying is the pits, so what are we two goofballs grinning at?” She never complained to the nurses, never talked back, never flinched. Everyone told me I had the nicest mother, the sweetest patient, their pet.

I still think,
Call Mom,
when good things happen, or when I feel the old tug of guilt—
Call her; is she okay?
The first time I made chicken soup after she died, and added a tablespoon of dried split peas, her trick, I stopped mid-stir because I realized it was a graduation of sorts. All the cooking, knitting, sewing, gardening, and even writing tips (“It’s good, but do you think it’s enough for a whole
novel?
” she asked once when I told her my latest idea) she dispensed in our forty-seven years together are complete. (Don’t talk on the phone during an electrical storm; don’t go out with wet hair; bananas before bed give you bad dreams; sleeping on your back gives you bad dreams; reading in the car makes you carsick; hair dye gives you cancer; raw potato takes the saltiness out of soup; don’t overbeat the eggs when you make a custard; feed your tomatoes Epsom salts.)

I haven’t been to the nursing home yet to pick up her clothes or the framed picture of us, her daughters and their husbands, or to say goodbye to the nurses and nurses’ aides who were so wonderful to her in the last months of her life. She’s back in Lowell, next to my father, her parents, her sister. The rabbi at the graveside didn’t know her but listened hard and got everything right—her personality, her unexpected courage when my father died, and her strength in the end—and he also made us smile. Nineteen ninety-nine was the year she would have turned ninety. She’d die if she knew I was telling you that. It’s also the year in which my sister and I will have to find the words to chisel on her headstone.
Mom,
we could say.
Beloved mother and grandmother.
Rest in peace. We only remember the good parts. How’s Daddy? Call me.

I’
LL BE CAREFUL ON THIS
St. Patrick’s Day, mindful that sending a valentine to an entire clan of hyphenated Americans would reveal myself as sociologically backward. I won’t generalize; instead, I’ll narrow my focus to one subset of Irish-Americans, the residents of the Lowell neighborhood where I lived until I was twelve. What strikes me as remarkable from this distance is how my family and I were folded in, embraced, accepted as far back as the 1950s, despite our being the sole Jewish family for blocks around.

The 1950s were not a decade famous for open arms: No laws were on the books suggesting that religious animus was punishable by the courts. Pope John XXIII wouldn’t until 1958 eliminate anti-Semitic pejoratives from prayers. New England hotels could advertise
GENTILES ONLY
or post signs that said
NO DOGS OR JEWS
.

My neighborhood was not the section of Lowell where mill owners, doctors, and lawyers lived. Ours was one of starter homes, clotheslines, one-car garages; no backyard was big enough for three bases and a home plate. Yet here was my childhood: my sister and I never heard an unkind or exclusionary word leak from the homes that surrounded us. From the day Marie McGowan moved in across the street, pregnant with her third, she was my mother’s best friend, confidante, and cofounder of the daily kaffeeklatsch.

With five daughters between them, hand-me-down dresses hopscotched between our two households. Because my mother was the best cook in the neighborhood, with a range from gefilte fish to spaghetti sauce, her Irish bread inevitably won the title of most delicious and most authentic. At Christmas, she made wreaths of cinnamon buns for the neighbors from a recipe handed down by my kosher grandmother. I still don’t know why Father Shanley regularly joined us for corned beef and cabbage, but it might have been a preference for deli-style over rectory-style boiled meat.

Marge Gibson was the neighborhood’s best seamstress, with my mother, a tailor’s daughter, a keen audience. Thus one fashion memory more vivid than any my own childhood offers up is that of Suzanne Gibson in white dotted swiss, brought by for inspection on her way to her First Communion, her mother’s creation more beautiful than any off the rack, especially on Suzanne, the adored baby in her family, with her blue eyes and dark finger curls.

Every summer night, weather permitting, my father walked uphill to Eddie Reeney’s veranda, where the neighborhood men smoked cigars in rocking chairs. My father marveled at Eddie’s real-world skills; Eddie, in turn, treated my father, the English major and least mechanical man ever born (“Jets don’t have propellers?!” he once proclaimed), with the studied patience of a shop teacher helping an armless student.

My father also revered the porch elder, white-haired Sam McElroy, a bachelor with a brogue, who lived with his two sisters from the old country. (I overheard my father tell my mother that it had not been easy for Sam growing up in Ireland: he was, my father confided, a Protestant.)

My sister, Debbie, and I dressed up for Easter, sans church, sans eggs, but kept our own council with respect to the Easter Bunny. Three years older than I, Debbie and her friends discussed religion just enough so that she came away accepting—not glumly, just a fact of life—that purgatory was the best she could hope for. St. Margaret’s was our buddies’ destination for church and catechism, but Temple Beth El, a closer walk, hosted the Brownies and Cub Scouts.

The McGowans, unannounced, came to my father’s funeral—from some distance and thirty-nine years after we had left Cascade Avenue. And when my mother died, Marie, Pat (now Scanlon), and Carol (now Sullivan) were with us at a graveside service.

I should repeat: it’s dangerous to characterize a whole group of people by their country of origin, or anything else. So today I’ll keep it on a small scale, a salute to the McGowans, the Gibsons, the Daileys, the Shanleys, the Mullens, the Cullens, the Crimminses, the Timminses, the Lemeres (Irish mother), the Reeneys, the Hogans, the Gallaghers, and the McElroys, whose backyards ran into the Lipmans’, and whose embrace hasn’t released us yet.

1939
(well before I was born): My cousin Freda, age three, is asking for something in agitated fashion. Her mother doesn’t understand what the toddler wants. Her aunt, my mother, translates: Turn on radio. It’s time for
Portia Faces Life.

1956–1959 (K–3):
School gets out at noon. I eat lunch in front of the TV, first
The Big Brother Show
with Big Brother Bob Emery. Then my mother joins me for “her stories.” Together we watch
The Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow,
and
As the World Turns,
some only fifteen minutes long. The last is my favorite because of the Lowell family: I live in Lowell, Massachusetts, which seems uncanny. My father calls it “As the World Squirms.”

1964–1968:
Luckily, Title IX has not yet passed, so there are no sports teams for girls to keep me late at school. I rush home, cutting through Bruce Levine’s yard every day to make it in time to watch my favorite soap,
The Doctors.
Maggie Fielding, MD, and chief of staff Matt Powers—will they ever
ever
realize that they are in love and made for each other? After that I watch the less cerebral
Another World
from its premiere episode. All I remember now is that Michael Ryan playing John Randolph needed a better-fitting pair of contact lenses and that I didn’t like that poseur Rachel and always rooted for Jacqueline Courtney, who, as Alice Matthews, never stopped loving Steve Frame. I experience my first remote locations: St. Croix. Because I am not allowed to watch television on school nights, I squeeze in as much as possible before 5
P.M.

Real-life dinner conversation slips into soap opera updates for my working mother. My father says, unfailingly, “Who’s Brock? Who’s Nora? Who is Dennis Carrington?” My sister and I say, “They’re on
The Doctors.
He’s on
Another World.
” He shakes his head slowly, eyes downcast, and says, “I can’t believe my wife and daughters are discussing the lives of people who don’t exist.”

September 27, 1965–June 24, 1966:
My sophomore year in high school, I add to my afternoon lineup the brand-new, soon-to-be-short-lived teenage surfer soap,
Never Too Young,
starring
Leave It to Beaver
’s Tony Dow. My father calls this one “Too Young to Know Any Better.”

Spring 1968:
I get into college anyway.

1969–1983:
I suspend soap opera watching while in college and later into full-time employment. In fact, I am a little disdainful of my fellow students who congregate in the living room of Simmons Hall to watch
All My Children
and
General Hospital.
Who are Luke and Laura?

July 1975:
I marry Robert Austin, newly minted MD. Unlike doctors on daytime drama, he never once encounters a patient suffering from amnesia.

1982:
I give birth to my son.

1983:
Twice a week a very nice young woman comes in the afternoon to babysit while I go to find a quiet place to write. She tells me, “I can come either before one
P.M.
or after two, but not in between.” I guess this has to do with another job or lunch or a bus schedule. Finally, she confides that the one hour of
All My Children
is sacred. I stop asking, “How about coming at one thirty?”

Late 1983:
I start watching
All My Children.
Favorite story line: star-crossed Nina and Cliff. Love the word “Glamorama” and later get my hair cut at a salon in Northampton, Massachusetts, named that as an homage.