Lies My Mother Never Told Me (14 page)

But this time I was desperate enough to make an appointment to talk to our family friend, Ben Wolstein, a psychoanalyst. I tried to describe to him the terror that seized me at night, and the sleeplessness that accompanied the grinding anxiety I felt. He asked me how much I drank.

“Not that much at all, really. I might have a couple of glasses of wine every two weeks or so.” This was, of course, a gross underestimation. Most people in the psychological field aren't trained to look for the symptoms of alcoholism, which is why, for the most part, patients talk and talk and talk and go right on complaining of their symptoms, without anyone picking up on them. In the meantime, the patients go right on drinking for years.

Ben nodded pensively and moved on to other subjects. I talked about my father, about how terribly his death had affected me. One day Ben said, “But what about your mother?”

“My mother?” I asked, mystified. “What do you mean?”

“Depression is anger turned inward,” he explained. “Do you think you're angry?”

“Angry?” I repeated. I had no earthly idea what Ben was talking about.

Right before Thanksgiving, Jamie called to tell me he intended to ask his girlfriend Beth to marry him. He wanted to know if I would mind if he gave her our mother's Dutch Schultz ring, an exquisite diamond solitaire in an ornate, old-fashioned platinum setting. Sometime in 1946, Dutch Schultz had apparently bought the ring for his mother but lost it to our grandfather, Tony Mosolino, in a poker game on the Broadway Limited, the overnight train from Philadelphia to Chicago. Tony gave the ring to his eighteen-year-old daughter Gloria, to the great dismay of his wife, Gertrude. Gloria had given me the ring some years ago, and I had put it away.

Jamie's plan was to bring Beth out to Long Island over Easter weekend and take her down to the beach to collect seashells, which she loved to do. He was going to find two clamshells and put the ring inside. It was a lovely way to propose, and I was very happy for both of them. I had already told Jamie years ago that he could have the ring. I thought it was wonderful that Jamie wanted to give it to Beth.

When I hung up, Andrew was standing a few feet away, looking gloomy. I told him about the call, and he remained obstinately, gloomily silent.

“What?” I asked.

“Do you really want to give up your diamond ring?”

“I don't need it, I have the one you gave me. Why shouldn't Jamie have it?”

“Well, it's
yours
.”

“It's not
mine
, it's the family's. I think it's great that Jamie wants it.”

Andrew shook his head, clearly disappointed in my inability to see things his way. He seemed to place great store in what a person owned, and felt that material possessions reflected who
you were. But there were very few objects I held so dear that I wouldn't give them up. My books, I wouldn't give up. And there was a South American silver bracelet, and a gold ankh ring my father had worn; also his National Book Award plaque, but none of these held any financial value. My mother had some artwork by old family friends that I hoped would stay in the family. It occurred to me, if only fleetingly, that I owned absolutely nothing, and Andrew's attraction to me suddenly seemed completely illogical. The thought frightened me, but I quickly pushed it away.

I remember sitting beside him on the couch one evening, watching some absurd sit-com he liked, and sipping Diet Orange Slice, which I hated. I had the terrifying thought, This is it. This really is the end of the road.

At least, this time I wasn't drinking. Well, I was only drinking once every two or three weeks—though getting potted is a better way of describing it. Therefore, I couldn't possibly have a problem. What was I worrying about?

I started watching
Oprah
in the afternoons while I cleaned the apartment or made dinner. I felt very domestic. One day, she interviewed the wives of alcoholics. There must have been ten of them sitting in a semicircle on the stage. They described the repetition patterns. They talked about promises made and broken; the impossibility of intimacy in such relationships; and the push-me, pull-you that keeps occurring. And, most staggering to me, the paralyzing fear of abandonment that kept them coming back, or staying, in the bad relationships.

I was so amazed I even told Andrew about it when he got home. I explained that I'd watched the most incredible
Oprah,
which described in perfect detail my relationship with Dennis, the only difference being that she was talking about alcoholics! Wasn't that amazing?

Andrew thought it was indeed amazing and moved on to the
more pressing issue of whether he should make his special Parmesan dressing for the salad.

 

On December 1, the Thursday after Thanksgiving, I went down to Wall Street to meet Andrew for lunch—something romantic and unplanned, for our life had already become totally ordinary and we were struggling not to bore each other to tears. We went to a sushi bar and had a fine lunch. I said something that annoyed him, something about being worried that my book wouldn't be as good as I wanted it to be.

“You're always worried about something or other,” he said peevishly. “Why can't you just be happy?”

“I think it would be nice if you could be something
other
than happy all the fucking time.”

“No need to use that language.”

“I'll talk any goddamn way I want. Let's go.”

Walking me back to the subway, out of the clear blue, he said, “I don't think this is working out. I think we should split up.”

I went from terror to elation in twenty seconds flat. Exactly the feeling I'd had on the Coney Island roller coaster at the age of ten.

“Okay, fine,” I agreed.

“I'm a much more sexual person than you are,” he explained. “I need someone who wants to have sex much more often.”

I started to feel that little prickle of heat below my skin, and my chest constricting. Could this be the anger Ben Wolstein had been talking about? All around us men and women in nicely tailored wool coats hurried along, clutching briefcases, their elegant shoes clicking purposefully on the sidewalk. In my long, flowing skirt and droopy chenille sweater, I felt like a hippie.

“You have to like someone to want to have sex with them, Andrew,” I said, my voice hard and tight. “I don't think I like you all that much.”

The next Saturday, we went to Sagaponack to tell our families. To say I wasn't looking forward to this would be an understatement. I wanted the whole thing over and done with. Couldn't we just pretend it hadn't happened? Andrew went to his mother's house down the street, while I went home to Gloria's. I dropped my bag at the bottom of the narrow stairs, a few feet from my bedroom door, and went up to her room.

She was lying on her bed, smoking a cigarette.

“You shouldn't smoke in bed, Mom.”

She didn't say anything, just continued smoking. I took one from the pack lying beside the ashtray and lit it with her lighter. I inhaled deeply, blew out the smoke, and said, “I have something to tell you but I don't want you to get upset.”

She sat up, her eyes suddenly wide and anxious. “What is it? You're not pregnant, are you?”

“Andrew and I are breaking up.”

“I knew it. What happened?”

What happened, indeed. Where to begin? Since, clearly, no explanation would be satisfactory, I told her what he'd basically told me.

“He says I'm a lousy lay.” And then I started to laugh, the ironic chuckle of a person about to climb the gallows steps. But really, I felt things were going to get much better now, as soon as the messy details could be cleaned up.

“A lousy lay?” said my mother. “A lousy lay? Jesus Christ.”

“He's going to stop by later to pick up his stuff.”

“A lousy
lay
?”

“I'm going downstairs now. You need to stay calm, Mom. I need you to stay calm.”

While I was in my room packing up Andrew's belongings so we could get this part over with as quickly as possible, my mother went out to lunch. I knew for certain that by 3:00
P.M.
, every friend (and enemy) she had in the world would know. Fuck
them. I didn't care. I just had to get out of it. Deal with the small details. Jesus Christ. We had to share the apartment for at least another six weeks. Andrew had told me on Friday, when he got home from work, that he'd been offered a job in an advertising company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with whom he'd been doing business for more than a year. He'd be moving there sometime after New Year's.

I decided to make myself a drink and got behind the pulpit bar and poured a tumbler of cheap vodka. I rarely drank vodka anymore, but fuck him and his Diet Orange Slice. After I'd gotten ice from the fridge, I went and locked myself in my room.

A while later, I heard a commotion in the kitchen. There was shouting and then running, followed by a frantic banging on my bedroom door.

“Come here, you slimy little coward. You son of a bitch, you're not even intelligent. Lousy lay! I'll show you a lousy lay, I'm going to cut your balls off!”

I rushed to the door and unlocked it. There was Andrew, pale and frightened, with my mother fast approaching, brandishing a long carving knife. I stepped between them, and he escaped into my room.

“Mom, you need to calm down. If you stab him, you're going to go to jail. It's not worth it.”

“Get out of my way.” Her voice was barely under control. “I'm going to cut his balls off.”

I could smell booze, heavy on her breath. She'd gotten ripped at lunch, as expected. But this behavior was a little extreme, even for her.

“Put the knife down, Mom, before he calls the cops.”

“This is my fucking house! I'll cut his balls off if I want to. This is
my
house!”

I pried the knife from her hand and told her to go lie down.
“In ten minutes he'll be out of here, and you'll never have to see him again.”

“Lousy lay.” She was stuck on this detail for some reason. Maybe I should have said something else.

In my room, I placed the knife on the dresser. Andrew was lying facedown on the bed, weeping uncontrollably, his shoulders shaking. I gathered he'd never been threatened at knifepoint before. I didn't feel like consoling him. Suddenly she was banging furiously on the door again, trying to kick it in. “Let me in! I want to cut his balls off, that lousy little coward!”

“I think you'd better go,” I told him. All I could think was, Good thing there's a back door to my room. Otherwise she might really try to kill him.

He stood up, pulled himself together, and started gathering the garbage bags filled with his things.

“I'll need the engagement ring back,” he said. “It's a family heirloom, after all.”

I didn't feel like giving it to him. Anyway it was back in New York, in my jewelry box, along with the wedding ring.

“I'll give it to your mother next time I see her,” I added coolly.

The hardest time I ever had to live through since my father's death was those six weeks when Andrew and I were separated but living in the same apartment. I moved into my office—the room where I wrote and where I kept my old futon—and went out every night, and drank until my mind became blank, and stayed out as late as I could, sometimes sleeping on a girlfriend's couch just to avoid having to face him.

 

Jamie stayed a couple of extra days in Sagaponack over the Christmas weekend, concerned about my state of mind. We did our Christmas shopping together in Southampton, braving a bit
ter, biting cold. Then, after Christmas Day, he reluctantly went back to Washington.

With nothing to occupy my overtaxed mind, I spent two drunken days holed up in an unheated pool house in Southampton with a blond Australian tennis pro I'd met on the Jitney coming out. I came home to my mother's a disheveled mess, only to learn that John Irving had invited us for dinner, in his pretty house in the middle of a potato field with its red barn imported from New England. I didn't want to go, but my mother insisted. I took a bath, washed my hair, put on a clean chenille sweater and black jeans, but I couldn't stop my hands from shaking.

John Irving gave us a tour of his barn, which he'd converted into a wrestling gym, complete with wrestling mat, dummies, heavy punching bag, and other equipment. He told us proudly that his older son was an excellent wrestler, just as John had been in high school and college. John was in amazing shape; rain or shine, summer or winter, you could always find him running the back roads of Sagaponack.

We moved into the living room for drinks. No one at the gathering mentioned my recent catastrophe, and I was grateful for their tact.

Peter Matthiessen, the writer and Buddhist scholar, was there, and I waited until he was alone and went over to him. Peter was tall and thin, and the older he got and the more lined his face grew, the more handsome he became. I told Peter I'd been volunteer teaching creative writing in a middle school, a class of troubled eighth graders who were at risk of not graduating. I told him, with all that was happening, I didn't think I could continue.

Peter said, “It's like feeding birds in the summer. If you put food out for birds in the summer and fall, they'll stay, they won't fly south, and then, if you suddenly stop, they'll starve to death.”

I looked up at him, my throat tightening. “That wasn't exactly
what I hoped you'd say,” I said, and smiled shakily. Peter laughed quietly.

 

I called Anne Puddu and told her I'd be back the third week in January, that I needed a few weeks to pull myself together. When I knocked on the door and entered the classroom, those tough, hardened faces turned to me like a field of sunflowers and broke into wide-open grins. They started cheering and clapping and jumping out of their seats.