The Jewish Daughter Diaries (4 page)

Mayim Bialik

They say no one loves you like your mother, especially your Jewish mother. In my case, I have had more than ample opportunity to test this.

As a child, I was teased a lot. I was a head shorter than the shortest person in all of my elementary school and junior high classes. I had a prominent nose, a deep scratchy voice, and no curves to speak of until I was about sixteen—up until which I could have passed for a boy from the neck down. I had an odd sense of humor and precocious taste in music. I often came home holding back tears, waiting until my mother could hold me and fill the air around us with her rose-scented perfume, listening to my sad tales of teasing and humiliation until I had no more tears to shed.

And then she would say the words that in her infinite wisdom were supposed to make it all better: “They're all jealous of you.” My earliest recollection of hearing her say “They're all jealous of you” is mixed with the distinct notion that I did not know what the hell she was talking about.

If they are jealous of me
, I wondered to myself,
why are they
teasing me
? It just didn't make sense. As I got older, I started to question her explanations of others' jealousy as the reason for their teasing. My mother met my bewilderment with a sympathetic glance and a modest recounting of my assets as she saw them: I was petite, adorable, funny, smart, and most importantly, I was a very good person, always trying to help those less fortunate than me. And if Barbra Streisand could be so famous and amazing and wonderful with
her
nose, why should mine be any problem? Actually, the way my mother told it, I was indeed a fantastic, gorgeous person and I am surprised I did not become jealous of myself.

• • •

I became a professional actress at the age of eleven, and my mother was right there with me at every audition and every callback, cheering me on as she primped my hair and applied my neutral lip gloss. At this tender age, I was already labeled an “ethnic character actress,” and at auditions as in real life, I was surrounded by an ocean of WASP-y, perky, nasal-voiced girls who had been in theatrical training since they were able to walk.

At first, I simply did not have success in commercials or in any roles calling for classic, American apple-pie looks. What do you think my mother told me when I lost all of those parts to those perky girls? “They're all jealous of you.”

By this time, some preadolescent angst and cynicism had set in, and I started finding it increasingly unbelievable that everyone in the world would be jealous of me. My mother's love for me—the fact that she was, indeed, my number one fan—slipped from my grasp, as I struggled to reconcile her love and adoration with the rejection I received from boys, from the popular girls in school, and now (seemingly) from the entire entertainment industry. Confusing times.

This phase did not last long, though, and a year after I started acting professionally, I was cast as the young Bette Midler in the 1989 Touchstone feature film,
Beaches
. Finally, I was in my element: I was portraying an ethnic (Jewish!) character actress and I really got to shine, New York raspy voice and all. The movie came out the week of my bat mitzvah, and unfortunately, despite my low-key nature, kids at school decided to be snarky toward me instead of excited for me. This led to a whole new phase of coming home in tears. I didn't want people to make any sort of fuss over me, but I certainly didn't expect to be the butt of a whole new set of jokes.

Leave it to my mother to remind me that they were all just “jealous of me.” As I entered and completed high school, my faith in my mother's assessment of everyone in the world as jealous of me faltered, but she never gave up. Even as an adult living on my own, when I would tell her that auditions for network executives for the latest pilot I tried out for did not go well, she would stare at me in disbelief and ask with heart-wrenching honesty, “How could they not like you?” When parts passed me by, she would come up with reasonable, if far-fetched reasons they chose someone over me.

“They wanted someone people would feel sorry for, and who could possibly feel sorry for you when you're so perfect?” “You were too pretty for that role.” And of course, “Oh, so-and-so got it? She was a guest star on
Blossom
. She was jealous of you then, and I bet you she's still jealous of you!”

In my mother's eyes, I am truly perfect. According to her, I am prettier than most (my resemblance to Sarah Jessica Parker, she says, is begging for a big sis-little sis feature, with me as the better-looking sister, I fear), smarter than most (“Did I mention she's a neuroscience doctor?” she will ask anyone willing to listen), and just plain better.

I don't mean to make her sound so stereotypically…Jewish. She despises the stereotype and really thinks she is beyond those clichés, since she thinks she has lost her Bronx accent (she hasn't), claims she doesn't “do” guilt (she's just sneakier than most), and really believes she is objective about her fabulous daughter (she's not).

Although my mother is by most measures a sane woman, her own logic challenges her from time to time. When Sara Gilbert recently came out with her own talk show featuring several actresses I worked with in my
Blossom
days as her co-hosts, my mother was floored, shocked, outraged that I was not included.

“How could they not have you on? They must be jealous of you.” She sometimes expresses absolute disbelief that I have not either been given my own television show or been elected president of the United States.

I sometimes wonder how any man I date or marry could compete with my mother's assessment of me, when what we hear from my mother is that I am her angel. No, correction: I am not her angel; I am an angel for all of humanity. The bar has been set unreasonably high.

I think I know what my mother would say if I asked her how any man could handle the standards she has set for them: “He's jealous of you.”

Meredith Hoffa

It's been two years since my mom passed away, and one of the things I miss most achingly is her laugh. I know it's a cliché—we're always missing people's laughs—but this laugh of hers was seriously bonkers. It was an unbridled, careening shriek, closer to a cackle than a warm guffaw, made all the more thrilling because it came from such an even-keeled, composed, exceedingly pleasant person. She was doing this laugh like crazy when, on a visit to LA, she told me she had a surprise for me.

“It's not a present, exactly,” she said, reaching into her NPR tote bag. “Just something that made me think of you.”

That something was a tiny little man-doll. It was a plastic G.I. Joe–style action figure like the ones my brother used to hide around the house in bookshelves and potted plants. This doll was bare-chested with a bandanna around his head and a sash around his waist; I think you'd call him a sensei. But what was striking about him, the thing about him that got my mom doing the Laugh, was that his legs had been pulled right out of their sockets. He was Torso Only.

It was pretty creepy.

It was like he had been made for us.

• • •

“Did you really come from me?” my mom would sometimes ask. She was teasing, but I knew what she meant. Of course I had, in fact, come from her. I had her same smile, her same alarmingly chubby big toe, her same perfectly circular weeble-wobble knees. Later, I'd become a dancer, like she had been. I was hers. But often it seemed impossible that we could be biologically mother and daughter, so profoundly different were our ways of seeing and being in the world.

The fundamental thing to know about my mom, the thing that everyone always mentions when they talk about her now, was her simplicity, her straightforwardness, her what-you-see-is-what-you-get-ness. With her, there was never any pretense. Related to this—or not—she was deeply un-girlie. Her brand of femininity was entirely devoid of embellishment or tricks or bluster. Her preferred state was unfussy, unpainted, and unadorned; she was never interested in makeup or jewelry or anything related to the art or industry of ladyhood.

“Putting on” sexy—in the form of clothing or attitude—made her uncomfortable. So much so that she tried to remove any trace of it from herself. She was a beautiful woman; people were always telling me so. She was dark-haired, with a graceful carriage and a strong, slim body. But she always hid behind her uniform of massive '90s-style eyeglasses and free sweatshirts from whatever organization she had last donated to. God forbid she draw any attention to herself.

In contrast to that was me. As a toddler, I'd beg to wear my party dresses and patent leather shoes to preschool on a daily basis. As a tween, I was a tireless mall-rat; the world of clothing and fragrances and potions and lotions was a mesmerizing haven. As a teenager, “bodying” became one of my hobbies: inhabiting my new womanly figure, dressing it up, showing it off, testing the parameters of its currency. I was obsessed with ordering clingy clothes from the Victoria's Secret catalog, like off-the-shoulder shirts, asymmetrical one-sleeved tunics, miniskirts, and other minuscule swatches of stretchy fabric.

For a long time, the differences between my mom and me were just that: differences as superficial as they were extreme. It wasn't until the summer of my fifteenth year that these differences turned into actual tension.

A part-time job I'd gotten leading birthday parties at the Gymnastics Academy of Boston was turning out to be a bust. I'd planned on having a life-changing, teacherly experience in which I'd mold young lives via positive role-modeling and my acrobatic prowess. Within a few weeks though, it was clear that this wasn't going to happen. The gig was really just a glorified clown position that involved me bellowing, pleading, and sweating a ton while also making sure none of the small, sweaty rug rats in my charge sustained a head or neck injury.

But the even bigger issue was that the job was unexpectedly very part time, just a couple hours per week. This meant my summer was shaping up to be one hot, unstructured, unsupervised mess. So I developed a little ritual. Every morning, my friend Julie would come over and my mom would help us pick a lovely cultural event to attend, like a concert at the Esplanade or a free kayaking class on the Charles River or a Pink Floyd laser show at the Museum of Science.

Then, once my mom's car had backed down the driveway for work, Julie and I would start our preparations, which consisted of holing up in my room and listening to En Vogue while shimmying into various items involving Lycra: tube tops, tube skirts, bandeaus, halters. From there, we'd hop on the subway train and ditch the suburbs. Of course the destinations themselves hardly mattered. Sometimes we ended up at the intended event; sometimes we didn't.

The point was simply in being out, in strutting, which we'd do for hours, giddily delighting in every head turn or lingering glance or catcall. We couldn't believe our new power—it was electric, inebriating, fantastically dizzying. The summers of wholesome sports camp were over. Our braces were off, our boobs had arrived, and the outside world was confirming our hunch: we were not little girls anymore.

It didn't matter that all my gross teen awkwardness was still screamingly on display: the neon-hued hair from overzealous Sun-In use, the curling-ironed bangs lying diagonally in a stiff cruller across my forehead, the mildewy embroidered bracelets snaking their way up my arms. It didn't matter a bit, because what I also had was an off-the-charts amount of brazen confidence. And each day brought new developments to feed my swagger.

One afternoon near Copley, some guys gave us actual business cards and said they'd worked with New Kids on the Block and would we be possibly interested in appearing in a music video? Another day found us getting a ride on a dude's Sunfish sailboat, which ended up capsizing into the vile, murky Charles, but we weren't grossed out at all. It was just a hilarious adventure to relate later that night at IHOP where my friends liked to convene to drink pots of decaf before heading to Burr Park to chain-smoke. I was a newly sexy motherfucker on top of the world. Then my mom swung by the house unexpectedly one day and spotted our near-naked bodies slithering out the front door. Her eyes widened and her mouth moved, though it took a second for any sound to come out.

“No,” she said, simply, plainly. Her voice was quiet, her tone alarmed, final. For what seemed like forever, she just stood there and stared at me, her child, in a backless tube dress. (Obviously it was from Victoria's Secret and obviously it made me look like Paulina Porizkova.)

“You can't walk around showing your body like that,” she said.

“This is my genuine self!” I insisted. “Why should I hide my body?”

“But your breasts…they're right there.” Her face made a tiny flinching motion, as if my boobs were about to leap out of my shirt and punch her in the face. “It's asking for it, Mer.”

That was just it. Asking for what? Attention? Free drinks? What does that phrase even mean?

Julie slipped out the door, and my mom and I continued. It wasn't a fight, exactly; no one yelled. But there was no seeing eye to eye, either. Our planets of origin and native languages were too different. My mom didn't even seem angry. She looked scared. I'd never seen that reaction from her. I felt kind of bad…Maybe this was guilt? Regret? I hadn't been trying to cause her worry. But fuck that. I was just living my life.

It was positively dumbfounding to me that a smart person like her could be so wrong. The way you dress doesn't have meaning behind it. It doesn't communicate anything. And that she thought it did made her seem old fashioned, un-empowered. I felt sorry for her, frankly. And for myself, for being so misunderstood by the person who, on all of earth, was most supposed to “get” me.

“You know, showing everything is not what's sexy,” she said to me that day. She'd say this to me many more times over many more years. “It's sexy to be subtle and make people guess.”

Yeah, right, I thought. Says the woman perpetually in blue jeans, Tretorns, and an old Red Sox T-shirt of my brother's.

From that point forward, my mom watched over me with hyper-vigilance. It was all about my physical body—keeping it safe and whole, shielding it from those who might leer, touch, grab, or defile me in some tangible or intangible way. There was the time, later that summer, when my old favorite camp counselor drove out to visit and my mom forbade me from getting in the car with him. “You two can walk to get some ice cream,” she had said, and we did, while I seethed. There was the infuriating rule that I was not allowed to get up before 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, a policy intended to limit my primping time since a girl shouldn't beautify for school.

Then there was one of our longest-running conflicts: temple attire. No matter what I put on, she had a problem with it. She could either see my cleavage or my shoulders, or the outfit was too short or too see-through, or she could detect “outlines” of body parts, like thighs. These crazy-making standoffs would often end with me whipping a pair of tights down the stairs and screaming, “
This
is
how
I
look. Deal with it!
”

I hated the way she was always covering me up, putting me away. She seemed to think my body was hers, that it was an actual extension of her own, and one day she articulated as much. I'd wanted to get my belly button pierced, and she forbade it on the grounds that it was trashy. Plus, my belly button was made from her body so it belonged to her and she was the boss of it, so, sorry, no, case closed.

And then came the saga of the torso.

• • •

It was a few years later, early in another steamy summer, when a chilling crime took place in Boston. A twenty-year-old Swedish woman who'd come to work as an au pair went missing from a downtown nightclub only to be found hours later—the torso part of her only—in a nearby Dumpster. A homeless guy discovered her. So, shock waves. It was a really big deal. The story was discussed at dinner tables: ours, neighbors', everyone's.
Torso. Can you believe it? Au pair. Torso.

To my friends and me, the story was shocking, but distantly so. We talked about it like it was a compelling episode of
Cold
Case
. The crime seemed so gruesome as to be ludicrous, so abstract as to be almost silly. It would never happen to us. Plus there was the word itself, “torso,” which caused stirrings of nervous laughter. “Torso” is not used often in regular daily life, but suddenly it was being uttered willy-nilly, everywhere. Torso torso torso.

To my mom, though, this was it. This was the thing. Her looming but vague fears had suddenly been made concrete by a news event that painted a literal picture and tossed it in her lap. It was the story of a Good Girl who had showered and dressed and gotten on the T, maybe talked with strangers, maybe danced with strangers, maybe had a drink, and then had her body destroyed. It didn't matter that this woman was a responsible person, or that she was just visiting town. It didn't matter that she was working for a nice family in the suburbs, or that she had planned a creative and enriching activity for the kids for the following day. This crime was a reminder that intentions don't matter. The world and the people within it can be hostile, and our fragile bodies don't always make it through intact.

My mom never actually said the words “I told you so,” but, yeah, she told me so. If there was ever a time when she might have been tempted to lock me up in the attic, it was then. But she didn't. Instead, we—and life—kept on. I went to college and came home for holidays and summers.

And, over time, a strange and very unexpected thing happened. This grisly, sobering news event—which, in our home, was now referred to simply as “torso”—made things better between us. Mostly, what it did was give us some common language, a semi-silly shorthand. “Torso” gave us a name for our push and pull, a name for the I'm-this-way-and-she's-that-way thing that had always flustered us so, a name for the mother-daughter standoff that had begun with the Summer of Lycra and was still in full force. Now that we had a label for it, the tension was lightened, a channel ever so slightly opened.

This meant that when I was seventeen and went to Israel with plans to work on a kibbutz but instead ended up traveling the country with a gang of fun-loving thirtysomethings, she could sigh loudly into the phone and say, “I cannot stand how torso this sounds.” It meant that when some college friends and I drove to Key West for spring break (where, as it turned out, we would befriend a team of sunburned Irish soccer players and spend our evenings playing drinking games in their suite at La Quinta Inn), she could tell me what a torso idea it was to attempt too much highway driving at night.

It meant that anytime I was showing too much skin for her liking, which was pretty much always, she could shake her head and say “That outfit is gonna get your torso tossed in a Dumpster.” We meant no disrespect. But there was such relief in putting words to our dynamic. Now that we could name it, we could breathe.

By the time I hit my mid-twenties, I was spending much less time in Lycra apparel, and, in general, my breasts and other body parts were properly stowed within sensible pieces of clothing. I was living in San Francisco with my fiancé, whom my parents—especially my mom—desperately adored, and I had my dream job working for PBS. It was chapter one of my Real Adult Life. And even though I was three thousand miles from home, a new closeness developed between my mom and me.

We were two women now. Sure, we were still profoundly different from one another. In Hollywood movie terms, I was the mouthy, irreverent one who craved the spotlight, and she was the prim, conservative one who kept her head down and stayed out of the fray. That would always be. And there would still be fits of exasperation. The temple attire issue, for example, never worked itself out as long as my mom lived, despite the fact that I'd often swing by Bloomingdale's to pick up some flattering slacks or a skirt specifically for the occasion. She was always still picking at me.