The Year My Mother Came Back (15 page)

When I looked up
epistemology
that night, I was even more confused
:
“the theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. The investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.” How the fuck would I get a new one of those?

Mom laughed when I told her on the phone about my thesis advisor.

“What's so funny?”

“Academics can be such jerks. She's threatened by your creativity.”

“Maybe so, but I'll need to come up with a new thesis topic.”

“First, you have to find a new thesis advisor.”

“Really?”

“I think so. Find an advisor who's more attuned to your interdisciplinary approach.”

This was new: Mom giving me good advice. And me trusting her. She seemed to intuit just how I felt and how to make me feel better. I hadn't felt this way about my mother since I was a little kid. I could tell she enjoyed helping me.

I switched advisors and decided to write an academic thesis on theater and ritual—using the renowned anthropologist Victor Turner's theory of ritual to analyze contemporary experimental theater as ritual of social change. My new advisor, Ellen Basso, was able to introduce me to Turner, her mentor. He was so enthusiastic about my ideas that he invited me to apply to the interdisciplinary PhD program he headed up: the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought.

“That's marvelous! I'm so proud of you,” said Mom. I glowed.

I DECIDED TO
go winter camping over Christmas break—two weeks in the Adirondacks, where it was currently twenty degrees below zero. Some grad student had organized the trip and put up a flier. I'd signed up out of desperation. My depression hadn't improved in three months. It was worse. Nothing had helped: therapy, art, books, classes, food (which I'd been eating too much of, trying to numb myself). I had a hunch that a survival trip might break the curse. I wanted it to scare me out of my depression. It worked with hiccups.

We drove upstate in three cars loaded with backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, army-surplus leather snowshoes, warm clothes, cooking pots, stoves, canisters of kerosene, matches in Ziploc bags, peanut butter, chocolate bars, and instant ramen noodles. We hoisted our sixty-pound backpacks and hit the trailhead in a snowstorm. Soon, we all looked like snowmen, covered with fat white flakes.

For fourteen starlit nights, we stayed warm by square dancing in snowshoes around the campfire. By day, we hiked in snowshoes, stripped down to our T-shirts and sweating, even as our breath formed white clouds. One day, I saved a fellow camper from frostbite by thawing his foot on my warm stomach; that night he and I shared a tent, and it felt like it might be the start of something. After fourteen sub-zero nights, after the excellent camaraderie that comes from living together in the wild, lining up our sleeping bags as close as possible to share body warmth—my depression was lifting. Life in the snow reformulated the equation, shifting the calculation toward optimism.

I rang in the New Year, 1976, at home with Mom, Dad, Madeline, and Jennifer, feeling better than I had all fall.

MAY ARRIVED, AND
my mom proposed a visit. “This is very last-minute, and you're probably busy with your senior thesis. But I have the day free, and—”

“Yes, Mom, come visit! I turned in my thesis yesterday, so I'm not busy. And the weather is gorgeous.”

I met her at the Princeton train station. She stepped off the train, carrying a picnic basket. She was wearing a paisley kerchief, denim wraparound skirt, and a button-down pale blue shirt. I was wearing an embroidered peasant blouse and jeans. It was two weeks before my graduation.

We sat in the grass and shared Brie cheese, French bread, and ratatouille. Our conversation was awkward. We were cautious with each other, unsure whether or not we were friends. Over the years, we'd become habituated to the glacial chill between us. It was different now. It was warming up. The beginning of something new. We were reinventing the mother – daughter rules, building a foundation for the years ahead.

“Did you hear from the University of Chicago?”

“I got in!”

“Congratulations! What did you say?”

“I said I was honored by the invitation, but I turned it down. I don't want to go into academia, Mom. I want to make theater. I'm starting a theater company with some other Princeton students.”

She sighed, tilted her head, and looked at me with her thoughtful brown eyes. “Just as well. You won't risk spending your life trying to finish your PhD dissertation, like I did. Which reminds me, I'm about to start a new job—a full-time faculty position at a brand-new college. It's exciting to be there at the start of something new.”

“Congrats, Mom, that's fantastic!”

We stashed the picnic basket in my dorm room and strolled around the campus. It was an awesome spring day after several rainy weeks. Everybody was outside, sunbathing, reading, and playing Frisbee. I had my camera with me, and I snapped pictures of campus, which was starting to look good to me again. I was graduating soon. I wanted to remember all this.

“Hey, Mom, I don't have any photos of the two of us together.” I handed my camera to a classmate who was passing by. “Would you mind taking our picture?” We posed in front of the formal garden and smiled for the camera, with our arms around each other.

“Do you want to spend the night, Mom?”

We stayed up late, talking in the dark. It didn't matter what we talked about. The essential thing was that we were talking. Mom on the bed, me in a sleeping bag on the floor; telling stories, confiding in one another
. I wondered how we ever lost each other for all those years. And how did we find each other again on this balmy night in May, at the end of my senior year of college?
Our words and laughter filled the void, replenished the empty well, cool water bubbling up from deep below, splashing over the dry slate walls and filling us up, filling us up, filling us up.

It had been a long winter for Mom and me. Nine years. The ice was thawing. It was spring. It was finally spring.

I lost the roll of film I shot during that visit. Three years later, I found it under a radiator in my apartment. The photo lab was only able to salvage one picture. The color is radically distorted, as if the chemicals were intentionally manipulated during the developing. Mom and I are in the center of the photo, smiling, our arms around each other, she in her paisley kerchief and pale blue shirt; me in that peasant blouse. Framing us is a psychedelic blaze of bright red, orange, and purple streaks, as if we're being engulfed by flames.

FOUR

It's the New Year, 2009, and Eliana doesn't want to go back to school. I encourage her to talk about her feelings. She hates being different, doesn't want to be stared at because she needs a walker. She doesn't want to rejoin the class when she's so far behind. She's been isolated for six weeks, while the life of the classroom has gone on without her, and she feels estranged.

“I'm so sorry, Honey. It'll take a long time to get better. But you can talk to me as much as you want.”

“I don't want to go to school. Please don't make me go.”

I let her cry. I hold her. But she has to go back. She is assigned a full-time health paraprofessional to take her up and down the elevator (which makes her feel even more self-conscious), while the other fourth graders sprint boisterously up the stairs to their third-floor classroom.

The winter storms begin. I'm petrified that Eliana will fall and rebreak her surgically broken leg. There's a snowdrift in front of the school, right outside the cab door, and ice on the ramp to the handicap entry. How do I help her walk safely through a snowdrift with a walker? The wheels get clogged with the gunk in the dirty snow. The wheelchair-accessible door is jammed, and I have to throw my full weight into it to get it open. Why doesn't the school take care of the handicap entrance? I'm an irate parent, and I'm going to have a word with the principal.

“I hate myself for subjecting her to this,” I confess to Michael.

Michael is torn between rolling his eyes in exasperation and wanting to comfort me. I'm grateful that he chooses the latter.

“We did what's best for Eliana in the long run,” he says, wrapping his arms around me.

“She used to play soccer. Now she can't walk.”

“She'll play soccer again,” says Michael. “This is temporary.”

“I hate myself.”

“Let it go.”

“ELIANA, THERE'S A
counselor at school who can help you talk about your feelings if you want—”

“I don't need help talking! I have too much therapy already. Physical therapy at school
and
at home. I don't have time for more therapy.” I can't argue with that. “Anyway, I only want to talk to you and Daddy about my feelings.”

“You can talk to us about anything, any time you want.”

“I know that.”

ON THE X
RAYS
every other week at the surgeon's office, there's a widening gap between the upper and lower halves of Eliana's femur.

“This looks great. Perfect. Your bone is growing beautifully, Eliana,” says Dr. Campbell.

Michael and I look at the same X ray, but all we see is a scary gap in the middle of her severed femur.
The Emperor's New Clothes
comes to mind.

“I don't see new bone,” says Michael. “It looks like nothing's there.”

“It's there,” says Dr. Campbell. “You have to know how to look for it. The new bone is still soft, like cartilage, which is good. We don't want it to harden too quickly while we're still lengthening it. If that happens, and it sometimes does, we can't lengthen the leg any more.”

That would be a total bummer.

After a few weeks of lengthening, her leg is visibly longer. I don't have time to go downtown to have Herman adjust her lift, so I bring her shoe to the Ecuadorian shoemaker on our block and ask him to reduce her shoe lift by half an inch.

“You want I make her lift smaller?” he asks, incredulously. “Explain, please,” he says, handing me a pen and a newly cut leather shoe sole to draw on. I sketch a picture on the leather of Eliana's leg with the fixator attached; and another sketch of her bone with the gap in it, narrating as I draw.

He nods thoughtfully. “My niece in Ecuador, she has one arm shorter,” he says. “Maybe one day she will have her arm lengthened.”

THE FRESH-FALLEN SNOW
is off limits to Eliana. Elevator doors are treacherous. Stairs are out of the question. Madeline tailors sweatpants for her, with extra fabric in the right leg to fit over the bulky fixator. She can't go outside for recess where the other kids are throwing snowballs. She has to sit in the cafeteria with the “homework club” kids, who haven't finished their schoolwork.

Sometimes her friend Jojo gives up her outdoor recess to sit with Eliana in the cafeteria and keep her company. They're allowed to play quiet games together.

“I don't want to go to school,” she says. Every day, I have to talk her into it. There are so many things she's not allowed to do, so I say yes to every reasonable request.

“Can I invite my friends over after school?”

“Yes, Sweetheart, of course you can.”

Jojo comes over. They can't roughhouse like they used to, so they play dress-up. James and Eliana play board games and watch Harry Potter movies. When Galia comes over, I film their fancy costumed tea party. Eliana's Flip video camera is a big hit. Annika films Eliana expertly licking her right elbow. On her next visit, they ask me to film a contest: Without using their hands, Eliana and Annika have a race to see who can devour an ice-cream sundae fastest. I try not to laugh while I'm filming, but they're so funny, like voracious kittens, their faces in the bowls, slurping vanilla ice cream with their noses dipped in chocolate. It's a tie.

THE NEW BONE
is finally visible on the X rays as a pale shadow, morphing from soft cartilage to solid bone. Eliana has finished the seven weeks of lengthening. No more quarter turns. But she still has six months of rehab ahead of her. There are endless physical therapy sessions and nightly pin care. Her daily regime has gotten more complex: in addition to an hour of stretching and strengthening exercises, she now has to wear an adjustable leg brace to straighten her knee for an hour, and another leg brace to
bend
her knee for a subsequent hour. For twenty minutes a day, she straps an ultrasound device onto her thigh, to escalate the rate of bone growth. (The insurance company tells us that the laptop-sized ultrasound machine is worth $20,000; we're careful not to drop it.) She does her homework while lying on the couch, attached to one or more contraptions. Every waking minute of her day is scheduled. She's sick of it, still sad and mad, but I think she's beginning to feel better. Physically. At least I hope she is. I'm ready for Eliana to feel better. This is a long winter.

“HELLO, I'M CALLING
from school about Eliana.”

“What's wrong?” I ask, in that instant, chest-tightening moment of panic every parent gets when they get a call from their child's school. It's a freezing January afternoon.

“Eliana is fine, but we have a little problem. Can Eliana walk down two flights of stairs?”

“No. Why?”

“The elevator is broken. But we have a plan. The fire department will carry her out of the building through the third-floor window.”

I picture Eliana floating through the icy winter sky, hoisted by a fireman out of the third-floor window and onto a telescoping ladder, which slowly, slowly, slowly descends down to the fire truck. I imagine Eliana—who is scared of heights, and who wishes she could be inconspicuous and invisible—being transported out the window in the middle of the school day, attracting stares from children who watch with amazement out their classroom windows, shouting, “Look at Eliana!”

“Don't call the fire department. I'll take her down the stairs myself.”

“Thank you, Ms. Cohen. We appreciate it.”

I hang up and burst into tears. I have no idea how I'll get Eliana down the stairs. Mothers all over the world carry their children to safety, but I'm not strong enough to carry her down two flights. Michael is out of town. Maybe I should just let the fire department carry her out the window. I'm afraid that if I try to help her, she'll fall and break her compromised right femur, which appears, on the X ray, to be held in place purely by imagination.

My friend Eric offers to help. We meet the assistant principal in the school office. She has a different idea. “We think it's safest to carry Eliana down the stairs in a wheelchair.”

Eric and I think that sounds riskier.

Eliana has another idea. “The easiest way is to slide down on my butt.”

With no help from us, she slides down two flights of stairs, using the banister to pull herself arm over arm, like a monkey.

“That was the most fun I've had since before my operation!” she says, face flushed, green eyes shining.

“You were amazing!”

I tell her about the fireman's ladder idea, hoping to make her laugh, and expecting to score points with her for finding a less scary and conspicuous solution than being carried out a window.

“Aw, Mom! Why'd ya say no? It would have been so cool to go out the third-story window on a fireman's ladder!”

Damn! I should have let her do it. She's outgrown coddling. My protective instincts have segued to overprotective. I try to do the right thing, but the maternal perfection business is beyond me. Flying out the third-story window on a fireman's ladder through the frozen air might have scared her out of depression, like the hiccups, like my extreme winter camping trip did for me.

But, you know? Sliding down three flights of stairs like a monkey had the requisite touch of danger. It was good enough. I'm acclimating to the sufficiency of imperfection, settling for being adequate, which is not so bad, in the scheme of things. My mother taught me that. She's still teaching me that.

ELIANA IS NO
longer in physical pain. Her spirits are rising. She has planned a Valentine's Day party. I make the cookie dough, while she writes the schedule and posts it on the wall:

Eliana's Valentine's Party!!!

Run around and scream—2 minutes

Make Valentine's cookies

Make Valentine's cards (while cookies are baking)

Pin the arrow on the heart

Eat cookies and cupcakes

Charades

If time, make up love stories