The Year My Mother Came Back (18 page)

NINE

I dream about my mother. She's a little girl in a white cotton dress, running with her Grandfather Jake in his peach orchard in Oklahoma. She's a teenager, studying late at night in her dark, unhappy house in Brooklyn. She's a fashionable Barnard student, typing papers. She goes on a date with Ira, the handsome Coast Guard officer back from the war, the one she was waiting for. She's on a research team with Margaret Mead. She gives birth to Madeline and is madly in love with her first-born child. She has a miscarriage, and then another, and another. She holds me in her arms, relieved that I made it. She comes home on a winter day with baby Jennifer. She takes me campaigning for civil rights. She plays tennis with Ira. She makes chicken soup. She naps on the hammock and birds alight on her book. She types and types and can't finish her dissertation. She gets sick. She's furious because I suddenly have breasts and she suddenly has none. She suspects Ira of infidelity. She types and types. She visits me at college, we have a picnic, somebody takes our picture. I treat her to lunch at the Indian restaurant. She's happy for the first time in years. She is sleeping beside Ira, suddenly sits up with her head in her hands, slumps back on her pillow. She has had a ruptured aneurism. I see it through her eyes, I see the blood and her blurred vision, I feel the unbearable pressure in her head, I hear the sound of the ambulance siren and then nothing.

THE LAST TIME
I saw my mother was the day I took her to the Indian restaurant, when she was fifty-seven and I was twenty-two, a year out of college, on the cusp of adulthood.

That was the year my mother came back.

She came back as herself, the way I remembered her, the way I wanted her to be, after years of sickness and sadness and anger; and after my years of stormy teenage sadness and anger. She finally came back. For one year. And at the end of that year, she died.

I WALK THROUGH
the Ramble on a windy July morning, and sit on a wooden bench in a grove of trees. The air smells like honeysuckle. A sparrow lands on the bench beside me. It hops closer. I remember when birds loved to land beside my mother on the hammock.

A wind rustles through the leaves, which flash their shimmering silver underbellies like they do before a storm. There's a stirring in the trees, with much birdsong and flying about. The sparrow flies away. I wipe tears from my eyes.

Mom, Mommy, Louise.

She flies under the leaves toward me, shimmering but invisible. The wind picks up, and I feel the warmth of her and the chill of her.

A warm, salty breeze wraps itself around me. It's my mother's hug. I want her here with me. It doesn't matter whether she's a ghost, or a memory, or my idea, or her idea, or God's idea, or dust, or sound waves, or transfigured molecules, or an echo from the Cosmos. She's here with me.

Mom throws salt over her left shoulder and over my left shoulder. In the next gust of wind, the salt floats and billows and swirls around me, blowing my long hair in all directions, and protecting me with salty swirls of luck and courage.

My mother is back.

“I love you,” I whisper.

“I love you,” echoes the wind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my brilliant editor, Andra Miller, for her insight, wisdom, and enormous patience; and to Sally Wofford-Girand, my remarkable agent, for her expert advice and personal warmth, and for finding the perfect home for this book at Algonquin.

Many thanks to my smart friends who generously read drafts and shared invaluable insights and suggestions: Juliette Carrillo, Barbara Kancelbaum, Melissa Kraft, Kathy Mendeloff, Jacqueline Reingold, Ricki Rosen, Susan Stephen, and Heather Tait. To my writer friends and colleagues who brainstormed with me over cups of coffee and
glasses of wine, and gave me courage when I most needed it, thanks to Libba Bray, Randi
Epstein,
Marie Myung-Ok Lee,
Ruth Ozeki
, and Jon Reiner. Thanks to the Upper West Side Writers Gang for our collective mulling, laughing, and cheering on; to Abigail Thomas for teaching me how to write courageously; to my colleagues at the New School Writing Program for their support and inspiration; to my students, from whom I'm constantly learning; to my friends Galia and Steve Moors, whose living room salons were safe havens for trying out early chapters-in-progress.

I'm indebted to the Writers Room, where I began this project, and to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, for three weeks of uninterrupted writing in a utopic setting, with three meals a day, a room with a view, and the exhilarating company of fellow artists.

I'm grateful every day to my remarkable sisters, Madeline Cohen and Jennifer Cohen, my best friends and confidantes, who helped me remember details about our childhood and who offered thoughtful feedback and support throughout the project.

Boundless love and gratitude to my amazing family—my husband Michael and daughters Julia and Eliana—for allowing me to tell the story of our turbulent year. (Of course, if you ask them to tell the story, they would each tell it differently.) Eliana, thanks also for allowing me to publish your poem.

Deepest love and gratitude to my late parents: my affectionate, encouraging, and whimsical father, Ira Cohen; and my wonderful, complicated, loving mother, Louise Giventer Cohen.

Published by

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Post Office Box 2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of

WORKMAN PUBLISHING

225 Varick Street

New York, New York 10014

© 2015 by Alice Eve Cohen. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

eISBN 978-1-61620-431-0