The Year My Mother Came Back (7 page)

After red jello and whipped cream, Madeline, Jennifer, and I cleared the table. My mother washed the dishes, while my father played the piano in the living room. I played hide and seek with Jennifer. Madeline had just turned ten and had lots of friends. She was tired of playing with me, because I wouldn't be six till November.

When Mom finished cleaning the kitchen and putting Jennifer to bed, she sat down at her typewriter, slipped off her shoes, and stretched her legs. I sat next to her, kicked off my shoes, and wiggled my toes. The stack of discarded pages—translucent onionskin paper with Mom's red ballpoint pen cross-outs, and waxy carbon copies with pale blue ink—belonged to me.

“Can you draw quietly, so I can concentrate?”

“Okay, Mommy.”

“Thanks, Sweetheart.”

Typing, typing, typing.

“What are you writing?”

“A book.”

“What's it called?”

She sighed audibly, which meant she was annoyed that I interrupted her.

“What's your book called?”

“ ‘My PhD Dissertation.' ”
Tappitty, tappitty, tappity.

“That's a silly name,” I giggled. “What does ‘Pea Aichdy Dish of Tashin' mean?”

She kept working, didn't answer, so I picked up a crayon and drew a picture on the back of a page covered with her words, some scribbled over with ballpoint pen, a mosaic of words and arrows.

Mom used so many big words, I was accustomed to not knowing what she meant. I sat beside her, drawing and drawing, Mommy typing and typing. She paused.

“What are you drawing?”

“A picture of you, Mommy.”

“I love it!”

TWO

I love that Eliana still likes holding hands when we walk to school. Julia had given it up by this age.

“Mom, why can't I walk to school by myself?”

“Because you're too young.”

“I'm in fourth grade, I'm not a baby!” She withdraws her hand. “Some kids in my class already walk to school alone. When can I walk to school on my own?”

“Um . . .”

What's the point in letting her walk to school alone now, when in one month she'll have surgery and then she won't be able to walk to school at all, with or without me? What's the point of giving her more independence now, only to take it away from her?
And
I don't think she's ready.

“At the end of fifth grade. That's when Julia was allowed to walk to school alone.”

“Okay.” She takes my hand again, and skips the rest of the way to school. I veer off eagerly, to walk through the park and to my session.

Walking home from first grade, I thought about God, and wondered whether our God was the same as the God that Kevin and Sally believed in. How could it be the same God, since Sally said that when they died they'd be angels in God's heaven but we couldn't ever go there, because we were Jewish and the Jews killed Christ, and that was why we couldn't ever be saved. Their heaven sounded comfortable, with good music on harps, but rather snobby and mean. It reminded me of the sailing club Daddy wanted to join, but they wouldn't let him because Jews weren't allowed.

My parents weren't specific on the subject of death and angels and heaven and God, and we only went to synagogue twice a year, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and it was mostly in Hebrew, which I didn't understand. Mom said she didn't believe in an afterlife. Dad said he was agnostic, but he wasn't ruling anything out. Mom said she believed in reincarnation, which sounds pretty cool, like maybe you'd come back in your next life as a lion, which was my favorite animal. But when I pressed her for details, she said she believed that when your body was buried, it helped plants to grow, which sounded boring. Mom and Dad both said it was okay to believe whatever seemed right to you. I hadn't worked out the details (like my dad, I wasn't ruling anything out), but I thought that whatever you believed was true, and that there were many heavens and many Gods, even though everyone said theirs was the only one. Kevin and Sally would probably go to their heaven that had no Jews in it, because they were so certain about it, and I'd go to the other heaven that lets in Jews. But what if I believed my heaven was for everybody? Then Kevin and Sally would be there, too. Phooey, that meant Kevin would still throw rocks at me in heaven. But maybe they wouldn't even know we were in the same heaven, and then wouldn't I have the last laugh? Just like Daddy said he had the last laugh when he won the sailing championship last summer even though he wasn't allowed to join the yacht club.

Eliana sleepily sits down to breakfast in blue and red striped pajamas, her unruly caramel hair an appealing mess. I arrange scrambled eggs, sliced cantaloupe, and toast on her plate, and open the fridge to make her lunch.

“I miss Julia,” she says.

“Me, too.”

I assemble a cheese sandwich and add some baby carrots to the lunch bag—wishful thinking on my part, as Eliana is a vegetarian who doesn't like vegetables.

“It doesn't feel like home without Julia.”

“I know.”

She looks at her plate and pushes the eggs around with her fork.

“You okay, Sweetheart?”

She starts to cry. I kneel beside her chair and she lets me hug her. She doesn't like anyone to see her cry, so she hides her face in my chest till my shirt is damp. She wipes her nose on a striped pajama sleeve and looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes.

“Mom, when do I have surgery?”

“Next month. About six weeks.”

“That's so soon!”

“I know.”

Her mouth quivers, tears brimming again. She glances at the clock and shifts into high gear. “I can't be late for school!”

She bolts into her room, slams the door, emerges moments later in T-shirt and jeans, speed-braids her voluminous hair, tosses her homework and lunch bag in her backpack, and we're off.

I FALL INTO
a daily routine, taking Eliana to school, walking through the labyrinthine paths of the Central Park Ramble, lying motionless on the radiation table. Those once excruciating sessions fly by, now that I've begun time-traveling with my mother. When Jamal says, in his beguiling Barbados accent, “Please lie perfectly still for ten minutes,” it opens a portal through which I summon her. These telescoping minutes might last for days, or for just a few fleeting moments. We revisit events from our past together. Sometimes we just talk. Always, my mother is there and she is not there.

IN MY PERIPHERAL
vision I see Mom leaning on the end of the radiation bed, ankles crossed, reading the
People
magazine I picked up in the waiting room. She's wearing a loose-fitting dress in an Indian paisley print, and she looks relaxed. It's comforting to have her in the room, watching over me.

“It's chilly in here. Are you cold, Sweetheart?” she asks.

“A little.” The side of my face is pressed on the mattress. She pulls the sheet up and smooths it over my shoulders. “Thanks.”

She goes back to reading the magazine. I listen to the pages flipping, and the customary electronic beeps and whirring of the machine.

“Mom, can I talk to you about something?”

“Of course.”

“You never told me about your childhood.”

“That's true.” She puts the magazine down on the end of the bed.

“I learned about your Oklahoma roots years after you died. I always hated your secrets, and this was one more secret.”

“I didn't intend for it to be a secret.”

“Really? Well, it was, and it made me mad. You never told me a thing about your childhood or about Oklahoma! I talked to your brother, he told me to talk to your aunt, and I had to invent the rest. Makes me angry now, all over again. Why didn't you ever tell me?”

“You never asked.”

“Okay. Sorry. I'm asking you now.”

“Then I shall tell you now.” She pushes her reading glasses up on top of her head and sits on the step stool next to my bed.

“I grew up in an unhappy home, in a big, dark house, in the orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn. My family was affluent, relatively speaking. My father—your Grandpa Ben—was a well-respected doctor. His office was in the house, and we had to be very quiet when he was seeing patients. Our home was brimming with polished antique furniture, bookshelves laden with books and medical tomes and ivory bookends. Persian rugs, oil paintings, bronze figurines of Greek gods and goddesses, Tiffany lamps, silver tea sets, velvet drapes, and very little light.”

As she talks, I picture her, simultaneously, as my fifty-seven-year-old mother and as a little girl in her dark house in Brooklyn.

“I lived with my mother, Rose, my father, Ben, my big brother, Edwin, and my horribly mean old Russian grandmother. Grandma spoke only Yiddish and hated my mother—her Oklahoma-born-and-bred, assimilated country hick of a Jewish daughter-in-law. I think my father loved Rose, but he was incapable of or unwilling to stand up to his toxic mother on his wife's behalf. My mother died in 1943, when I was twenty-two.”

“That's how old I was when you died.”

“Is that right? Yes, that's quite a coincidence. I used to visit Mother in the hospital after my classes at Columbia. She had diabetes. She died from too much insulin and too little happiness.”

“Please do not breathe so deeply, Ms. Cohen,” says Jamal, over the speaker.

“Do you want me to continue?”

“Please.”

“My father Ben grew up in Odessa. He studied to be a rabbi, before abandoning that career path to become a Marxist and a doctor. He spoke five languages, had a photographic memory, and liked to show off at every opportunity, by extemporaneously reciting entire pages of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Gershwin, Puccini, and Tolstoy. When he quoted from
Anna Karenina
, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,' I was sure he was talking about us. Father didn't tolerate intellectual mediocrity, especially in his progeny. He disparaged my brother Edwin for his lack of ambition and set his sights on me, his high-achieving wunderkind daughter. He raised me with big words, great expectations, and enormous fear of his judgment.

“Every summer, my mother and my brother and I fled our claustrophobic home in Brooklyn for the wide expanses of Oklahoma. Our annual pilgrimage started with a two-day train-ride to Tulsa—and then on to the family homestead. We relished those summers on the peach farm with Grandpa Jake and Grandma Hattie. We hated having to go home. It was the only place my mother was truly happy. She was a farmer's daughter at heart. She was so alive there.”

“Why'd you keep Oklahoma a secret, if it was so important to you?”

“I wanted to preserve the kernel of happiness Oklahoma represented, and feared it would be lost if I spoke about it out loud. Talking about it would be like opening Pandora's box. All hell breaks loose, and the potential for future happiness flies out. In social science terms, talking about Oklahoma was taboo. You see, what is considered taboo varies from culture to culture, depending on what commodity is in short supply: in a sexually repressed society, talking about sex is taboo; in a culture experiencing famine, it's taboo to talk about food—saying the word
yam
is the equivalent of telling a dirty joke, met with ribald laughter.”

“So for you,
happiness
was the commodity in short supply. Thus, Oklahoma—representing
happiness
—was taboo.”

“Exactly.”

“Mom, you and I both lost our mothers twice: first to depression and then to death. Was it too painful for you to remember losing Rose? Is that why you exiled her from your memories?”

“Probably. Isn't that why you exiled me from yours?”

SCHOOL IS CLOSED
for Yom Kippur. Madeline stays home with Eliana. I've rescheduled my radiation session for the afternoon so I can go to synagogue in the morning.

“On Rosh Hashanah it is written. On Yom Kippur it is sealed.”
We repeat this prayer throughout the day, chanting it in Hebrew and in English. On Rosh Hashanah, God inscribes the fate of every human being into the Book of Life—“
Who will live and who will die? Who shall be happy and who unhappy?”—
but God's judgment is not finalized until the book is closed, ten days later, on Yom Kippur.

Who gets happiness?

Was Aunt Phyllis able to love radiation because of her innate state of happiness? Does that explain her capacity to transform an “Oh Shit” moment into an “Aha!” moment? I think so. Her default barometer is set on feel-good. Even huge obstacles—and she's had some—don't derail her. They are simply temporary detours from her general state of contentment.

Is her propensity for happiness inherited? Learned? Willed?

Who gets to experience it all the time?

Who gets to experience it once in a while?

Who never gets it?

Where can I get some?

Is happiness a function of chemistry? Genetics? God?

If God, is it determined by God's mood, as God thumbs through the Book of Life, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, deciding who shall live and who shall die? Does he also decide who shall be happy and who shall be sad or depressed or screwed up?

What is God thinking about, while marking up the Book of Life with editorial comments and directives in the margins?
“Live, die. Let's see . . . this one will break a toe; that one will get into her first-choice college; he will be hit by a bus and lose a leg; she will have one shorter leg.

“You will get cancer and live happily for four more decades,”
like my mother's father, Ben.