The Year My Mother Came Back (8 page)

“You will die depressed and sick at age forty-five,”
like my mother's mother, Rose.

“You will live happily to age a hundred and three,”
like Rose's little sister, Sylvia.

“You will be diagnosed with brain cancer at seventy-five and given only six months to live, but will survive another ten years,”
like my congenitally cheerful Uncle Edwin.

Edwin was more resilient than my mother was. The jovial, self-proclaimed absent-minded professor, renowned for his Brooklyn College courses on Moral Development, Ed's contentment was irrepressible and infectious. Whatever my mother's mood, she would always brighten up in her brother's presence. When we visited Uncle Ed, the moment we walked through the door he would launch into song—an operatic recitative about whatever happened to be on his mind—improvised in loosely rhymed verses:

Welcome, my darling sister, Louise!

Take off your coat. Have a drink. Sit down, please.

Come in, come right in, my three lovely nieces!

May I interest you girls in some nice, stinky cheeses?

Then Mom would sing with him. Just
because.
It was silly and entertaining, and we understood that she
only
did this with her brother:

It's a pleasure, dear Ed, to drink sherry with you,

But first, I've a question, or maybe a few.

What books are you reading? What conceptual forces

Are driving your Moral Development courses?

Uncle Ed would pull a book from his vast bookshelves, open to a page, and paraphrase—in song:

(To the tune of “The Hallelujah Chorus”)

Mar-tin Buber!

Mar-tin Buber!

“I and Thou!”—Not

“I and It!”—That's

—his Phi-
lo
-so-
phy
!

Then, Uncle Edwin would pick up his violin and play some scratchy melodies, while my Aunt Abby served the sherry and stinky cheeses.

When Edwin was diagnosed with brain cancer, his right jaw and skull were surgically carved away, bit by bit, year after year, until he looked like he was wearing an expressionistic mask, his mouth a diagonal line on the far right side of his decimated face. Even so, he woke up every morning beside his beloved wife of sixty years, happy to be on earth another day, joking, “What do you know, Abby-girl? I'm still alive!”

“You, Alice, will be the brooding sister.”

“You, Julia, will inherit your birth mother's lightness of spirit.”

“You, Eliana, will inherit your mother's propensity for brooding.”

Are the infinite varieties of the human condition randomly assigned? God's capricious whims? Or a meditative, thoughtful, and painful endeavor? Like making art. Is God plotting the beats in our collective lives with parental compassion? Or is it a creative act? Is she writing fiction, inventing characters for an epic novel? Is he the head writer for an ongoing soap opera called
Life on Earth
?

I try to achieve an Aunt Phyllis – like state of euphoria during treatments. There are times when I approach it, lying nearly motionless on the radiation table, when my shallow breathing slows, and the itch on my nose that's been driving me crazy fades from consciousness.

At those moments, like right now, lying facedown in a room as sterile as a space capsule, I enter a Zen state of equilibrium, akin to happiness. But unlike Aunt Phyllis, I have to consciously will it, and must work hard to maintain it.

I carefully set my compass on a course headed toward joy, fretfully checking to see that I haven't veered off course, that I'm not sailing straight back to the black hole of sadness where I've already spent too much time. Like my mother did, and her mother, too.

THREE

“We were close, weren't we, Mom? Before your cancer?”

“Yes. That was a dreadful turning point. It wasn't the end, but that was our great divide. There was a before and an after.”

“The after was when all hell broke loose.”

“For both of us.”

I was twelve. Tomorrow, I would start eighth grade. I looked at myself in the mirror, previewed my back-to-school outfit—red miniskirt, black turtleneck, black fishnet tights. I stuck my skinny chest out, trying to look like an eighth grader, but I still looked like a little girl.

On the last day of seventh grade, Dad took Mom to the hospital. He didn't tell us why. When she was away for three days, I was sure she had died.

Then Mom's best friend Shirley called.

“Hello, Alice, dear. I'm so sorry about your mom. Tell me, darling, did she have one breast removed or two?”

I didn't understand Shirley's question. I couldn't imagine why breasts would be removed.

“. . . Alice? Are you there? One or both?”

“Um. Um. One. I think just one.”

“Well, that's a relief, isn't it? At least it was only one.”

I was wrong.

Once Mom came back from the hospital she was changed. No longer the mother I knew. No longer the mother who smiled and laughed and grew flowers and napped on the hammock so the birds would land on her. No longer the mother who once loved me so much, the mother who hugged me, called me Sweetheart and Honeylamb and Sweetiepie, who said she loved me to pieces, who praised my drawings, who did “X Marks the Spot” on my back, over and over, as many times as I asked. This other mother barely noticed us. She was an imposter. Like the Mean Mother from the bad dream I used to have. My mom didn't actually die, but she was gone.

Dad didn't talk to us very much all summer. He came home from work and played piano for hours. Chopin. Beethoven. Mozart. Brahms. Gershwin. Bach. Sometimes he and I played clarinet-piano duets together. I was getting good at clarinet. We were practicing the Brahms sonatas.

I looked in the mirror again. I was the youngest in my grade and I was completely flat. This was going to be so embarrassing. I'd be the last girl still wearing an undershirt. Maybe, maybe, maybe Mom would take me shopping for a training bra, like all the other mothers of every girl I knew. I hoped she would.

No. This wasn't the time to ask my mother to take me bra shopping.

In the schoolyard, some of the fourth graders are flirting with each other. Their juvenile attempts are bumbling, graceless, and adorable. The boys intentionally bump into the girls. The girls push the boys and run away laughing. And so it begins. Eliana isn't yet interested in boys in that way, which is fine with me. The only boy she considers a close friend is James, her best friend since they were three years old.

I was fourteen. It was August 1969, two years after Mom's surgery. I was home from a month at music camp, where I played in an orchestra for the first time; where I got drunk for the first time; where, unbeknownst to me, another camper slipped acid into my hive medicine and I unwittingly tripped for the first time (and
last
time—what a nightmare!); and where I suddenly, unintentionally, flamboyantly, extravagantly, conspicuously reached puberty. My breasts grew so fast, you could watch their size increase with every passing day; for the boys, it was a spectator sport.

I came home with my brand-new breasts, and there was Mom with none at all.

“Falsies” is an embarrassing word.

Everything is embarrassing when you're fourteen.

Nothing is more embarrassing than your mother's falsies.

Mom wore a crude prosthetic, a padded bra, which slid around, telegraphing to the world that she had “falsies.”

It was like she hated that I was suddenly sexual, and she was suddenly not.

At music camp, my new figure made me a catch to the predatory boys. Squirrel to their falcon. A minute ago, I was a little girl, and—
Boom!
—now I was a sexpot. Ogled, pursued, invited to join illicit midnight skinny-dippings in the pool. It was dangerous, fun, titillating. And it was too much, it was overwhelming, confusing.

I was having a secret romance with David, the eighteen-year-old counselor who taught woodwinds and conducted the chamber music ensemble. The first week, we took secret walks in the woods, holding hands. One afternoon, he pulled away from me, stared at me with a crazed look, and abruptly unzipped his jeans and ripped them off.

I was thinking, “Oh my God, oh my God, this is it! David is overcome with sexual desire. He's taking his pants off. What's going to happen next? Am I ready for this?”

There was a praying mantis crawling up David's thigh. A six-inch twig with legs. He flicked it off, and I laughed my head off. He laughed, too, then pulled his jeans back on.

That night in my cabin, according to plan, I tied a long piece of string around my wrist, and threaded it through the knothole in the wall beside my top bunk. David tugged on the string to wake me at midnight—very Romeo and Juliet—and I quietly climbed down from my bunk, tiptoed past Sheila the counselor, and out of the cabin. We ran into the pine forest and snuck into an abandoned cabin David had the key to. We took our clothes off. I learned about male anatomy, a new subject for me. There was lots of touching and stroking and fondling, no more than that, but it was a lot. I still felt like a little kid, wearing the strangely persuasive costume of a young woman.

We were busted in the middle of the night, naked in the cabin in the woods. Flashlights on us. David was fired. The camp director called my parents.

Mom was furious.

With camp? With David? With me?

Yes and yes and yes.

When I went home at the end of the summer, buxom and fattened up from camp food so bad that all the kids filled up instead on white bread slathered with butter and sugar, my mother looked at me like she didn't recognize me.

She looked at me with . . . what is it? Disgust? Envy? Fury? Loss?

Yes and yes and yes and yes.

Mom forbade me from ever seeing David again.

“He's too old for you, Alice. You're in tenth grade. What is a college freshman doing with a fourteen-year-old?”

“Almost fifteen!”

“I don't trust him.”

“You haven't met him!”

“I don't want to meet him.”

I ran to the living room where Dad was at the piano, playing Chopin.

Mom followed me, arms crossed, lips pursed.

Dad finished playing, then turned to face me.

“What's wrong, Alice?”

“Please let me see David. We're in love!”

Jennifer, my goofy-looking little sister, looked up from her book, eyes wide, her crooked teeth facing every which way.

“You know me,” said Dad, chuckling, turning it into a joke, “I don't know a damn thing about relationships. All I understand is music, and since David is a classically trained musician, in my book, he's—”

“Ira!” snapped Mom.

“Uh . . . Listen to your mother, Alice.”

“Daddy, please!”

“Your mother says no. So that's that.”

“This is so unfair!” I ran upstairs to my room and threw myself on the bed, sobbing, Juliet separated from her Romeo. Amanda the Cat jumped on my bed, licked my face and purred. She always did that when I cried. I wanted to believe it was affection, but I think she just liked the salt. I took out my stash of love letters from David—he wrote me long, flowery, idolatrous letters every day—and I cried some more.

MY SISTER MADELINE
was going back to college. We drove up to Boston and helped her move into her new dorm room at Brandeis. Gone, just when we needed her the most. Madeline didn't live with us anymore. Jennifer and I were sad that she wasn't home. Why did she have to leave now? Madeline always saw the bright side of things. With Mom angry all the time, we could have used Madeline's calming infuence.

Mom was always glaring at me. Sometimes she stood behind me and insulted me, while I was looking in the mirror. She had never insulted me before. Never said stuff like this to me, never before this summer. She was acting crazy. I got the feeling she couldn't say this stuff to my face because she knew it was wrong.

“You're getting fat,” she told my reflection.

“Leave me alone.”

“Your legs look like stuffed sausages.”

“Leave me alone!”

“Your breasts are enormous.”

I started to cry. “Stop it!” I put my hands over my ears.

“You eat too much. Have a yogurt for dinner,
or
a bowl of soup.”

“Shut! Up!”

“Not both. I'm concerned about your health. You used to be—”

“Don't!”

“—so slender and pretty, and—”

“Please leave me alone!”

“Now look at you!”

“Get out of my room, Mom!”

“Are you pregnant?”

“GET OUT!”

DAVID WENT TO
college in Boston. He wrote me long love letters and took the train every weekend to see me. We would meet up secretly at the home of his friend Ralph, a senior at my high school, who had also met David at music camp. David recently had a falling out with his parents, and they locked him out of their New York City apartment where David grew up, so David would crash at Ralph's on the weekends. But now, even Ralph's laid-back parents were tiring of David, who had a habit of getting kicked out of places. The two guys cooked up elaborate schemes for our clandestine meetings, which once entailed my climbing into Ralph's second-floor bedroom window via the maple tree in his backyard.

Sometimes, David brazenly knocked on my front door. If Mom was out and Dad was home, I would let him in, and they'd talk about music. He successfully wooed my father with his musical passions: they had the same favorite conductor (Bernstein), same favorite orchestra (Philadelphia), same favorite composer (Beethoven). He made my dad positively ecstatic by playing duets with him.

But as soon as my mother came home, the music stopped.

“Get out of my house.”

“With all due respect, Mrs. Cohen—”

“Shut up!”

It was sort of a relief when David and Mom fought over me. I was momentarily out of the spotlight. Dad ignored them and played piano, providing the soundtrack to their arguments. Jennifer and I sat on the sofa, observing Mom and David's back and forth debate, as if we were watching a tennis match. Jennifer worshipped me and my teenaged friends. In Jennifer's eyes, I could do no wrong.

David sometimes went to outrageous lengths to try to win over my mom.

“Mrs. Cohen, I noticed that your floors needed mopping and waxing, so while you were out, I took it upon myself to . . .”

The floor shone under its slippery coat of wax. My mother was momentarily speechless, stupefied by the deafening clash of gratitude and rage.

“It was very nice of you to mop the floor, David. Thank you, but it doesn't change my opinion. Now leave.”

“Mrs. Cohen, with all due respect, I know you don't trust me—”