Nanny does pick the chicken from the bones, and saves the carcass for us to use to make soup the next day. After dinner Anya and I clean the kitchen, leaving it spotless, we think. But when we get up in the morning, we see that Nanny has rewashed the roasting pan, from which I hadn’t, apparently, managed to clean every crusty trace. Now it gleams almost tauntingly on the stove. She didn’t even leave it in the drying rack beside the sink—everything she washed, she dried on the spot.
She washed it again, I say, shaking my head disbelievingly, holding the pan up to the light. What is she thinking? She’s almost a hundred years old! How the fuck does even she get things this clean?
Anya comes over to inspect the surface of the pan, which is older than either of us but bears no sign of having ever been used.
You left bits behind! She had no choice, she had to clean the bits! she says in another perfect imitation of Nanny’s heavy Brooklynese. Anya turns the pan over in her hands, closely inspecting its immaculate surface, shaking her head, too. That’s some fifties housewife shit, she says.
My mother and father took longer than two weeks to marry, but not much. For them, it was two months. They met at The Bottom Line, a rock ’n’ roll club in Greenwich Village, on a humid August night in 1976. Having lost her own father months earlier, my mother had spent the better part of the year shut in and grieving. But that night her little brother’s band was playing a show and her friends coaxed her out. At the time, my father was casually seeing a woman named Moxie Mandelbaum, and my mother caught his eye in part because she looked like a prettier, sexier version of Moxie. The pickup line was characteristically direct. “You look like someone I’m dating, only better,” he said. My mother hadn’t even planned on going out that night, let alone falling in love. Like Nanny, she couldn’t imagine throwing a party without her father alive to be there, so they eloped, married at City Hall with just one witness—a friend and Rolling Stone photographer, who captured them beaming as they got into a yellow cab, my mother looking casually stunning in her wedding dress, a belted haute-hippie summer frock the color of mushroom soup with a cream bohemian patterning—then retired to a room at the Plaza Hotel, from which they telephoned their parents to announce the nuptials.
I’ve always thought that the decade when your parents were in their twenties is the one that assumes the greatest significance in your mind. For me that is the seventies. I can picture its colors, I can smell it. I know its cultural artifacts and I long to have experienced its particular variants of cuisine, of concerts, of tourism. Though I don’t have any of my own memories of that decade, I still feel betrayed by television shows that I don’t think, in their costuming or their coloration, get it quite right. My seventies is the one in which my parents, bronzed to a deep summer tan, met in the Village in tight T-shirts and jeans. Or maybe my mother wore a calf-length denim A-line skirt. Some of the T-shirts even survived into our childhood: one for Baby Watson cheesecake, one for the band Sparks, one a bright green long-sleeve shirt, tight on my father, with the realistic image of a palm tree emblazoned on the front. One, which I still have, that is mustard yellow and bears a silkscreen of my father’s smiling face—a birthday gift to him from my mom. I’ve thought fondly about her wearing that fan T-shirt, her being that big a fan of my dad, her long brown hair falling casually around the dollops of her bra-less breasts. After their non-wedding, they took a honeymoon to Greece, where they got even deeper tans. A few photographs survive from that trip. My parents look nut-brown and sultrily zombified by love, their green eyes glazed over with that gaunt, electrified early-relationship sex calm. As a child, I used to see frequently in friends’ houses the iconic framed photos from their parents’ weddings. The dad in a suit, the mom like a happy cream puff in frilly lace. There was the prom-style one, heads tilted in together, or the one of them dropping a knife together into the tall, tiered white cake, teeth flashing. We had none of these. In my parents’ early photos, happy is not the word. Rather, they appear strung out on love, like they’ve been fucking for days and now are moving slyly, wolf-like, through the streets of a hot European city in search of food.
There was something wild and lustful in this love, something sensuous and frankly ethnic, which always seemed to me to counter the chilly, WASP-y love of movies and diamond commercials, of other families, with their big houses with wraparound porches. There might have been other things they did better, but we did this best: loved loudly and laughed.
I’ve also thought that when love reaches this tenor, we catch a glimpse of what a women’s world could look like, a matriarchy. In All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks has written, “Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners.” It is men who tend to put limits on love, she says, leaving women in a “constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.” Swept up in a powerful, perhaps unpragmatic love, it can feel like a man has submitted to the women’s way, entered the temple of women’s love, which is abundant and wild, boundless.
Although it wasn’t just the women who were lovestruck in my family. Even my father, for all his stoic silences, was prone from boyhood to a kind of mania around love. He told me that his first crush seized him in elementary school, long before he even knew what sex was. In bed at night, he imagined rescuing her from the ocean. She would plant a kiss on him in gratitude. At ten, he developed a crush on a girl named Sally Stone. He didn’t know Sally, he just saw her get out of a car each morning when they dropped his sister off at school. He attended a boys’ private school and wore a jacket and tie to class all day. When he found out Sally Stone’s name, he began carrying a stone in his breast pocket. “Right next to my heart,” he said. The two never even met.
Is this love or madness, or is love madness?
While in graduate school, I traveled to Russia one summer. I was supposed to be starting my doctoral research, but I spent most of my time there wandering. I took Russian language classes during the day, then walked for a couple miles, stopping at markets and bookstores, eventually descending on the long breezy escalators into the gorgeous metro and heading back to the apartment where I was staying. When I emerged at my stop, I bought a foil-wrapped block of ice cream, which I ate while perched on the windowsill, looking down on an evening soccer game. In the neighborhood where I was staying, I kept noticing apologies graffitied onto the sidewalks and walls. Walking down through the courtyard to the street one morning, I saw a message, in big, bright, royal blue lacquered lettering. KSENIA I’M SORRY. It was enormous, all-caps Cyrillic, and some letters had dripped, blood-like, nearly down to the ground. I felt my breath go out of me a bit, a jolt of excitement at standing before so large and bold a renunciation of propriety, of property. This wasn’t like New York, where graffiti was everywhere. I walked on briskly, but it wasn’t even another block before I spotted the next message, in the same hand, taking up three big sidewalk stones. KSYUSHENKA I LOVE YOU. And then a half block later, a bulbous, badly drawn heart with another one: KSYUSHA MY LITTLE STAR, and three long arrows—I imagined the remorseful lover, bent over in devotion, dragging the tip of a spray paint can along the avenue. The arrows led all the way to the corner, the metro entrance, where there was one final plea, this one in curlicued script, a schoolboy’s best penmanship: KSYUSHA FORGIVE ME YOU ARE MY LOVE. I had no idea who she was, but I loved to imagine that she would see all this, whoever she was, teetering to the metro on stacked heels the way the girls did there, that someone had vandalized the city in her name. I wanted that. Was there a way to compel the grand gesture if it wasn’t an apology for an equally grand mistake?
chapter twelve
My parents’ marriage didn’t reveal itself to be broken until it had already fallen apart. To me it looked like this: One day my parents were happy. Then, they spent a summer smoking and talking in hushed voices on the screened porch. Were they having a good time or a bad time? Lucia was living in a dorm in the city, twenty minutes away, but it
felt much farther. She was hard to reach and when she came home she was exhausted and looked wan and sickly. Could they be talking about her all that time? All we knew was that anytime we walked by, they went silent. Need something? one of them would say upon noticing I was in earshot. An abrupt leap into geniality that made everything awkward.
I’m going to meet Emily for ice cream and to study. We have an English final this week, I said.
Okay, honey, said my mother but they were already back in conversation with each other. They talked and talked and smoked and smoked, and then they were done.
My father thought things were fine—I thought we were happy, he actually said, with a kind of wonder, as the ax came down—but my mother’s dissatisfaction had been building for a good decade at least and it had finally found expression in the dreaded and tragically conventional form of another man. I’ve since learned that this is, if not common, then certainly not rare either. A Norwegian friend once called the man who plays this role in a woman’s life the ferryman. The man who carries you out of your relationship. Some people know the ferryman is only a catalyst. Others try to stay with him. My mother tried to stay. She fell in love with what he’d shown her in herself; she mistook that vision of herself for him.
Jim was in my mother’s work orbit. She ran an art nonprofit that put artists in underfunded city schools and he worked for a similar nonprofit nearby. Not because he was an artist but because he was the kind of well-meaning guy who threw himself into secular good works. He seemed smart and kind and solicitous and she found him cute. He was cute, after a fashion—cut from the same preppie cloth as my earnest, chiseled English teacher, and literary in the benign, mildly awed way of someone who still quotes the Wallace Stevens poems he read in college. I was the reader in our family, so he was always trying to connect with me over great works of literature and new books he thought might lend him some street cred. Have you read Junot Díaz’s Drown? Your mom and I really liked it, he said. He could be funny—a punster, the type of guy who talks out loud while doing the crossword, who feels himself to always be operating in some capacity as entertainment. Her infatuation was beyond the scope of what I, the teenage child of my mother, a child newly adjusting to the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, could possibly understand. But I was close enough to my mom (primed by so many hours of worrying over Lucia with her and talking about her marriage to my father) to be able to see her also as an independent adult, not just Mommy but a woman. A woman with needs. I accepted my mother’s choice faster and with more ardor than either of my sisters, and I tried to be friendly to Jim. Yes, as a matter of fact, I had read Drown.
You’re kind of a kiss-ass, said Anya.
No, I’m not! I said. I’m just trying to be supportive of our mother.
Well, “our mother” is acting like a teenager. Besides, he’s annoying. He tries too hard.
He does try too hard, I agreed. But he makes Mommy happy.
I was a total kiss-ass. Or merely a codependent. Determined to appease, to be flexible and hide my true feelings, which came out when I was alone, writing frantically in my journal, or more rarely in snide remarks under my breath. But mostly I wrapped up my real feelings and buried them. If you do this long enough, you stop being able to tell what your real feelings even are.
My parents had crazylove—or at least started there. Over time, their marriage became something steady and reliable—at least to us, their children. But we were not aware of the tectonic shifting taking place beneath our feet. Maybe because of his age or his eagerness, Jim illuminated in an almost cartoonish way the things my mother lacked in her marriage: enthusiasm, playfulness, possibly the virility of youth. In that regard, Jim embodied our worst nightmare. He was closer in age to some of our boyfriends than to my mother. He was peppy, or maybe he was just nervous when he was invited into our home, the one our dad had lived in. Initially, Jim made my mom so happy it was almost sickening. Via the jitters of early love (perhaps also the anxieties of divorce), she shed as if by magic the ten pounds she’d been trying for a decade to lose (which she didn’t need to lose; the same ten I’ll be needlessly trying to lose until I die). She looked svelte and gorgeous. She started wearing dresses like the ones she’d worn when we were kids, long, chic, silky floral dresses that emerged from her closet like long-lost cousins. She began to look different to me, like a young person all grown up, rather than like an old person—a mom—which is how she’d looked before. Watching her fall for Jim, I kept realizing she was simply a woman. I wanted to be a big enough person to grant her that, to smooth the way for that, maybe even eventually celebrate it. My sisters were more guarded, or maybe simply more honest, as they always were. But I wanted to remain my mother’s good girl—I embraced him.
I navigated cautiously my relationship with my father, who seemed more obviously crushed by their parting, even as he enthusiastically took up dating. Once, my dad revealed to me that in the days after he’d moved out and Jim had moved into our house, he would sometimes park across the street and just look at our house. Jesus, I said. Were you waiting for one of us to come out? I asked. He wasn’t. He was fantasizing about challenging Jim to a basketball game under the hoop in our driveway.
When it became clear that their marriage was really ending, my father took to bed. The low queen bed in the upstairs room. A glass of water beside it and a paperback facedown. The sheets had begun to smell like wilted cotton and bodies, that tactile-textile bedroom smell that hangs in the air and can be comforting in spring and summer. He was diagnosed with depression, and though he had always been mildly depressed, my sisters and I had never seen him like this, in an almost catatonic state, and when I sat on the edge of the bed to talk to him, mostly to announce my comings and goings, his face looked wan and actually hurt. It was frightening to see him like that—not a shell, like depressed people are so often described, but rather full with discomfort, with pains that seemed to shoot around his body like gas, forcing small adjustments as he lay there. You’re going to be okay, my mother told him, dressed for a work event in a black sheath dress and heels, some artful glass-bead necklace dangling as she leaned over him. I’ll call in one hour and check on you. You’re going to be all right. How good the click of the pavement must have felt when she finally closed the door, strode away from the house, and headed Jim-ward to freedom.
Once, while my father was still living at the house, Jim called and asked to speak to my mom. Anya wasn’t home, it was just me, my parents, and my Uncle Nick and Aunt Josie, who were staying with us for a while. Jim for you, said my dad, handing her the receiver. My mom took the call, then came back into the living room and said he’d been hurt, badly beaten up, and she needed to go get him. I watched the gravity, the implications, of the statement unfold across my father’s face. She had to “go to him,” she was saying, like a lovestruck girl in a movie.
Where is he? asked my father.
East Orange, said my mother.
You’re not driving to East Orange alone at night. My father, always calm, now almost alarmingly so, stood and retrieved his keys from the entryway table. Nick, go with your sister, he said. I sat in the excruciating quiet with my dad and Aunt Josie that night, picking at a pizza.
Jim had a few gaps in his résumé, but we didn’t know that yet. He said he’d spent a year in Portugal building houses, whatever that meant. He liked Mexican food and alt-country music—before long, my mother was eating tacos and listening to Cracker and Steve Earle. I even ran into the two of them at a concert once and couldn’t decide whether to find it embarrassing or sweet. His age and boyish manner were mortifying. But my mother looking that happy? That charmed me.
The drinking problem was hard to hide. He could blow through a six-pack in a couple hours. Outside the convenience store where we bought our coffee and cigarettes in high school, I ran into him blind drunk one Friday night. This was after he’d moved into our house. My eyes widened in mort
ification when he stumbled over to talk to me.
Isn’t that your mom’s boyfriend? my friend Alexandra said as we walked back to her car, smacking our Parliaments into the palms of our hands to pack the tobacco.
Oh my god. Oh god, I thought. Yeah, sort of, I was answering her when the foghorn of his voice went off.
Heyyyyyy, Ninnna! he said too quickly, then blinked to let his brain catch up to his mouth. Nee. Na. Laughter. I do know your name. Howzerrr night going? he spat. I instinctively took a half step back, farther out of the arc of his arms, his warm breath.
Yeah, it’s a nice night out, we’re on our way to our friend’s party. Are you driving tonight? I asked, like a cop.
Nah, I’mmm not driving, s’okay, he said. He raised his eyebrows with his eyes still closed as though he had an idea. Could drive, but I’m got a buddy at McGuire’s want to have a drink with. But I’ll see you at home later, cool?
Cool, cool, I said back, and we walked past him through the parking lot. Is this my actual fucking life? I said, settling my ass into the low seat and pulling closed the door of Alexandra’s Honda Civic.
Jim’s crack addiction revealed itself slowly. My poor mom didn’t even know to think of crack. Once, he said he’d been jumped by some guys in Newark for no reason (love truly is blind if she bought this after the East Orange debacle) and came to work with bruises on his face. Then he took a couple “business trips” during which he was unreachable and following which he was pallid, ornery, and exhausted, his vocal cords burned out. She began asking the questions she was by then practiced at asking my sister and finally wrestled the truth out of him.
Jim was “fun.” Though he sometimes affected a shy air (in a way I found completely disingenuous), his personality was big and goofy. He “got” all the cultural tidbits that my mother found amusing. He watched The Daily Show, which my father didn’t find particularly funny. He was very much unlike my dad, whose evenness, unflappability, and obliviousness were sometimes maddening. My dad was a steady presence, but he wasn’t always paying attention. In high school, Lucia once came down for breakfast with blue hair and he didn’t even notice. The same happened when I pierced my nose myself. These were things we did perhaps only to get him to snap to, to yell, to give a shit. He never did—a testament to his open-mindedness but one that could leave us feeling unmoored.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 12