“Sure, I’d love some company,” I said. “Can I pour you something to drink?”
“Maybe some club soda.”
I handed him his soda and held up my glass of scotch. “Cheers,” I said.
Eyeing my glass, he said, “That’s a helluva way to live, brother.”
“Look, Freddy, I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine.”
“Don’t tell me you’re fine. None of us is fine.”
“All right, all right,” I said. “I hear you.” On the other side of the room, Alice was putting on her coat.
“I think I’m on your wife’s bad side,” I commented.
“You know Alice loves you. You just worry her, that’s all. But you come to Manny’s tomorrow, usual time, and she’ll be glad to see you.”
Freddy gave my arm a light squeeze, then went to join his wife. I went outside, looking for Sarah. She was standing in the backyard, leaning against the railing of the porch, holding a burning cigarette in her hand. I leaned back next to her. It was a clear night with a numinous moon. For a minute we both looked at the sky. I watched a star blink on and off, like the very pulse of the universe.
“Since when do you smoke?” I asked.
“I don’t. This is just my private way of remembering Mom.”
She then did a spot-on imitation of Ruth, placing half the cigarette in her mouth and inhaling until her eyes bulged.
“Give me that,” I said. I took a deep drag on the cigarette and then exhaled Ruth style: head turned, one eye shut, blowing the smoke out of the side of my mouth.
We both laughed.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve tried a cigarette,” I said, coughing.
“Congratulations.”
“Did you know that Mom had Seamus privately publish one hundred twenty copies of a story I wrote in college?”
“Yes.”
“Did you read it?”
“Yes, it’s beautiful, Seth. It really is.”
“Why didn’t she tell me she was having it privately published?”
“She had this strange idea that you stopped writing because of a letter she sent you about that story. I think she was always hoping you would write again.”
I inhaled deeply on the cigarette and then handed it back to Sarah.
“Seamus said I was a lot nicer to Mom in that story than I ever was in real life. Do you think so too?”
She let the cigarette fall to the ground and meditatively ground it out with her shoe.
“I remember one time when we were eleven,” she said, “and we were fighting in the backseat of the car somewhere on the turnpike. Mom pulled over to the side of the road and ordered you out. We came back about ten minutes later—that was about how long she needed to go to the next exit and turn around. It was the middle of summer, but you were shivering from fright, and you had peed in your pants.”
Sarah’s eyes were filled with tears.
“I have absolutely no memory of that,” I said.
“I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“I can’t believe I don’t remember something like that.”
“Maybe your memory is more selective than you realize.”
We looked up at the night sky, mainly, I think, to avoid eye contact, but perhaps we were also wondering if Ruth was somewhere out among the stars, looking down on us.
“Can I say something really strange?” I asked.
“Everything you say is strange,” my sister replied.
“I know, you’ve told me that maybe a zillion times. . . . But I miss Dad,” I said. “I feel like we’re really orphans now.”
“I know what you mean,” she said.
“Do you think about Dad at all?”
“Not much. But sometimes I think I’d really love for him to see my children. Maybe because they’re the one thing in my life I’m really proud of.”
I looked back up at the stars to hide the fact that I was crying.
“Oh, Seth. I’m sorry.”
“Forget about it. . . . I actually ran into Dad in Cambridge.”
“You did?” she exclaimed. “When?”
“Years ago. After Molly and I split up.”
“How was it?”
“Strange. I had sent him a condolence note when Hortense died, and he scolded me for writing just two sentences.”
“Jesus! What did you say?”
“I told him he had miscounted. I wrote three sentences.”
Sarah let out a mirthless laugh. “Let’s go in. I’m getting cold.”
INSIDE, I WENT OVER TO the couch where Zipporah and Avi had moved with their book. When I sat down between them, Zipporah’s brow furrowed.
“What’s the matter, honey?” I said. “Don’t you want me to sit next to you and Avi?”
She looked anxiously around the room, as if she were afraid of being seen with me. Then she cupped her hands to my ear and whispered, “Uncle Seth. You’re not supposed to sit on the couch.”
I cupped my hands to her ear and whispered back, “Why not?”
She sighed with frustration.
“Because,” she whispered, “you’re in mourning. You have to sit on one of those wooden boxes.”
Feeling left out, Avi put his mouth to my other ear. He didn’t have anything to say and just breathed warmly into my ear.
“Can’t I mourn after I visit with you and Avi?” I asked.
I said this lightheartedly, but she looked deeply vexed. Was she afraid that if I violated Jewish tradition I would be banished again back into the world of the dead, or wherever she thought I had been until six months ago?
“You’re right, sweetie. I’m going to sit on that box and mourn properly. Can you and Avi join me? I really don’t want to sit on a box all by myself.”
“OK,” she replied.
The three of us moved to the other side of the room. I sat on a crate, and the children stood on either side of me. I opened their book to read to them from the story of Ruth, a story of loss and love, of living among strangers.
I noticed Rachel standing over us, holding a crate in her hands too.
“Do you mind if I join you?” she asked.
“Sit,” I said.
She set her crate down and sat on it. Avi stared at her. “Hello,” Rachel said. “What’s your name?”
Avi turned to me and said, “Is this your wife?”
“No, that’s my friend, Rachel.”
“Are you Jewish?” he asked Rachel.
“Yes,” she answered. “Are you?’
Avi was tongue-tied, but Zipporah laughed. “She’s kidding with you, Avi. She knows you’re Jewish.”
I began reading to them, but after just a page or two I realized that Zipporah was looking out the big picture window. I looked out too and saw Seamus deep in conversation with Elijah. Alice and Freddy were standing nearby. Under the moonlight, my brother’s tzitzit glowed luminously against his black trousers. I looked around the room. Rhoda was whispering into Poppa’s ear; Sarah and Aaron were sitting on crates, their children on either side of them; Jenny and Jeanette were eating off each other’s plates. Everyone was here except my mother. For the first time all day, I missed her in a way that made me dizzy with dread. I was here and she was in the cold ground, sealed inside a pitch black coffin. It was the same dread I had felt so many years before on the night of my bar mitzvah, the night I held my mother in my arms, kissed her on the lips, and told her I loved her, because I was afraid she would disappear down a deep, dark hole and we would all be sent to live in different places.
I looked back out the window. Seamus was nodding, apparently in agreement with something Elijah was saying. Then he bowed his head and placed a hand over his face. Elijah pulled him close and the two of them embraced, rocking and swaying in each other’s arms.
Zipporah leaned casually against me, extending an arm across my back. I prayed that she would live another one hundred and twenty years, and that she would always remember this night, remember all of us who
were here.
Date: October 18, 2002
Subject: Bat Mitzvah, Books, Stories, etc.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Dear Zipporah,
Well, I hope your father doesn’t stroke out when all the boxes are delivered to your house later today. He didn’t want any keepsakes from Nana Ruth’s apartment when she died, but I’m sending you all of her books now. I read them all by the time I was your age, so you better start reading. Anyway, the books aren’t my actual bat mitzvah present for you. I’m also sending you a story I wrote many years ago. That’s my real present. Nana Ruth would have wanted you to have her books, and I know she would have wanted you to read this story. It’s a story about our family, a story about longing for solace and connection with something that’s been lost.
Much love, many kindnesses—
Your Favorite Uncle (AKA Seth)
A STRANGER ON THE PLANET
By Seth Shapiro
Three months before my thirteenth birthday, I persuaded my father to sue my mother for custody of me. This was in late August, near the end of a two-week visit with my father. I wrote my mother a letter informing her of my decision. I told her I knew she might be disappointed, but I wasn’t rejecting her; I only wanted to spend more time with my father, to know and love him as well as I knew her. I also told her not to call me. We could discuss this when I returned home, if she wanted to.
She phoned the second the letter came. Phyllis, my father’s wife, answered the phone. “Hold on, Sandra,” she said, and held the phone out to me, her palm covering the receiver. I shook my head. Phyllis gave me an exasperated look and told my mother I was busy. She called three more times in the next hour. I had known this was going to happen, but I was not even thirteen, and I wanted to forget how well I knew my mother. Phyllis agreed to relay her messages to me: How long should she preheat the oven for my lemon chicken recipe? Should she run hot or cold water when scrubbing the sink with Comet? What should she do if the washing machine stopped in midcycle? I had typed out three pages of instructions before I left, but the calls kept coming right through dinner. Could she use ammonia on Formica surfaces? Should she use tap or distilled water in the iron? Finally, Phyllis exclaimed, “Jesus, Sandra, we’re eating. He’ll be home in two days.” Then I watched her face darken and imagined the blast my mother was delivering. Don’t you tell me when I can talk to my own son. I’m his mother, and when I tell you to get him, you jump—understand?! Phyllis hung up the phone and sat back down at the table, her lips drawn across her face like a thin white scar. Ten seconds later the phone rang again. My father and Phyllis looked at each other. I felt like Jonah hiding in the bowels of the ship, knowing the storm above was all his fault. No one moved. “Mommy, the phone is ringing,” said Leah, my little stepsister. “Maybe you should answer the phone, Alan,” my father said. I stood up from the table very slowly, giving myself every chance that the phone might stop ringing before I reached it.
“What’s the problem, Mom? I wrote everything down.”
“You little bastard! Don’t bother coming home. If I never see you again I’ll die happy!”
My father wasn’t enthusiastic when I asked him to sue. “Lawyers? Court? Not again.” My parents had divorced when I was five, and the episode still bothered him. He had wanted to work things out quietly, but my mother staged a grand opera. She asked for an exorbitant amount of alimony and minimal visitation rights for my father. She accused him of being an adulterer and wife beater. My father was a rabbi in a small town on the New Jersey shore and brought in many members of his congregation as character witnesses. My mother had no witnesses on her behalf. She lost every point she argued for.
“But, Dad,” I implored, “she’s driving me crazy!”
He and I usually didn’t have much to say to each other, but I expected the word crazy to explain everything, as if I were revealing to him that we shared the same inherited trouble, like gum disease or premature balding. I pitched my case to him, describing how she complained about her haywire menstrual cycle when I was eating, how she slept on the couch every night, sometimes with a cigarette still burning in her hand.
“Do you know how dangerous that is, Dad?”
He pressed his palms up his cheeks, a gesture that always led me to imagine he was trying to stretch his beard over his forehead. I envisioned him doing the same thing the day he met my mother. When I had asked her, the year before, how they came together—a far more mysterious question to me than where I had come from—she answered, “In the shower.” Both were on an archaeological dig in Israel. My father, recently ordained, was covered with soap in the primitive communal shower when my mother walked in, nineteen, naked, enthusiastic about everything. Several months later they were married, but my mother was bored by the life of a rabbi’s wife. She had no interest in charity work or Sisterhood meetings. She saw an analyst five times a week and signed up for classes on Sanskrit and criminology. Once she planned a lecture at the synagogue on Gurdjieff’s centers of consciousness. Three people came.
I told my father I was fed up with cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing.
“I thought you liked doing housework,” he said.
“Not all the time. I want to have a normal life, Dad.”
He touched his beard lightly, thoughtfully. I had found the right word.
“Sometimes her boyfriends sleep over. I see them on the sofa bed when I get up in the morning.”
“All right. All right.”
“Dad, I’m telling you this is an open-and-shut case. I’m old enough to live with whomever I want. That’s the law.”
I knew about the law from my mother. She sued everyone. Landlords, universities, car dealers, plumbers, my father. She stayed up all night researching her cases and planning her strategies. In the mornings I would see her asleep on the couch, openmouthed, beneath a blanket of law books and the sheets of paper on which she outlined her complex and futile arguments. Years later, after I graduated from law school and returned to New Jersey to practice law, many of the older lawyers around the courthouse told me my mother had a reputation as a compulsive but knowledgeable and creative litigant. “I always thought the law was a metaphysical exercise for her,” one of them said to me. “I can sue you: Therefore I exist.”
I also learned the art of exaggeration from my mother, the art of how to invent something when the truth is boring or makes you anxious. I had seen her on the sofa bed with a man only once. The year before, she had come into my bedroom very early one morning to tell me that Sidney, her sometime boyfriend, had spent the night. “You don’t mind that he’s here?” she asked, sitting on the side of my bed. Her weight was comforting, as were her warm, heavy sleepy odors. I told her I didn’t mind. “I slept in the other room,” she said anxiously. “But I’m going to lie down next to Sidney for a couple of minutes.”
“All right,” I said, and went back to sleep. I knew she liked Sidney. She had told me that he had always wanted a boy to raise, and that he was personal friends with Joe Namath. He bought me books, bats, tickets to ball games. In two years he would go to jail for fraud and income tax evasion, but that morning my mother and I both believed in him. When I went into the living room he was asleep on his side. My mother was awake, pressed up against his back with an arm around his chest. She smiled at me as if Sidney was some wonderful secret between us.
My mother’s explosion of telephone calls came on Thursday night; late Sunday afternoon I took the bus from my father’s town to the Port Authority bus station in New York. My mother usually met me inside the terminal, but I didn’t see her anywhere. I called home six times in the next hour, counting twenty-three rings on the last attempt. The next local bus across the river didn’t leave for two hours. I found a bench at the far end of the terminal, and, sitting with my suitcase between my knees, watched everyone going home, everyone except for the panhandlers, the proselytizers, the old men sleeping against walls, teenagers who had run
away.
My mother wasn’t in when I arrived home. She hadn’t left a note, and by ten o’clock I still hadn’t heard from her. I knew what she was doing. She was letting me know how it felt to be abandoned. I knew she would return the next day, but I was still in tears by the time I was ready for bed. My room felt like the loneliest place in the world that night, so I pulled out the sofa bed. I had never slept in the living room before, and I couldn’t orient myself, couldn’t gauge the black space around me.
Gradually the darkness lightened into a dull grayness. When I could see everything in the room clearly, I began preparing for the first day of school. I kept thinking, Now he’s brushing his teeth, now he’s deciding which shirt to wear, now he’s pouring milk over his cereal. . . . as if, without my mother in the house, I were inhabiting someone else’s life. I was all ready by six thirty. I lay back down on the couch and watched the clock for the next hour and forty-five minutes.
At eleven thirty, during biology, the school secretary came to the classroom to tell me that my mother had phoned. She told me that I was to go right home because of an emergency. The year before, I’d been called out of class about once a month because of an “emergency” at home. Usually my mother had fought with a patient, or a married man she was seeing had stopped answering her calls, or her father had sent her another sanctimonious letter, or some judge had treated her in a cavalier manner.
I declined the secretary’s offer of a ride and walked home. When I let myself into the apartment, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She held the letter I had written to her in one hand and was burning holes in it with her cigarette. She looked like a curious child torturing a small animal.
“I thought you saw a patient now,” I finally said.
She was a psychologist but had only four regular patients. She used her bedroom as an office, though she longed to have one in town. “Someplace beautiful,” she would say. “Someplace where I can really be myself.”
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