Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  

  In this time, when my mother’s dislike of me weighed heavily, I met a girl in orchestra named Mindy who played the violin—I, improbably, played bass. I admired from afar her plaid mini-skirts and the color-coordinated knee socks. “Admired” is too mild: I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I loved the way she wadded up her gum and placed it carefully in a tissue, the way she flipped her hair before positioning the violin on her shoulder, the way she crossed her ankles when she played. At eleven, Mindy had already “developed”; I loved the way she plucked at the hem of her sweater, pulling it away from her body to minimize the curve of her breasts, a habit she retained in middle age.

  And then there was Mindy’s house and her family, with an ebullient mother—a fashionable blonde dance teacher named Muriel—an older brother, and a fat beagle named Muttnik. Every day after school, Mindy and I would make ourselves a snack, curl up together in her parents’ huge unmade bed, with its piled-up pillows and comforter, and watch TV. We’d kick at the dog sleeping in the bedclothes, and he’d ride the waves, groan, fart, hold his ground. The disorder was splendid, not just the messy house, with lipsticked butts in ashtrays, but the noisy relationship Mindy had with her brother, the hair-pulling and fighting in the back seat of the car, their baroque means of torture—Indian burns, noogies, half-nelsons—which did not hide their attachment to each other. Once Mindy’s brother called their mother a bitch and she said, “Get out of my sight,” and threw a spoon at him, and the next night, he was at the table, amusing them with the yoyo tricks he’d learned—Around the World, Walking the Dog.

  The morning after my first sleepover, Mindy climbed into bed beside her mother, and I stood in the doorway until Muriel said, “Come, tsatskelah. I don’t bite.” I curled beside her and never wanted to leave.

  School was like math. I tried before I gave up. By ninth grade, boys and pot and the occasional purloined bottle of booze gave me the kind of pure pleasure I’d once found in “the woods.” I was bad in familiar ways: I cut classes, left a baggie of weed in my open purse, ripped up my report card when it arrived in the mail. There was so much screaming. She hated me and I hated her, and there were slammed doors and threats; once, a glass of orange juice poured over my head, and my father to the side, with his impotent, steam-engine shushing. But I was part of a community made up of other kids whose parents were unjust, so these quarrels, though vicious, did no lasting damage.

  It was afterwards, when the heat had died down, that I could feel the ache of my love, and the knowledge that I could not wound her, could not, could not. Then I would knock on her door to say I was sorry. Knocked again. Twisted the knob. She would not let me in.

  I wrote a letter, trying to explain how I’d felt. What did it say? I love you, don’t hate me for not being as smart as you, it’s not my fault. I put the sealed envelope on the kitchen table. Day after day it remained there unopened.

  One school morning, when the unopened letter was still there, and I was standing at the stove, waiting for the water to boil, she walked past me on her way to work and said, “You ugly little worm.”

  That same cool tone, when I was dressed to go out with friends. “No one will ever love you.”

  To be hated like this made me lose my fear of her, and I fought back and then turned on myself.

  Mindy was busy with extracurricular activities—choir and French club. So I went straight from school to her house, often arriving before she did. I’d follow the haze of smoke from the cigarettes that would kill Muriel, then closer, the edge of whiskey, Chanel 5, tobacco. Come here, doll. Come, tsatskeleh, a hug for mama. If company was over, Muriel would tell her friends, “This little beauty is my other daughter. The artistic one.”

  By high school, Mindy was a National Merit Scholar and in honors classes and I’d gravitated to the stoner crowd, smoked pot, ate mushrooms, spent hours designing psychedelic posters for imaginary concerts. I braided the front locks of my hair, wore Indian shirts with little mirrors sewn in the fabric and long flowing skirts. Mindy said my friends were druggies and losers and I was turning out to be like them.

  I hated school, didn’t give a shit about my dumpy, boring friend, stopped going to her house.

  For seven years we did not speak.

  Once, at the end of my senior year, I stopped to get ice cream with my friends and through the shop window saw Muriel get out of her car. I raced across the street without waiting for the light to change, and when I caught up to her, held out my ice cream and said, “Cherry vanilla.” She took the cone and drew me close with her free arm. “Where have you been, tsatskeleh? It’s been too quiet around the house.”

  Her blonde hair looked brittle and her skin was lined, and I felt a chill, an awareness of mortality. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Friends fight, tsatskeleh. It happens,” she said. “But you could still come see me.”

  “Really?” I said.

  I hugged her again and promised to visit, and didn’t out of shyness. Years passed before I saw her again. She was very sick by then and would not let me apologize. “You were a kid,” she kept saying when I tried to explain.

  That fall, at a college that admitted anyone with a beating heart, I took an intro to psych class and learned about Harry Harlow’s groundbreaking studies on human attachment. Miserable, alcoholic Harry Harlow, determined to disprove an earlier theory of mother love as being dangerous, gets some rhesus monkeys, and divides the group into those who have prickly, hurtful wire mothers that can provide only nourishment, and terrycloth mothers that provide warmth but no nourishment. The monkeys with the terrycloth mothers will thrive. The warmth of these pseudo-mothers provides the comfort they need when they are frightened or left alone. The other monkeys, the ones with the wire mothers, scream and rock and pull out their hair, inconsolable, forever damaged.

  I read this on the top bunk in my dorm, where I stayed instead of attending classes, taking occasional breaks from those wide-eyed, inconsolable monkeys by reading fashion magazines and getting stoned.

  Take this love quiz to determine the kind of attachment you seek.

  Q: Do you want to tell your romantic partner everything about you?

  A: Yes, except for the monkeys.

  I never wanted to speak about those monkeys, never could admit how often I saw their faces.

  Two

  As if to fulfill my parents’ expectations, I flunked out of school and then moved as far away as I could—for me, the West Coast. A friend in San Francisco got me a job at a dress shop in the Haight called the Chic Pea, a tiny store where a small number of pricy, badly sewn garments in crushed velvet or crepe hung on giant clotheslines. Because so few people came in to browse, I spent long afternoons sitting in an old club chair, drawing.

  What was I? Men took in my dark eyes and hair and guessed Greek or Italian.

  Nope.

  I was elusive.

  Then what was I?

  A citizen of the world. It was how I thought of myself.

  “Garlick is a Jewish name,” said one dubious lover.

  Sometimes, I told him I was from Belarus; for I knew that “Garlick” and all its variations (Gorelik, Garlick, Garelik, Gorelick, Gurlick, Horelick, Garlock) could be translated in Russian as “someone who had a house fire.” There were also “Garlicks” from Lancashire, England. Sellers or eaters of garlic.

  “But you’re Jewish,” he insisted.

  “Some would say,” I told that boyfriend, because I thought, I really did, that I had separated so completely from my parents it was as if an actual cord had been cut.

  During those long afternoons at the Chic Pea, I began discharging the hated hieroglyphics of my childhood. Even when I set out to draw something realistic—the bony woman with the henna frizz looking admiringly at herself in a misshapen tunic—eights were in her hair and her nose was a seven.

  Certain piquant phrase
s began to roll out of me during this time, complete with a slight European accent, sometimes Yiddish, other times British. I beg to disagree. I haven’t the foggiest notion. Friends were amused by what seemed to be a shtick, particularly a boyfriend from Fairbanks, Alaska, who was fascinated by what I considered the most banal parts of my past, curious to know if we were more Phillip Roth or Partisan Review. I could delight him by going on about the balabustas in our neighborhood, the drek in the stores, the miskeits rolling in the mail carts at Bell Labs, with their bitten nails and scuffed shoes, the support staff in my mother’s department. Huh! A typical engineer! A technician!

  Even in my dreams, I felt her presence. I was always calculating. Once I worked so hard to solve a problem that had presented itself to me in a dream that I woke myself up with the question: Which is greater in number, mice or Coca Cola?

  Per unit there are more mice, I decided. Per volume there is more Coke.

  Then I went back to sleep.

  I called home often. Something in my body demanded it. I no longer remember these exchanges, only that afterwards, raw and irritable, I quarreled with my friends, broke up with my boyfriends. Terrible PMS, I called these flare-ups.

  In my second year in California, I began to put together a portfolio so I might apply to art school. On one of these phone calls, I mentioned this program to my mother. Art school was nonsense, she said. If I thought she’d waste her money paying for tuition I was out of my effing mind. I applied anyhow and was accepted. When I called home to tell my mother about the small fellowship I’d been awarded, my father said, “We’ll pay the rest.”

  “Daddy!” I hadn’t even known he was on the other line. “Daddy, wow!” Never had he shown any evidence that I was more to him than “daughter who was bad at math.”

  After that, I tried to talk to him when I called. I always asked how he was, and he said, “I have no complaints.” Then, “I’ll put your mother on the phone.”

  One spring, I came home for a visit. This was after I’d graduated, after I’d had my first success—designing an album cover for a record that went gold. I’d come to Bell Labs to drive my mother home from work and was standing in the lobby, looking at a display of all the scientific advancements and technology that had been developed there—the phonograph, the transistor, the laser, radio astronomy. I’d paused over a photograph and biographical sketch of William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, when a man came up beside me and said, “That’s kind of sanitized, don’t you think?”

  “What is?” I said, noticing the smudges on the glass case, and then the big, handsome man with straight black hair that flopped in his eyes, and small, square teeth.

  “Shockley was a racist. He spent a lot more time advancing his view that blacks were genetically inferior to whites than he did working on the transistor. Don’t you think it should say that right here?” He tapped the glass.

  “Maybe they should remove him from the case,” I said.

  “No way. He has to be here. No Shockley, no Silicon Valley. No electronic age. He was a real shit—and he changed the whole course of human history. How about ‘William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and vocal proponent of eugenics.’ What do you think? You don’t work here. I can tell by your shoes.”

  His name was Tom. He was an electrical engineer and made me laugh. He told me he was waiting for his girlfriend to finish work, then asked for my phone number. I gave it to him, and later I married him, and much later, I’d learn that he’d come upon another young woman looking at photographs and asked for her number, and she, too, gave it to him, as did the next one and the one after.

  When I explained to my San Francisco friends that I was moving, I said, “New Jersey—what you do for love!” as if I was sacrificing everything for this man. Tom had a house not far from my parents’ and even closer to the split-level where Mindy lived with her husband and three kids, a fixer-upper with fat plastic children’s toys in every room. The first time I visited, we fell into each other’s arms, and when we parted, her blouse was wet with breast milk. We doubled over with laughter, as if we were back in junior high, and had never quarreled and hated each other. How we got together so often during that time remains a mystery, since I was commuting to New York for work, and she had her babies, and the last of her coursework, and then her clinical year.

  As for my husband—he was childish and hotheaded, unfaithful, and also, in his own way, fiercely loyal. When we visited my mother and father, Tom was so protective of me it was as if he were the parent. He called my mother “Leona,” so I did too, in those years. He respected her, found her maddening, and was her match, teasing her, sparring with her, sometimes heatedly. When they started talking shop—Bell Labs was then on the cusp of being split into pieces—my father and I cleared the table and made awkward conversation in the kitchen.

  With Tom beside me, I could be with my mother and want nothing from her. I could laugh about her self-absorption and mimic her expressions. I pretended she was writing a memoir called I Beg to Disagree—the Life and Times of Leona Garlick, PhD, and on the drive to their house, proposed chapter headings. “Chapter One: You’re Completely Mistaken,” and “Chapter Two: Those Bastards.” Chapter Ten, which had a diatribe against her support staff and a one-sentence reference to our marriage, was called, “Huh! A Typical Engineer!”

  Toward the end of our marriage, Tom’s sparring stopped being playful. It was as if he had to break up with my mother before he could leave with me.

  One evening, after I’d won a design award, Tom boasted about it to my parents. “It’s the Nobel Prize of design,” he said. An exaggeration, not that it mattered: When my mother interrupted to describe her induction into the National Academy of Science, his face began to redden. “We’re not talking about some award you won thirty years ago. What the fuck,” he said, pushing himself from the table.

  We listened to the door slam. “What’s he upset about?” asked my mother after a moment of stunned silence.

  I found him pacing at the side of the house. “Forget it,” I said, though his pride in me had meant everything. “Please come back inside and forget it. For me, okay?”

  I went into the house alone. “No one has ever spoken to me that way,” said my mother when I sat at the table.

  “Forget it, okay?” I begged.

  My father forgot.

  After he retired, he began to forget a lot of things—to turn off the flame under the tea kettle, to take his key out of the front door lock.

  He’s always been careless, said my mother. She had retired from Bell Labs and briefly taught, but she had no lab, no graduate students or grants, so that ended, too.

  Simple tasks began to confuse my father—how to use the remote to open the garage; how to get to the dry cleaners or use the CD player.

  “He’s just being stubborn,” my mother said.

  It got worse, until even my mother could not deny it.

  When I stopped at my parents’ house, I helped him put on appropriate outerwear and walked with him on the quiet streets of their neighborhood, pausing to pet dogs or listen to a bird calling to its mate from a high-up branch. Then the two of us had cookies and tea.

  One afternoon—this was after he’d thrown away his glasses and dentures and before he’d lost his language—he leaned across the table, studied me for a long time, and then asked, “Wasn’t there another one?”

  I was disheartened, though hardly surprised, that in his confused state he might imagine a more remarkable daughter, one endowed with the beauty and brilliance of his wife.

  Three

  In the summer of 2000, my mother announced that she was moving to Tel Aviv. By then, my father was dead, Muriel was dead, and Tom had gone.

  “You’re kidding!” I said.

  My mother never kidded. I’m not sure she would have been capable, had she been inclined. Still, in my shock, it was all I co
uld manage. “Why would you do that?”

  She had just turned eighty and was formidable, healthy, sharp, fashionable, still living in the house of my childhood.

  I knew my father’s long descent into dementia had been devastating. Though she’d never seemed to like him much, he’d been her companion, housekeeper, chauffeur, speaker of her languages, guardian of her secrets. My mother had never learned to drive, so it made sense for her to sell their house (my house, I still thought of it) in a town where public transportation was so poor only indigents and cleaning women took the local buses. Still, to leave the country seemed extreme when there were nearby boroughs with busy shopping areas and train service to New York.

  “My mind is made up,” she told me.

  “Tel Aviv?” I said. “Israel?” I tried to tell myself that it was childish for a full-grown woman to feel abandoned, but I was stung, deeply hurt. “That’s quite the choice for someone who doesn’t like Jews.”

  She raised an eyebrow and scrutinized me. It was a trick she confessed to having practiced in the mirror, enamored of an English movie actor who interrogated suspects in this manner.

  “Religion is what I hate. Don’t twist my words.”

  “But Israel?”

  Why would she relocate to a place where she had no friends or colleagues, no interest whatsoever in my father’s niece, who lived there with her family? Then, and every other time I asked, puzzled, hurt, annoyed, she said, “No one is left in New Jersey. Everyone is dead.”

  “I’m not dead.”