How could I know their economic status in life when the text was in Hebrew? “I’m just going by their looks,” I said.
After a few more choices, I realized that Dina did not like Sephardic men, whose skin was brown like hers, and it puzzled and upset me, given how proud she was of her cultured father, and her mother who’d been accepted to Oxford and ended up in a tent in Israel instead. I imagined asking her why she was so self-loathing. I imagined her asking me.
I don’t know, I would say.
Dr. Barry Berenbaum was small, fortyish, with a discreet little yarmulke, neatly-trimmed beard, and a mellifluous voice with a New Zealand accent. It was early evening, a Sunday at the end of October when Dina brought him to my mother’s door. I invited him into the kitchen, clean by then, and showed him to a wicker chair at the small table by a window overlooking the sea. My mother was already seated there.
Dr. Berenbaum’s warm eyes fastened on my mother in such a way that she straightened, turned sideways in her chair, and glanced over her shoulder in a manner that was both flirtatious and authoritative. He spoke a few words in Hebrew to Dina, in English to me, and to my mother in some amalgam that charmed her.
It was as if she were a child and we’d set up a play date for her, because when Dina took me back to her apartment and rolled the rickety office chair beside her own, I began to worry about how they were getting along. I imagined my mother talking about her illustrious career, while he took in her stained blouse and ill-fitting slacks and the clutter in the next room. I wanted him to like her, to see something of the person she had been, and yet to understand that her bold assertions were set pieces, the embers left from the fire, and not be fooled into believing she was fine.
While I was scrolling through the JDate photos I was stopped by a face—a man with fuzzy gray hair and large, protuberant eyes that seemed to take me in. Rust-colored shirt. No kids, no props, no pets. Just a man. Standing with his arms at his sides. Behind him a stone wall. Dina noticed how closely I studied the photo and read some of the profile aloud. “He is a professor, this Baruch Geschwind, and doing such interesting work; Roxanne, he is so admired.”
I didn’t care about this man or his profession. The picture was what had drawn me in. A snapshot, it seemed, taken without much thought, yet one of those mysterious photos, where the emotion on the subject’s face is as powerful and unnamable as a word on the tip of one’s tongue. I touched my finger to the sharp edge of his Adam’s apple. Then, fearful Dina would mock me for studying the photo, I tried to scroll past.
She grabbed the mouse, slammed it on the desktop, and returned to the photo. “He is a very great intellectual; everyone respects him so. You must write to him now; I will help you.” She wheeled her chair closer. “Write to him. He is divorced a year and new to the JDate.”
I wondered what had gone wrong for the man whose Adam’s apple I touched, this former husband, father of two. Had he instigated the divorce or been blindsided by his spouse? I wondered if at first he’d felt furtive and lonely contacting women late at night, or if now, like Dina, he looked forward to returning home, his apartment brightened by the messages and photos, replacing the family that once filled the room with happy noise. I imagined that the man who looked straight at me had already had sex with several nubile oldsters.
Or not. I had no interest in writing to him or anyone else. “I don’t live here,” I said.This announcement disturbed Dina as much as my attraction to swarthy men. “Why don’t you go out with him?” I said. “He’s more your type.”
It was true. She had a weakness for pale intellectuals, while I, apparently, liked taxi drivers and proprietors of falafel stands.
By then my thoughts had wandered. I was no longer scrutinizing the photo or thinking about Dr. Barry Berenbaum across the hall—a Jew from New Zealand, how was that possible? No, I was thinking about the mystery of attraction. A boy I had once loved because he had beautiful forearms, muscular, hairless. Another boy I could not love because I was repelled by his ears with their tightly attached lobes. The boy, the man, from whom it had been so hard to separate, with his transparent lies, his overwrought protestations of love, the crushing depression he denied, all of the energy he expended hiding whomever he was.
I tapped the photo of the man with the huge sad eyes and long neck. “Write to the guy,” I said to Dina.
The man seemed to look at us both. Maybe he wasn’t sad. His brow was not furrowed. He wasn’t frowning. It was as if he was saying: I have seen it all and here I am, still standing. Or maybe not. Maybe he thought: Life is a vale of tears. No, that wasn’t it. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Not that either. I couldn’t say, and for a few moments, until Dr. Berenbaum knocked on the door, I continued speculating.
“Your mother has given me permission to speak with you,” he said, when I stepped into the hall.
I nodded mutely.
“She told me she’d been fine until her trip to the States. Something there made her ill, yes?” Yis is how he said it. “Has she been living this way for a long time?”
This way—a reminder of the clutter. “Our house wasn’t like this when I was a child,” I said, ashamed to admit that I didn’t know.
“She was a physicist?” He seemed dubious.
“She was,” I said. “Whatever she told you about her professional life was true.”
“And she was depressed when you were young?”
“She was busy,” I said. “She had a very demanding job, especially when she became a department head and had to manage people on top of everything else.”
Just then, as if I were thousands of feet above the earth, looking down from Shlomo’s Cessna, I saw fissures, rages that came without warning, terrible screaming that filled the whole house. “Getting upset” was my father’s name for these episodes. What brought them on? Because I got water on the bathroom floor after a shower, because my father had bought a cheap cut of beef, because she couldn’t find the stapler and was convinced I’d gone into her drawers with my sticky fingers and stolen it? That wasn’t depression, though, was it? She didn’t stay in bed or sit in a dark room for hours, the way Harley often did.
“I don’t know,” I said, remembering my father helping me glue the handle back onto a cup I’d dropped, wiping the seam with a dampened towel while I held the pieces together until the epoxy set, because we loved or feared her. “She was difficult.” I was struck by the inadequacy of this word I kept using.
For a moment, I was silent, and the parrot squawked “ma!” behind Dina’s door. “She had a terrible temper. Working for her must have been a nightmare. She was also extremely fearful, though only my father and I knew. No one would have believed it.”
It was true: My mother, who radiated confidence and never minced words, would not go out alone at night. She stiffened when a dog approached. She trusted no one. “She was isolated,” I said finally.
“Yes. The situation with your sister must have been quite a strain.”
A chill passed through me as if I were hollow inside. “What sister?” I said.
Dr. Berenbaum regarded me. His eyes were soft, his demeanor calm.
In the endless instant of standing outside Dina’s apartment with this soft-spoken man, my thoughts blazed past my mother, past my toothless, senile father leaning across the table, asking, “Wasn’t there another one?” Like a comet, further back in time, and there was no place to settle, no single incident, only the sorrowful way my father breathed, his odd, embarrassing tearful moments; the halting way he spoke in my mother’s presence, his muteness when she was gone. It was as if all we had in common was our fearful love of Leona and our failure to please her.
“What did she say?”
“Families have different ways of responding to this kind of tragedy, especially years ago when the stigma was even worse. Your mother is a very proud woman.”
“Can you back up, Dr. Berenbaum?” I aske
d. “This is new to me.”
He hesitated. I could feel him trying to recall their conversation. “When I asked your mother about family, she told me everyone was dead. So I pushed a bit and asked, ‘What about the woman staying with you? Is she your daughter?’ She agreed. Yes, this was one of her daughters. The other was dead.”
“Was she a child, the one who died, or grown up? What else did she say?”
“Something happened during childbirth. Birth asphyxia, perhaps. Lack of oxygen. She said it was the doctor’s fault for letting her labor too long. That may well have been the case, since these things still happen.”
“And this was in Israel? Did she say anything else?”
“She was very agitated. I saw no reason to press further.”
Laugher echoed, jarring and strange, as tenants climbed the stairs, passing us as if we weren’t there. I waited for the click of a lock one floor up.
“Your mother has some dementia she is working very hard to mask. You see this often. Imagine trying to admit your mind is slipping. For someone like your mother, it isn’t possible. Of course she will deny it. She cannot be living on her own. I’ll send a letter to the Bituach Leumi and recommend home health care. You’re staying here in Tel Aviv?”
It wasn’t a question.
I watched him walk down the steps. The lights flickered on, illuminating his path. I felt as if I were only tissue, barely anchored to the ground, and any moment might rise like a Chagall figure, float out the window and over the roof, leaving all the rooted, troubled souls behind. I touched my cheeks, felt my nose, chin, collarbones, and shoulders, as if to reassure myself of my own existence. Then Dina appeared, dressed for her date with Shmulik the translator, and I was called on to help with some weighty decisions—the necklace, yes or no, the green flats or brown ones, her hair pushed back, or let loose—and these welcome distractions brought me back down to earth.
Across the hall, my mother sat in her chair, across from the TV, in the one section of the living room I’d cleared. Her head was bowed and a journal was on her lap. As I stepped closer, the words tumbled into my mind—the situation with your sister—and I felt sure that I’d known about this sister. Not that I had been told and had forgotten, but that I had known without language, that the knowledge was preverbal, more a feeling than something I had put into words. I thought of a friend who was walking her two dogs off leash. One was struck by a car and the second one witnessed the death. And this second dog stood at the door waiting for her companion day after day. Not eating, not playing with her rubber bone or shaking her cloth lamb. The left-behind dog had no words, did not process the event the way humans did. The knowledge was there, the feeling of loss, of what no longer existed. Absence that has meaning, that shaped the days that followed. All that had brought the dog pleasure in the past—food, bones, toys—was no longer of interest. She’s depressed, the vet had said. She misses her friend. Maybe it was this way for me, the reason an unshakable sense of loss was always within me. And for my mother, it had to be so much worse, I thought, standing beside her. I had grown up in safety and privilege and she had lost everything.
She opened her eyes, drew her journal close to her chest as if I might snatch it away. “What do you want?”
“I was wondering,” I said. “Did you like Dr. Berenbaum?”
“Who?”
“The doctor who was just here. I thought he was nice and so I wondered.”
“Why did you call him? So you could put me away?”
“Ma.” There was still so much stuff piled against the walls. “I was concerned.”
“I’m not senile, you know.”
“No one is saying you’re senile.” Was there tenderness in my voice? I meant for there to be. “Your nosebleeds worried me. And even you’ve been saying you’re not yourself. So I called Dr. Berenbaum, and now I’m wondering what you told him.”
It was hard to go on. I had so completely internalized the law against asking that even now, it was hard to get the words out. “Was there another one, Mom?” I asked at last. “Was there another child? Daddy once asked if there was another one. Do you remember? He was still living at home with you.”
She straightened. “What are you going on about? I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
My father’s dentures were gone by the time he’d asked that question. He’d thrown away his glasses. It was as if wherever he looked, he saw a faint shape and couldn’t say what it was or bring it into sharper focus.
I plowed on. “What was her name, Mom?”
“Why did you ask that man to come? So you could throw me away? Go home and leave me in peace.”
“Dr. Berenbaum. You told him you had another daughter. Was she older? Could you tell me about her? All I want is to know something.”
“Stop pushing at me. I’m an old lady. Leave me be.”
“Please, Mom. You told a stranger about her. Please say something to me.”
“Why did you come here? To blame me for your problems? The mother is always the villain. It’s always her fault. Go home and leave me to die.”
“How about a yes or no? Don’t I deserve that?”
“You deserve bupkis. Go home. Go away.” She grasped the journal she could no longer read. “Leave me alone so I can think.”
When I was in third grade, my teacher asked all the kids in class to bring in baby pictures for an art project we’d be doing. I told her we had no baby pictures and she laughed in a dubious way. You just showed up on your parents’ doorstep one day, like hello, what’s for dinner?
She was so young and pretty, with a soft voice, and an engagement ring with a tiny diamond she’d shown off to the class, holding out her hand, splaying her fingers. I’d loved this teacher and wanted so much to please her. Embarrassed by her laughter, I went back to my seat, lowered my head over my paper, and colored furiously with the fat crayons in my desk.
Later, she asked if I’d been adopted, like Chrissy, who’d come from an orphanage in Korea, then went on at great, mysterious length about how deeply Chrissy’s parents loved her. My classmate, Chrissy, a cheerful girl who wore fancy barrettes and shared her pencils, went to a Korean school on Saturdays and attended potluck dinners with her family so the other children from Korea could form a community. There was no community of children born to parents who had not wanted them and were uncomfortable with one in their midst. When I’d dared to ask my mother if I was adopted, she gave me a look that curdled my curiosity. “What kind of foolish question is that?”
It was foolish. Our hands were identical, our feet odd in the same way, with oversized big toes. Lollipop toes, Mindy had named them years later.
Now, sitting on the floor of my mother’s apartment, stuffing trash bags with manuscripts on dot-matrix paper and canvas-covered lab notebooks filled with my mother’s elegant, familiar script, this memory came back. Why didn’t we have baby pictures? Was it because of this nameless, never mentioned sister?
Over the next days, as I waited for a nurse from the National Insurance Institute to evaluate Mom, I tried asking friendly questions. How did you and Daddy meet? What was it like when you first came to the U.S.? The only stories she shared were those from her time at Bell Labs, first in Murray Hill and then in Holmdel, and they were full of color and detail, and so familiar I could repeat them verbatim.
This sister had to have been born in a different era, well before me. Maybe she wasn’t an accident, as I was. Or perhaps she was the reason my parents had not wanted any more children. Perhaps, when I asked Ronit, I’d learn that this situation was the kind of benign family secret my friends’ parents kept: that Dad had a weird uncle who lived in a hut, and Mom had been briefly married to a pothead housepainter named Roy.
I knew I wouldn’t find answers in the massive amount of stuff that remained, no tiny sweaters or booties, no art work or baby pictures. But I paus
ed now; I looked. Dried leaves fluttered from the pages of The Age of Faith, by Will and Ariel Durant—swamp oak, chestnut, Japanese maple, birch, the mitten, and three-fingered leaves from the sassafras tree. They triggered a dim recollection of a winter day when my father and I had walked through the woods and he’d shown me how to identify trees by their bark. I ruffled the pages until the last leaf had slipped out and waited for him to speak. He remained silent, his thin lips pursed.
What am I? I remembered the cold brick wall outside my elementary school, where I’d stood at recess, unable to answer that question.
Nothing. How ironic that my mother was the one who tried to teach me about the limits of the naked eye. “Nothing” is what people said when the stars were not visible in the night sky. Nothing, when it was quiet. Nothing, because they lacked the language of mathematics and could not understand what they experienced every day. Remembering this lesson made me reconsider my feeling of aloneness, this sense I’d always had of being incomplete, as unfurnished as an empty apartment.
My mother had scored badly enough on the “mini-mental,” to be eligible for twenty hours a week of home healthcare. On a bright morning in early November, I sat in the kitchen waiting to meet the woman who I hoped would be her companion.
Mom was dozing in the living room with the newspaper across her lap when the buzzer rang. “It’s Sunny!” I said.
I saw the headline as I crossed the room: Yasser Arafat was dead, and the Israelis would not allow him to be buried in Jerusalem. I unbolted the lock, waited by the door, listening to the careful footsteps up the single flight. “Hello!” a voice echoed, and “Hello!” I called in return.
Then, Sunny, a short, square Filipino woman, dressed this morning in an olive-colored quilted jacket and red sneakers. She stepped into a kitchen that was bright and clean, craned her neck and continued past me, into a living room with a sofa and chairs upholstered in blue, and small Persian-style rugs on the tile floor. She pulled a chair close to Mom’s and began talking to her in Hebrew.
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