Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  This is a work of memoir, which is an act of memory rather than history. The events and experiences rendered here are all true as the author has recalled them to the best of her ability, and as older stories were related to her over the years. Some names, identifying characteristics, and circumstances have been changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals involved.

  Copyright © 2019 by Elissa Altman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Girl is used by grateful permission from the author, Marie Howe.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Altman, Elissa, author.

  Title: Motherland : a memoir of love, loathing, and longing / Elissa Altman.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019007425 | ISBN 9780399181580 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780399181597 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Altman, Elissa. | Altman, Elissa—Family. | Women caregivers—United States—Biography. | Mothers and daughters—United States—Biography. | Codependency. | Women authors, American—Biography. | Lesbians—United States—Biography. | New York (N.Y.)—Biography. | Connecticut—Biography.

  Classification: LCC CT275.A624 A3 2019 | DDC 306.874/3092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019007425

  Ebook ISBN 9780399181597

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos

  Cover art: Marietta Anastassatos

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part II

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Elissa Altman

  About the Author

  So close to the end of my childbearing life

  without children

  —if I could remember a day when I was utterly a girl

  and not yet a woman—

  but I don’t think there was a day like that for me.

  When I look at the girl I was, dripping in her bathing suit,

  or riding her bike, pumping hard down the newly paved street,

  she wears a furtive look—

  and even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now

  she would never come into my arms

  without believing that I wanted something.

  —MARIE HOWE, The Girl

  Mother

  (1) a: a female parent

  b: a woman in higher authority; specifically: the superior of a religious community of women

  (2) an older or elderly woman

  (3) source, origin

  (4) maternal tenderness or affection

  (5) vulgar

  (6) something that is an extreme or ultimate example of its kind specifically in terms of scale

 

  (7) vinegar or sourdough starter

  Also:

  Mother sauce

  Mother tongue

  Motherboard

  Mother ship

  Mother lode

  Mother love

  Motherfucker

  Preface

  I WAS BORN WITH A small irregular spot on my fifth rib, beneath my left breast and below the ventricular, arrhythmic tip of my heart. The color of a faint lavender bruise, it is shaped like a triangle; a nick in a piece of old furniture.

  “You were supposed to be a twin,” my father said. “That’s probably all that’s left of her.”

  He told me this over a pastrami sandwich at our local delicatessen in Forest Hills, New York, where we lived in a brick apartment building the color of a pencil eraser; it was the early seventies, and I was a young child, still in single digits. The air between us was humid with sauerkraut and Cel-Ray fumes, and I placed my hand over the mark and closed my eyes. I imagined who she might have been and what she might have looked like. I swore to protect her in a way I can only now describe as maternal.

  As a child, I wore this mark like a badge of unfulfilled promise. I believed that she, this disfigurement, was the one I was supposed to be, the one who could have made my mother happy and eased her yearning.

  I

  Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

  —URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Lathe of Heaven

  1

  MY CONNECTICUT KITCHEN IN THE EARLY MORNING.

  MY WIFE AND I LIVE where it is quiet, not quite rural, not quite suburban, where a car driving down the street in the middle of the day is cause for wonder and, because I am still a New Yorker at heart, for the locking of the front door. Recently, we bought a heavy-duty deadbolt—we’d never had one—because the previous owner, who built our little house on an acre in 1971, had installed a simple push-button bedroom lock on the hollow-core front door. It wasn’t that he was cheap; there was just no reason to have anything more secure. He didn’t want to court karmic trouble by kitting out his home like Fort Knox. He was safe here, he told us, with his wife and two growing daughters.

  When Susan and I came to look at the house on a snowy February afternoon in 2004, the owner, in his late eighties and wearing a black-and-red wool hunting coat and a green camouflage knit cap, leaned his wooden cane against one of the front pillars, pulled a massive gas-powered snow blower out of the garage and carved a wide path for us to safely walk side by side around the property. He apologized for the state of his beloved rhododendrons and azaleas, which had recently been devoured by deer but were nonetheless neatly wrapped up like cigars from top to bottom in garden burlap as if to protect the possibility that they might flower again when the season changed; gardening is a contract with hope.

  The man’s wife, a laconic blue-eyed woman just beginning to forget, gave us a swatch of the original yellow-and-silver-striped wallpaper, in case we ever needed to match it. They had led a good life here, the man said, and were downsizing to a nearby retirement community; one daughter was moving to England and the other to a small village in the Berkshire foothills. They were proud of their home, but soft-spoken and humble in the way Yankees tend to be.

  Except for removing the wallpaper, we touched nothing else for years
, including the girls’ bedrooms, whose walls still bore the vinyl-flowered adhesive evidence of their childhood. We eventually turned one room into my office and the other into a book-lined guestroom that I envisioned someday containing a simple Shaker-style crib, a rocking chair, a changing table. We even took chances with the lock until I began to work from home. Susan and I had thrown caution to the wind because security and safety can be such a myth; trouble can come from anywhere.

  * * *

  —

  In the years that Susan and I have been in this house, I have learned the seasonal trajectory of light, which in the morning streams through the dining room window onto our ancient barnwood table in one harsh bolt. By sundown, it glares through the living room in an explosion so bright that it’s often hard to see the house across the street. Our life here is slow and quiet, and, for two women together nineteen years, conventional. My work is solitary; when I’m writing, I can sit at my desk and not get up for hours, until the sun has made its circle around the house. A clock isn’t necessary. I know what time it is by the cast of light on the walls.

  On this day, the sun isn’t all the way up, and the interior of the house is a murky gray. I have just come in from a run. I was never a runner, but I began recently because it creates a kind of porosity; it allows air and light to filter through me and loosens the knot that snares me every morning before eight when I answer the phone, in the slim moment between the ring and the sound of my mother’s voice. A rest; a beat. A break in the symbiosis that has defined us and the universe in which we’ve lived. I stand in my kitchen and stare at the phone. I inhale. It rings. The dog barks. I exhale. I choose my response—the seconds between stimulus and reaction, Viktor Frankl called it—in which lies my freedom.

  * * *

  —

  Like the Centralia Mine fire, my mother and I have been burning for half a century.

  We draw life from the heart of battle, a dopamine helix that propels us forward, breathing air into our days like a bellows. Some Buddhists say that anger is good when it is generative; if so, the warring to which we are addicted has enlivened us and built up our muscle memory, like the hands of a boxer. We bob and weave; we love and we loathe; we shout and whisper, and the next morning we do it all over again. Like tying our shoes or brushing our teeth or shaving one leg before the other, this is our ritual, our habit. We know no other way.

  “What is your intoxicant of choice?” I was once asked at an AA meeting. I sat on a rusting beige metal folding chair in the basement of a white clapboard Congregational church in rural Connecticut, drinking cold coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. “Wine? Scotch? Beer before breakfast? Shopping? Porn?”

  “My mother,” I whispered.

  People shifted; they held their chins.

  My mother.

  Lead a simple life, a neurologist advises Joan Didion in The White Album, when she begins in middle age to suffer from a nervous disorder with symptoms she describes as being usually associated with telethons. Not that it makes any difference we know about, the doctor adds. Leading a simple life may be nothing more than placebo, a psychogenic bandage under which one is able to catch one’s breath and find one’s footing. I’d moved to the country because I’d fallen in love with someone who lived there, but also to find the peace that I had so longed for; I fled my hometown of ten million for a village of three thousand. I was settled, but also easily startled, like a battle veteran returning to the suburbs from the front. Instead of spending my days traversing Manhattan in stony silence, my mother’s delicate arm hooked in mine as we gazed into the shop windows along Madison Avenue, I worked in my windowed basement office that looked out onto Susan’s shed, blanketed with the white Pierre de Ronsard climbing roses we’d planted the summer before I left the city. We spent days together, side by side in our overgrown garden; I pulled weeds in dazed shock. My sleep began to grow fitful and my hands trembled when I drank my morning coffee. Where my mother had regularly called me four or five times every day and often waited for me to get home from work in my apartment building lobby, we now spoke only morning and night and saw each other every other week. Bitter recriminations flew. How could I have left? When was I coming back? How dare I go. While Susan slept soundly next to me in our bed two hours away from everything I’d once known, I was jolted awake at 3:23 every morning, sweaty and disoriented, my heart pounding hard as though I’d been grabbed by the shoulders and shaken from a night terror. I would scuttle down the stairs to the kitchen and pour myself a small juice glass of red wine, which I’d drink while sitting on the couch in the dark next to the dog.

  Wine had become a third party, a witness, a fly on my wall. The fiercer the battles with my mother, the deeper my thirst; the more wine I had, the more firmly I held my ground. My father, divorced from my mother after sixteen years of marriage, had introduced me to French Burgundies during our custodial weekends alone together. At fifteen, I furtively sipped his glasses of Gevrey-Chambertin between bites of cassoulet at fancy Manhattan restaurants, and the world was serene. With my mother, I drank either to sleep or to get drunk, to dull the blade, and the world got angry. Awakened in the middle of every night, I became an insomniac; I needed a fix. I poured myself a small glass, sat on the couch, and called her to make sure that we were okay.

  It was not the alcohol to which I was addicted; it was she, and together we fed on our affection and rage like buttered popcorn. I suckled on my mother’s beautiful fury; it fed me and nourished me. We clung to the silent compact that neither of us would ever abandon the other, no matter what.

  Until I did.

  I had the audacity to leave New York City for good, to find love and happiness elsewhere. To make a home and family at which she was not at the center. To leave her for another woman.

  It had been a choice: my mother’s life, or my own.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN MY HOME, WE WERE three: mother, father, daughter. There were books; my father’s gold-spined Reader’s Digest Condensed Editions lined every shelf, sandwiched between Philip Roth and Henry Miller. Every month from the time I was four, a My Weekly Reader paperback selection arrived in the mail with my name on it. We listened to Trini Lopez and Peggy Lee, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Judy Garland, on my father’s teak Garrard turntable, and my mother sang along. We had annual memberships to a local pool club, MoMA, and the Smithsonian. Piles of Vogue, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Modern Photography, and The New Yorker were stacked in every corner of the living room and on the floor in front of the toilets in both bathrooms. My short, corpulent father, possessed of a violent temper that could turn with the direction of the wind, was witty and cerebral, deeply affectionate and clinically depressed, in love with Commentary and Irving Kristol and the perceived safety of intellectual Jewish conservative tradition. He ran twice for local office as an Independent, stumping for unpopular causes, and failed.

  My mother had been, for thirteen weeks in 1957, a national television star; she was the fair-haired all-American girl singer on a Saturday night variety show, the precursor to Andy Williams and Carol Burnett, and her job was to step out on the live sound stage and do as her boss, Galen Drake, asked: Sing us a song about this terrible rainy weather, Rita, he’d say, and she would. Her appearance on television defined her and was the focal point of our family dinnertime conversation. As a child, I longed to see her on the other side of the screen, where everyone seemed perfect and happy; I spent every Saturday night turning the television dial, looking for her show even though it had been canceled five years before I was born. She was a myth I searched for and never found.

  * * *

  —

  My mother was elegant, preternaturally thin, pouty, and so radiant—unlike my friends’ mothers: older, round, dour women with the trauma of war still lingering in their eyes—that one had to squint to see her clearly, as though her vibrancy made it too dangerous to look directly at her wi
thout corneal injury. Propelled through life on the fuel of desire and regret, she was beautiful and stylish in a way that seemed unreal, as though she had stepped out of the pages of a Diana Vreeland editorial feature. She stopped traffic; handsome men I vaguely knew flagged her down and crossed the broad, dangerous boulevard that ran east to west through our town in order to speak to her. While my father carried himself with an air of studied formality, my mother was devilishly, fabulously flirty; even young children can detect innuendo in the set of a jaw. When we walked together down the streets of our neighborhood, I was proud to be hers, to be of her, to be seen alongside her. I held her hand; waiting to cross the street, she lifted it affectionately to kiss mine. We strolled side by side; I watched her closely, as though I were looking at the moon and searching for evidence of life.

  My mother said hello to no woman unless they acknowledged her first; only then would she respond to them and stop to talk, placing her hands on my narrow shoulders and positioning me in front of her like a shield. Conversations were warm and friendly and then, inevitably, slithered down the slope of competition; they grew quietly seething and tempestuous. An acquaintance with a new outfit, a new hairstyle, a new boyfriend, a new lipstick could send her into a tailspin for days until, relieved by an impulse unharnessed—a new coat for me that I didn’t need, a set of engraved Tiffany stationery for her—she was soothed like a junkie with a hit of heroin. My mother was strategic and gamine; her illusoriness terrified and delighted me, as though she were an automaton at Disneyland whose controls could at any moment go haywire.