You’re in adrenal depletion, an East Village massage therapist told me, laying a lavender-soaked cotton chamois over my face. I tried everything to calm myself: valerian root that stank like dirty socks, two-in-the-morning wine in massive goblets that I hid in my mother’s den closet at the foot of the pullout sofa where I slept. Chronic anxiety had blown out my endocrine system, thinning out the masses of my blond, uncontrollable curls that she loved.
Our crowning glory, she had called it, as if it belonged to both of us.
I took her out for lunch and asked her for her advice: It was a cosmetic issue, a problem of beauty, I reasoned, and she would know the answer. She would help me. It would bring us together.
“You’re doing it on purpose because you hate me,” she bellowed from the waiting room of a specialist she’d found through her best friend, Lucille. He injected my twenty-five-year-old scalp with an expensive cure that turned out to be nothing more than saline solution, while two nurses blockaded the procedure room.
“I’ll bring in a policeman if you don’t let me in!” she screamed.
Any stress in your life? the doctor asked, as he hovered over me with a long syringe.
So all these years later: Fine. The hair is just fine.
Still, it is touching: that moments after waking, after her first cup of hot water and the fork scrapings of a day-old chicken breast draped under a sheet of plastic wrap in her fridge, my mother, frail from nearly a century of starving herself, would fret and keen over how I look. Because if I look different from her, if I am different from her, I will have abandoned her.
I’m exhausted with worry, she will say on those mornings. I had to take a Xanax because of you.
“What else is doin’? How’s the dog?”
“Fine,” I say. “He’s fine.”
“Does he need anything? Any toys? I could send him a toy—”
“The dog’s fine, Ma—he doesn’t need anything—”
“Something new—I’ll go to the drugstore. They have dog toys—”
“He’s fine, Mom—please—”
The dog has fallen in love with my mother, and she with him. Petey is a scruffy apricot-colored mutt of indeterminate origin, a herder who was rescued from a Memphis ditch when he was three months old. He arrived at our Connecticut home a month later not knowing what to do with toys and unable to smile or wag. Not interested in food, he couldn’t be trained with treats; he was traumatized and distrustful, hardwired for survival. Susan and I worried about what and who he would become: Would he accept love and grow into his own heart? Or would he remain snappish and unpredictable?
What happened to him, this darling baby, my mother asked when they first met, pulling him into her lap and squeezing his neck. He fought her but never growled, squirming to get away until she forced his twenty pounds into place; he gave up and went limp as a corpse, and she showered his yellow head with kisses that left red Clinique lipstick stains from his ears to his eyebrows like a tattoo.
My mother prefers dogs to people; she trusts them more, she says, and I grew up loving them as much as she does. It was learned behavior.
Dogs will never turn on you, she said, provided you give them love and affection, and sometimes even if you don’t. When we walk in Manhattan, we will stop and say hello to whoever approaches us, regardless of size: drooling Newfoundlands, snorting pugs, bounding golden retrievers, teacup poodles. She introduces herself to the animals but never to their people, bending down, taking their heads in her hands, stroking them. I come by my love of dogs honestly; they were not clean or predictable enough for my father, who merely tolerated them. I get my affection for animals purely and solely from her, a shared affinity for these wordless creatures of ritual and joy who are often left behind like garbage, who only ever want the simplest of kindnesses.
When she visits, she showers Petey with gifts; he won’t leave her side. He follows her to the bathroom and into the guest room; he sleeps on the bed next to her. One late weekend afternoon, I furtively filmed her over her shoulder while she sat on our living room loveseat with him. Susan and I were in the kitchen, cooking, and my mother removed a slender antique volume from our bookshelf—how did she come to choose it?—and I could hear her reading him Moldy Warp the Mole, an English children’s book. Petey’s head rested in her lap, his eyes closed. She stroked him gently, like a baby.
* * *
—
On our early-morning call, after we’ve covered my hair, and Petey, and his need for more toys, my mother asks, “And how is she?”
“Fine—” I say “—and her name is Susan.”
“You always want to fight—” she says, sighing.
After nineteen years, the fact of Susan is an irritant to my mother, like lemon in a paper cut.
“She never expected you two to last so long,” Lucille, my mother’s best friend, once told me.
A fact-finding mission. I called her one night after ten years of being out of touch. I reached out to her out of the blue, adult to adult, to get a sense of perspective: She’d known my mother for sixty years. But Lucille and my mother were no longer speaking; they fought about money and men and my mother’s bottomless fount of need and desire. My mother told her she was entitled to have whatever she wanted because she’d given up so much. Lucille told my mother to see a psychiatrist.
“You’re a cunt, Zelnick,” my mother told her, and said goodbye forever.
I sat on the couch with a glass of Scotch and listened to Lucille’s hard-edged Brooklyn whine. She had known my mother early on while she was on television. I dug around my mother’s life that night like a miner with a pickax, looking for the edges of our narrative, the ecotones, trying to fit our story together and make sense of it. I searched for the corners, the anchors, and the foundation like the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle we assemble every year at the Maine house.
“She thought your father had money,” Lucille said, “and he didn’t. She thought she’d be a star again, and she wasn’t. She thought you’d be just like her, and you aren’t. She thought a man would always be there to take care of her, and she was wrong. Your mother is not a woman equipped for disappointment…”
I listened.
“…and she blames Susan for everything, for taking you away from her, for making you leave the city. You could be giving to her what you’re giving to your wife. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
A chill crawled up my spine, the kind that comes with the onset of flu.
* * *
—
“What is it?” my mother asks during our call. “I can hear it in your voice—it’s something.”
I flip through the pile of bills and statements rubber-banded on the table in front of me. She’s run short again; something’s gone haywire. A bad month, she says. I can always quietly help tide her over. Sometimes she won’t even notice it. We don’t have to talk about it. Money often appears, miraculously, in her account; a gift from the gods. We can simply avoid the conversation. We can talk about the dog.
But artists’ lives are feast or famine. When things break—a printer, a tooth, a muffler—they sometimes stay broken until Susan and I can afford to fix them. If I am my mother’s keeper—the person who makes sure that, in older age, her practical needs are addressed and met, and who assures her safety—I should know the truth. It is only right; I rationalize this. I ask her the way a parent asks their teenager about the sudden appearance of a dent in the family car.
“Mom,” I say gently. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
Silence.
“I had to buy food,” she says. “I must eat—would you rather I starve to death and die?”
She turns up the television volume so we can’t hear each other. I shout over Ilsa and Rick. The Germans wore gray; you wore blue.
“You have nothing in your fridge. I checked the other day.�
��
On the first of my twice-monthly visits, I opened her refrigerator for a quick inspection. A pint of matzo ball soup. A roast turkey leg. Slices of rye bread and bags of pickles from the local deli. Ancient Milk of Magnesia. Last year’s bottle of Pinot Grigio that sits in the door, open and corkless, its thin green neck stuffed with a wad of tin foil.
“If you’re not buying food, Ma, where’s the money going?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she growls. “It’s none of your goddamned business. Even Dick says I don’t have to tell you.”
* * *
—
She has met a younger man.
I like to be seen with you on my arm, he has told her.
She coos when she talks about him; she bats her eyelashes, like a silent-movie actress.
Susan and I are pleased. We would like her to meet someone who can give her the attention she craves, someone who can fill the need bucket, unlike the psychiatrist a decade earlier whom she gifted with half a dozen Hermès scarves in their flat orange boxes and who ended their working relationship when she demanded he leave his wife for her. We wonder whether this new man is really interested in her or she’s imagining it, the way she once believed she was dating Paul, her musical accompanist.
“He’s gay, Mom,” I told her. “He lives with his husband.”
“I could change him,” she said. “He just needs a good woman.”
Dick is six years older than I, tall and doughy, pale as a potato, and spends his days gambling in Atlantic City since his wife recently died, tragically young, not yet fifty. I compare him to Ben the furrier, whom she married the summer before I left for college: natty, funny, kind Ben. Ben with the heart of gold and the patience of Job, who covered her in the important jewelry that she loved: the massive pieces engorged with square-cut, large-carat diamonds and emeralds that made people gasp and worry for her safety as she walked from one side of the city to the other. Ben, whose grown children and grandchildren she refused to let into the house because she was certain they stole. Ben, who slowly drank himself to death in front of The Cosby Show every night when they got home from work. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage, which my mother was certain was an allergic reaction to the shrimp and lobster sauce they’d ordered from Empire Szechuan on Seventy-Second Street.
An all-er-gy, she wept to the triage nurse when I found her on that rain-soaked January night in 1997, drenched to the skin and sitting alone in the busy emergency room at Mount Sinai, long tracks of black mascara running down the sides of her face. Nothing but an all-er-gy.
* * *
—
“Dick is a very fine man,” she says on our morning call, her voice deep and furious. “You just want me to be alone. I know. You’re just jealous, because I have Dick and you don’t.”
“I’m a lesbian, Mom. I don’t want Dick.”
“I have no food in the house—none. So I took some money out, and for this you’re yelling at me? Don’t send me a birthday present this year. I’d rather have the cash.”
“I’ll send you food, Ma,” I say, “but not cash.”
“I did for you!” she screams, “and now you do for me. You have no idea what I gave up for you—you don’t even know.”
“So tell me, Ma,” I say, sipping my coffee. “I’m listening.”
“Your grandmother walked out on your father when he was a baby and he still gave her everything she ever wanted. He gave her what should have been mine—She left her family—I never left—”
For reasons long forgotten or perhaps never known, my paternal grandmother, nearly one hundred years ago and at the age of twenty-four, walked out on her husband, three-year-old son, and young daughter and took up with a man of vague wealth and shady pedigree. Unable to reconcile her bourgeois desires with her bohemian lust, this tiny Romanian immigrant who arrived on Ellis Island as a toddler in steerage fell for the man’s promises of things that would change her place in the world and its perception of her: a yacht, a motorcar, trips to Paris, furs.
His mother’s leaving was my father’s weak point—the loose brick in his wall—the spot that, when attacked, made him crumble like strudel. He was a little boy; for three years he prayed for her return, and after three years of my grandfather’s begging she came home. All was forgiven. Rife with desperation and abandonment, the story became the foundation upon which my father’s life was built; one part of his family hid it for fifty years. It became corrosive; shame engulfed generation after generation.
As a child, I suffer from profound separation anxiety. I am certain that my mother will go grocery shopping and never return. She’ll have her hair done and disappear. She’ll take a taxi to the state line. These things happen. Famous: Doris Lessing walks out on her two eldest children and husband in Rhodesia and moves to London so that she can have a literary career, believing that motherhood and the making of art are mutually exclusive. Not famous: my stocky Jewish grandmother from the old country leaves her children and husband at the start of the Depression.
In our family, it never mattered that my grandmother came back. That wasn’t the point. In her twenties, believing that her life would not be fulfilled if she stayed, she had the will and the inclination to leave. And she did.
But is there more? Is there a part of her story that no one knows, that none of us could possibly imagine, that we can only guess at? A young mother, small and beautiful, of Orthodox Jewish lineage, bore her husband two children, a boy and a girl, five years apart. She was kind and warm. She cleaned house and made sure her children were washed and dressed and her husband satisfied. She cooked for her family every morning and every night, and cared for her own aging mother, who lived over the bridge in lower Manhattan. And this is where things go murky. Had my father’s mother been filled with some sort of visceral regret that tore her apart? Was her husband violent? Did she suffer from postpartum depression?
Did my grandmother run away to save herself?
Walking out: indefensible.
The stamp of abandonment was imprinted on our little family like a wax seal. My mother became obsessed: The story wormed its way into every conversation, every spat, every disagreement. She would pull out this nugget of shame midfight, like a switchblade from a back pocket, and hurl it at my father’s head across the table over the Friday night brisket and the Soave.
Your mother left; your mother walked out; your mother didn’t love you.
My father, red-faced and trembling, would stand up, put the leash on the dog, and walk him into the Queens night.
* * *
—
On this, our daily morning call, after she asks about my hair and my dog and my wife and I ask her where her money is going, I want her to tell me what she gave up.
“Everything,” she says, her voice breaking. “I gave up everything for you, because I love you—”
“Tell me, Mom—”
“Already—this is what you’re doing to me?” she shrieks.
I set the phone down on the dining room table next to the envelopes. I press Talk so she can’t call me back. I sit on the sofa and throw the pillows on the floor. I wrap my arms around my knees.
Seven twenty-six A.M.
Streaks of light brighten the living room. The sun is coming up.
A new morning; a new day.
5
NEW YORK HOSPITAL.
We go there because, fifty-two years ago, that’s where I was born. We go there because my mother believes that every other hospital in Manhattan is a suspect, filthy repository of syphilitics where people go in and never come out.
* * *
—
It’s an early Saturday night in December 2016. I am home from a long book tour. It’s the first night in weeks that Susan and I are together; it’s quiet in the house. We’ve built a fire. We’ve opened a good bottle of Pinot Noir. We’re
reheating a block of frozen turkey soup left over from Thanksgiving, a month earlier.
Every holiday my mother says Just make a reservation and I say No, I want to cook. I want my family around my table. I am convinced of it: Our table—handmade by a local craftsman from three-hundred-fifty-year-old New Hampshire wormy maple barnwood, and alive with history—will save us. We will sit down together around antique ironstone platters laden with foods that my mother will consume with delight, and like Clark Kent in a phone booth, she will magically morph into Mother Walton. Peace will be ours.
Living out my Rockwellian Thanksgiving fantasy, I corral every stray person I know to avoid having it just be the three of us—me, Susan, my mother—because just the three of us is grim. Three of us might as well be watching the parade in front of the television and eating Swanson’s frozen turkey dinners with the little apple crisp in the middle of the aluminum tray. Three of us is my culinary PTSD trigger. It sends me hurtling back to the first Thanksgiving after my parents’ divorce in 1978, when Gaga, wanting the holiday to be exactly the same as it had been in the past, roasted a twenty-pound Butterball and made her baked sweet potatoes and cornflake pie topped with marshmallows. The turkey emerged from the oven, she and I carried it over to the dining room table on an orange melamine platter, and my mother said, What the hell do we do now. At fifteen years old, I pulled from the drawer an old serrated bread knife left behind by my father in his haste to flee and dismembered the bird over the course of an hour, sawing and pulling, chopping and slashing, until it was a pile of shredded, dry meat with the consistency of balsa wood. My mother, chewing on the leathery tip of a wing, turned on the little television set that sat like a dinner guest at the end of the table and watched Gone with the Wind, mouthing all of Scarlett O’Hara’s lines and That Vivien Leigh was such a whore.
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