Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  Somewhere between the Stork Club and the frock and the time she left the Copa and had to step over Oscar Levant passed out in the gutter to get into a taxi back to her mother’s house, she leans forward over what’s left of the bread basket and the small chocolates that the server brought over on a small pewter tray and speaks to me directly; she breaks through the fourth wall. She sees me. She stops, as though a Pause button has been pressed. She focuses. She stares down at the table.

  The coffee cup.

  The chocolate wrappers.

  Bread crumbs.

  “Lissie, darling—” she whispers, reaching across the table for my hand.

  “What, Ma—” I say, giving it to her. Her hands are so cold.

  “I’m afraid—”

  “So am I, Ma—”

  * * *

  —

  When the bill for dinner arrives, I become the man: I palm over my credit card without looking at it, just as Ben would have done. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind my mother’s banquette: my lip gloss chewed down to a hint of blush, my hair beginning to frizz from the humidity. I sign the receipt and gaze up to find her glaring at my eyes, her mahogany irises haloed by a tired sclera red-lined like a road map.

  “Are you running out of makeup? Because a woman with no eyebrows is no woman at all.”

  I consider picking up the silver sugar dispenser—a coy little French contraption: a footed bowl with an attached lid on a hinge—and, because I don’t throw like a girl, hurling it across the room, over the heads of the other diners sipping their wines and their Negronis, past the servers and the busing station, until it ricochets like a squash ball off a far wall of the restaurant behind the table where Tony Kushner is eating roast chicken.

  “Your face is all red,” she says. “Drop ten pounds. Even five—”

  She shakes her head in dismay and we get up to leave, squeezing past the other tables and through the mirrored restaurant, down the street into her mirrored lobby where she pauses every few feet to check her face, into the mirrored elevator for the ride up to her mirrored apartment.

  “But it was such a lovely dinner,” I hear her say to someone on her bedroom phone, behind a closed door. “She always takes me for such lovely dinners.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN MY MOTHER GOES TO bed, I busy myself the way I always do on my visits: I hunt for evidence of us, a trail of crumbs that will lead us to where we are now. I look for images of our past, proof of existence, glimmers of affection.

  I unearth an ancient vinyl Alitalia travel bag from the den closet. I rummage through thick stacks of peeling snapshots, fading SX 70 Polaroids, the Bruno of Hollywood medium-format professional portraits that mesmerized me as a child, not because of their empirical beauty but because I couldn’t fathom that I was remotely related to her. Buried at the bottom of the Alitalia bag, curled in a letter C around a sheaf of my childhood postcards from camp in which I plead love for her in Cherokee pencil, my grade school report cards, and a few yellowing studio shots from her Copa days, is the picture of her sitting in front of my father’s fake Pollock. The image of the woman who was once so glamorous she shimmered is literally wrapped around what she became: the dazzling, ambivalent mother to me: a plain child she never intended to have, the once-successful television star yearning only for what she once was and for what she might have become had her choices, made so long ago, been different.

  “You don’t even know what I gave up for you,” she tells me in moments of rage. “You don’t even know.”

  I have stolen something from her, this stunning woman in the photo, the gold charm bracelet dangling off her wrist.

  I have taken something from her—something vital and life-giving—and I have made it mine.

  8

  MY HIGH SCHOOL FRIEND TESS and her husband, Paul, travel down from their home in Bangor to have dinner with us at our little rented cabin by the sea. Susan and I have spent the day close by, waiting for them to arrive. I have consulted my tide chart. We hike along the water’s edge with Petey, who runs in and out of the waves, chasing seagulls and terns, barking furiously at surfers and kites and babies, and the spincasters who set themselves up for the day with a portable radio and a cooler filled with beer. I watch him, worriedly. Nature; acts of God. My fear: Something will catch his attention, the tide will turn, and he will be swept away.

  * * *

  —

  Years ago, before I knew Susan and was still living in the city, I spent a week every July in Sconset, the farthest, wildest, most rose-covered edge of Nantucket. I was a guest of Sally, my best friend from college, her husband, William, and my friend’s grandmother, a high-ranking member of an ancient European royal family toppled at the turn of the twentieth century. Maria, profoundly reserved and given to displays of neither wealth nor social register, rented annually a rambling gray cottage on a bluff overlooking the water. Our daily schedule was built around her; she took constitutional naps midmorning and in the late afternoon. We sat at the breakfast table together: coffee, eggs, ham, fruit, newspaper. Maria, dressed in older white slacks and a white cotton turtleneck, her lips swiped with a gloss of shimmering pearl pink lipstick, did the crossword puzzle and read the bridge column; William, the financial pages; Sally and I, everything else. We went to the beach and swam in the frigid water; we came home for lunch; we took late afternoon walks. At five o’clock every day, Maria woke from her second nap, changed for dinner, and, leaning against the butcher block kitchen island, drank two fingers of good bourbon; no more, no less. Maria’s extended family from her second marriage, longtime summer residents of the island, came for lobster dinners eaten around a long table covered in flowered oilcloth; Maria sat at the head. Everything was planned and organized around her. She required nothing beyond peace and calm.

  Life, she said—this woman who had, as a young girl, been imprisoned in a gulag, her family slaughtered—was hard enough. Be in beauty; be with the people you love, who love you back, who require little more than kindness. Do the things that give you joy.

  * * *

  —

  In our early days together and even though it was just the two of us, Susan and I always rented big properties—rambling, drafty, nineteen-thirties lake cottages with creaking floors and room for ten. I imagined us waist-deep in the water, our shoulders burning under the hot August New England sun, teaching the young children in our family to swim and kayak. Cousins with babies would come; tiny bathing suits would dry on the line in the yard. A fire would be built; s’mores would be made. Blueberries would be picked and folded into a pie crust. They would spend two weeks with us, and every summer, they would look forward to it: Dates on calendars would be automatically blocked out, year after year.

  My mother, I dreamed, would relax on a chaise, ensconced on the massive porch in a wide-brimmed straw hat, sipping iced tea, reading a fat novel and looking up from time to time, smiling. Content.

  “Has she ever come?” Tess asks when I tell her my fantasy, and how our habit of beach cottage rentals first started: my visits to Nantucket, the belief that someday I could have the same, and that it somehow, miraculously, would replace the years of enmity, overtaking them like an eclipse. A do-over; a makeover.

  “She’s never been invited,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  Tess and I found each other on Facebook, where we are part of a core of old friends who knew one another in high school. People are very close; when a guy from my advanced placement English class develops pancreatic cancer, fundraisers are set up. When my friend Candy comes east from Santa Monica, parties are thrown and brunches given. Every Thanksgiving, a touch football game is organized in Flushing Meadow Park, in the shadow of our high school; college-aged children play alongside their fathers. Jokes are made about broken hips and knee replacements and walkers with tennis balls. Th
ere are divorces, illnesses, accidents, jobs lost, jobs found, aging parents. Kids are getting married; parents are dying. Who we are now is bound up with who we were then. I carry tucked into my wallet the Delmore Schwartz poem “Calmly We Walk Through This April Day.” Time is the school in which we learn / Time is the fire in which we burn.

  My friends post pictures of their children on a closed, private page. I post pictures of my mother. My friends knew her well; it was right after her divorce, and she fought with them, threw them out of our apartment, claimed that they stole from her, bummed Marlboro Lights off them, brought them along on my birthday to see A Chorus Line.

  Wow, my friends write. She’s still so gorgeous.

  I’ve seen Tess three times in almost forty years, once right after college graduation, when she and her mother were traveling on the down escalator into the lobby of the World Trade Center and my father and I were traveling up to Windows on the World. We were both working our first jobs. She asked for my number and I gave it to her; I asked for hers and she said no.

  We hadn’t been close.

  Tess left Forest Hills for good and after years of living in the city and working in advertising married a soft-spoken Mainer she’d met in college, an engineer. Active members of their local church, they recently moved from a solid, wide-porched bungalow built in the early nineteen hundreds—all foundation and solidity and weight—to a modern ranch house built of glass walls and angles and air. It’s a curious thing when people do this—when they go from living in a home of one distinct style to another that is so utterly different, as though the form itself had become a bother, had grown tiresome and old, like fashion, or a hairstyle.

  “It made sense,” Tess told me, matter-of-factly. It would be easier for her elderly mother, who was still living in New York, to get around if she had to move in with them, which was looking like a distinct possibility.

  “No stairs,” she added.

  * * *

  —

  On the day of their visit, we grill local cherrystone clams and mussels over a wood fire in a makeshift aluminum foil bag, tossing them hot with sweet butter, chopped garlic, and a handful of parsley in a blue ceramic bowl decorated with small lighthouses. We roast summer vegetables bought out of the back of a red Ford pickup parked on a state road in Lincolnville while we were driving back from the beach with the dog, who is covered in salt and sand. We open bottles of ice-cold white wine of middling quality; we drink to one another’s good health, to our mothers, to time.

  It’s after dinner, and Susan is in the kitchen cleaning up; Paul is on the porch, playing my guitar. Tess and I sit opposite each other at the dining room table. Her hair, long and brown, to her shoulders, exactly how she wore it in high school, is beginning to gray. The contact lenses she started wearing in tenth grade have given way to thick glasses, a nearly undetectable line separating the top of the lenses from the bottom. She asks how I am.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “No, really, she says. “How are you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She’s fine too, she says.

  We’re both fine. Everyone, we agree, is fine.

  “How is everything with your mother,” she says, leaning forward.

  The universe that contains your mother. All that she encompasses; all that she swallows up, like Jonah and the whale.

  “The way it’s always been,” I say. “Only now, she’s older.”

  “So are you,” Tess says, pushing her glasses up.

  “So are we,” I say.

  “I brought you a gift,” Tess says, folding her hands in front of her.

  She unzips the small red-striped L.L.Bean boat bag on the chair next to her. She reaches in and extracts a tiny square hardback book covered with a bucolic out-of-register stock image of a flowering valley. Lush trees. In the distance, rolling hills. Tess reaches across the dinner table and hands me Hope for Today, published by Al-Anon Family Groups. The corner of a page is turned down.

  I’m annoyed at the presumptuousness that this would even be remotely okay.

  “You think I’m an alcoholic?” I say. “You don’t even know me.”

  “I thought it could help with your mother,” she says. “Read the page.”

  Please lead me to those who can give me what I need and grant me the compassion to love those who can’t.

  9

  AFTER SON OF SAM RAVAGED our Queens, New York, neighborhood, after the garbage strike of 1977 was over and his magazine business failed, my father and I spent his custody weekends floating through the city together in silence. We were a statistic, the midcentury detritus of divorce, and anyone looking at us—me makeupless, in Levi’s, wide-striped rugby shirt, white-soled Topsiders, he in a boxy gray Harris tweed jacket and mossy green corduroys—would have assumed that we were on our way to pay a shiva call.

  My arm linked tightly in his, our gait was loping and slow. We traversed the city in a trance: Central Park from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West, Greenwich Village from Saint Mark’s to Christopher, the Upper East Side from Madison to First. Every weekend we retraced the previous one’s steps, doing the things that my mother had taken little interest in during the sixteen years they were married.

  Here were the carousel and the charcoal artists who set up their portable easels alongside the sailboat pond at Seventy-Second Street, and the statue of Alice in Wonderland, crawling with children. Here were the Eastern European restaurants, Vaselka and Christine’s, and the building on East Ninth Street where my father’s grandmother had lived until she died. Here was the Vanguard and Art Tatum and Chet Baker, the Met and the Guggenheim and the Whitney. Here was my father’s unblinking fixation on Edward Hopper. Early Sunday Morning: a deserted city street, familiar, possibly New York, a strip of low-slung tenement buildings facing east, the sun glinting off three windows, their shades drawn, the ground floor storefronts obscured in darkness.

  My father was making up for lost time, and these were activities that had their roots in exteriority and wonder; they demanded imagination. They took us outside ourselves and into a world at which neither my mother, nor we, were at the center. At the theater and the museum, my mother’s spotlight would be eclipsed by a stranger, an artist she assured us didn’t deserve it; at the Philharmonic, she got bored and fell asleep. Our days together in the city didn’t orbit her past as a model and national television singer and what she was sure could have been, had her choices, made early on, been different. Art did not yield regret. My father and I went out in the world to see it, to absorb its possibility.

  Every weekend, we sat for hours in the darkened MoMA movie theater and watched Julie Christie in The Go-Between, and Fellini’s City of Women. He loved the precision of Bach’s cello suites, and we attended chamber music concerts in tiny jewel-box galleries that dotted the city. We watched the croquet players in Central Park, dressed from head to toe in crisp white outfits. We walked, we stopped, we sat side by side in silence eating damp Manhattan street pretzels like an elderly couple, bookends on splintering, green-painted park benches. We stopped for dinner at the restaurants of his bachelorhood; he drank dry gin Gibsons that made him cry for what he once had and lost, and he gave me a sip.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE HAD BEEN A HANDSOME, blue-eyed Naval officer twelve years her senior, a dashing night fighter pilot flying off an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, a failed writer and poetry lover who returned to a career as a Madison Avenue advertising executive on a national butter campaign. She had been a professional singer from the age of three, first on radio and then on national television, an easily startled, blank-eyed only child born to stolid, older parents who reminded her every day of her life that she was fat and ugly and a mistake that they regretted. Her father, hunched over and his hair gone bone white in his twenties, a ringer for James Joyce given to neither public nor private displays of j
oy, admonished anyone who dared flatter his little girl, as though they might be lying to her.

  * * *

  —

  My mother and I are sitting alone in her den a decade after I’ve left New York; I am visiting for the day from Connecticut. It is late in the afternoon, quiet and dusky, and we are drinking cups of tea. A new shipment of makeup from Saks has arrived, which will leave her little money for food for the month; the doorman thrust it into my arms on my way upstairs. More lipstick. More shopping. The space between stimulus and reaction; rather than fight with her, I try to understand. I ask her why. Why. Why the piles of it in every room in her apartment. She responds not with typical defense and rebuke. She tells me the story.

  “I was with your grandfather at the candy store down the street from us in Brooklyn, and the man behind the counter said, You have such lovely eyes, little girl—”

  “Well, you do—” I said.

  She shook her head. No—

  “Grandpa yelled at him. Don’t ever tell her that again, he said to him.”

  I imagine my grandfather peering down at his daughter, round of face, her almond-shaped eyes the color of mahogany, swimming with tears. She was six, and standing at his elbow.

  While she speaks, I gaze up at the studio shot of her hanging on the wall above her. She is in her twenties, lithe, willowy, swan-necked, with warm, empathic eyes that know. She had been told that she was ugly almost every day of her young life. She stored the words in her heart; pain became a universe that, as Claudia Rankine once wrote, was buried in her, that turned her flesh into its own cupboard.