Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  My father was certain I would be a boy; he had chosen Erich, the Germanic spelling. My mother loved Elizabeth, for the queen of England—It bodes well, she thought—but was certain that, when asked to spell my name for my nursery school teacher, I wouldn’t know how; it would be too hard for me. Eliza wouldn’t work, because of Eliza Doolittle. So my mother named me for Elissa Landy, a long-forgotten B-movie actress, and for Mandy Rice-Davies, a model and call girl who figured heavily in the Profumo affair.

  You named her after a hooker? Gaga said.

  I like it, my mother said.

  * * *

  —

  “So beautiful,” my mother says, sipping her coffee at the diner. “The Baby was so small and delicate. Just like a little doll—”

  Babies are, by their nature, small and delicate; size and fragility are not exceptional, I tell her.

  “But you were,” she says. “I used to hold you on one arm, with your head in my palm and your feet nestled in the crook of my elbow. I vacuumed the apartment that way until Gaga yelled at me that I’d drop you.”

  Did she understand that I was real? That if she dropped me, I would break? Conceivably die? We were one: a life inside a life for nine months. Did her congenital analgesia extend to me?

  The words she uses to describe The Baby: spindly, delicate, tiny, petite, dainty, exquisite, fine-boned, wispy. A china doll. Not one to nurse—I didn’t want to risk having a chest like Gaga’s—she feeds The Baby tiny amounts of formula, botching the instructions given to her by the ancient, white-haired obstetrician and Freudian analyst who delivered me, Dr. Heller. The Baby screams all day and all night for the first three months until the next-door neighbor in Yorkville, a German woman with a face like Dietrich and migraines left over from Dresden, tells The Baby’s mother that the child is probably hungry: She instructs her to fill The Baby’s bottle with thinned-out oatmeal, cut an X in the nipple, and let the child eat. She does, and at last The Baby stops crying.

  The Baby also balloons up like a small version of the Michelin Man.

  “A giant,” my mother says. “Suddenly!”

  In an old photograph, The Baby’s head, round as a bowling ball, appears to be directly connected to her shoulders, with no involvement of her neck. The Baby’s legs are braceleted with cascading bangles of fat, necessitating larger and larger snowsuits and rompers. In home movies, The Baby is plunked down in her playpen on the family terrace and cannot move; she can’t get up, or roll over, and doesn’t try to crawl, as if the oatmeal weight anchored her to the earth like a yard dog staked to the ground. In one snapshot, The Baby’s mother looks exhausted and sad. She hoists her daughter in the direction of the camera.

  “I was so ugly and fat afterwards,” my mother says when I ask her about the picture. “The Baby, she was the beautiful one. That was what your grandfather said: Look at her beautiful eyes. I couldn’t stand myself.”

  In this picture, my mother faces away from the camera, detached, looking at something else. Eventually, the oatmeal weight falls off The Baby and The Baby becomes me.

  * * *

  • • •

  “GAGA SAID YOU WERE DAMAGED,” my father once told me. “Stood right there at the nursery window at New York Hospital and proclaimed you scarred for life.”

  I was sixteen; we were eating blueberry pie at the Belmore Cafeteria right after Taxi Driver came out. My father’s business had failed; my mother had asked him to leave. He had considered, for a moment, driving a hack. He was doing research, he said.

  A damage; a twin.

  I touch my right hand to my temple when he says this. I feel for imperfection, for brokenness. There’s a shallow indentation indiscernible to anyone else, a persistent ancient pain that I live with every day. When I was eight, I fractured my skull in a bicycle accident that nearly killed me. On a sunny May afternoon in 1971, I rode my bicycle around our Forest Hills cul-de-sac and followed my friend Todd down a long steep hill that emptied into the exit of an underground parking garage. It was a risky prospect, and not something we were prone to do as mostly thoughtful and obedient children; we could easily have been hit head-on by an oncoming car.

  I blacked out somewhere on the way down the hill and careened directly into the concrete wall at the bottom. My brain slammed hard into bone, nearly killing me without a scratch. I regained consciousness at Todd’s mother’s kitchen table with a cold rag wrapped around my head, a brown stoneware plate of gingerbread cookies in front of me. For a moment, I step out of myself—I see myself sitting at the tiny table in navy blue sailor pants with a fresh hole at the knee the size of a dime; I see the red-and-white-striped T-shirt, and the pink rag around my head dripping down my neck—and there is Liz, Todd’s mother, heavy and blond, dressed in a paisley housecoat, on the phone, hands shaking, dialing the rotary, frantically trying to reach my mother. Where is she? Why can’t they find her? Minutes—hours?—later I am carried through the lobby by Buck, our neighbor, a local boys’ school teacher and my father’s best friend, out to his white Falcon. I see my mother over Buck’s shoulder; our eyes lock and she looks away, her face twisted in terror. I sit on Buck’s lap, next to my mother, at our local emergency room. Buck is drenched in cheap aftershave and wearing glen plaid trousers, brown and gold and white. The pattern dizzies me and I pass out, my forehead landing square in the middle of his muscular left thigh. I come to, just as a teenager with a slice running the length of her forearm is rushed passed us, her bone-white wrist peeking out of a blood-drenched flowered kitchen towel held aloft by her mother.

  More than forty years later, the dull ache at my temple throbs; it still hurts to the touch. I warn my hair stylist and colorist about it every time.

  Remember the spot, I tell them. Please don’t go near it.

  * * *

  —

  “The Baby’s here,” my mother says to someone, I don’t know who, when I come home for a weekend from college; it is her birthday, my freshman year and the first time I have been away from her for any length of time. I walk into her apartment to find her in the kitchen, the telephone receiver nuzzled against her neck, a Tiffany goblet of Soave in her hand.

  “She looks terrific—The Baby looks terrific—She lost so much weight—”

  My mother hangs up and grabs me in a tight, delicious hug; we don’t let go. She kisses the side of my head, quick and hard, over and over, like a woodpecker on a tree; my pain doesn’t exist for her. She leaves a hot pink brand in the shape of wax Halloween lips on my temple at my hairline, on what she has called since my accident the sore spot.

  “I kiss The Baby’s sore spot,” she says, affectionately. “I kiss it. Kiss. Kiss.”

  21

  DORA HAS REARRANGED MY MOTHER’S linen closet. After living with her for seven months, my mother refuses to let her caregiver do anything else.

  On the middle shelf, my mother keeps a white-and-blue tartan baby blanket folded neatly in thirds and shelved directly at eye level. It is the one that she and Gaga tucked up around me in my metal stroller on cool fall and spring days in the early sixties, once the weather began to turn.

  I conflate the sight of the blanket, its rough, oily British wool grazing my tiny infant neck and point of my chin, my small hands buried deep beneath it, with the antique clouds of tuberose and musk clinging to my grandmother’s wrists as she forced the fabric around me. The blanket is safety and it is love, and in the split second between sight and memory—my eyes and my heart; the present and the past converge—I open my mother’s linen closet door and it tumbles out and lands at my feet in a haze of Manhattan apartment dust. I pick the blanket up and hold it to my face. I inhale. It smells of Gaga, dead thirty-five years. It smells of us.

  More than once I have considered liberating it—spiriting the blanket out of the apartment in my overnight bag and bringing it back to my home in Connecticut, where I live the mundane life of a
middle-aged adult, in love, laundry to do, errands to run. It would cover me on the couch while I read the Sunday paper, or be spread out on the freezing rocks for a picnic in Maine. I envision it rolled up at the foot of our bed to stave off a chill in the middle of the night, or, having gone threadbare and moth-eaten, draped over my legs on a cold New England afternoon in my later years, when running will be a memory and walking will cease to be easy. The blanket will come home with me and stay, and I wonder where it will end up when I have faded away: at Goodwill, or in a dark green metal clothing dumpster behind the local Congregational church, or swaddled around the grandchild of a distant relative I barely know who, in lieu of the baby I never had, is burdened with the fact of my things.

  I stop myself. This was my blanket—home movies show me wrapped in it while being pushed in my pram around the Upper East Side of Manhattan—but it is not of me; it belongs to my mother. To take it from the apartment, from her, would be to presume that my past as her baby is severed from our present. To take the blanket from her would be to render me gone, and to imagine that she would neither notice its absence nor miss its memory.

  The blanket, this remnant of time and biology, lives there, sandwiched between an assortment of mismatched and tattered fabrics that represent the arc of my life: the worn bedsheets that fit the convertible pullout sofa where I slept for two years in my mother’s den, the blue-and-white Scandia duvet cover I used when I was away at college in Boston, a jumble of stiff cotton hand towels with the consistency of sandpaper from my childhood bathroom in Forest Hills. Tucked in among the sheets and towels is a gift box of six heavy cardboard placemats decorated with eighteenth-century sketches of English country parsonages, given to her after a visit by Sally and William, to whom my mother responded with a handwritten note that read Thank you so much for being Elissa’s friend. I appreciate it.

  * * *

  —

  Other things:

  In the entryway coat closet near the kitchen, a tiny red plaid umbrella, given to me by a neighbor when I had my tonsils out at four, hangs next to my mother’s mink coat. In the living room closet, old grocery cartons containing my organic chemistry textbooks and Osmond Brothers albums, my collection of Dr. Seuss books and my grade school notebooks are piled up on the floor beneath my mother’s shoulder-padded 1980s suits, Yohji Yamamoto skirts, and silver-fox-tipped cashmere shawls. On the top shelf, next to a brown vinyl bag containing a monogrammed bowling ball the color of melting caramel—a present from my father on my twelfth birthday—sits the blue Samsonite train case my mother carried to the hospital when she went into labor with me, a wooden scrapbook stuffed with her publicity clippings, and beside that, a massive silver-and-white-striped cardboard box containing her 1962 wedding gown, involving a monkey jacket and a pillbox hat.

  My mother is a keeper of our things, a hoarder of our life together; the sight and fact of them steady and guide her, and when she’s having a bad morning, she reviews them, as if taking an inventory of experience. They are proof that we are mother and daughter, that I was once a child utterly dependent upon her. There are my report cards, and my tiny baby teeth stored in a small manila envelope in her jewelry box next to the rosary beads and marked ELISSA TEETH in Gaga’s sprawling Palmer Method hand; a lock of strawberry blond hair from my first haircut; the fake pearl ring I bought her for a quarter at an upstate New York hotel gift shop when I was seven; my first-grade notebook, covered in stiff black-and-white cardboard and still stinking of school paste; the wedding gown; the monogrammed bowling ball.

  “I spent the morning going through everything,” she says when I call to check in on her, to make sure she is up and has eaten and that Dora is there.

  “You were such a darling baby. But that goddamned bowling ball, Lissie—”

  I tell her to get rid of it, just to toss it. She can’t, she says.

  “It belongs to you. It’s monogrammed!”

  We giggle at this together—a delicious private laugh that comes from a secret shared history belonging only to us—and at the utter absurdity of it: that my father, possessed of a jumbled, inappropriate formality, would force the implied value of inheritance onto the mundane. He thought it would be a good idea to monogram a bowling ball like a piece of fine jewelry, as if it, too, were to become a family heirloom in the manner of the engraved Tiffany pill case I gave to my mother after Ben died, meant to be passed down to the next generation and the one after that in the same breath as a vintage train case, a Kennedy-era wedding dress, an English woolen baby blanket.

  22

  I AM LYING ON MY back on an examination table. My feet are resting in metal stirrups; a lime-green paper sheet is stretched across my lap. It is cold in the room. I’m shivering; my legs tremble.

  My father has recently died in a car accident. Susan and I have left her tiny cottage in the Litchfield hills and moved to the ranch house closer to New York, where Susan works every day. We see thirty houses before deciding: a quaint farmhouse on the Hudson, whose resident army of fire ants attacked my ankles as I walked through the overgrown perennial garden. A stucco Tudor with a stream flowing through the basement, owned by an Italian sulky driver who races at a nearby track. A decrepit colonial on a busy street, built around a massive stone fireplace.

  The ranch house, for us, is ideal: neither too big nor too small, it is perfect for a couple, perhaps with a child or two. Older parents who will visit us—my mother, Susan’s mother—will have no trouble navigating the stairs, because there aren’t any. It is in a lovely community filled with farm stands and markets, a short drive from the commuter train, two hours from Manhattan.

  The school system, the real estate broker tells us when she shows us the house, is excellent.

  * * *

  —

  Susan and I have been together for four years. I have left New York City for good; the tiny apartment in which I have been living since Julie moved to San Francisco ten years earlier has been sold. Connecticut is now my home; Susan is my home. Children enter into our conversation at every turn: over dinner, over drinks, over hikes, over dog walks. We talk about adopting, which, in this early part of the twenty-first century, can still be problematic. We hear stories of people we know—same-sex couples who have been together for years—who plan for adoption organization home visits by hiding evidence of coupledom: pictures are stashed, joint checkbooks and bank statements removed, bills shredded; one-half of the couple moves out. A family cloaked in deception; they are rendered invisible. Having stepped out of one shadow—my mother’s—I cannot step back into another one. I make a doctor’s appointment. Because I am ten years younger than Susan, I am the obvious one.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty-five years earlier, Susan and her partner, Judy, made a baby with the help of a friend named Charles. Deep into her second trimester, Judy got sick; an infection. Susan slept on the floor of her Manhattan hospital room as her partner, burning with fever, was pumped full of antibiotics. It was a choice: the life of her partner, or the life of her child. Judy lost the baby. They saw it; they said goodbye.

  “It had been a little girl,” Susan said.

  How is grief metabolized? How is it possible to breathe again? They never tried to have another. Their relationship collapsed, perhaps under the weight of the kind of sorrow that infiltrates the cells of the body, that lives on, as the Chinese say it does, in the lungs and the hips. Grief that changes the color of the sky. The prospect of life, of hope, of the cycle that is human existence—mother/child/mother/child—begat death.

  We rarely discuss it; the subject is changed.

  * * *

  —

  “You don’t have a lot of time,” the doctor tells me.

  He looks weary and sad; he is squeezed like a sausage into stained blue scrubs, his tan hair brushed into a wiry, unruly comb-over. He appears older than his years; how many lives has he carried in
to this world? How many lives has he seen lost? How many daughters and mothers?

  I am a new patient: He delivered my neighbor’s daughters fifteen years earlier at a local hospital near our new home. He came highly recommended when I said that I needed a doctor; I didn’t say why.

  “You should have started ten years ago,” he says.

  “Ten years ago I was alone and living in Manhattan,” I say.

  “So? Single women in Manhattan have babies alone all the time, if they want them badly enough. You would have been thirty, right?”

  “Right,” I say, staring at the yellowing stains on the chipped acoustic ceiling tiles hanging above me. Someone, years ago, had taped a color Xerox of a mountain lake directly above the table; the tape is peeling, and the picture, ripped.

  “Even thirty can be hard for some women,” he says, sighing. He pushes himself away from the table and rolls to the other side of the room.

  “How old was your mother?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “First pregnancy?”

  “Only pregnancy,” I say, looking at the ceiling. “Except when I was twelve.”

  * * *

  • • •