A moment of tenderness and peace; we’re both listening.
“Because,” my mother says, “Papa told me.”
She shakes her head. She flings away the magazine in disgust.
“What, Mom?”
“Papa says that I’m his homely little girl.”
26
I DO NOT REMEMBER WHERE my mother was on the day her father died. I do not remember seeing her when my father, who was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor in our apartment in Forest Hills on a Saturday morning in 1967, pulled me into his lap and told me that my grandfather was gone, and that wherever he was, he had loved me. I do not remember where she was when I wept at the fact of her father’s death, because even at four, I understood what it meant: that I would never see him again, that life had a final and specific moment, an end point. A person could suddenly leave, and the world would change; the cast of the sky would look different. I did not see my mother that morning, and I did not call for her.
* * *
—
My grandfather, who had inherited real estate from his late mother all over Williamsburg, insisted, in his late seventies and quaking with Parkinson’s, on collecting the rent on the five buildings himself. He was an old man, older than his years, frail, his body tortured by disease into a curve; he was followed into North Williamsburg near the piers where, as a child, he had eaten oysters on the waterfront in the shadow of Walt Whitman. He was robbed, beaten, and left for dead. In the emergency room, they examined him and X-rayed his chest to make sure that no ribs were broken. The doctors found a massive cancerous tumor in one of his lungs; he had been a smoker all his life with a five-pack-a-day habit. He loved unfiltered Camels, cheap cigars, a good pipe. He was taken to the New Jersey hospital where his nephew was a surgeon. They would not operate. He lived only a short time, and died there.
“The last time I saw him,” my mother tells me, “I sat on the edge of his bed, and I fed him from a spoon, just like a baby.”
* * *
—
Every year during the Jewish holidays, my mother lights four Yahrzeit candles: for Ben and for her parents, and an extra.
“—for those who don’t have anyone left to pray for them,” she says in the car, when Susan and I bring her to the house for dinner.
I set the table with good silver and a crisp white linen cloth, the way Gaga did when I was a child. Susan makes matzo balls—after almost twenty years of Jewish holidays, she has become an expert; they are perfect and round and light as a feather—and together we feed my mother: soup, brisket, Gaga’s noodle pudding, apple cake, tea. A round challah that signifies the continuing cycle of time and the passage of years. Foods that promise a sweet new year.
“I’m not hungry,” my mother says.
She cleans her plate.
A month later, at the very end of the gardening season, she returns. She has been feeling well. She wants to see us, she says, and to see the dog; it is a week before we leave for Maine. My mother stands in the vegetable garden with Susan, who will set up the lightweight hose for her. In full makeup and with her cane leaning against the side of the house, she will water the boxes, overgrown with late-season kale and winter squash and bolting lettuce. She will water the gravel and water the splintering picket fence. She will wave furiously, like a child, and tell us about the victory garden she grew in Brooklyn during the war, in the spit of urban grass between her apartment building and the next one. In the evening, we will sit her on the porch in an Adirondack chair with a glass of white wine; the neighbors will come over to say hello. We feed her, and we take her back home to the city the next day.
* * *
• • •
“I WOULD LIKE TO LIVE to one hundred and three,” my mother tells me over brunch. She takes a sip of wine.
“One hundred and three,” I repeat, pushing eggs around on my plate.
We have walked together from her apartment to the bistro down the street. She is dressed in narrow dark jeans, a tight spangled Sonia Rykiel sweater from the eighties that she unearthed from the living room closet, the white Air Jordans that Susan and I bought for her when she was finally out of the cam boots, and a long raw silk cardigan the color of straw that comes to her knees. She is carrying her favorite blue tote, which is filled with sheet music, compact discs, Xeroxes of her reviews, her makeup bag. She wears thin gold hoop earrings that graze her shoulders, and a horn link necklace that Susan and I bought her from an artist in northern Maine. There is a ring on every finger: the coiled snake I brought from Greece years ago; an ivory Buddha she found in a Tibetan antiques store on Bleecker Street an hour before Susan and I were married at Buvette, around the corner; Gaga’s white-gold wedding band.
She seems shorter now since the accident, and she clings hard to me as we cross West End Avenue. She twirls her cane like it’s a walking stick and she’s Fred Astaire.
“You need to use it, Ma,” I say. “Please—”
“It’s just for show,” she says. “I don’t need it.”
She tucks it under her arm.
A breath; the space between stimulus and reaction. I can stand right here in the middle of the street and plead with her, the way I once did in my twenties after dinner with Ben and his friends when I was drunk and taunting the traffic, wanting all of it—the anger, the rage, the yearning—to stop. I can remind her what the last two years have been: the surgeries, the pain, the rehabilitation, the caregiver she hated, the wheelchair, the money that is gone.
I let it go.
We pass a playground thronged with young children. My mother stops to watch. The little ones climb monkey bars, play tag, play catch. They shout and squeal; a little boy, maybe three years old, straight brown hair hanging long to his shoulders, runs to the bench where a young woman—his mother? his au pair?—sits reading the newspaper. He is thrilled with something he can barely explain to her. He can’t contain himself. His joy, pure and complete, bubbles like a volcano. She listens to him with rapt attention, her eyes wide with interest. He beams; there is something, a secret, that he is proud of. She lifts him into her lap, hugs him, puts him back down, and he runs off into the fray.
“He’s beautiful,” my mother says, pointing at him. She smiles at the woman and waves.
She leans her cane against the chain-link fence that separates the street from the schoolyard. She pulls off her gloves—the forest-green ones I bought for her years ago on my first trip to Florence—and stuffs them into her tote bag. She looks into the schoolyard, her eyes glistening.
“What’s wrong, Ma—”
She grabs my hand and holds it in her coat pocket, like a child’s. She squeezes it hard, picks up her cane, and turns east, toward the bistro.
“Let’s keep going,” she says.
Afterword
THIS IS NOT THE BOOK I envisioned when I first sat down to write it.
On a snowy night in 2016, a few weeks after the catastrophic accident that would require my constant presence in my mother’s life—a fate that I had struggled for years to escape—my editor came for dinner.
“How will this fall change your story?” she asked. “Because,” she said, “it will change your story.”
It was early in the process. My first drafts focused on the past: our past, my past, and the moment when my mother ceased to see me as a child, and instead recognized me as an independent woman—a stranger so utterly different from herself that the very fact of me was a betrayal. Initially, my own anger, frustration, and blindness at being her lifelong emotional caregiver and effective spouse were primary threads, along with the trifecta that inevitably came with them: depression, addiction, and darkest humor. The cords were visceral, ancient, and osmotic: My grandmother’s rage begat my mother’s, and my mother’s begat mine, and tugged our story along like a wagon behind a child. In the earliest versions of Motherland, vulnerability was elusive.
* * *
—
Writing this book while my mother was—and is—still alive also meant navigating the practical and moral complexities of constructing a story from the inside while it was still unfolding. Authors who write about their relationship with a parent (Frank Conroy, Kathryn Harrison, Tobias Wolff, Mary Gordon, and Sue Miller, among others) usually do so after that parent is gone. They approach their subject with the perspective and safety of time, and the tempering of grief. I had chosen not to wait. I wanted to excavate meaning from our story, to understand how a mother and daughter so tightly knitted to each other can simultaneously manage to survive half a century of enmity and still find love—the human constitution is a powerful thing. In Motherland, I wanted to know not who we were, but who we are, together; I had to know. I yearned for clarity and context. I would not write from a place of conjecture or speculation; I would write from a place of observation and self-scrutiny. More than anything, I wanted to heal our very thorny and fraught relationship while there was still time—assuming it was possible.
* * *
—
My mother’s accident ignited my father’s prophecy, revealed in the first part of the story: I would have to take care of her. Her care would be my job. In the months following her fall and surgery, my exposure to her increased; it had to. We spent our days fending off ancient engraved furies and instead told each other stories. We fought; we raged. And then I listened, and she listened. Motherland morphed from a memoir written only from a place of codependence and my ferocious devotion to a mother carapaced by beauty against the ravages of time like a beetle in amber, to one written from the point of view of the present, with its attendant issues of reality: caregiving, dwindling resources, Talmudic expectation, age. By the time Motherland was completed, our roles had reversed. She became the child I never had, in whose face was drawn the purest manifestations of humanity unvarnished: fear of the unknown, and love. And Motherland went from being my story of survival to one of mutual vulnerability and a profound if complicated affection that belongs to us both.
For my mother, now and always
Acknowledgments
In the two years during which I was actively writing this book, the narrative took me to places I could never have expected or predicted. At root, this is a love story, and without my mother, there would be no story, no parallel tale of survival, no beauty, no profoundly complicated affection worth struggling to unravel and heal. It has not always been easy, but it has always been, and I am forever grateful to my mother for her generosity of spirit, unflagging energy, style, humor and bravery, resilience, and fierce affection. But Motherland’s creation has taken far longer than two years: for as long as I can remember, I have been writing about the complicated character that is not only my relationship with my mother but most if not all mother-daughter relationships in their furious primacy. To be able to untangle it in real time, as it is still going on, still unfolding, has been a priceless if exigent gift, built on the promise and hope of understanding. I would not have been able to accomplish this work had it not been for the steadfast guidance and wisdom of so many who supported and empowered me along the way, both in word and action.
To my dear friend, the late author, chef, and community leader Kurt Michael Friese, who passed away suddenly in the last hours of my work on this book, and who held me, intractably, to the highest standards of compassion and kindness, I will be forever grateful. To those whose work bolsters and inspires me: Marie Howe, Kate Christensen, Claire Messud, Patricia Hampl, Terry Tempest Williams, Mark Doty, Jacki Lyden, Annie Dillard, Nigella Lawson, Diana Henry, Heidi Swanson, Anne Lamott, Molly O’Neill, Martha Frankel, Andrea Gentl and Martin Hyers. To Krista Tippett, Parker Palmer, Tobeya Ibatayo, and all those I met at the On Being Gathering, and who make the promise of resilience and reconciliation both a necessity and reality; thank you. To Joe Yonan at The Washington Post, who gave me a column and the opportunity to begin telling this story in Feeding My Mother, thank you. Warmest thanks to my earliest readers, who offered invaluable feedback: Dani Shapiro, Katie Devine, Margaret Reid Boyer, Licia Morelli. Grateful thanks to Vermont Studio Center, where I began work on Motherland. To the Schwartzes, the Londons, the Fertigs, the Wulfsons, the Jaegers, the Puchkoffs, the Fiebers, the Turners, the Hopkins, Jean-Marie Cannon, Vanessa Feinman, the Murphys, the Latowickis, the Other Turners, the Pennarollas, the Watsons, the Brigantis, grateful thanks. To the vast team that has helped care for my mother and done so with breathtaking grace and patience, thank you. To Dan Ravelli, who kept my house from falling down around me while I was writing. Thanks to Jeff and Lynn Sternstein, Stevie and Porter Boggess, Louise and Mark Carpentier, Michael Maren, Jane Green, Cha Tekeli, Lisa Feuer and Alyssa Awe, The Frieses, Maki Hoashi, RF Jurjevics, Laura Zimmerman and Joey Johns, Liz Queler and Seth Farber, David and Rachel Slavin, Jacqueline Church and Caleb Ho, Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin, The Glin Group, Imen McDonnell, Cliodhna Prendergast, Catherine and Sootie Fitzgerald, Rebecca Gleason, and Cynthia Barrett. To Tara Barker and my friends in Maine, which continues to be my safe place and where I drop my anchor: thank you.
To my dream editor, Pamela Cannon; her assistants Hanna Gibeau and Erin Kane; the extraordinary team at Ballantine Books—Ted Allen, Benjamin Dreyer, Marietta Anastassatos, Taylor Noel, Melanie DeNardo, Kara Welsh, Matthew Martin; copy editor Emily DeHuff; and to my brilliant, tough, wise agent Heather Jackson: thank you.
To my love, Susan Turner, who lights my way and is my home.
E.M.A.
January 2019
BY ELISSA ALTMAN
Motherland
Treyf
Poor Man’s Feast
About the Author
ELISSA ALTMAN is the author of Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking and the James Beard Award–winning blog of the same name and Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw. Her work has appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The New York Times, Tin House, The Rumpus, Dame Magazine, LitHub, Saveur, and The Washington Post, where her column, “Feeding My Mother,” ran for a year. Her work has been anthologized in Best Food Writing six times. A finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, Altman has taught the craft of memoir at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Loft Literary Center, 1440 Multiversity, and Ireland’s Literature and Larder Program, and has appeared live onstage at TEDx and The Public, on Heritage Radio, and widely on NPR. She lives in Connecticut with her family.
elissaaltman.com
Facebook.com/elissa.altman
Twitter: @ElissaAltman
Instagram: @elissa_altman
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