by Steven Gould
She’d changed. I don’t know why this surprised me. Before she left, Mom had black, shiny hair, long and thick. She’d also been plump, talking endlessly about dieting, but never turning down a dessert. She’d also had a nose one might call aquiline if one was kind, or beaklike if one wanted to be nasty. I shared that nose with her and with her father, so I knew well enough what people could say about it.
Her hair was short now, cut close around her face, shorter than Millie’s, and it was white, as were her eyebrows. She’d lost at least fifty pounds and was wearing a narrow-waisted dress. I saw at least two businessmen turn to watch as she walked past. And her face had changed. Certainly not beyond recognition, but it took me a minute to realize what it was. Her nose was smaller, slightly turned up, and I felt a moment’s sharp grief, a feeling that I’d lost another connection to her. For a paranoid moment I wondered if I’d made up the shared features, that I really wasn’t related to her—alien. Perhaps really alien.
Then I remembered the hospital stay, and the surgery to repair her face after she’d left us.
She was scanning the crowd at the gate, all of them, except me, waiting to board the continuation of her flight to D.C. Her eyes crossed over me, a young man wearing a (new) expensive suit, then looked quickly back, a tentative smile on her face.
I advanced, the flowers held before me, almost like a shield. “Welcome to New York,” I said.
She looked from my face to the flowers and back to my face. She set the briefcase down, took the flowers from me, and opened her arms wide. Tears were streaming down her face... and mine. I stepped into her arms and squeezed her nearly as hard as she held me.
It felt wrong. She was shorter than me and the ample plushness of her hugs that I remembered from my childhood was also gone. It felt uncomfortably like holding Millie. I let go after a minute and stepped back, profoundly disturbed, confused. Who was this person?
“God you’ve grown,” she said, and it was all right again.
That voice was there, the voice of my past, the voice that said, Oh, not much. How was school? The voice that said, Your father can’t help it, dear, he’s sick, sick. The voice hadn’t changed.
“Well, I suppose I have. It’s been six years.”
I picked up her briefcase and swore at myself. She knows how long it’s been. Why’d you say that? “You look really good, Mom. I like your hair and you lost a lot of weight.” I didn’t mention her face because I didn’t want to talk about the events that caused her operations, that drove her away in the first place.
She just nodded and walked along beside me, sniffing occasionally at the roses. She held then in both her arms, cradled, as if they were an infant.
I used a pay phone in the baggage area to call the limo’s cellular phone. The limo was waiting up on Ninety-fourth Street, just on the other side of the Grand Central Parkway from the airport. By the time we’d claimed Mom’s luggage and got out on the sidewalk, it was sitting at the curb. The driver, a small black man in a black suit, was leaning against the hood.
I’d met him at the limo agency the day before, so he recognized us right off, coming forward and saying, “I’ll carry that, ma’am.”
Mom looked at me, surprised, and perhaps a little frightened.
“It’s okay,” I said. “This is Mr. Adams, our driver.”
She relaxed and handed him the case. “A limo? A limousine?” she said, looking at me.
“Well, yes. I think that’s what they’re called.”
Mr. Adams held the rear door for her, his body tilted forward solicitously, a hand ready to help her in. After Mom was in, he continued to hold the door, looking at me.
“Oh.” I put the suitcase I was still holding down beside the other cases and climbed in. Mr. Adams shut the door and put the cases in the trunk.
“A limousine?”
“You keep saying that, Mom. Would you like something to drink?” I opened the small refrigerator. “There’s a split of champagne in here.” I’d make her open it if that’s what she wanted—I wasn’t going to open any more champagne bottles without practicing first in private.
She settled on mineral water. I took ginger ale. We used the champagne flutes anyway. Mr. Adams took the Van Wyck to the Belt-Parkway. The Saturday-afternoon traffic was light, so it was only thirty minutes before the limo pulled up before my brownstone. “This is the right address, sir?” He sounded doubtful.
“Yes,” I said, blushing. I was seeing my neighborhood through his eyes—the trash and graffiti and groups of sullen Hispanic and black men who stood on corners. I never saw this side because I always jumped straight to my apartment. If I wanted to go for a walk, I’d jump to the Village or the south end of Central Park or downtown Stanville, Ohio. Places that weren’t so nervous-making.
Still, it was my building I was really worried about. I hoped we wouldn’t run into Washburn. We didn’t.
Mr. Adams made sure the limo was locked and its alarm activated before he carried the bags up to my apartment. Once he’d put the bags down in the spare room, Mom tried to tip him.
“Oh, no ma’am. I’ve already been paid a more than adequate gratuity for the weekend.”
“The weekend?”
“Mr. Adams will be driving for us during your visit. It can be hard to get cabs out here sometimes.”
She blinked. “Oh.”
Mr. Adams tipped his hat. “I’d best be getting back to the car. May I suggest, sir, that I move it until you need me? You have a lot of nice things here in your apartment—it might be best if the limousine wasn’t downstairs to draw the wrong sort of attention to it. You could reach me on the car phone.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you.” I saw him to the door. Before he left I said, “There’s a precinct house three blocks toward Flatbush Avenue. Perhaps that would be a good place to park... for the car that is.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, relieved. “I hope this isn’t inconvenient.”
“No,” I answered. “It’s probably best for both reasons.”
Mom spent some time in the bathroom, freshening up. I sat in the living room, in the recliner, my feet up, and listened to the sound of running water. She hummed to herself as she washed, another reminder of the past, comforting and disturbing at the same time.
“I see you managed to ‘clean up your room,’ “ she said, coming into the living room and standing before the bookshelves.
“Well... yeah.” I added almost convulsively, “I had a cleaning service in.”
She laughed quietly. “I’m glad to see you’re still reading. Your father never was much of a reader.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. She turned to me with raised eyebrows. “Yes, reading is very important to me,” I said into the awkward silence. “I think if I hadn’t been a reader, I would have gone mad.”
The small smile on her face died. “Escape?”
“Yeah—escape and a feeling that the rest of the world wasn’t mixed up or crazy. That people could really have lives that didn’t involve...” I shut my mouth. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Mom took a deep breath. “I need to say some things to you, Davy. I need to say some things I’ve been thinking about for years.” She looked scared, but somehow determined.
I sat up in the recliner, the footrest folding beneath with a little click. My stomach started to churn. “Okay,” I said.
She sat down on the end of the couch closest to the recliner and leaned forward, her elbows resting on her legs, her fingers interlocked. “Have you ever heard of Alanon?”
I shook my head.
“Alanon is an organization modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. Its emphasis is not on alcoholics themselves, but on their family members, their spouses or children. I started going to their meetings after I moved to California.” She paused a second. “When a person lives with an alcoholic, with any abusive person, they start to have the same kind of arrested emotional development that the alcoholic does. For the same reason, the techniques for tr
eating alcoholics also turn out to be effective for treating the victims of their abuse.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what she was getting at and I suspected I didn’t want to know, but she was my mom.
“The thing that both organizations depend on is something called the twelve-step program. The steps are things one has to accomplish or accept to overcome and heal what has happened to them. Without going through the whole list, I need to do what is called a ninth step with you.”
This was not my mother. This wasn’t the woman who joked with me, comforted me, looked after me. I didn’t know who this serious, determined woman was. Reluctantly, I said, “What is a ninth step?”
“Making amends. Acknowledging the harm and damage that one has done to the person that was harmed and damaged.”
“Oh, Mom. You didn’t do it,...”
“Shhh. This isn’t easy. Let me finish what I have to say.”
I slumped in on myself, my arms crossed tightly, and looked at the floor between us.
“I did terrible things to you, Davy. I abandoned you for six years with a man I knew was an alcoholic, capable of terrible emotional and physical abuse. Before I left, I silently abetted emotional abuse. I let him destroy your self-esteem. I let him ‘punish’ you for things that didn’t warrant punishment. I was a silent partner in his abuse of you.”
As she spoke I curled in on myself, as if my stomach were cramping, as if to curl around my pain, my hurt, and shield it from the world.
She went on. “I failed to confront his abuse of you out of fear, out of doubt, out of uncertainty. I failed to take action after I abandoned you, action to protect you from his abuse, action to recover you from him. And, worst of all, I abused you directly, by abandoning you, by taking my love and care away from you, by treating you like lost luggage, that one doesn’t have an obligation to, a responsibility to.”
She took a deep breath of air and I looked at her face, not lifting my head, but peering through my hair, where the bangs fell forward. Her cheeks were wet, but her eyes watched me, blinking to clear the tears.
“I pray,” she said, “that one day you’ll be able to forgive me.”
“Oh, Mom... it wasn’t your fault. You were driven away!”
She shook her head violently. “I’m just as responsible. I acknowledge that responsibility even if you don’t want to think of me in that way. Someday you will, and I fear that your anger at me will be far greater than what you feel toward your father.”
“Oh, never! I... I can’t even talk about him without... without, ah shit.” I started crying myself. Mom came to me, quickly, and perched on the armrest of the recliner. I leaned into her and she held me, silent, one hand patting awkwardly at my back.
After a minute I tried to wipe my tears from my face with my fingers. My nose was dripping so I mumbled, “Excuse me,” and stood, Mom’s arms dropped. I brought a box of tissues back from the bedroom. We both knew our noses and laughed a little.
“Genetics is wonderful,” I said.
“You’re entirely welcome.” She blew her nose hard, alike a mezzo-soprano foghorn. “Thanks for listening to me.”
It wasn’t you. It wasn’t your fault. “You’re welcome, I guess,...” I wanted to argue the point, but even more I wanted to drop the subject, to talk about anything else. “Are you getting hungry yet?”
“A bit.”
“I have a reservation in the Village for six-thirty. It will take us about forty-five minutes to drive there so we need to leave in about thirty-minutes. I also have theater tickets to Grand Hotel.”
“My God. Are you bankrupting yourself for my visit?”
I thought about the money chest, ten feet behind her. “Not even close, Mom. Not even close.”
“Well,” she said with a kind of artificial gaiety, “I’d better change then.
We are at I Tre Merli, an Italian restaurant on West Broadway. People stared when we got out of the limo. I tried to act nonchalant. Mom thanked Mr. Adams warmly for holding the door. We arranged a time for him to pick us up with enough leeway to get to the theater.
Our table was ready immediately, a consequence of eating early, though the hostess had seen Mr. Adams hand us out of the limo, so perhaps that helped as well.
During dinner, the waiter suggested wine from the restaurant’s own vineyard. Mom agreed. I drank a glass of red that seemed to go well with the food. It made me lightheaded and nervous. I spoke to her about it.
“Do you drink much, Davy?” She looked sideways and leaned closer. “I guess, technically, you’re still underage in New York, aren’t you? Though you don’t look it.”
I shrugged. “That’s not it. I can always pay somebody to buy it for me. I just don’t know... I mean, Dad...”
“Ah. You wonder if you’re an alcoholic, too. I shouldn’t worry about it too much, not if this is the first alcohol you’ve had in... how long?”
“I tasted some champagne about six weeks ago. I didn’t think much of it.”
She nodded. “Well, it’s something to keep an eye on, but don’t be too paranoid. It was one of my fears, too, after I got to California. My therapist convinced me my problems had different causes.”
I wondered if there was a secret organization out there: Teleports Anonymous. Hi, my name is David Rice and I’m a teleport. Mom didn’t look like a teleport, did she? What does a teleport look like? I wanted to tell her, but things were going so well—I didn’t want to blow it by revealing my alienness. Or the bank robbery, for chrissakes. The only time I remember her punishing me was when I stole a neighbor’s toy.
Grand Hotel was good, brilliantly staged, with wonderful music. My favorite character was Mr. Kringelein, the terminally ill Jewish accountant. The Jimmies, two black entertainer/waiters, were also good, but while I liked the way the play ended, there was one thing that disturbed me greatly.
The aging ballerina, expecting the young and handsome Baron to meet her at the station, isn’t told by her manager and companion that he’s died the night before. I hated that. It seemed like the harshest bit of kindness I’ve ever seen, like betrayal—like manipulation, to make her go on dancing. I hated that.
Mom shrugged. “It’s life. It’s too much like life, perhaps, but it’s realistic.”
Neither of us had slept well the night before, in anticipation or dread of the visit, so Mr. Adams drove us back to the apartment and we turned in.
The next morning as we were getting into the limo I saw Washburn watching us from his window. I ignored him, acting like he wasn’t there, but I couldn’t help but remember the gun in his fist. I wonder how he got back from Central Park?
We ate breakfast on the Upper West Side; then Mr. Adams dropped us over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we took in the Russian traveling exhibit of French Impressionist paintings.
“You’re a member of the museum? How often do you come here?”
I shrugged. “More, since I joined. I spent some time here when I was still living in Manhattan.”
“Oh.”
We enjoyed the exhibit, though the Sunday crowd was thick and obnoxious.
After a woman stepped directly between Mom and the painting she was looking at, she took me aside and asked with a smile, “Do they train people how to be New Yorkers? I don’t see how they could be so rude otherwise.” She frowned then. “Well, I guess they do. Family behavior is training. Dysfunctionality passes down through generations. God, I hope all New Yorkers aren’t products of dysfunctional families.”
“I’ve met lots of friendly New Yorkers,” I said. “Me, for instance.”
“Ha! You’re an import. Definitely foreign material.”
“Well, Mr. Adams, then.”
She nodded. “I’m sure there are plenty.”
I called Mr. Adams from the pay phone and he picked us up out front. It would probably take us an hour to get to Kennedy Airport. “I know we have plenty of time,” Mom said, “but I want to double check my aisle seat. I can’t stand to sit in th
e middle or at the window. I hate it.”
On the way out to the airport Mom tried to talk to me about getting into therapy.
“Are you saying I’m crazy?” I was a little angry—upset. I’d been trying to work up the courage to tell her about the teleportation—to ask her if she could or anyone in our family. If she thought I needed therapy now....
“No. Not crazy. However, you just can’t shrug off what you’ve been through. We all carry this baggage around with us, this emotional garbage. We have to work through it, or we’ll end up inflicting it on our children.” She avoided looking at me when she said this. “Seeing a therapist doesn’t mean you’re crazy, or bad, or sick. A therapist is like a... a guide. He knows the signs, the roads, the pits. He can help you find the pain inside, acknowledge it and its cause, and get past it.”
I looked out the window.
She kept talking. “You ran away from your father and that was a good thing. But the damage is there and you can’t run away from it. It’s a part of you.”
No problem is so big that it can’t be teleported away from: Linus, paraphrased.
I found myself getting angrier and angrier. Cool it, Davy. It’s not worth it. “I’ll think about it,” I lied, finally, to get her away from the subject.
She looked, for a moment, like she was going to keep on it, but she smiled after a minute and said, “Tell me about your job.”
I shrugged. Maybe I should have let her go on about therapy. “It’s more like banking interests. Nothing really to talk about. I’d rather hear about your trip to Europe.”
I don’t think I fooled her. I think she knew there was something about my “job” that I didn’t want to talk about, but she didn’t press it.
“We’re spending four days in London, two days in Paris, three days in Rome, two days in Athens, three days in Istanbul, and then home again. It’s crazy, but it’s one of these travel agents-only tours to evaluate hotel facilities. I’ve done it twice before and you’re always so tired that you really haven’t a clue about the facilities. Still, it helps to be able to tell a client what they have to do to get a cab in Lisbon or change money in Amsterdam. And I’ve never been to Turkey before, so that will be nice.”