by Anne Raeff
My father kept running his finger around the rim of the glass, but there was no moisture left, so it didn’t make a sound. My mother looked at me and chuckled. “Don’t be absurd, Deborah,” she said very calmly.
“Well, I did. I fucked her and she fucked me,” I said.
“That’s enough,” my father said. “That’s enough,” he said again as he walked to the kitchen to check on the trout. Neither my mother nor I moved from our seats or said a word until my father brought in the food and said, “Mesdames sont servies.” Then we all moved silently to the dining room table. We ate as fast as we could, as if we hadn’t eaten in days, and my mother and I kept saying that this was the best trout we had ever eaten. My mother’s hand trembled ever so slightly as she pushed the fish away from the bone, but it was hardly noticeable. She was sitting up really straight and she brought her fork the distance from the plate to her mouth without bending at all. And then I knew that nothing had happened between them because she wouldn’t have been able to lie about something like that. I wondered whether she was trembling because she had wanted something to happen and it hadn’t, or because she believed me, knew that I wasn’t lying about me and Marisol, or because the thought of all of it, of her with Marisol, of me with Marisol, made her want to vomit. I don’t think it did, though, because if she had felt like retching, she wouldn’t have been able to sit there so tall, eating one bite of fish after another until all that was left on her plate was a fish skeleton.
And that’s what happened. After dinner, I went back to my room and fell asleep, and in the morning my mother was on the couch, and in the afternoon she was still there, and in the evening too, and after a few days she started to smell, and no matter what my father cooked you could always smell her underneath everything. My father kept his usual watch, leaving her side only for necessities the first few days, then slowly, when he knew it made no difference whether he stayed or didn’t, he went back to the library for a few hours each afternoon. At least that’s where he said he went. I certainly didn’t have the energy to follow him around.
She wore the same clothes until my father changed her right there on the couch like they do in hospitals. I wonder if she gets bedsores. Maybe that’s part of the smell—erupting bedsores. He handed me the pile of dirty clothes and told me to wash them, which I did, using almost half a bottle of Woolite so it took hundreds of rinses to get the soap out. Still, they smelled funny when they were dry, like wet dog, so I washed them again, but they still smelled. I don’t think my father notices the smell, or maybe he loves it like he loves everything about my mother, maybe it’s like loving someone who is really ugly, but the ugliness becomes beauty when you’re in love. I wonder if that really happens or if it’s just another one of those things people say, that people try to convince themselves of but feel guilty about if they can’t really pull it off.
My mother’s eyes bloated to the size of oranges, like tumors—her eyes were like infected tumors, yellow and red like Marisol’s paintings. In fact, I should have invited Marisol up to paint a portrait of my mother. She could have focused on her arms, which lay by her sides so limp and weak it seemed as if one little pull would have detached them from my mother’s body, as if they were sewn on to her with dried-out rubber bands. I would have painted her with one arm swinging from its socket, just about to pull loose.
I tried to apologize, but my apology only made things worse. My mother’s sobs grew louder and louder the more I spoke, and she covered her eyes as I tried to approach the bed. Once, I stood in the doorway watching her and I could tell she knew I was there, but she wouldn’t look at me. So I apologized to my father for swearing, and I got a very cursory and distracted acceptance. My parents believe foul language is used only by people with too small a vocabulary and imagination to use real words. That was only the second time in my life I had used such language in front of them. The first time was when I was thirteen. I had been invited to a bat mitzvah and my mother had bought this ugly plastic purse for me to give the girl for her bat mitzvah present. “It looks like a piece of shit,” I had said and my mother had looked at me as if she had just seen me slit the throat of an innocent kitten. For days afterwards I couldn’t look her in the eye, and I gave the girl the ugly purse without any further protests.
This time, though, I didn’t feel bad about using such harsh words because they were the most appropriate words to describe what had happened. In fact, there are times when it would exhibit a lack of imagination not to use such expressions. I guess I expected them to help me in some way. Maybe I expected my mother to march over to Marisol’s studio and slash all her paintings, tell her she was a jerk, which she was, but not because of what happened. We were both jerks. They could have said something. They could have said that, according to the Old Testament, what I did was wrong, but, of course, none of us believe that. And I had wanted to ask my mother so many things, about what she had felt standing for hours while Marisol looked deep inside of her.
I saw the paintings. At first Marisol didn’t want me to see them, and I thought it was because they would reveal something she didn’t want me to see, but now I think it was because she didn’t want to be alone with me again, because it had been just as weird for her as it had for me, even though she had seemed so calm, surrounding us in all that silence. There were two very large canvases, maybe eight feet high by five feet wide, which took up a whole wall from floor to ceiling. She told me that instead of working on the floor like most painters do when they are working on large canvases, she nailed the canvas to the ceiling and painted from a ladder. “Like Michaelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel,” she said. I tried to imagine her high up on her ladder, the blood rushing to her head and my mother below, standing very still. Had Marisol had her holding a decapitated head like in the painting? It was Judith and Holofernes. I recognized them right away, only Holofernes looked like a Latin pop singer—handsome in a dark and boring way. The head wasn’t bloody at all. It was as if Judith had just finished a laser surgery and was holding up her work for all to see, only the setting for the scene was an old-fashioned milliner’s shop, not an operating room. In the background were shelves lined with women’s hats and those old, round hatboxes you see in movies. There were red velvet hats with black veils and black flowers, yellowish Easter bonnets, and pillbox hats in all the possible shades of brown, yellow, and red. Judith, my mother, wearing a doctor’s smock with a surgical mask dangling around her neck, was holding up Holofernes’s head as if she were showing it to a customer.
The other canvas depicted my mother, bare-breasted. (They had told me my mother had modeled clothed. I should have asked Marisol whether she had used her imagination to paint my mother’s bare breasts or whether that had been a lie.) My mother was sitting up in a big four-poster bed, reading a book; the rest of her was covered by a white sheet. The room was filled with birds, crows mainly and some vultures and yellow and blue canaries. They were perched on all four bedposts and on the headboard and the chandelier that hung directly over her head, and they were all over the floor and on the sheet about where my mother’s stomach would have been. My mother, the reading woman, didn’t seem to notice the birds at all, but she also didn’t appear to be engrossed in her book. Her eyes were somewhere else, neither in the room nor in the story contained in the book. It was as if Marisol had seen my mother’s decline coming on, seen it in her eyes and in the flesh around her nipples.
I liked the paintings. I didn’t want to like them, but they were the kind of paintings you could look at for hours and keep seeing something new. Marisol told me she had a solo show opening in Amsterdam in the fall and she wished my mother would model some more because you can’t make a show out of two paintings; she had wanted to get at least eight large canvases out of my mother.
“Why doesn’t she want to do it anymore?” I asked innocently.
“She says she’s bored, but . . . just look at that.” She pointed to
my mother holding up Holofernes’s head. “Does that look like a bored woman?”
I had to agree. She was anything but bored. Triumphant is the word that comes to mind.
And then I almost told her that my mother had sunk into one of her depressions, that she was extremely ill. But I stopped myself. “She’s weird,” I said. “Sometimes she walks out of concerts in the middle of a piece. She just gets up and slides out of the row and runs out of the hall. She says sometimes it’s too much for her.”
“Then perhaps I should be honored,” Marisol said.
“Perhaps,” I said. There was no need to have a long discussion about it. If she wanted to feel honored, let her; let her think that her paintings were just so deep that my mother couldn’t stand being inside of them.
“Tell her I would be forever indebted to her if she would come back.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said, but of course I didn’t. If she really needed my mother so much, she would have called her up, told her herself.
“How about going out for a drink?” she asked.
“I’ve decided to stop drinking for a while,” I said because I didn’t feel like having a drink with her.
“How American of you,” she said. I just let it go because I didn’t want to get into an argument about something I had just made up anyway.
I wanted to know if Marisol had come onto my mother, although that term didn’t seem quite right. Propositioned might be more appropriate, but that too didn’t really fit. There was no point in asking, though, because she would not have told me the truth. I wonder if Marisol misses my mother. Maybe she doesn’t even think about her at all. I wonder if she is standing right now in her cold apartment, gazing out at a brilliant winter sun, thinking she missed her chance, that my mother missed her chance. They could have been happy—the artist and the model. In the morning that same cold sunlight would warm their naked bodies. Nights they would spend in cozy corners of warm bars drinking red wine, eating thick rings of squid, planning a trip to Bucharest for Marisol’s next opening. But my vision is different; it is of my mother, naked, lying on a mattress in the corner of Marisol’s bare room, her skin yellowish from a sickly winter sun, her smell seeping into the unfinished canvases that hang upside down from the ceiling like sides of beef. And Marisol? Where is she in my vision? I’m not sure, but she is not sitting next to my mother, holding her hand, whispering about how if she would only get up and go outside, she would see what a beautiful, crisp day it was.
It wasn’t easy walking out of Marisol’s apartment, not having a drink with her, not touching her, not letting her touch me. We didn’t even exchange the usual friendly Spanish cheek kisses. We waved at each other in the doorway, and then I turned around and fled. It was fleeing. There is no other way to describe it—my heart was beating fast, like I had narrowly escaped being hit by a car.
When we first got back from Spain, I used to have dreams in which I found myself throwing things at her—usually living things like plants or mice. Once it was chickens—raw chickens with their heads chopped off. She laughed when I threw the chickens at her, and I woke up crying. In one dream my mother and I were throwing rocks at Marisol as if she were Mary Magdalene. There were other people throwing rocks too, but I didn’t recognize them. In a way, I wish I hadn’t gone to see the paintings because now when I think of my mother, I picture her holding up that head like a hat or lying on the bed with all those crows around her. It’s like after you’ve seen the video for a song and then every time you hear the song those video images run through your brain and you can’t make up your own images for the music no matter how hard you try. If I could paint, I would try a simple portrait of my mother standing in the Magic Carpet, surrounded by rugs in deep red.
We left Madrid as if we didn’t know anyone there at all, as if we had just been tourists on a brief vacation. It was very early in the morning, still dark, when the taxi called for us. My father got my mother all cleaned up—dressed her in her travel slacks, washed and pinned up her hair so it wouldn’t be in her face. It made her eyes look really old. On the plane I kept thinking that everyone could smell her, but it was probably just my imagination. Still, I kept looking around to see if people were holding their hands over their noses. No one was, but I kept looking anyway, sure that as soon as I turned around, they pulled their hands away.
Have my mother and Marisol exchanged letters? Perhaps they have called each other. Did Marisol manage to pull off some more pieces for the Amsterdam show? Maybe she sent my mother the reviews—“stark images of feminine rage.” What if I sent Marisol a notebook full of sketches: My Mother Lying in Bed I, My Mother Lying in Bed II, My Mother Lying in Bed III . . .
The Typewriter is Silent
Walking up the stairs to her apartment, Mrs. Mondschein realizes just how tired she is after staying up all night. She walks slowly, stopping at each landing to catch her breath. An adolescent boy with huge feet bounds past her, taking the steps three at a time. “Be careful,” she wants to call after him, but doesn’t have the energy for it. As she unlocks the three locks on her apartment door, starting from the top and working her way down, her mind settles on a nice hot cup of coffee and oatmeal. Yes, oatmeal. It would be good for her stomach. She would sit at her little kitchen table and drink coffee and eat oatmeal, and then she would take a long, hot bath, and then she would sleep. More than anything she wanted to sleep.
From the bathroom, Deborah hears her grandmother unlocking the door, then taking off her winter gear and hanging it on the rack. She imagines her sitting on the little bench in the entryway removing her street shoes, setting them neatly underneath the bench, and slipping on her house shoes. Down the long hallway she comes. Deborah hears each slow step. She dries her face and hangs the towel, which smells of Ivory soap and old magazines, back on its proper hook. Should she come out to greet her? Now Deborah hears her in the kitchen, running water, opening the refrigerator. A bag rustles, a pot clanks. Deborah tiptoes towards the kitchen, trying not to make the floorboards creak, but the more softly she treads, the more they creak. Now she is in the kitchen doorway peeking in at her grandmother, who is still oblivious to her presence. She watches Mrs. Mondschein pour boiling water from a kettle into her old percolator. How long can I stand here before she notices? she thinks, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to slip out of the apartment now, walk back up to the bus terminal, get on the 14K.
“Hi,” Deborah says.
Mrs. Mondschein turns to the doorway. “Deborah,” she says. There is very little surprise in her voice.
“I came in through the kitchen window from Mr. Claromundo’s apartment. I waited for a long time, but you didn’t come home.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Almost twenty-four hours. I thought something terrible had happened to you.”
“I was with a friend. He was very sick, but now he’s much better. I haven’t slept all night. It’s been years since I’ve been up all night.”
“You should rest then,” Deborah says.
“Yes, I’ll just have a little bite to eat first. I was going to take a bath, but I think I’ll wait. Come, have some coffee. Do you like oatmeal? It will settle your stomach. But your stomach is probably not unsettled.”
“I like oatmeal.”
“Good.” They sit down and have some oatmeal.
Mrs. Mondschein eats her breakfast very slowly, giving her stomach a chance to receive each mouthful. I don’t want my bowels exploding, she thinks.
Deborah eats slowly too; there is something hypnotizing about her grandmother’s movements that makes her try to lift the spoon at the same time, raise it to her mouth, chew, swallow at the same time. When they are finished, Deborah says she will clean up and Mrs. Mondschein hesitates for a moment. “I’ll take . . . Thank you, Deborah. I’ll excuse myself then.”
A
nd then Deborah hears her grandmother close the door to her bedroom. There is just a slight rustling after that—the newspaper being folded properly, the shades being lowered, and then it is quiet. All Deborah can hear is the eternally thumping bass through the floorboards, and she sits at the kitchen table for a while, listening for a change in the rhythm, but it doesn’t change, so she washes the dishes, has another cup of coffee, and decides to go to the museum, the Metropolitan Museum, not the Museum of the American Indian, which is far too close. Her grandmother needs at least eight hours of rest—a woman of her age needs her sleep even though Deborah read somewhere that old people have a hard time sleeping. It must be terrible, she thinks, having all that time on your hands, sitting in a chair all day long, just waiting for bedtime and then not being able to sleep. But her grandmother is different. Mrs. Mondschein has never been the type to sit around in a chair, nodding off in front of the television. She is the type of old person who will sit up all night with a very ill friend.
But Mrs. Mondschein is unable to sleep. She wants more than anything else to sleep, but all she can think about is how small Tommy’s father’s hands are. They seemed familiar somehow and she wonders if maybe he bought a token from her years and years ago. She feels like going right back down to the hospice, asking Tommy’s father if he used to take the subway at 110th Street fifty years ago.
“I recognize your hands,” she could say to him as he stands in front of his dead son, crying so softly, and he would look at her in his small way, and his wife would ask them what they are talking about and they would answer that they are talking about buying subway tokens at the 110th Street station fifty years ago. They wouldn’t say they are discussing his hands.
“Oh,” she would say.