by Alan Shapiro
In the middle of the night, her mother was shuffling to the bathroom when she slipped and fell, breaking her hip. Even Miriam now realized her mother needed more care and supervision than they could give her.
A few weeks later, after Tula had entered rehab, Miriam decided to break the news to her that she would not be coming home, that they had found her a nice place in a nearby nursing home.
When Miriam arrived at the rehabilitation center, her mother’s door was closed with a DO NOT DISTURB sign on it. Miriam opened the door a crack, and her mother yelled go away—she was sitting half-naked in her wheelchair while a nurse standing behind her held up one of Tula’s arms and sponged it down. With every stroke, loose swags of flesh swayed back and forth, like sheets on a clothesline, and Miriam shuddered. The nurse said it was bathtime and she’d bring her mother out in a jiffy when they were through.
Miriam took a seat in the waiting area beside the nurse’s station. The only magazines strewn on the table were on car racing, gardens, or cosmology. She picked up the one with a picture of outer space on the cover, its subject as far away as possible from a human body, and thumbed through it, trying to shake the image of her mother’s naked arm, its sagging drapery of flesh. She read about something called dark matter which, “though unseen, makes up more than 90 percent of the mass of the universe.” Outside the waiting area, she could hear one of the nurses on the phone, not wanting to be noticed, her voice soft but tense with what it was trying not to sound like, saying, “Honey, listen to me, honey. Honey. Honey. I am not your mother. I Am Not Your Mother.” Starlight, Miriam was reading, has to bend around that invisible dark matter, warping itself in order to be seen. “So even after we factor in the distorting effect of time and distance, the light-years of light-years that light has to cross to reach us, the visible shapes we see inside our giant telescopes look nothing like the shapes they are.”
On the wall facing Miriam, there was a picture of a white shark hanging next to a muted television on which Miriam saw an aerial view of a funeral procession or a rally—fists were shaking in unison, and if the sound hadn’t been muted she would have heard voices chanting, but all Miriam could hear around her was a gauze of medical talk and the occasional soft laugh or cry, and the nurse saying over and over, honey, honey, listen, honey, no you listen, while on the screen she continued looking up at the mass of people who were seething down below the camera like a cell seen under a microscope or, Miriam couldn’t help but think, like a dense coating of flies on something dead.
Then suddenly a red car, a convertible, was on the TV screen; it was driving itself down a city street and a black man was running after it and, all at once, he leapt into the air and floated feet first down into the driver’s seat and drove away, right to left, as if into the open mouth of the bright white shark.
The writer of the magazine article described dark matter as a black canvas on which the visible universe is painted. That metaphor, the writer said, captures best what he called the paradoxical relationship of gloom to glitter. Miriam wondered if the canvas couldn’t also be the painter, the unseen the conjuror of the seen, as if the 10 percent that didn’t hide were being imagined by the 90 percent that did.
Dark matter. She was not his mother. She refused to be his mother.
“Here she is,” the nurse said cheerily, wheeling her mother, “fresh as a daisy. Time for exercise.”
Miriam followed them down to physical therapy where, as usual, her mother refused to participate. They were surrounded by the old, the damaged, the infirm, all working with therapists at different stations in the room. One old woman was looking quizzically at her hand as if it wasn’t hers, as it tried to squeeze a yellow ball over and over, only the tips of her fingers twitching while the young black therapist encouraged her the way a mother would, though she was not her mother, almost singing, “That’s it, Lois, come on now, girl, you can do it, like you did yesterday.”
And nearby a man wizened to his very bones held fiercely to the rails of a small track down which he took unsteady small step after small step, like a toddler crossing wet stones—he was followed by another woman who held her hands out ready to catch him if he fell. Everywhere inside the room, the young, the healthy, the fortunate, were helping the old, the sick, the hobbled—everywhere the old, eyes burning, were pushing back with all their might inside their bodies against the dark matter their bodies had become.
Miriam found it beautiful to watch, and strangely hopeful: the room was like a vision of a world, a real world where terrible things did happen, yes, but where the sick desired only to be well, and where everyone who wasn’t sick was caring tenderly for everyone who was. But her mother refused all help or comfort, her silence the darkest matter, an impossible density nothing could get around without distortion, broken only by her saying—when Miriam told her about the nursing home and how beautiful it was and how often she would visit—“You are not my daughter, I don’t have a daughter, “ saying it over and over, as if she knew that Miriam would carry those words and that voice, inside her ever after, beyond rehab and nursing home and funeral, no matter whom she spoke to or where she went, that voice reverberating in her voice, reverberating in the ones she loved, the ones who loved her.
The distorting effects of time and distance. Nothing the shape it was.
Scene XVII
Sam was sixteen when he came home from school one day wearing a cap, a tweed cap, the kind Irish cabdrivers wear. It was three sizes too big.
“Where’d you get that?” Miriam asked.
In a stage Irish brogue, he said, “An old weasel and a young weasel are sitting in a bar; the old weasel says to the young weasel, ‘I slept with your mother.’ And the young weasel says, ‘Dad, you’re drunk. Let’s go home.’ ”
“The hat,” she repeated. “Where’d you get it?”
“I bought it,” he said.
“Bought it? With what? And why? It doesn’t fit you.”
“With money I saved from running Grandma’s errands. And I’m not gonna wear it, Ma, I got it ’cause I like the look of it.”
“It’s your money,” she said. “You want to waste it, waste it. But why?”
He answered with a stupid jingle: “As with my hat upon my head / I walkd along the Strand. / I there did meet another man / With his hat in his hand.”
When Curly saw the hat, he shook his head. “My son, the chemist,” he said. “The only person I know who can turn money into shit.”
Every day after that it seemed Sam came home with another hat—he had a special fondness for those Irish touring caps, but he also brought home berets, fedoras, an occasional porkpie hat, a Stetson, a bowler—it didn’t matter what style, or even what size, whether they were too big or too small, since he never wore them; he only nailed them to the walls in his room. Why? He couldn’t say; he just liked the look of them. By the middle of his junior year his room looked like a haberdashery or like a bat cave with hats hanging on the walls instead of bats.
Finally, Curly had had enough of the hats. He didn’t care if Sam bought them with his own money; he said the hat buying had to stop. He couldn’t stand to see his son waste hard-earned cash. Sam had just learned to drive, and Curly said, you buy one more hat—you hear me—one more, and you’ll never use the car again. Never.
IT WAS TEN o’clock on a Saturday night in early summer. Sam had taken a girl out on a date. Curly had given him the car. Miriam was in bed reading when the phone rang; she could hear Curly yelling from the den: “You’re where? You what? Didn’t you lock it? You didn’t what? Are you kidding? What are you laughing for, you, you, for Christ’s sake!” He threw down the phone and called her to come talk to her idiot son.
“What happened, Sam? Why’s your father so upset?”
“Ma,” he said, “we went to Harvard Square, see, and well I parked the car and Martha and I, you know, we walked around for a while and then we came back and the car was gone.”
“Gone,” she asked, “as in stole
n?”
“I think so.”
“Well, didn’t you lock it?”
“I did,” he said, “I mean, I think I did.”
“You think you did?”
“No,” he said, “I mean I know I did. I just . . .”
“Just what?”
“I just think I might not have rolled up the window.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Where are you now?
“We’re at the police station. But Ma,” and now he’s giggling.
“What are you giggling for?”
“Well, you see, there’s something else.”
“What? What’s so funny?”
“Well,” he said, “if you think Dad’s angry about the car, wait’ll he sees the hat I bought.”
AT THE END of Sam’s junior year, on the Friday night of the big school dance, Miriam opened the door and screamed: “Oh my God, what happened?” Sam was leaning against the doorjamb, eyes swollen and his nose plastered to the side of his face. “Your eyes, your beautiful nose, who did this?”
“Don’t get hysterical,” Curly said behind her. “It’s just a kid fight, right, Sam? No big deal. I hope you gave as good as you got.”
“No big deal?” she said. “Look at him, will you? He could have been killed.”
“I was dancing,” Sam said groggily.
“Dancing? This happened dancing?” Miriam asked, stroking his cheek, leading him inside to the bathroom to clean him up.
“I was dancing with someone’s date, might have even been his girlfriend and . . .”
“Did you know she was with someone else?” Curly asked.
“What difference does that make?” Miriam said.
“I did, yeah,” Sam said, “when the guy pushed me.”
“Serves you right, Sam, when you go after another guy’s girl.”
“Curly!” Miriam yelled. “You can’t be serious.”
“Did you push him back?”
“Curly!” Miriam yelled again.
“He’s got to stand up for himself, for Christ’s sake, even if he is in the wrong. Otherwise he’ll become a punching bag for every thug and bully in the school.”
“I did try out a little Jewdo on him, Dad.”
“Since when do you know judo?” Curly asked.
“Not the J.U.D.O. kind, but the J.E.W.D.O. kind,” Sam said with a pained smile. “The ancient art of Jewish self-defense.”
“And what is that, exactly?” Curly asked.
“I tried to talk my way out of it.”
“Jeez,” Curly said, shaking his head. “It’s a wonder you’re still alive.”
“I did get in a few good jabs,” Sam added, “but they went over his head.”
BY HIS SENIOR year in high school, Sam, too, was hardly ever at home, and when he was, he hardly ventured from his room. He spent hours with the door closed, listening to “music,” to Bob Dylan, in particular, to one song, which he played over and over until Miriam couldn’t get the screwball lyrics out of her head, something about a kid named Johnny in a basement mixing up medicine, while someone else was on the pavement thinking about the government. Lyrics were Noël Coward, Stephen Sondheim, Gershwin, Lerner and Loewe, but this, what in the world was this? And you call this singing—singing? This was the sound of cats fighting in a Dumpster. And anyway, what did it mean? She would ask him, and he would shrug and say whatever you want it to and close his door.
He was taking creative writing at school, he was studying poetry, of all things. Poetry! Mrs. Pinkerton’s revenge! Mrs. Pinkerton, the widow, the walking calendar. Miriam could practically hear her old teacher saying, “Enunciate, girls, enunciate! Expectorate the spuds!” Why did this not surprise her? To make matters worse, he called his teacher, Dallas Alderman, by his first name, Dallas. Since when did that happen? The teacher was barely older than Sam, and with his long hair, work shirt, and bell-bottoms, he was easily mistaken for another student. Sam used to play basketball, but now when Curly asked him why he had stopped, Sam said that organized sports, like organized anything, was too repressive: “Dallas says it’s just a dress rehearsal for the military.” Curly exploded, “I don’t give a shit what Dallas says. Just don’t you go and get involved in any politics—you do and I’ll disown you like I did your sister. You hear me?” Sam never answered. Closing his door, he’d mumble, “Get dressed, get blessed, try and be a suck-cess . . .”
One day she found a scrap of paper in a pocket of his jeans, which she was taking from the dryer. There was writing on it, but the ink had mostly faded in the wash. Someone whose name began with “M” (the other letters were illegible) was “floating face down in the ego swamp . . .” She found another scrap in the pocket of a shirt. On that, all she could make out was the word “marriage,” and, under that, one fragmentary line: “cold shoulder, cold shower, cold storage.” On the other side of the paper, something or other, she couldn’t make out what, was “like a foreign movie without subtitles.” She didn’t know what any of it meant (a foreign movie without subtitles indeed!), but she didn’t like it, not one bit.
RABBI ALTER CALLED. Did they realize that their son Sam was applying for conscientious objector status and that he’d asked the rabbi for a letter in support of his application? Had they read the application? No, they hadn’t. Well, they should.
Sam had made an appointment with the rabbi for early next week. The rabbi suggested that Miriam and Curly come to the synagogue before Sam, so they could sit in the library off the rabbi’s study and listen in on the interview.
Rabbi Alter was not your stereotypical rabbi. He wasn’t ancient, bearded, and otherworldly. He wasn’t stooped with sorrow. He looked like Paul Newman. A dapper dresser with a vaguely patrician affect to his speech (vaguely goyishe, Miriam thought)—everything about him projected worldly success and secular enjoyment. His office, too, was bright, modern, and neat, more like the office of a divorce attorney than a holy man. He ushered them into the library and left the door ajar. While they waited for Sam, they read his CO statement.
They couldn’t believe their eyes. Sam presented himself as a pacifist, a pacifism derived from his Jewish heritage, which was laughable given how “religiously” he had avoided stepping foot inside a temple since the day of his bar mitzvah. He refused to go even on the High Holidays. They knew he hated organized religion; organized anything was, in his book, “fascistic.” He hated absolutes of any kind (except his own). When they would argue about religion, he would tell them that he regarded God the way Bob Dylan did, as a hypocritical sanction for the basest human impulses, for nationalism, greed, and hatred. Yet here he was fabricating a bullshit religious justification for refusing to fight based on the biblical injunction to treat others as you would have them treat you. What shocked them most of all were the two “conversion” experiences he described, what he called the “turning points” of his spiritual development: when his father decked the drunk before Julie’s graduation and when his classmate decked him at the high school dance. But in his version of the events, both Sam and the drunk were portrayed as victims of unprovoked attacks. Not only that, he actually compared his father to “warmongering” America and the stranger to the innocent and noble North Vietnamese. Bad enough that he would lie about what happened, but to malign his father’s character like this, to describe him to the rabbi, of all people (and to the government!), as a “short-tempered man who lived by a dangerous code of preemptive justice, a man who swung first and asked questions later, a man whose eye-for-an-eye ethic could only foster conflict, not resolve it,” and to do all this in the name of saving his own skin—well, they were speechless with rage and embarrassment.
When Sam entered and sat down before the rabbi’s massive desk, it was all Miriam could do to keep Curly from running out and spanking his “spiritual” ass right there.
“So, Mr. Gold,” the rabbi said, holding up a copy of Sam’s statement, “you’re a pacifist, is that right?”
“Yes, I am,” Sam answered confid
ently.
“And you say here,” he said, flipping through the pages, “let me see if I can find the sentence, yes, here it is, that your pacifism ‘comes from my religious training and my study of the bible . . .’ ”
“Right,” Sam said, not quite so confidently.
“Mr. Gold,” he asked, “how many years were you in Hebrew school here at Kehilleth Israel?”
“I don’t know,” Sam answered, “maybe six years?”
“It’s seven,” he said. “The exact number is seven. And when you got your bar mitzvah, you were in what grade?”
“Of Hebrew school?”
“Yes.”
“I was in third grade.”
“So,” the rabbi continued, “that means, does it not—correct me if I’m wrong—that you were kept back four years in a row?”
“Um, well, I was never very good at math, but I guess that’s right.”
“And why,” he asked, twirling his glasses, “do you suppose you were kept back four years in a row?”
“Incompetent teachers?” Sam offered with a nervous laugh.
“You know, Mr. Gold, we’ve never had another student stay back four years in a row, did you know that?”
“No, sir,” Sam said. “I didn’t.”
“Yes,” the rabbi went on, “you’re something of a legend in these venerable halls. Your accomplishments have not been forgotten.” He got up from his desk and took a Hebrew Bible down from the bookshelf. He laid it open in front of the boy.
“Read,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Sam asked.
“Read,” he repeated. “Read. I want you to read to me, if you’d be so kind.”
“But it’s in Hebrew,” Sam said. “I can’t read Hebrew.”
“Remind me, then,” the rabbi said, “how you managed to read the haftorah during your bar mitzvah service.”
“Well,” he said, “I listened to a recording of the part I had to read. I memorized it.”
“So,” the rabbi said, “you went through seven years of school here, stayed back four years in a row, never opened a book in all that time, so that you couldn’t read a single word of Hebrew at your own bar mitzvah service, and since that day you haven’t stepped foot in temple, have you?”