by Betsy Lerner
Periods of heavy rainfall hit the skylights with an explosive sound like a round of unexpected gunfire. My mother and I are in her living room today on the huge overstuffed corner couch with giant pink accent pillows. Her glass coffee table is massive, and the side chairs are stuffed and cinched so tightly they look like balloon animals. A chandelier over the dining room table is made up of vertically hanging crystal rods. It alternately looks like a huge spaceship or a tiny earring depending on which end of the telescope you’re looking through.
“So, what’s on the agenda?” My mother settles into the couch.
My mother is always eager to talk when I come over, as if she were a famous actress and I am Diane Sawyer. We have never really talked like this.
“I want to know about your infertility problems. When did you start trying?”
I’ve always known my mother had difficulty getting pregnant. On the rare occasion when she’d mention how long it took, it was only to emphasize how fortunate she felt to have us. It’s one thing to get something you want, she’d say, another to get something you think you can’t have. The way she explains it now: she didn’t wait to get pregnant; rather she endured not getting pregnant.
“We never even thought about trying.” My mother is emphatic. “It’s what you did. Having a family was all part of the package.” She looks at me, her famous eyebrow raised. Do I comprehend? I get it: no one was wondering about readiness, about completing a degree or climbing a mountain. If you were married, you were ready.
My mother tried for seven years. All her friends were getting pregnant, some having second and third children during those years.
“It was terrible for me. It was just awful. Everybody was having kids.”
There was another woman in town named Marion who was also having trouble conceiving. They weren’t particularly close, but her infertility problems also became known through the grapevine. When my mother heard that Marion got pregnant it came as a blow and a wake-up call. The following week my parents started the adoption process, filing papers with the Jewish Adoption Agency.
The truism “if you bring an umbrella it won’t rain” worked its backward logic over my mother’s womb. Once the adoption papers were filed, it happened. She missed three periods before it occurred to her that she might be pregnant. When she went to the doctor her suspicions were confirmed.
“I went sailing into the lumberyard to tell your father. I couldn’t wait until he got home. And I was thrilled to have morning sickness,” my mother says. “It confirmed the good news.”
My mother loved shopping for maternity clothes and treated herself to the best. “I never felt better than when I was pregnant. End of story.” Her contractions began a day before her father’s birthday. She called him to say that she was trying to give him a birthday gift.
“He told me not to bother.” Classic.
Her first child, a girl, arrived the next day, May 12, 1958. It was her father’s birthday, and the day after Mother’s Day.
Rhoda also had trouble getting pregnant. She and Peter moved twice when he was called back from the reserves during the Korean conflict. In Philadelphia, Rhoda first went to see an expert in the brand-new field of infertility. She discovered she had fibroids and that the only treatment was surgery. In Pittsburgh they consulted another doctor and tried artificial insemination, but they would leave the city childless. It’s a small detail, but Rhoda still remembers the marble windowsills of Pittsburgh coated with a fine layer of coal dust. Like chalk off a blackboard, they were easier to clean; her disappointment more difficult to erase.
The young couple would finally land in New Haven, where Rhoda was happily within driving distance of her parents. She sought the help of yet another doctor, who recommended having the fibroids removed. Hopes up, hopes dashed. The doctor told Rhoda that she would need a hysterectomy in five years.
“So we began to actively pursue adoption,” Rhoda says, trying to stay upbeat.
“We started with the Jewish Family Service. They told us quite clearly that they average a baby a year. So that was devastating.”
Eventually Peter and Rhoda were able to make arrangements through her doctor. She is sure to add that they had an attorney and followed all the protocol.
“And that is how we had our Beth.” Then, like many new mothers, Rhoda confesses, “I had never handled a baby in my entire life. I was so frightened. I didn’t even know how to hold her. Peter was better at it than I. He took to it right away. I was frightened out of my wits. Really frightened.”
Eighteen months later, Peter heard about another newborn that was going to be given up for adoption. Rhoda was floored. She didn’t think she could handle another child so soon. Beth was an extremely active little girl, and the thought of two children seemed overwhelming.
Peter said, “We already have one child, what difference does it make?”
Rhoda’s voice fills with a blend of disbelief mixed with a tinge of indignation, “I’ll never forget that response.”
As Rhoda suspected, the responsibility and work of having a newborn and an eighteen-month-old were overwhelming. “I still remember leaving the dishes in the sink and staggering up the stairs to bed, completely worn out.”
Rhoda’s mother had set the table every night, served a home-cooked meal, and wiped down every last dish. The same for her relatives in New Haven. Her aunt was a fastidious homemaker and gracious hostess. Her way of doing things became famous as “The Sosner Way.” Rhoda adored her aunt, was happy to adopt the Sosner Way, which she considered the gold standard, and expected no less from herself. Knowing Rhoda, I can only imagine the defeat she felt going to bed with those dishes in the sink, knowing she would have to face them, and her own shortcomings as a new mother, come morning.
“We never planned anything.” Bette insists that none of their three babies were planned. “I know couples plan for their future now, when they’re going to have a family, they plan for retirement. We never really planned anything.” This is not to say that Arthur and Bette were free spirits, dropping acid and space dancing at Grateful Dead concerts. From the moment they moved into their town house as newlyweds they fully expected to start a family. Following weeks of a cold, Bette went to the doctor and discovered she was pregnant. She stopped at a drugstore on the way home and called Arthur from a pay phone. She picked out beautiful fabrics from the store and had maternity clothes made. Like all the ladies, Bette was on a need-to-know basis with her doctor. He asked her and Arthur to come into the office during her seventh month and showed them pictures. “This is stage one of giving birth, this is stage two, this is how you look and feel in stage four and five.” When Bette’s water broke, she called her doctor and said, “You know that picture of stage three? I’m in it.”
The young couple moved into their first home in November and their oldest daughter was born in December. Two more children, another daughter and a son, would follow in succession. Bette was happily cast in her new role: mother.
A red cardinal pops up from the bushes like a jack-in-the-box and hits the window with a thump like a small cry for help. He’s been here for a week already, and Jackie can’t figure out what he wants or if he’s hurt. I flinch every time he crashes against the glass. When I visit with Jackie now, we no longer sit in the living room. We’ve moved into the mask-filled den and share the same couch. We’re not curling up under a blanket and watching Gilmore Girls, but I think Jackie has gotten more comfortable with me and me with her.
I can hear Dick rattling around in the kitchen.
The bird suddenly crashes into the window with more force, and I startle.
“Oh, it’s that stupid bird! What does he want?” Jackie loves all animals, but now she sounds annoyed.
Jackie didn’t get pregnant for a while, almost as long as my mother, but she doesn’t recall getting upset. Concerned is the word she uses. She and Dick got checked out and everything was okay. Jackie was twenty-eight when she got pregnant with her first child, a girl
born on December 7, and a boy followed soon after. I ask Jackie what she remembers from her pregnancy.
“Well, I didn’t have to wear maternity clothes until my sixth month. So I was really only in maternity clothes for three months.”
“Oh, were you a tiny little thing?”
“I suppose.”
“You didn’t show until the end?
“I guess.”
“Barely gained any weight?”
“No, I didn’t gain much.”
“You bitch!”
Jackie looks at me askance.
Too soon?
A few minutes later, two lamps set on automatic timers pop on as if to say time’s up.
When Bea told Carl that they should have children, he said, “Why?”
It’s not clear if Carl was joking, but Bea provides the punch line regardless: “I should have listened, Betsy.”
They waited until Carl finished medical school and finally had a “few pennies to rub together.” Because Bea is the most frank of the women, I asked what she used for birth control.
“Diaphragm.”
Bea was a sophomore at the University of Louisville when she met Carl at a party. He was an ambitious medical student who was putting himself through school playing piano at clubs and weddings. He asked for her number. When he phoned a few days later and said “Hi, this is Carl Phillips from the other night,” Bea asked him if he was the blond. He wasn’t. Awkward! Then he asked her out for Saturday night, but before Bea could answer he said, “If you don’t want to go out it’s all right.”
Bea wasn’t husband hunting. Fort Knox was thirty miles away and supplying a steady stream of soldiers. “I just wanted to dance, and we had a good time. The war was very far away. It’s a dreadful thing to say, but we had a good time.”
“Any crushes?”
“I imagine I did.”
“Necking? That stuff?”
“Oh, sometimes, sure.”
Bea can’t recall what she and Carl did on their first date. “Isn’t that funny?”
“Sparks?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t instantaneous, no.”
But he called her again. After a time, he’d come over on a Sunday. Bea would make supper while Carl studied. I asked Bea if her mother approved. “At first she wasn’t quite sure he was Jewish, with a name like Phillips. Remember, I was a Bernstein. But then she did like him. Carl was very likable. More so than I.”
Bea got pregnant right away.
“When I walked into the office, I told the gynecologist that I was pregnant. And he said, ‘No you’re not.’ Then he examined me and said, ‘By god, you’re pregnant.’”
“How did you know?”
“The same way everybody does, Betsy.”
“You missed your period?”
“That’s right,” Bea says, as if I were the dumbest kid in sex ed.
Bea and Carl had three children: Nancy, their first, followed by two boys. When I asked Bea about the deliveries, she laughs and points her finger at me, her crystal bracelets scattering up and down her thin wrist. “I delivered those babies in twenty minutes.”
“What about when Nancy was a newborn, were you scared of taking care of her?”
Bea says she loved getting up at three in the morning to feed the baby. “The phone didn’t ring, there was no one around. You’re just alone with the baby, and you know what—I liked it.”
“Did you feel the maternal instinct kick in?”
Usually Bea is quick on the draw, but she takes a moment before answering. “What is a maternal instinct?”
Bridge is back at the Athenian. The first order of business today is who is making seder. The ladies want to know if my mother and Bette are cooking fish this year; they may be the last two Jewish grandmothers in the tri-state area who still make homemade gefilte fish. I’m scandalized when Bette admits she no longer makes the fish, hasn’t made it for a few years. Worse: she buys it at Costco and doctors it with boiled carrots!! She insists no one knows except her mother in heaven.
How this tan and gray mixture the shape of a miniature meteor has been promoted to delicacy status is something I will never understand. All throughout our lives, my mother would first serve the fish to my father. No one would take a bite until he sampled it like El Exigente in the Savarin coffee commercials. All eyes would be on him as he swallowed, his eyes bulging from the sharp horseradish he slathered on the fish. When he pronounced that it was good, the people would dance in the streets, widows waved white handkerchiefs from balconies.
The ladies say I should learn how to make the fish from my mom. Not happening. She is now the last of the Bridge Ladies to make it from scratch. In fact, she uses Bette’s mother’s recipe, which calls for three kinds of freshwater fish: carp, whitefish, and pike. They all need to be special ordered, and according to my mother no one knows how to properly fillet fish any longer. She often curses the men and women who, over the years, have poorly filleted her fish. “I’d like to cut his hands off,” she’d say with the same gusto reserved only for hairdressers who “butcher” her. When the ladies repeat that I should cook with my mother and learn the ropes, the subtext is not lost on me: she won’t be here forever.
My mother is already wearing her black apron with the red, yellow, and green pepper decorations when I arrive. No sooner am I in the door than she starts muttering to herself about getting it right as she bustles around her kitchen. The ingredients cover the countertops, and two enormous stockpots are on her electric stove, which looks like a rectangle of black ice.
“Really, Mom, after all these years you don’t have any confidence about getting it right.”
“That’s right,” she says, and “Okay, make a prayer,” and then with some added vim, “Let’s rock and roll.”
If you say so.
She begins to paw through the packages of fish. This year, miraculously, a young man named Brion (she notes the spelling of his name) at the A&P has done a magnificent job filleting the fish.
“He should live and be well,” my mother says, an expression of her deepest gratitude.
She looks up at me from her work of separating the packages of fillets, fish skins, and heads. “I wanted to tip him. Do you think I should have?”
“I think everyone appreciates a tip.”
“But is it appropriate?”
It’s the word that guides my mother’s life. The breath she takes between every thought and action. In this case, I know what she means. Tipping at a supermarket—is it done?
Brion has marked every package with its contents. Apparently, no one has ever done this in the entire history of the world. “I’m going back and tip him.”
The fish has to be dry. To that end my mother rolls out fields of paper towel and pats the fish down. Then she starts the great hunt for the recipe; it’s either stuck inside a cookbook, her basket of papers—some of which date back to the mid-1960s—or in a folder tucked away somewhere.
“Here it is,” she says, proud of the record time with which she has located it inside a FedEx envelope that has been raggedly torn open with the word RECIPES scrawled on one side. The recipe looks like a panel from the Dead Sea Scrolls: stained many times over with fish grease, darkened with age spots like the back of an older person’s hand, annotated with figures for doubling the recipe, and a smattering of unidentified schmutz. At the top: From the Kitchen of Sylvia Cohen. This is Bette’s mother, universally acknowledged throughout New Haven and its environs as one of the great all-time cooks.
“Now we take out the eyes,” my mother says with too much gusto. And then without warning she raises a knife, Norman Bates–style, and plunges it into the eye of the fish. A wave of nausea moves through me, and I feel like I might faint. I run into the den, plop down on the couch, and pull out my phone while my mother continues her gouging. I know she has moved on to the next step when I hear the whirring of the Cuisinart’s blade.
“I’m grinding the fish,” she calls out.
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�It smells disgusting,” I maturely offer, coming back into the kitchen.
“Then go home.”
My mother cranks open a window, tacit acknowledgment of the fish stink.
“You take a handful,” my mother says, reaching into the fish and matzoh meal mixture, “and pat it like so, into balls.”
Ground, the fish looks like brains. “There’s no way I’m touching that.”
“Why don’t you go home, you look exhausted,” my mother says, though I have clearly exhausted her patience. I know this was supposed to be some big bonding opportunity and I want to get into the spirit, but it’s too artificial. We both know I’m not going to make gefilte fish, it’s doubtful I’ll even make a seder. A big part of why she goes to all this effort is so that my daughter, half-Jewish and half-Catholic and not raised in either religion, will have an experience of Judaism. She is nervous that Catholicism with its Christmas gifts and Easter bunnies will win out. I’m not sure how she thinks she stands a chance with gefilte fish and plagues, but nevertheless every year she rolls out the Haggadahs and seder plate.
“Now the moment of truth,” she says, undeterred in her work. Will the layers of fish balls fit atop the heads, bones, and skins at the bottom of the pot? She layers them like bricks, right up to the top of the pot. She consults the recipe, biting her finger, and says, “Oh yeah,” then sprinkles two teaspoons of sugar around the edges, gently urging on the fish, “come on, come on.” Then she turns to me and says, without a flicker of irony, “Now, we pray.”
We stay in the kitchen until the pot boils, at which point she will reduce the heat. My mother stands over the stove, fiddling with the knobs on the control panel. “This goddamn stove.”
I know I should get going, get back to work. But I linger, plop down in “my chair” at the kitchen table, where I sat for every family meal. Eventually she joins me.
“I really can’t believe you’re still so insecure about making the fish.”
“I’m insecure about a lot of things.”
“Such as.”
“Well, I never feel I’m smart enough.”