and all the beasts of the field
the night will glow with the eyes of my cats
“Comments?” Sarah asks. No one says a word, so she begins. “Debbie, that was very strong. I like the way it flows and builds momentum. There was almost a rhythmic expression in your tide image. Were you playing with the word foul intentionally?”
“Where?” asks Debbie.
“Where you wrote ‘foul of the air.’ ”
“Oh, that wasn’t on purpose,” Debbie says.
“You might want to change it, then,” Sarah suggests. “Other comments?”
Michelle, who is the mom, says, “I noticed you didn’t use any capital letters, except for ‘I’ and ‘Eve.’ ”
“Yeah, I did that because I feel that capital letters and punctuation interrupt the flow of the poem and I associate them with male discourse and hierarchy, sort of dichotomous and either-or oriented, night-day, yes-no, and I see Eve as more of a mediator figure. But I didn’t want to use a lower-case i or write eve without a capital, because I feel that in a way E. E. Cummings appropriated that idea, and what I was trying to do was take back the I for the female voice.”
“It’s about subversion,” says Brian, the landscaper, once a graduate student, then sidelined for ten years by drugs, but now making up for lost time. He is an unnaturally thin man, sunburned, with a scant beard.
“Yeah, and it’s very close to what I’m going through right now,” Debbie says. “I’m having a conflict with my boyfriend about my cats right now.”
Then Brian begins to read his “Dialogue Between Jacob and the Angels on the Ladder.”
Scene: Desert at midnight, countless stars shining. On the rungs of Jacob’s ladder, the spirits of THOREAU and WALT WHITMAN, sitting with JACOB.
WHITMAN (to Jacob, with a look of ecstasy): You shall be as many as the stars in the sky
You will multiply into millions
and every last one of your children will be million
heirs because this is the night of your birth
this is your birth-night
and every grass blade, every insect and tiniest being
in the world knows it
every animal, bird, fish, and locomotive knows it
THOREAU: Given a choice, I think any man would rather sit by a warm fire than become a nation.
“Wait, wait,” Debbie says. “You’re talking about grass blades? I thought this was supposed to be a desert.”
“Maybe you should say grains of sand,” Michelle suggests.
“Well, I think that’s already in the Bible.” Ida, the retired homemaker, is wearing her reading glasses and flipping through Genesis.
“There’s nothing wrong with using images that are already in the Bible,” Sarah says.
Ida pulls off her reading glasses and looks over at her. She has snowy-white hair. “Then I want to change mine,” she says. “Can I change mine?”
“All right,” Sarah says. “Brian, what do you think about using grains of sand?”
“But I was trying to sort of allude to Leaves of Grass.”
“I don’t know, this is really heavy. Really—abstract.” Debbie is staring at the play. “Have you thought about getting some more action into it? I mean, I don’t think you want to end up with just all these talking heads!”
Brian looks dismayed.
“I see it more as a Platonic dialogue,” Sarah says.
This seems to cheer Brian. “I want it to be like Under Milk Wood,” he confides to the class. “That’s my dream.”
—
Sarah picks up the groceries and then the dry cleaning on her way home. “Four shirt, two dress, one skirt, pleated, one blouse. This could not come out,” the cashier tells her. She looks around wearily as the cashier rings everything up. As always, hanging in the window is a wedding dress, freshly cleaned, in clear plastic, the dry cleaner’s tour de force.
When Sarah gets home, Ed comes out of the house to help her carry everything, so they are both outside when the phone rings, and Ed runs up the steps in front of her with his keys jingling in his pocket and his shirt coming untucked. “Who is it? Your mother?” Sarah calls out as she comes in.
He waves his hand at her impatiently. “Ma? What is it? What? You’re in the hospital? What happened?”
Sarah picks up the phone in the kitchen and hears her eighty-seven-year-old mother-in-law crying. “Yes, yes, I’m in the hospital,” Rose sobs from California. “They took me here. I didn’t even know what was happening to me. I was unconscious. I could have been dead.”
“Mother, wait, slow down. Start from the beginning. What happened?”
“What hospital are you in?” Sarah breaks in.
“St. Elysius? Or Egregious?”
“No, no, that can’t be it. That’s a TV show. Try to think, Ma.”
“Maybe St. Elizabeth’s,” Rose says. “How should I know? I was unconscious.”
“Ed, I think we should talk to Dr. Klein,” Sarah says.
“Sarah, I’m trying to hear what happened. Start from the beginning, Ma.”
“I told Klein I needed a new prescription. My refills ran out. I went to three different pharmacies, and they wouldn’t fill the prescription for my pills. I went to Longs, Rexall, and Pay Less, and they all said I needed a new prescription from my doctor. But when I told Klein I needed him to write a new one he wouldn’t do it, and so I told him that if he didn’t write me one I would tell the state medical board he drugged Gladys and Eileen when they passed away, and he just said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, ‘You damn well know what I’m talking about. You killed them with morphine.’ Then he just walked out and left me alone in his office. So I had to go all the way home, on the bus, by myself. I was exhausted, I was ill. I went straight to bed. I put on my videotape of Pride and Prejudice, and I took some of the pills I had saved, because I felt so ill. Then, when I woke up, I was in a hospital bed in a hospital gown.”
“Oh, Christ,” Ed groans. “Ma, now I want you to give me the telephone number by your bed. I’m going to call the doctor.”
This is not the first time Rose has overdosed and collapsed, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Sarah remembers Rose’s second husband, Maury, who passed away in 1980. He was a cheerful man ten years older than Rose, and as the years went by he only seemed to become more jovial. He whistled happily, walking with his cane through the increasingly grim streets of Washington Heights. He became ever smaller and more spry, his clothes hung on him, and his face was shrunken behind his black-framed glasses; he had almost turned into Jiminy Cricket, but every day he and Rose went out to lunch at the deli, and every week he brought home stacks of large-print books from the library. The two of them traveled, and he used to collapse in dramatic places. On the observation deck of the World Trade Center. In the botanical gardens in Montreal. In Hollywood, on Hollywood Boulevard. He would sit in the hospital and talk about the service in different cities. Sarah had always marveled at him because he was such an extraordinarily cheerful man. When he died, she found out that he had been taking Percodan, among other things. It wasn’t just good nature. He’d got Rose started on pills. After the funeral, they also found out that he hadn’t paid taxes for years, and that he had squirreled away his money in small sums in over a hundred different bank accounts around the country. It was then that Rose drafted her amazing handwritten will, a document she never tires of showing the family. Ed was the one who took care of all Maury’s deferred aggravations. He closed up the Washington Heights apartment, collected the money from all the accounts, and moved Rose to Venice, California, where she could be near her other son, Henry, who was managing a gallery there. But Henry left for England—years ago—to start one of his new lives, and taking care of Rose is again Ed’s responsibility.
Ed is pacing in the living room with the phone, talking to Dr. Klein, and Sarah picks up her extension in time to hear Klein say, “Well, it seems that she was stashing the pills away. She wasn’t
taking the prescribed dose. Unfortunately, she took them for her moods.”
“Well, why didn’t you check on her before?” Ed says.
“Well, Ed, I cannot control everything that she does in the privacy of her own apartment. I cannot take total responsibility for her actions. Of course, I asked her whether she was complying with the prescription, but I’m afraid she didn’t tell me the truth.”
“No, no, I’m sorry, my mother is not a liar.”
“She has a severe dependency on her medication and—”
“Well, that’s the point. I thought that was what we were trying to work on, to wean her away with the limited doses.”
“Yes, that is what we were trying to do, Ed,” Klein says. “But it wasn’t working. I think we’ve had this discussion before. It’s really a question of patient management. Now, Rose has decided to enter a residential treatment program at Santa Rosa.”
“Why weren’t we consulted about this?”
“It was her decision.”
“No, I think it was your decision,” Ed snaps. “You told her she had to do this.”
“I advised her to do it, because she has got to start understanding her dependency. She has to find other ways to deal with her boredom and loneliness.”
“Oh, so this is really all my fault,” Ed says. “Because I’m trying to take care of her long distance. It all comes down to me. I should be there twenty-four hours a day. It’s not your fault and it’s not her fault, so it’s got to be my fault.”
—
Sarah is up half the night because Ed is so upset. He lies on his left side and then rolls over, punching his pillow with his fist. He kicks at the blankets, then flops onto his back. Sarah lies on her stomach and thinks about Rose. Boredom and loneliness. It’s a real question: Can an elderly woman subsist on Masterpiece Theatre alone? Rose is, as Sarah’s student Ida calls it, a retired homemaker—except that she was never so professional about being a homemaker, or about being retired. What she really wants, Sarah thinks, is to return to the houses of her childhood. She is nostalgic for them; they are still the backdrops of the romance she has developed about her life. Her parents’ house in Bukovina, her foster parents’ grand house in England, where she was sent during the First World War—a place with servants and vast drawing rooms. Rose did not suffer in the wars directly, but she imagines she did, and in her mind’s eye sees them sweeping away the world she loved. She has often told Sarah that Gone with the Wind is the most beautiful novel ever written, and urged her to try to write one like it, threatened to write it herself, although she says she has never had the strength. But it is hard to sustain a life with memories, especially when the best memories come from novels.
—
“I call these Identity Haiku,” Michelle tells the Creative Midrash class the following week. She pauses, then adds, “I was going to do traditional haiku, but it was really cramping what I wanted to say, so I didn’t do the syllable thing.”
1.
generations
stars in sky
yellow stars
holocaust
2.
sun rise
moon rise
tower
sun down
moon down
babel
3.
cut
cry
covenant
“These are really beautiful,” Debbie says.
“Why didn’t you use titles?” asks Ida.
“Um, I just thought it would be overkill. I felt like it would be almost stating the obvious if, say, I titled Number 3 ‘Circumcision.’ ”
“I love the way you stripped down your images to the essentials,” Sarah says. “Tell us more about why you called them Identity Haiku.” As she learned in her pedagogy class, Sarah shows with her body language that she is listening to Michelle. She leans forward and nods her head, but she is thinking about Rose, who has been calling each night. The residential treatment center is a prison! It’s Sing Sing. Auschwitz. No one can leave. What do they do there? They sit in a circle; they have to talk about their past with a facilitator. She can’t bear it. To listen to them talk. This one was raped when she was seven years old! That one was assaulted by her own father and brother. This one was a prostitute! “Such horrible things! Things we would never talk about. Now they put all of it on TV, but I would never watch!” Sarah can only imagine Rose sitting in that circle of chairs with these other patients, some the age of Rose’s children, some the age of her grandchildren. And then Rose herself, half dead from shock, asked to tell about her own abuse. And even to begin, to talk about her childhood after what she has heard! To speak of her own treasured past, the elegant life that she has always treated as something to fold and fold again in tissue paper. No one listening to her, no one interested except the facilitator, probing with long needles, trying to draw blood. Naturally, she wants to go home, but she cannot just check out. “This is a clinic,” the doctor told her, “not a hotel.” Ed took a flight out to L.A. last night to talk to the doctors or straighten out the Medicare insurance claims or save Rose, depending on how you want to look at it.
It is Ida’s turn to read. She is a beautiful woman. A woman who goes to the hairdresser every week and comes to class with her white hair curled and shaped. And she dresses up for the class. She comes in suits and gold jewelry—quite a contrast to Debbie in her rumpled shirts or Brian, who sometimes forgets to take off his bike helmet. She is the oldest in the group, just as Rose is. Her voice is tense as she reads; it chokes up on her and she is embarrassed.
Naomi and Ruth
My daughter and I are like Ruth and Naomi, but with a twist. When my husband passed away, may he rest in peace, and we went on the way, as it says in the Bible, I said to Ellen, “Don’t stay with me, go on and live your life.”
“I want to stay with you and take care of you,” she said.
“No, you need to live your own life,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. So she went back to New York where she was attending NYU film school.
I stayed here alone in the house. She wants to make films, and if that is what she wants, so be it, but I tell her, “Ellen, I wish you would meet someone. You are almost thirty.”
She tells me, “Mother, I have met someone, and we have been living together for five years.” But this is something that is breaking my heart. This man, a broker, is eleven years older than Ellen and not Jewish.
This is what I want to ask her—“How do you think you can live in New York like a Ruth gleaning in the alien corn? How do you think you can come to him and lie at his feet in the night so that one morning he will marry you? How can you go on like this living in his apartment for five years? If I had known this would happen when we went on the way, I would not have told you to go. I would have said, ‘Stay.’ ”
Something about this pricks at Sarah. Tears start in her eyes.
Debbie rakes back her long hair and says to Ida, “Well, she’s got to make her own choices.”
“I have a question about the genre of this,” Michelle says. “Is this like an essay or a short story?”
“Ida,” Sarah says, “this is—” She wants to say that it moved her, but she cannot. The words would sound cheap in the context of the class with its formalized intimacy. “It’s very simple and beautiful,” she says.
Debbie is looking over her copy, pondering Ida’s work. “I guess it’s an age thing,” she says.
—
Sarah’s desk stands at the window of her bedroom. She has always wanted a study, and she and Ed are hoping to redo one of the other bedrooms in the next few years. The kids are away at college—one at medical school—so they don’t have the money to do anything with the house. Sarah and Ed went to a local one-woman performance of “A Room of One’s Own,” and it occurred to Sarah as she left the theater that Virginia Woolf never had any children. Her own desk is piled with papers, some hers, some Ed’s, also bank statements she has not yet filed, bills marked paid, issu
es of Writer’s Digest and Poets & Writers Magazine, and copy for the Shaarei Tzedek newsletter, which she edits. Sarah is the Washington stringer for several national Jewish periodicals, and she writes frequent book reviews. She sits at her desk and thinks about what insufficient time she has for her own work. She has written one novel, published in 1979 by Three Penny Opera, a book about a woman—a painter—growing up in Brooklyn and Long Island, but she didn’t move fast enough after that publication, didn’t follow it quickly enough with a second novel, and she regrets this, the loss of momentum. She writes poetry as well, poetry that is perhaps too old-fashioned for a contemporary audience. With its wordplay and complicated rhymes it is closer to the seventeenth century than to John Ashbery. It has been difficult for her as a poet, to be influenced by Donne, Marvell, and Herbert, but to write about giving birth, a son’s bar mitzvah, Yom Kippur. Several years ago she sent a collection of her poems to her brother-in-law, Henry, who runs a small press of his own in Oxford. But Henry felt that Sarah’s work, while “extraordinary,” was not moving in quite the direction that Equinox was trying to move in with its current series. She still finds it strange that even Henry, who loves Victorian furniture, eighteenth-century books and bindings, antique china, and plush novels—he who, as a person, is almost baroque—nevertheless admires poems that are sleek, smooth, minimalist, functioning like state-of-the-art appliances. As she boots up her computer, the phone rings.
“Sarah?” Ed says. “Hi. Listen, we’ve got a mess here. She’s already racked up twenty thousand dollars for hospitalization. That and the treatment program are covered, but there is another sixteen hundred for consultations with Klein, which they aren’t covering.”
“What do you mean?”
“They say they aren’t covering it. We’re disputing the bill, so—”
“How is she?” Sarah asks.
“Not so hot. Disoriented, exhausted. She’s lost weight.” He sighs. “Sarah, I got here and I realized this is it. We can’t kid ourselves about this any longer—she can’t stay out here alone. We’ve got to bring her home.”
The Family Markowitz Page 20