by Rachel Ament
I recently read a chilling magazine story about anesthetic—how sometimes people who seem fully under are nothing of the sort. They are just externally paralyzed. On the inside, they are awake: violently flailing and screaming bloody murder, because someone is slicing them open, and they can feel it. I think my mother is imagining something like that.
This is not the conversation I am used to having with her about death. That old, well-rehearsed sketch is the one where she makes me swear up and down, left and right, that I will make quick work of her before I ever so much as think of putting her in a home for the elderly. She used to say that I should shoot her before she “gets old.” For a while, this meant sixty-five. Then when she turned sixty, the age where I reach for my revolver became seventy, and now that my mother is sixty-eight, age has been entirely replaced by the more open-ended nursing-home idea. Stewed prunes for breakfast in a teal dining room surrounded by murmuring caregivers rocking wheelchairs? My responsibility, as my mother’s daughter, is to make sure she never sees it.
“And after you kill me, don’t put me in a box with pink satin like I am a bonbon.”
“Okay.”
“Just a plain box. The religious, they sell them. A plain box.”
“Okay. Kill my mother. Get a plain box from the religious. Anything else?”
“Then push the box into the ocean from Frishman Beach. It has to be Frishman.”
Frishman Beach is the Tel Aviv shore my mom grew up on. I have a set of photos of her, back when she was twenty-two, then a well-known Israeli folk dancer with a ponytail that freely grazed the small of her back. She is wearing a bikini. It is the mid-sixties. She looks like And Then God Created Israeli Woman. I have one of the pictures framed. Whenever anybody walks into my living room, it’s the first thing they ask about.
I tell my mother it might be illegal doing anything with a corpse on Frishman beach. Too many sunbathers, ice cream eaters. The lifeguard might not like it.
“So? Do you know how many immigrants sneaked into Israel from that beach? You go at night, you push me into the ocean, finito.”
Please do not mistake my mother for morbid. She is in fact the opposite, so full of life that death seems like some extremely far-off, non-applicable journey—something that happens to others. In our relationship, I am the melancholic Harold to her high-kicking Maude, the limping, gloomy Igor to her effervescent professor. A few years back, I enraged her by going to New Hampshire to take a vow of silence for several days to promote a feeling of “emptiness.”
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked. “There will be plenty of time for being an empty nothing when you are dead.”
I’m not so sure. My own feelings on the afterlife flip-flop between admittedly idiotic worrying that I will need my liver and a diaphanous voile dress for entry into heaven’s ball or hell’s BBQ to a more rational belief that one’s fate is conditional to one’s disposal. If you are buried, you become earth. If you are sunk at sea, you become shark food. Then you become a shark, and then the shark poops you out, and then you become sand. Someone might as well have my kidneys.
My mom says I am being neurotic about this organ donor form, overthinking, as usual. Actually, what she really says is: “Why don’t you take your slippers off already and go outside?” In the world of our exchanges, that means the same thing. The great thing about being as opinionated and yet fiercely nontheoretical as she is that the combination makes for a great accidental philosopher. While Proust can write 1,200,000 words on the past and never quite crack the nut of it, my mother eats Swann’s Madeleine whole with her succinct “If it’s already happened, then it’s nothing anymore.”
“So what do you think happens after death?” I ask her.
“Well, I can’t believe there will ever be a time when I haven’t existed,” says my mother.
If you twist that one around in your head for a while, you might come to the conclusion that my tennis-nut, Zumba-dancing mom is a genius, having just created the perfect elevator pitch for every major spiritual tradition’s view of mortality, from Buddhism to Islam (and all this while writing out her Costco shopping list: party pack of lamb chops, eternal continuation, blackberries, mozzarella…).
“Why don’t you tell the organ donation people that you are Jewish?” asks my mother, looking up from her list. “Lots of the people I know won’t even stress about this organ thing because they are Jewish.”
Some think the Bible says Jews are not supposed to be cut up after death, not even autopsied. And even though lots of modern Jewish thinking has found loopholes in that, I would love to glom on to it, if only because there is so little in straight Biblical Judaism that is good for getting you out of anything. But I just can’t.
There is something I call Convenience Judaism. And for a shrimp-eater like me, not signing your organ donor form for reasons connected to ancient Jewish law reeks of it. It’s much worse than taking the day off work for Yom Kippur, only to spend it watching DVDs on your computer with snacks. You answer the phone solemnly. Doesn’t the caller know it’s the Jewish Day of Atonement? And then you return to your HBO-and-pretzels marathon.
Before leaving for Costco, my mom tells me that if she ever did sign her organ donor form, it would be so “people can see how healthy I was.” And I will end up signing mine. Because I figure that, with all my mother’s genes in me, better to become someone’s liver, better to get back into life, than to become a bunch of ocean floor fertilizer—off the coast of Frishman beach or anywhere else.
YA WANT AN OPINION?
Iliza Shlesinger
I often wonder how much my mother fits into the Jewish mother stereotype. My mother has never compared me to my brother (but she has compared me to my cousin, who went to Yale). She never nags me about marrying a doctor (maybe because I’ve never been married so there’s still a chance), and she never makes me feel bad about myself (probably because, as a comedian, I do that job pretty well already).
Aside from sending me weekly chain emails about the State of Israel or the Holocaust (I know, Mom, “Never forget,” but I don’t need to be reminded every Monday morning), she’s not your standard Jewish mother.
But she is your standard New Yorker.
The popular misconception about New Yorkers is that they’re rude. They aren’t rude; they’re in a rush. They’re in a rush and they don’t have time for your crap. Ya want an opinion? Ya got it. Ya don’t like it? Ask someone else.
And my mother, with her tough, no-BS attitude and bluntness, would have seemed ordinary had I grown up with other New York Jews, but I didn’t. Because when I was one year old, my parents moved from Manhattan to Dallas, Texas. Yee-ha. Or, in this case, Yee-cha.
New Yorkers have a certain bluntness about them that outside of the Tri-State area can come off as a little brash. It took me until recently to learn that snapping, “Give it a rest!” at someone who’s being loud is considered rude.
When I was in the fourth grade, I had a teacher, Mrs. A, who would always roll her eyes at me, no matter what I said. I told my mom, who immediately went down to the school to have a talk with her. Mrs. A’s response was, “Well, I can’t control my facial expression.” (This is the level of intelligence I was dealing with in a Plano, Texas, public school classroom in the mid-’90s.)
My mother simply responded with, “Is there something wrong with your muscles that you, as an adult, can’t control your expression specifically when my daughter speaks?” Having probably never been called out on her less-than-sterling teaching tactics, Mrs. A was speechless and embarrassed. I could see it in her eyes.
Mom 1, Texas Public Schools 0.
Sarcasm was a big thing in our house. Whenever I’d tell my mom something of childish importance like “I have to pee” or “Sometimes I like to smell the inside of my own nose,” my mother would say flatly, “I’ll alert the media”—a sarcastic nuance lost on five-year-old
me.
Even as a child, I remember playing with a bag of confetti in the back of the car and my mother threatening me.
“Ya spill that in the backseat and ya dawg meat,” she’d say, and I literally thought she would grind me up and feed me to Tippy, our white mini poodle.
When I was seventeen, our physics project for the year was to design a hovercraft. (Go, private school!) We spent a semester building plywood discs with tarps stapled to the bottom, inflated by leaf blowers. The culmination of our efforts was a hovercraft race. The teams assembled in the school’s cafeteria and had to race their creations around orange pylons. This was fun. Until Mark Stein, a genius who I never talked to because I wasn’t in the genius classes (also he was weird), didn’t take first place. Enraged, he picked up one of the orange pylons and swung it at another pylon—sending it flying across the room and hitting my mother…in the shin.
Oy.
I think most mothers, most people, actually, most non-guerrilla-warfare-trained people, would express their pain from being hit in the shin with gasps, whimpers, or, at most, choice words. And my mother did all that, for the first few seconds. Then the pain turned to rage. She got up and, wielding a pylon above her head, marched toward Mark, yelling, “He needs to know how this feels!”
I, being much stronger than her, was able to choke her out. Just kidding.
But I was able to physically hold her back and convince her not to hit my classmate in the leg with a piece of the obstacle course. (I know, I know, everyone has a childhood story like this.)
Side note: Mark Stein grew up to be hot. Kills me that we never knew each other in high school, and now the only thing connecting us is the memory of my mother’s attempted assault on him.
But like most New Yorkers, my mother is not only tough; she also has a soft side. Growing up, my brother Ben and I fought a lot, and my mother did the best she could. Sometimes, out of exhaustion, my mother would take my hand and my brother’s hand and force us to tickle each other. Then we’d inevitably start laughing and the whole episode would be over.
Looking back, it’s a weird thing to do: physically force laughter out of your child by prodding them with another child’s reluctant limp hand, but hey, definitely better than a spanking. Ironic that, years later, I’d find a career in forcing laughter out of people with words, not my hands—although that is an inspired idea for hecklers.
My mother’s patience stretched yet even further. She never made me feel stupid for saying weird things. And now I don’t feel stupid saying them onstage in front of hundreds of people. I knew my mom was special because once I asked her, “If a witch turned me into a bug, what would you do?” Normal question for a kid to ask…except this was last week. She didn’t blow me off and she didn’t call me silly. Without missing a beat, she said, “I’d put you in my pocket to keep you with me always”—a really sweet sentiment. Until my mother revealed that when she dies, she would not only like to be cremated, but wants me keep her ashes in my underwear drawer, so “I can be with you always.”
Since New Yorkers are, inherently, always in a rush, they have to manage their time. My mom loves the idea of me going to bed early to get a good night’s sleep but hates if I sleep in, thinking it’s a waste of time. When I was growing up, she’d come in to wake me up just to “go be productive at something. Anything. Just stop sleeping.”
One time, and I swear this is true, I woke up to her standing on my bed, hanging a painting above me. Couldn’t wait, huh, Mom? Had to get that painting hung up and centered for the big gallery opening in my room? Another time she made only half my bed…because I was in the other half, still sleeping!
When she visits my place now, it’s not out of the ordinary for me to wake and find she’s rearranged all of my downstairs furniture. I’ll say, “Mom, I don’t want the table there,” and she’ll say, “Who cares what you want?” And then I’ll go back to sleep in retaliation.
In theory, I love the idea of being organized and neat. In practice, my subconscious has rebelled, and now, as an adult, I keep all my stuff in a constant state of disarray. I’m a novice hoarder—unless Mom is visiting. Then I clean up and pretend that it’s always like that.
My mom also has a very New York attitude about health. She is consumed by it, which makes sense, given all the horrible diseases we can or have already contracted. And yes, Mom, you already regaled me with the tale of “The Woman in My Development Who Got the Plague, Can You Believe It? Such a Freak Thing. So Remember, Wash Your Hands and Stop Kissing Your Dog on the Mouth.” (Never!)
But, now that I live on my own, my mother’s good intentions have become mere echoes of suggestions. As an adult, I’ve found the phrase “I pay taxes; I don’t have to listen to this” to be most satisfying in terms of abating my mother’s inquiries about what items I keep in my refrigerator. Mom, I’ll come clean. You know what I do? I order, like, a hundred dollars’ worth of takeout on Monday and just pick off it for a week. That’s what I keep in my fridge. I’m a vulture. Also? I keep candy in my car and sometimes don’t eat all day, then go for Chick-fil-A at 1:00 a.m. Last week I only ate carnival-themed food for two days! Taxes!
No less than two times a week, my mother calls me to extol the virtues of keeping frozen dinners in my freezer “just in case.” (In case what, Mom? A sad, single-girl convention needs to have an emergency meeting in my living room?)
“Lean Cuisines,” she’ll say, “they’re easy to just heat up when you’re busy or have a late-night show and are hungry.” After that, she will rattle off the benefits of keeping Lonely Girl frozen dinners on hand. (Lonely Girl portions are smaller than Hungry Man, just with a bigger serving of cheesecake.) She’ll then go on to tell me that they’re “sometimes five for ten dollars at the grocery store.” (Not to get your hopes up.)
• • •
Growing up, we always had a ton of food in the house, all healthy stuff. I was in high school during Y2K, and my mom and stepdad (my parents divorced when I was seven, spoiler alert!) kept a decent amount of extra food…just in case. But they bought random items. Looking back, no one was going to survive the apocalypse on a diet of grapefruit juice and three bags of Kirkland Trail Mix, but it was a decent effort.
However, when I visit their house now, I find no food. My stepdad likes to go out for meals so they don’t keep a ton of food in the house anymore. My mother is tiny and requires very little to sustain herself. On one trip home, I went to their kitchen and only found bottled water, carrots, and a life-sized hamster wheel.
When I visit and tell Mom I’m hungry, I get the pleasure of watching her dart around the kitchen, collecting what few items are in stock and trying to make them sound appealing to me.
“You want tuna? I have a little bit of tuna salad. Ooooh, smoked whitefish, you want that?” After I reject a variety of whipped fish flavors, she moves on to “You want me to put cheese on matzah? How about a hard-boiled egg? I have a delicious bell pepper. Sometimes I’ll eat a whole bell pepper for lunch, fills me right up.”
Mom, in no world do I want to eat a bell pepper, a hard-boiled egg, and a giant cracker. It’s lunch, not a compost heap.
• • •
Sometimes I feel bad for my mother. It must be difficult to act normal and sane when you have so much New York energy brimming inside you. But I never get annoyed at my mom when she worries about me or warns me about things I already know, like “Stop showing men pictures of your dog. They’re gonna think you’re crazy” or “Have an apple before your date. That way you won’t eat too much” or “Don’t drive late at night. There are nuts on the road.”
All this coming from a woman who, even with a car that has a camera built in so you can literally see on a dashboard screen where you are backing up, has still managed to back into several stop signs, effectively puncturing a giant hole in the trunk and costing her around five grand in damage.
My mother warned me abou
t all the other nuts out there. Mom, I know a nut when I see one. I grew up with one…and I own a mirror.
MY LITTLE SHIKSA GODDESS
Dylan Joffe
When I was nineteen, I went home with my college boyfriend to meet his family in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was so nervous about it all—about what it meant—that for weeks before, my friend would sing “Shiksa Goddess” to me from The Last Five Years.
“I’m breaking my mother’s heart/ The longer I stand looking at you/ The more I hear it splinter and crack/ From ninety miles away.”
I was nineteen and I was madly in love. My entire flight to Knoxville was spent wondering how I would appear to his parents. I wanted them to like me; I needed them to like me. Hey! Hey! Shiksa goddess/ I’ve been waiting for someone like you.
As an insecure teenager, it felt like everything I did wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t pretty enough for their son.
I wasn’t smart enough for their son.
I wasn’t Jewish enough for their son.
“Our son tells me that your father is Jewish. Did you have a bat mitzvah?” No, I didn’t.
“We’re going to light the candles now. It’s okay if you’re lost.” I wasn’t.
“Some people might not refer to you as Jewish because your mother isn’t. It’s okay. You’d just have to convert if you wanted your children to be Jewish.” His mother said it nonchalantly, and no one else reacted. I unconsciously put a hand over my nineteen-year-old uterus. Children? I was a child; a child was not something I was having.
One night at dinner, I said the word “shiksa.” It was in reference to my mother; I was trying to be funny. I was nervous. It slipped out, Freudian-style. I saw his mother’s body tighten. I felt my words become thick. They were humidity in the room, a rain cloud above our dinner, above their son, above his unclean abomination that would say such vile things.
I remembered my grandmother’s face, looking up at me. Her words echoed in my head.