We skipped New York the following year.
I pull the handle on our old Volvo. I have been child-locked. We are in the middle of rush hour, so the ride is an awkward dance of stop and go. Mom knows all the shortcuts and back roads, since she has lived in DC for twenty years now. We inch across a major intersection and dip back into the streets lined with houses, most of them covered in sagging spiderwebs, jack-o’-lanterns, bats, and other scary things.
“Where are we going?” I say.
“I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”
“Oh, the illusion of choice.”
“Don’t get smart with me. I’m actually enjoying this,” she says.
“Oh, good. I’m not.”
That’s not the entire truth. Actually, this is the calmest I have felt since my bathroom discovery. Something about being driven somewhere by my mother, something about being warm inside this car.
“Can I turn on the music?” I ask.
“I’d rather not. Thanks for asking.”
“How about the radio?”
“Same.”
We zoom under the Kennedy Center, and I lean my head toward the Potomac.
“It’s dark. Won’t Dad be worried?”
“You don’t seem to mind the dark,” she says, “and Dad’s already worried.”
Mom crosses the bridge to Virginia and we drive on the GW Parkway, where the traffic gives us time to admire the sights across the river. There is nothing as white as the monuments at night. The whole scene is like a giant clay model. We don’t have a skyline here in DC. We have a museum.
“It’s pretty,” I say.
“This is where Dad used to take me when I missed New York too much.”
“Do you still miss New York?”
“Rarely. Sometimes I do.”
“When Ari comes to visit?”
“When I listen to music.”
“Why is that?”
“I fell in love with music in college. When Opa and Oma finally agreed that it was best for me stay on campus, instead of commuting from Jersey, I bought myself a Walkman.” She snickers. “Do you even know what that is?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, I got one, to celebrate my independence, you know. We used to trade tapes in the dorms. Nineteen eighty-two was a big year. Madonna had just come out with her first single, Joni Mitchell got married in Malibu. Ozzy Osbourne got arrested for pissing on the Alamo.”
“Watch your mouth,” I say.
Mom smiles.
“But I was in love with Morrissey,” she says.
“I know Morrissey.” I beam. “From the Smiths.”
“Good girl. That’s right.”
I wish I could take credit for knowing something about music, but everything remotely interesting has come from my sellout ex-boyfriend.
“Anyway. I had this Smiths tape that one of Ari’s punk friends had given her.”
Ari is Mom’s best college friend. She comes over once every couple of years, and they spend three days eating and drinking and talking. No one is allowed to bother them. If you speak, they don’t listen. I can do whatever I want when Ari comes to DC.
“Ari had punk friends?” I say. “She has, like, a million children.”
“Five. She has five children. But, yes, she had a lot of friends you wouldn’t necessarily imagine her with. She was a bit of a rebel. A disciplined rebel.”
We are passing the housing projects right before Old Town. After we cross King Street, Mom turns into the quaint cobblestone streets and we bump around between the dark, tiny houses on the historic register list.
“Their first album had just come out, and only the coolest of the cool knew about it. Ari left it on her desk, and I picked it up one day. Ari was always home on the weekends our first two years. That was before her parents kicked her out of the house.”
“What? Why did they do that?”
“I guess I never told you that story. Ari fell in love with a guy at Columbia. Her parents didn’t approve.”
“She couldn’t date?”
The streets are deserted. Everybody is saving for tomorrow, when they’ll all turn into wizards and witches and bleeding zombies.
“Oh, she could date. She was supposed to find a husband.”
“So what was the issue?”
“The guy was an atheist.”
“Like a reform guy?”
“Like not Jewish. Like did not believe in God.”
“Oh.”
“Right,” she says. “Oh.”
We drive out of town, back to the Parkway, where the cars in front of us start to disappear into their exits until it’s just us, as far as I can see. I check the gas meter. We have a half tank. The lights flood the trees as we pass. We’re heading to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s place. I bet it’s really pretty here during the day.
“So what happened?” I ask.
“They stuck together until senior year. She stopped talking to her parents and most of her extended family ignored her. Her sister would occasionally bring food on Friday, or stop by when she was in the city visiting.”
“Where did her family live?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Isn’t that in the city?”
“It was different in the eighties. Brooklyn was far in the eighties.”
“Were they Hasids?”
“Not quite, not the way you picture it. They were committed. They were traditional. They didn’t have beards, if that’s what you are asking.”
I roll my eyes.
“What were they scared of?” I say.
“Of change, of losing something. Of not honoring having lost something.”
“What happened with the guy?”
“His name was John. He moved to California. She stayed in New York.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing? She gave everything up, after all that trouble?”
“It’s not everything. He asked her to go, and she said no, and that was that. That’s all she gave up.”
We’ve reached George Washington’s estate. The parking lot is closed, but there are still a few tour buses hanging out with their headlights off. Mom goes around the circle and heads back to the street.
“Why did she say no?”
“He wasn’t Jewish.”
On the way back, she takes a less scenic route, past strip malls and mega churches and pupuserias. The day laborers are jumping off pick-up trucks, coated in paint and dirt, and walking home to their crammed apartments, making a call to their wives back in El Salvador.
“Can we stop for some food?” I say.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
“There’s some cashews in the glove compartment.”
The cashews look withered and smushed in their bag.
“How about Chinese? Isn’t there a decent Chinese restaurant out here?”
“This isn’t a date, Miriam.”
“No. It isn’t.”
“You want to start talking?”
“About what?”
“Let’s start with the pictures. Since when are you taking pictures in the middle of the night?”
Mom moves confidently through the spiderweb of the Metropolitan area, where the cars split toward the South, the North, and the Federal. Georgetown looks like a medieval village on the hill across the river.
“I can’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just hear everything.”
“Couldn’t you tell me about it? I could have helped you. How long has this been going on? Are you going by yourself? How do you even get to these places? You’re a girl. It’s the middle of the night. You cou
ld’ve been hurt.”
“Jesus, Mom. If you want me to talk, maybe you should let me.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. Fine. Go on.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be worried.”
“Why not?”
“Because the pictures are nothing. They’re just pictures.”
“So why is Adam so upset?”
“Because Adam is Adam, and he makes big deals.”
“And you don’t?”
“I make big deals out of big things.”
“Adam is the best friend you’ve ever had. And the smartest. Unlike other people.”
I decide against slamming her head into the steering wheel, for now. I remember what she doesn’t know, and it helps me feel sorry for her.
“Whatever,” I say.
“Not whatever, Miriam. I’m your mother. We came to get you at the train station in the middle of your trip this summer, and now you haven’t slept for two months. You’re going to tell me what happened, or we’re going to run out of gas in West Virginia.”
“You’re a bully.”
“You can’t change this.”
The thing is, she doesn’t have to push me because I have been waiting to say something, anything, to anyone for a while now. I want to talk about the fight, and the sculpture, and Adam. I’ve just gotten used to being silent; silence has become the place I live in, like a room that gets messier and messier, but gradually, so you think it’s actually normal. You think this must be what it always looked like.
“He didn’t stand up for me,” I say, tentatively.
“Okay … ”
“His dad made a really stupid comment, and he didn’t say anything.”
She pauses. “What did his father say?”
“It’s so embarrassing. I don’t even want to repeat it.”
“I’ve probably heard it,” she says.
I take a breath. “Something about how art and faith don’t save lives. How we should stop investing in things we can’t count on.”
My eyes start to sting with the same rage and confusion. I watch my mother’s face and see no anger, just bones and lines and silence.
“Did you say something?”
“Not much. What was I supposed to say?”
“Well, what was Elliot supposed to say?”
“Oh my God. You’re taking his side.”
She rolls her eyes and almost misses a stop sign in front of Georgetown Hospital. This is where I was born. Six weeks early. July 23rd. Barely a lion.
“I’m not taking any sides, Miriam. I’m just trying to figure out what you wanted.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“You can’t expect him to feel as strongly as you do about this.”
I think back to the sculpture and Eva. How strongly we both felt, how angry. She was right. She would understand. I promise myself to check for her key again as soon as we get back home. I’m going to get her that picture. I’m going to find her.
“I do expect that, Mom.”
“Honey … ”
“Mom, I pushed the Picasso at the museum. I did it.”
The stillness, the creepy hum of the truth, the gratitude my body feels at finally letting go. All of that precedes the look of terror on my mother’s face. I see, for the first and last time in this story, that I have robbed her of something I don’t even understand. For the next few minutes, she gives me permission to wonder what she is thinking, because she can’t call the guards fast enough, she can’t get her face together in time. That window, that empathy, saves me, in a Freaky Friday way, because it makes me look at me.
thirty-six
This is how the truth comes out. In traffic, at night, in her Barnard sweatshirt, in a car I can’t even drive. She takes one trembling hand off the wheel and looks for mine, and then she holds it tight so the sweat won’t let it slip, and I cry. I cry so hard my head hurts for the next three days, so hard I have to blow my nose in the sleeve of my favorite shirt, so hard the lights blur into a mess of white and blue and red and green, and I let them. I don’t force my eyes to focus, like I would the camera.
My mother does not say a word. She just squeezes my hand tighter every time I sob, making every effort not to stop me or talk me out of it, knowing that if she opens her mouth, she might run us into the World War II Memorial. We pass the monuments on the Mall, and she finally turns into the parking lot next to the Albert Einstein statue. She lets my hand go, gets out, and waits for me on the sidewalk. When I peek through the bushes, I see the genius is still smiling. I used to climb on his bronze pants, step on his bronze papers, pet his bronze mustache. When I learned to read, I would trace the letters carved on the granite bench. This is what they say: “The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.”
Perhaps that’s right, but truth is a motherfucker sometimes, selective and cruel. We walk to the stoplight and wait for the crossing man to turn green. It’s chilly out. The air bites where the tears have dried, on my neck and cheeks. My nose must be enormous. It always swells after I cry. The cold has scared most other people back into their hotels. Tomorrow is Halloween.
I struggle to keep up with my mom, and wonder if I should grab her hand again, or if she wants to be alone, if she even wants me here. We walk under the trees toward a bright yellow light, until we’ve crossed the concrete barricades and are facing the Lincoln Memorial. There’s no moon in the reflecting pool.
We walk all the way up to the top, where Lincoln sits like a wise giant in his temple. My dad would kill us if he knew we came here without him. As my mom reads (or pretends to read) the inaugural address, I lean on a yellow column. I am only a mortal. My mother is neither sad nor pissed. She’s lost, and she’s looking for strength in a man made of marble. When I’ve had enough of the tension, I walk down the stairs, letting all my weight fall with every step, hoping it will startle me into something real. You have a dream. I have a dream too, an impossible one.
This moment is beautiful, even if it’s scary, even if it’s sad. It’s our détente. I know it will all be spoiled, that it will be real by sunrise. I will have to look my mother in the face, and she will have to say something uglier than the Gettysburg Address. Her words will not fix anything. It will have to be something about what comes next.
When I get to the bottom of the steps, a couple asks me to take their picture, and I’m too tired to say no. One, two, three and take a picture of their two matching grins. They’re having a good time. I have to give Adam his camera. I have to get Bogart back from Eva. I’m going to have to explain everything.
When we get back in the car, my mother turns on the heat and says: “You are telling your father.”
I nod and swallow. My angry-girl mask dropped as soon as I told her the news. Someone has to tell him, so I will.
Back in the city (ours, not hers), when we cross the Buffalo Bridge over Rock Creek, I tell her I’m sorry, and she tells me I don’t need to apologize; we just need to deal with it. We. I let the plural go, since I’m too exhausted to fight. I feel like I’ve run a hundred marathons but never once crossed the finish line. Like I can’t get to the end. It’s past nine thirty, and although we’re both tired and my mother might appreciate some time to herself, it seems wrong for me to fall asleep right now. Tonight, she will cry when I close my bedroom door. She has not cried yet. My eyes are losing focus.
“Maybe she just didn’t want to go to California,” I say, super drowsy.
“Who?”
“Ari. Maybe she just didn’t want to leave New York.”
“Yes,” my mother says. “Maybe.”
“Or maybe she didn’t want to be with him.”
“I doubt that.”
My mom gives me a sideways glance, her eyes puffy and tired, her hands gripping the wheel to make it
home.
“Do you think she’s happy?” I ask.
“I think she’s fine.”
“Fine?”
“Fine. Good. Great. She has a good life, beautiful kids, funny friends, a husband who says yes most of the time.”
The leather squeaks under my sinking body.
“You think she should’ve gone.”
“I think she should’ve been a dancer. She was a wonderful dancer, one of the best I’ve ever seen.”
“You smell terrible, Ma. You shouldn’t smoke.”
“I know.”
When we get home, I’m asleep and it’s my father who comes back to the car to wake me up. He can’t carry me anymore, but he keeps his hand on my back as we walk to the door. Inside, across the hall, he’s strung the prints of the night pictures, with pins, on an old clothesline. It’s overwhelming. Sometimes he’s so far away and in his head, and then he just comes close, or notices something, or pays attention, and it always overwhelms me.
“Thanks Dad.”
“Sure. They’re pretty. I don’t know when the hell … ”
“I just need to go to sleep.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Good night, bean.”
“Good night.”
I duck under the pictures to go up the stairs. I can hear the shower on in the master bathroom. Eva’s key is nowhere to be found. Today was Shabbat and nobody said a word.
thirty-seven
is it your mom?
thirty-eight
It turns out I didn’t have to tell him after all. He already knew.
“What do you mean, you knew it ? Did Mom tell you last night?” I say.
Where You End Page 17