When I go back home, the house is still all filled up with him. I wonder if that’s why my mother has stayed in it all these years. My mother doesn’t talk about my father anymore, but it floats in the air around her, what his death has cost.
In the Coopers’ bathroom I looked in the mirror on the medicine-cabinet door, and steadied myself against the sink. My hair had grown longer that year, and rode the middle of my back. My round, baby face had finally chiseled itself into a shape I was no longer embarrassed of. I saw the difference, the way boys stopped on the street to look at me. It felt good to have their eyes on mine if it meant I could become remade from one of Lilly’s daughters into a girl someone desired. My mother taught us early how important it was to make sure a man couldn’t live without you. She based all of our lives on that notion.
After my father died my mother, who was only twenty-five, woke up each morning, put on the same white sweatshirt and ankle-length black stretch pants that clung to her thin legs, and tied her hair back with a black string. She wore not a stitch of makeup. This time was when I felt connected to her, when I snuggled up next to her on the couch before bed at night and she dreamily stroked the top of my hair.
My sisters and I played in the deserted winter field at the end of the street and came back with chapped red cheeks and dirty fingernails to find Lilly sitting cross-legged on the couch watching the snow begin to build outside her window. She held a magazine in her lap, though the pages were rarely turned. The same pained look would be in my mother’s face when, sometimes, with no warning, at the supper table, or standing in the grocer’s checkout line, a memory would seize her and her eyes would cloud up. She’d take a deep breath, will back her strength, and smile at us.
My mother’s grief was mostly unspoken, only a slow, steady throbbing that permeated the body of the house. She sometimes spent an entire afternoon indoors doing crossword puzzles or staring into space. In the morning she made bowls of cereal for us and then watched the day begin, completely unaware that another year had passed since her husband had died. But her eyes were soft, filled with part daylight and part darkness.
After Lilly rinsed the bowls and set them on the rack to dry, she’d prod us upstairs to dress in whatever we could find, and paid no notice when our socks and sweaters began to fade.
Nobody came to the house and nobody called. After my father’s death, we had been cut loose of the world and our connections. When my father’s family was face-to-face with us, we seemed to reflect back what they had lost; our presence was too painful. My mother—she was still a young woman then—was pitied more than loved. We felt as if we were a pack of girls to stay away from. Still, those were days when we were still connected as a family, in the three or four years after my father died. Even though my mother was ensconced in her grief, my sisters and I were a part of it. Nothing had happened yet to hint that we would not be saved.
In those years my mother would sit on the couch all day clipping pictures from magazines and newspapers while the TV ran. Gilligan’s Island or the other mindless shows she watched would be interrupted by a news flash. More troops were being sent to Vietnam; each day thousands of American soldiers were killed. Meanwhile my mother occupied herself with cutouts while my sisters and I played on the floor making flimsy houses out of a deck of cards. She clipped prints, photographs, pictures of certain objects she liked: furniture, gardens, bouquets of flowers, women in exciting, fashionable dresses. She had acquired a peculiar passion for snipping and saving. Soon she had shoe boxes and hatboxes and folders overflowing with samples of things in the world she loved. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “I’m trying to capture something,” and then drifted away again. Before my father died she collected old pictures and postcards she’d find at local flea markets and junk sales and she took them out from the baskets where she stored them. She made scenes of garden parties, blond children playing in the sun, men and women embracing. Sometimes she’d clip African mothers from National Geographic. She brought the outside world inside our house so she would never have to leave home.
When she felt particularly blue, she’d snip black-and-white photographs of catastrophes. A woman who had lost a son in a boating accident; a picture of a family mourning a plane crash. Sometimes she’d clip articles from the obituaries. I watched her make this paper menagerie of dreams and nightmares, which was stuffed and folded at night’s end, and tucked under the couch.
One day Lilly slept until late afternoon. She finally came downstairs to find us transfixed by the television. President Kennedy had been shot. My mother grew hysterical. She crumpled a Kleenex in her hand as Walter Cronkite reported the tragedy. The day of President Kennedy’s funeral Lilly was still beside herself. She opened a new box of Kleenex and hunkered down in front of the television and watched the processional. Her eyes were glued to the screen as Jackie stepped out of the limousine holding the hands of her two small children. “That poor woman,” Lilly said over and over, as if she were guardian of Jackie’s fate.
When I picture those years when my mother was a widow, it’s like this: my mother in her bedroom fast asleep all day, or working on her cut-outs, Ruthie staring out the window, her long braids wrapped around her head in contemplation, and Louise and me playing tic-tac-toe in the cellar.
The summer before I entered second grade, something changed. My mother seemed to realize that we could no longer live in seclusion, that the world expected more from us. Maybe my mother was getting bored, clipping and sorting all day, stuffed in our house like dirty, used-up socks in a drawer. Maybe she simply needed to be touched by another person besides her daughters to feel vital again. Nevertheless, once she stepped out of our isolated cocoon, nothing was the same. It was no longer just the four of us bundled together like a package.
My mother had decided she had to do something to change our lives. At first, she changed her cutout world. One day I was watching her, as usual. The purple light of dusk had crept through the windows. I looked down from the couch at my mother’s newest composition. The entire living room floor was laid out in elaborate festive party images. I remember the cutouts of men and women dancing, and a long buffet table covered with a lace cloth. On top were crystal wineglasses filled with champagne. In the center of the scene was a grand piano topped with a lilies-of-the-valley bouquet. Up above sailed colorful butterflies and powder-white clouds. Paper doilies cut in the shape of furniture were carefully arranged around the garden on my mother’s imaginary canvas. By this time I never questioned what she was doing day after day, alone in the house; that in her grief she had become eccentric.
As I looked closer the scene came more strikingly into focus. While it was impossible to remember every detail from the cutout world she was creating, there was one image I’ll never forget. My eyes rested in the right corner on a black-and-white photograph: It was a picture of my father and mother cutting a three-tiered wedding cake. All that evening she lingered with a pair of scissors in her hand, sipping cups of tea and reflecting, as though she were trying to savor her memories of her wedding, my father, her happiness, to store them in a place she’d never lose them.
My mother grew up in East Cleveland, on a block where houses were two and three stories high and lined one beside the other. It was a community of Jewish immigrants from Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. Lilly told us stories of how her father’s friends used to play cards in the basement while Aunt Rose made big meals of stuffed cabbage, borscht, noodle pudding, and sweet and yeast breads for everyone who happened to stop by on a Sunday. Aunt Rose and my grandfather were siblings. My mother was eight years old when her mother, Dora Rosenberg, died of a brain aneurysm. Afterward, no longer able to live in the house his wife had inhabited, my grandfather and mother moved into Aunt Rose’s two-family. Aunt Rose became my mother’s second mother.
Sometimes in the evenings Lilly would stretch out on the couch and take down her photo album, which seemed sacred to her, like a bible. In one picture my father and mot
her are inside Aunt Rose’s house. My mother is dressed in black loafers and stretch pants, leaning against my father. Her hair is irregularly parted, and her eyes are burning with happiness. It’s one of the few photographs of my parents together.
Before my father died, we used to go to my great-aunt Rose’s house every Friday night for the Sabbath.
“Hi, Daddy,” Lilly flirted with her father, as if she was still a young girl, the minute she opened the heavy storm door to their house. When we walked in the door, my grandfather was usually sitting in his leather recliner smoking his pipe. The cherry scent of his favorite tobacco was on his breath, and the prickle of his six-o’clock shadow scratched our cheeks when he hugged us. If we listened we could hear the sounds of Lilly and Aunt Rose already chattering in the kitchen.
When I recall my childhood, I’m not sure if I remember an actual event, or whether what seems like a memory comes from a story my mother or one of my sisters or Aunt Rose told me or whether I’ve blurred events together. But if memory can also be a feeling, I can still feel the extravagant warmth of our Sabbath dinners at Aunt Rose’s house before my father died; the smell of Aunt Rose’s brisket simmering in the kitchen, mingled with the powdery smell of the rouge she brushed on her cheeks; how my grandfather squeezed my hand, sometimes so hard I felt my knuckles crack.
After we had sat at the long table and Aunt Rose served us bowls of matzo ball soup and plates full of brisket, potatoes, broccoli, and farfel with onions, our grandfather took us into his study and gave us each a shiny, brand-new copper penny. To us it was worth a hundred dollars.
From the kitchen we could hear Aunt Rose talking to Lilly while they did the dishes. My mother and Aunt Rose could not begin a conversation without rehashing the stories of my mother’s family in the old country before they’d been decimated by the war. It was a connection they shared strong as the current of a river. My father would be in the bedroom watching the news on Aunt Rose’s portable television.
My mother told us that after her mother died, my grandfather did not allow his wife’s name to be spoken in his presence. He dealt with his grief by routine: Every day he went to work at the bank where he was a bank teller; at night he returned religiously at five-fifteen to have dinner with Aunt Rose and Lilly. On Saturdays he meticulously manicured his lawn and garden.
Aunt Rose was the only person Lilly dared talk to about her mother. I remember catching snippets of their secret conversation. (If my grandfather happened to walk into the room, it was as if a door slammed shut. The room went silent.) One Friday I had crept into the kitchen to tell my mother something, and stopped in the hallway.
“An aneurysm?” Lilly was saying. “But, Aunt Rose, she was so young. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Your mother and I were so close. We were like sisters.” I could make out Aunt Rose, around the corner. She always dressed modestly. Her skirts and blouses were ironed perfectly, her hair braided on the top of her head and held together with one long hairpin. “She had no one in America, except us and your father.
“None of the doctors would confirm it, but what do doctors know anyway?” Aunt Rose finally said. “The aneurysm was caused by what your mother endured in the war. How could it not catch up to her?” She shook her wet hands before wiping them on her apron, then brushed a wisp of salt-and-pepper hair from her face. “Imagine, all those months living in a basement alone, in hiding.”
“What was my mother like?” Lilly asked. “It’s hard to remember.”
“Like you, Lilly,” Aunt Rose answered in her sturdy voice. Her eyes brimmed with tears.
Aunt Rose had never married. My mother told us that she was once engaged to a man who was in the army. They planned to marry when he returned on leave. But years went by, and she never heard from him. Aunt Rose eventually tucked away his photograph, which used to sit on the nightstand by her bed, but when I grew older I could tell, when I went out to visit my aunt and we watched a sad love story on television and her face filled with shadow, that her heart was broken. When it became clear she wasn’t to marry, my grandfather arranged a job for her as a secretary at his bank. After Lilly’s mother died Aunt Rose had devoted her energy, when she wasn’t working, to making a home for my mother and grandfather. Like other immigrants, she lived modestly, never expecting more from the world than enough money for a hot meal on the table and clean clothes for her family. In her presence I always felt like I had room to be myself, because she demanded so little of me. Maybe she expected so little from others because she liked herself.
Dora Rosenberg, my mother’s mother, had endured the invasion of the Nazis in Lithuania. She was the only member of her family to survive. After the war the priest who had kept her in hiding arranged for her to live with a family in Switzerland. Eventually the family orchestrated Dora’s passage to America. She met my grandfather on the boat to America. Their first home was in Hoboken, New Jersey.
I remember, as the Sabbath candles burned low in the dining room, listening to my mother and Aunt Rose talking. I couldn’t take in the reality of the Holocaust. I couldn’t believe that Lilly had lost her mother when she was eight.
When it was time to go home that Sabbath evening, my father turned off the black-and-white television with the bent rabbit ears in Aunt Rose’s bedroom, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and came to collect us from the living room. I was very young, and looking back, it seems impossible that I could remember the details of that evening at Aunt Rose’s house with my father. Perhaps I had fused together the story of how Lilly’s mother had died with one of the only memories I had of my father. But still, the memory of the evening seems so vivid, as if I’d sealed it into my consciousness and willed myself to always remember.
In the winter, snow had often accumulated in the few hours we were at Aunt Rose’s. My father would get in the car, turn on the heat, and then carry each of us from the side door to the car if we had forgotten to wear our boots. Squished in the backseat, our mother yawning in the front, my sisters and I waited while my father cleaned the snow off the windshield. I felt sleepy and dozed against Ruthie’s shoulder. The winter could have lasted all year for all I cared. There was no reason to stay awake or keep alert, no fear or danger. There was no reason to want, or try to hope, or have to pray.
Lilly was nineteen when she married my father. She went from her aunt and father’s grief-ridden house to her husband’s without learning how to pay a bill, iron a shirt, make a pot of soup, tidy a room. After her mother died, she had been treated like a little princess. Everyone, I suppose, tried to make up for the fact that she had lost her mother. Maybe you never recover from a loss like that. Maybe you’re always damaged.
After my father died we lived off the blue Social Security checks Lilly received from the government each month, a small life insurance policy, and occasional handouts from Aunt Rose or Nonie and Papa, my father’s parents.
I know that I had lost my father, but I couldn’t imagine losing my mother. Maybe because my mother was all that I had. After all, even if Lilly forgot about us for an hour, a day, or two, there was always the gentle sound of her voice humming at the sink, her different smells, her footsteps on the wood floor. I had learned to believe the mere physical presence of another person was enough. Sometimes at night after my father died, before I fell asleep, I used to worry that something would happen to my mother to take her away from us.
Lilly’s father had passed away from lung cancer the year before my father’s death. Aunt Rose had boarded up the house in East Cleveland, packed her bags, and moved to California to be with one of her girlhood friends who was recently widowed. With my mother married then and her brother gone, she felt free of her responsibilities. How could she have expected my father to die so suddenly, at the age of thirty?
We all missed Aunt Rose’s Sabbath dinners after she moved. Without them it felt as if a piece of our lives had fallen away. And after Aunt Rose had settled in California, at her age it was too much for her—the Cleveland winters ma
de her arthritis flare up—to pack up again and move back, to help look after Lilly and us girls, when my father died.
My mother must have figured that we’d survive somehow. It didn’t occur to her that it was up to her to put our lives together. She just preferred to drift off into a quiet, godforsaken place where nothing was demanded of her. She favored dreams and wind and sky.
One summer day Lilly was again cutting out things from magazines, laying them on the floor of the living room, as if she were a young girl playing with paper dolls. Again she was re-creating with her cutouts her own wedding scene, when Ruthie and Louise came barreling through the front door and the wind sent my mother’s menagerie flying.
Lilly laid her head in her hand and breathed heavily.
“Look what you’ve done,” she said. “I thought I told you to come through the back door.”
“Why do you cut things all day?” Ruthie asked.
“There’s nothing wrong with using your imagination,” Lilly answered defensively. Her hand reached down for the wedding photo, and she stuck it inside her brassiere. “But you’re right,” Lilly said. “I’m going to have to pull myself together.” She took us in her arms and hugged us, but we hadn’t any idea what she meant.
In that gesture I remembered another hand. A cool, coarse hand placed gently over my forehead. A hand that massaged my temples as I lay under the stars, on his lap, and he pointed to Ursa Minor, through the crown at the roof of the gazebo, not knowing this was what he might be remembered for. It was a touch I carried with me, wore like a second skin.
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