An Abbreviated Life

by Ariel Leve

  From the stage I can see out into the audience. I can see the chair with no one in it. It remains empty throughout the performance. Every time I look out, I am hoping to see my mother.

  When the show is over, I emerge with my classmates from backstage and I am excited to see the group who are there for me. Rita in particular. I give her a hug.

  “Is Mommy here?” I ask.

  Mommy is not there. Rita is careful. She does not tell me this but instead says the auditorium is very crowded and my mother might be there but she hasn’t seen her yet. She has her camera with her, a Nikon that is on a thick strap around her neck and makes her look like a professional photographer. She is taking many photos. She has several albums on a shelf in her apartment filled with photos of me and my life and the moments we shared. In all of these photos I am smiling and laughing. In some of them I have Mickey Mouse ears on. I am missing my two front teeth. She saves these albums so that my father can see them at a later date.

  We head up to the classrooms and I show Rita a globe and point out Bangkok. My mother has been talking about our moving to Bangkok, and I tell Rita about this with excitement. I tell her about this because I believe it to be true.

  It will never happen.

  A teacher comes into the classroom. “Ariel has a phone call,” she says.

  My mother is on the phone. She has called to let me know she is running late, but she is on her way. My grandmother walks with me to the lower school principal’s office and takes the receiver. “Suzy,” she says, “the show is over.” I can tell from her clipped tone of voice that my grandmother is furious at my mother for missing the play.

  We stand at the exit of the school and wait for my mother to arrive. I am with Josie and my grandmother; Rita has to leave. She departs with my uncle. There are clusters of adults gathered out on the sidewalk, hovering around classmates who have been in the show. The crowd thins out and I am still waiting for my mother to show up. When she does, she bounces out of a cab, flustered and making excuses. When I refuse to greet her with a hug and a kiss, she is wounded. The hoops that she jumped through to get there at all are unappreciated.

  SHE LINKS MY arm as we enter the theater on Broadway. She is delighted. “Mary Poppins! Goody! I’m so happy! This is the best present in the whole world.”

  “I’m glad,” I say.

  “And I want you to give me more than just a few hours.”

  I need an out.

  “There’s a chance I might have to meet someone for work,” I say.

  “You’re not going to rush off, are you?”

  “No.” I reassure her I won’t rush off. But afterward, I might have to work.

  This is not acceptable.

  “You can reschedule. Can you spare an afternoon and an evening? Can you be a loving daughter for once and spend a little more than a few minutes with me?” And then, inevitably, “After everything I do for you?”

  I give in. Weary from her persistence, I don’t want the hassle of combat. That I don’t choose to spend time with her is something she could never make sense of. We will spend the afternoon together. “And I don’t want you to make other plans,” she instructs. I can hear the tension in her breathing subside. My resignation is her victory.

  I LOOK AROUND at the audience in the theater for Mary Poppins. It appears we are the only adults who do not have children with us. She is humming the melody of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.”

  Suddenly she begins to limp. “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “How do you think we got these seats?” she replies with a giggle.

  “What if they find out?”

  “What if who finds out?”

  We are being led to our illegitimate seats.

  “No one is going to find out. And I do have a bad knee.”

  She limps down the aisle as we move toward a row very close to the stage.

  “You don’t think it’s wrong?” I ask.

  It’s a question I should have kept to myself. Of course she doesn’t think it’s wrong. She is impressed with her moxie. But now she is displeased that I am not equally impressed. She detects my disapproval. And pounces on it.

  “Where are your street-smarts?” she asks, sounding incredulous. “I am handicapped.” She laughs. “Emotionally handicapped.”

  We have settled into our disabled seating in the orchestra section, the show begins, and she is engaged and full of energy. She sings along to “A Spoonful of Sugar” and leans over frequently to comment at full volume about how she’s in heaven.

  “These songs are genius!” When there is applause at intermission, she stands up and her enthusiasm is uncontained. “Bravo!” she shouts. “Bravo!”

  At the end of the show, she limps to cut the line for the bathroom. Afterward, we are standing in Times Square and there are crowds looking for cabs. I tell her I have to go. “Thank you for spending the day with me,” she says. She is emotional. There are tears in her eyes. “I had the best day ever. Thank you. Where are you going now? Can we go out for coffee?”

  I tell her I can’t, I have to go. “But you promised the whole day and the day isn’t over yet.” I tell her again that I can’t, that I have to go—but she has already begun to fixate on the next time we will see each other. When? When? She can’t let go without a guarantee.

  Just then she spots an empty cab. She lunges in front of a man who has been waiting and her voice is filled with urgency as she explains, “Please, would you mind if I take this cab? I have to go to the hospital—it’s an emergency.”

  Without hesitation, he takes a step back. Once in the backseat, she rolls down the window and cheerfully blows me a kiss. “I love you!” she calls out as the cab pulls away. Through the open window she continues shouting, “I love yoooouuu!”

  I watch the taxi disappear into the Manhattan traffic until it is no longer visible. I stand still as the crowds of tourists pour out of the theaters. For several minutes, maybe more, I don’t move. There is no one I want to call or speak to, and I begin to walk down Broadway. Ten blocks turns into twenty. I keep going until I am able to lift off, holding on to my invisible umbrella, from the feelings of the day. Until I am able to savor the sense of relief and it is no longer heartbreaking.

  37

  I have never seen my mother do the laundry, make a sandwich, or drive a car. I’ve never seen my mother in a hardware store. She has never paid her own bills or taxes. She has never served on jury duty or filled out health insurance forms.

  She was practical in other areas. She was proud of her ability to get what she wanted, never ashamed with the method, and some of the scams—a word she would never use—were brazenly inventive.

  Donald, Josie, my grandmother—they all begged her to use the phone book to look up a number. But she couldn’t. She was too impatient. Instead, she would call 411—information—and have them connect the call for the additional charge. As she was always on the phone, the charges mounted. The bills for 411 inquiries were astronomical. Hundreds of dollars.

  One day, unwilling to pay the bill, she asked to speak to a supervisor at the phone company. She told them the reason she’d used their service so much is because she was blind. The charges were reversed.

  She persuaded people to give her things all the time. Chutzpah won them over. There was a multitude of private lessons. Tap dancing, flying, tennis, in exchange for a promise that went unfulfilled. She was industrious. She bartered—instead of receiving payment for a debt, the florist would get “points” in her latest production.

  She would relay these stories and friends would laugh along with her at her originality. She talked her way out of paying for a mink coat by offering the furrier the chance to have his company name on the program in her musical. The musical never happened.

  Once after she came out of her bedroom wearing an evening gown, she was complimented on the outfit. “All of my chicest clothing comes from the dry cleaner’s mistaken deliveries,” she said, laughing.

  SOME OF HER misdemean
ors were easy to spot. She would take a neighbor’s umbrella or a newspaper from outside the front door of their apartment.

  “But that doesn’t belong to you,” I’d say.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she responds blithely. “I’m just borrowing it. I’ll put it back.”

  She never did.

  When she removed the flowers from the lobby display and brought them up to the apartment, she shrugged when she had to give them back. “Oh, well.” She giggled, handing them over to the doorman. She had an ongoing tab at an Upper East Side restaurant, and when she argued with the owner, after her check bounced, he banned her for life. Eventually, though, she persuaded him to reconsider; she paid off her debt and apologized for the misunderstanding. Her heartfelt defense was endearing. Gliding with the smoothness of an eraser, it wiped away the resentment. Until the next time. And there was always a next time.

  MY MOTHER MADE connections any way she could. We lived near the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, which often had services for show business insiders. Sometimes she would dress in black and attend the memorials of strangers. There, among grieving friends and family, she would extract a phone number of someone in the industry who was a potential investor. Or producer. An important contact. She would and could talk her way into anything.

  A friend of hers recalled, “Your mother could sell cigarettes to someone dying of lung cancer.” She said this to me with admiration.

  AS AN ADULT, I could distinguish her actions as moral transgressions. But as a child, the understanding of right and wrong was murky. I knew lying was wrong, stealing was wrong, and fabricating stories was wrong. Yet when I called her attention to this, I was told I was too serious. If I scolded her, she would scold me back. No bringing up mommy.

  As I grew up, right and wrong became absolute. I needed boundaries; they were sacrosanct. There had to be clarity. Certain lines couldn’t be crossed. There could be no unpredictability. No margin for error.

  38

  I am in seventh grade, and my mother has just called my science teacher a moron. She was defending me. She had been called in for a conference with the headmistress because I had been misbehaving. I wasn’t paying attention. And also, I’d stolen a bladder.

  In the science lab, there was a plastic torso used to teach human anatomy. It was named Henry/Henrietta. The science teacher would remove the organs—the liver, the heart, the peach-colored bladder—and pass them around the room so that we could examine the valves and the ventricles. On one occasion, at the end of class, it was time to reassemble the parts, and the teacher looked irritated. “Where’s the bladder?” he asked. No one moved. A second later the bell rang, we filed out, and it wasn’t until after lunch, in the cafeteria, that I was caught. A classmate reported that I’d hidden it in my book bag.

  Along with two other girls, I was in trouble for this. We had to meet individually with the headmistress—an unfriendly older woman with a bouffant of gray hair. A meeting with her was a serious occasion, and the three of us sat on the hard wooden bench outside her office, nervously awaiting our turn.

  THE MOTHERS OF my two friends had shown up on time for the appointment and were dressed appropriately. I envied that they looked presentable. My mother frequently referred to one of them as a “socialite whore,” and it would enrage her that I didn’t share her point of view. Her contempt for the other woman’s superficial values, designer clothes, and status-conscious conduct had to be validated.

  “What is Irene’s talent?” she would ask. “Screwing rich older men?”

  Maybe she was right. But I didn’t see it that way. I saw Irene as refined. A mommy I would not be embarrassed by.

  It wasn’t until later that I could appreciate my mother’s perspective. When I made up my own mind about what my values were, they did in fact reflect those my mother desired me to have. Not because of the demand, but in spite of it.

  THE HEADMISTRESS SAT behind a large mahogany desk in front of heavily draped windows overlooking East 74th Street. I sat on the couch in her office and waited with the science teacher for my mother to arrive. I hoped that she wouldn’t be coming right from her tennis lesson, wearing her sweatpants, tight perspiration-soaked T-shirt, unshowered. When she showed up, that’s what she had on. Her hair was messy and flattened from sweat; her tennis racket was under her arm. She sat down and I could see she was aggravated. Not with me, but with my teacher. Her attitude was hawkish and her flippancy about my misconduct embarrassed me. She was on my side, but I didn’t want her to be.

  She blew me a kiss and I looked away. I stared at the floor. The meeting began, and as the headmistress explained why I was in trouble, my mother glared at the science teacher, her tongue wedged in the side of her cheek, muttering “uh-huh” curtly and nodding. When he spoke, she could barely contain her indignation.

  “Who are you to say that my daughter is incapable of paying attention? Who are you?” She interrupted him and he smiled uncomfortably.

  “It’s okay,” I said to her, an attempt to defuse the hostility. “I did misbehave.”

  “I don’t blame her for not paying attention,” my mother continued. “I wouldn’t pay attention to you either. You sound like a bourgeois idiot.”

  She went on. “Ariel is a kind and wonderful person who has more to offer than you’ll ever have. How dare you discourage her? Where do you get off insulting other people’s children? How dare you bring me in here and ask me to listen to you insult my daughter?”

  Everyone was silent.

  “No, it’s my fault,” I said softly. But she didn’t hear me. She called him incompetent, and the headmistress looked on, unsure what to do. Then there was a knock on the door. It was the cabdriver. My mother had kept the taxi waiting outside the school and he needed her to pay the fare.

  39

  Mario is painting a wall of the bungalow when he says, “What I see is that you keep questioning as a way for you to find out whether the answer changes to see if the person is lying or not. To find out if you can trust. It’s a test.”

  He is cutting the tree high above me when he says, “It makes you happy if you can demonstrate the inconsistency in others.”

  “Happy is not the right word,” I say.

  The branches fall down, one by one. He is not even visible. His voice comes from behind a curtain of leaves.

  “It’s not enough to give you a simple answer. There has to be another question. Then there has to be another question after that.”

  A LARGE BRANCH tumbles down. I move out of the way. He continues in a calm, laconic manner. I crane my neck back so that I can see him and shield my eyes from the sun with my hand.

  “You’re not programmed to trust,” Mario says. “You’re programmed to doubt. The fact that there is the possibility to trust leaves you in an uncomfortable place that you don’t want to accept. So you keep doubting and you create stress. And when you create stress in the other person, from never being trusted, it will give you what you’re looking for and push them away.”

  He looks at me with a mixture of sadness and patience.

  “You have a roof over your head and people who love you. What more do you want?” he asks.

  I stare at him, unable to respond.

  WHEN MARIO BREAKS an agreement with me or forgets what he said, I am suddenly barefoot and helpless again, standing at my bedroom door at 180, with a feeling of confusion and futility. It triggers a reaction. To him, an overreaction. But I am walking a tightrope high in the air and the rope is fraying. He has changed the parameters of what I can count on. I am no longer forty-five. I am seven years old. I look to him to soothe me, but he can’t. I am responsible for soothing myself. It is no one’s fault now but my own.

  40

  I am waiting for my mother in a Japanese restaurant near my apartment in the Village. I am in my late twenties. I am seated at the table; it is lunchtime. She is late. I look around and wonder: what are all these people doing? They look like people who have plans. People who do t
hings on a Saturday. None of it really matters. Sometimes it can be comforting to think about how nothing matters. It just can’t be thought about for too long.

  My mother walks into the restaurant and my muscles tighten. There are days she can enter a room and it pulsates with her presence. Whoever she talks to will comment on how healthy she looks and how vibrant. Her audacious laugh and dynamic manner will be on display. But today she is not laughing. Today she does not look vibrant. She looks puffy.

  Her psychiatrist had called me as I was walking out the door of my apartment.

  “Just so you know,” he warned, “she’s not doing well. She’s very nervous about the holidays.”

  I’d asked him about hospitalizing her and he said it wouldn’t help. He said that after three days she’d be released; she’d talk her way out of it. “She’s exceptionally shrewd when she needs to be.” He told me she’s alienating everyone and that no one wants anything to do with her.

  FROM MY MOTHER’S vacant expression, I size up her mood: she is in an unstable state and I will have to be careful.

  She approaches the table and I see people whisper comments about her appearance. Her hair is unbrushed.

  She has always overlooked brushing her hair. I would make deals with her before she left the house. She’d be about to walk out the front door and I’d stop her, ask her to wait, and run into her bathroom to get the hairbrush. I’d hand it to her and she’d pass it over her hair absent-mindedly. “That’s not brushed,” I’d say, and make her lean down so I could do it myself. Properly. She’d complain I was making her late, but I didn’t care. I wanted her to be groomed.

  WE ARE HANDED menus.

  “I don’t feel well,” she tells the waiter. “I have a terribly upset stomach.”

  He looks at her sympathetically.

  “I’m nauseous. My stomach has been upset all day.”