Lili’s tutor had encouraged her to continue creating collages, because they gave her a nonlinear outlet to order her thoughts and perceptions. “Lili’s collages reflect her great gift, a ‘subliminal awareness’ of the people she cares about,” the tutor wrote in her final evaluation letter. I didn’t completely understand the term “subliminal awareness,” but I was so proud of Lili’s “great gift,” particularly after watching her struggle with her schoolwork, that I’d neglected to give props to my mother, who had intuited Lili’s need and filled it. My mother’s scrapbook was the first of dozens Lili completed throughout the years. The memory made me feel like a canoe capsizing in rapids of love and regret.
I stared at the two of them, completely absorbed in the documentary. “You ladies sure know your history,” I said. I waited for another commercial to tell Lili that her grandmother practically ran the history department up at the university.
My mother gazed at the television with a nostalgic smile. “I learned about all this when I typed up a paper on the Treaty of Paris for Norman in college.”
She had to be talking about her brother, because when Neil was in college, she’d been too preoccupied with the Shabbos goy to pay attention to him.
“Who’s Norman?” Lili asked.
“Your grandmother’s brother,” I said.
Lili looked baffled. “Norman? Where is he? Did he die?”
“Shhh, let’s watch this part. I’m a big McKinley fan.” My mother looked at Lili and pointed to the remote. “Will you turn it up, dear? I can’t figure out these buttons.”
Lili turned up the volume and mouthed to me, “Norman?”
I shrugged.
“You sure have a lot of secrets, Grandma,” Lili said through a yawn, but her words chilled me. I couldn’t tell if my mother was engrossed in the show or just hadn’t heard Lili’s comment, but either way, she remained the vault, and none of us, maybe including her, had the key to open the door.
I squeezed Lili’s shoulder, got up and cleared the plates, and pulled the glossy Lakeline brochure from my purse. The photos featured old people visiting with younger versions of themselves, sipping iced tea on a lovely veranda at tables covered by blue and red umbrellas. A young girl I recognized as my former student Nancy Feinberg played checkers with one of the residents. Up until a few minutes ago, I couldn’t imagine Lili casually playing checkers with my mother. I’d been so careful to make sure that my mother could never hurt Lili that I’d thwarted what might have blossomed between them.
Shortly after four, Theresa and Sarah knocked on the back door, carrying an aluminum pan covered in foil and a bouquet of Mylar balloons.
“I can’t believe you two,” I said as I let them into the house.
Theresa put the lasagna down on the kitchen table, and we went into the den. Sarah handed Lili the balloons.
Lili grinned again. “Oh my God, these have designs on them.” She pulled each one toward her and examined it with glee.
Sarah sat down next to her. “You’ve probably outgrown Hello Kitty by now, but we couldn’t help ourselves.”
Theresa walked over to my mother, who was looking on with great interest. “Hello, Mrs. Pupnick, my name is Theresa. I’m your daughter’s assistant teacher.”
“Mom, this is Sarah, my boss and our fearless leader, and Theresa, my partner in crime.”
Sarah piped in. “Your daughter is actually my boss. She runs the place.”
“Well, she certainly is lucky to work with such generous people,” my mom said.
“It’s our pleasure. Barbara is always the first person to organize meals when people need it,” Theresa said.
“Yeah, Mom, I’m a Brisket Lady,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
Everyone looked confused except my mother. She laughed, and I warmed at the notion of our sharing an inside joke.
“So, ladies, please tell me what happened today at school,” I said.
They looked at each other. “You’ve got your hands full, we can talk about it later,” Theresa said.
I knew what they were avoiding. “Ally Cooper?”
They nodded.
“I’ll call her mom tonight.” Ally had been teasing and hitting another little girl. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with Lili and my mother, I would have called Ally’s mother this week as a preemptive strike. I’d observed Ally in the threes, and she was a different kid this year. Something was going on, and I would figure it out. Some people took apart cars or ham radios for a hobby. I liked figuring out the puzzle of a child like Ally.
Theresa looked relieved. “You know your daughter is a genius with kids, and parents too,” she said to my mom.
“Well, she’s been working in a preschool since she was….” My mother paused. “How old were you when you started with Mrs. Kessler?”
My mother’s acknowledgment that we were a family with a real history and real memories filleted me. “Thirteen,” I whispered.
“Well,” Sarah said, slapping her knee, “that makes the rest of us mortals feel a little better!”
“Mom, you’re a rock star,” Lili said.
“Okay, enough of this,” I said, but I didn’t want Theresa and Sarah to leave and take their version of me with them.
We were all in good spirits when Sam came home. Minutes later, Megan and Kara knocked on the back door, their arms filled with flowers and shopping bags.
“Look at all of this,” I said, hugging them. Megan had spent so much time in our house that she felt like a second daughter to me, and Kara, a serviceably pretty girl with a widow’s peak and a perfect pug nose, had pulled Lili through algebra their freshman year. They made a beeline for the den, and Lili tore through the contents of the goody bags: DVDs, cookies, and a host of trashy magazines.
“Can Kara and Megan stay for dinner?” Lili asked.
Sam and I looked at each other. “You sure you’re feeling well enough?” I said.
Lili nodded. She looked high from the Vicodin. What could it hurt? I was also relieved to see her having fun with her old friends.
A few minutes later, Taylor knocked on the back door, and I ignored Lili’s slight shift in demeanor—a new self-consciousness perhaps—because the house was so full and loud and happy.
I heated up Theresa’s lasagna and took out salad fixings from the fridge.
“Looks like we’re having a party,” my mother said as she walked into the kitchen. “Put me to work.”
“Sure, you can give me a hand setting the table,” I said.
She roamed around the island in the center of the room. Since she’d never offered to help me in the kitchen, she didn’t know where I kept anything. I pulled plates from the cupboard and silverware from the drawers and directed her to the napkins in the pantry. While I rinsed black grit from romaine leaves, my eyes began to fill with tears again. Forget the fact that my mother had no place else to go; she was here and she was acting like a normal mother. Remembering the radishes I’d purchased a few days before, I went to the fridge and saw my mother standing at the head of the table, staring at the stacked plates and silverware. Sam came in and set down the extra chair he’d retrieved from the front closet. He walked over to the table. “Let’s start with the plates, June,” he said in the tone he used with Lili when she was frustrated with her math. He picked up a plate and placed it in front of a chair, and she put one down next to it, and they continued setting down plates and utensils until they’d completed the task. He looked boyishly handsome in his red University of Wisconsin T-shirt. The light caught the sun-bleached hairs on his forearms, ropy from playing golf. I’d always thought he looked like a shorter, Jewish version of James Taylor. God, I loved this man.
My mother seemed tired during dinner. The more the girls prattled on about their mean trigonometry teacher, the more she retreated into herself. Her absent stare, the one that had always indicated that she was preparing for flight, rekindled the ugly thoughts I’d had in the tahara room, thoughts that had been flickering
inside me but wouldn’t fully ignite, like a candle wick coated with wax.
“Mom!” Lili snapped me back to the table.
“What, Lil?”
“I asked you to pass the lasagna like four times,” she said. “You and Grandma are like in your own worlds.”
I could feel the spacey look on my face, and worse, a current pulling me away to someplace old and dark. Lili must have felt it too.
“Yeah, like Earth to Mom and Grandma.” Taylor let out a cruel snicker.
I’d heard such cruelty before. Taylor was the kind of girl who teased the fat kids and laughed instead of looking away when someone tripped or left a fly open. There was something broken about her, but not broken in the way that made me want to help piece her back together, as I’d done with some of Lili’s other friends. She was broken in a way that made her mean and dangerous. Megan and Kara looked down at their plates, clearly uncomfortable with Taylor’s display of disrespect and Lili’s giggling at it, as though they’d received confirmation that Lili’s alliances had shifted away from them.
“I’m tired. Thank you for a delicious meal,” my mother said, and got up from the table, her lasagna untouched. I’d forgotten that she disliked mozzarella. She never made lasagna, and she wouldn’t have mixed cheese and beef when we were growing up in the Schines’ shul anyway. It still felt odd to mix the two.
Sam broke the awkwardness. “What do you say we try some of Kara’s famous cookies?”
After dinner, Kara’s mother picked the girls up, and Sam settled Lili into the sofa bed while I looked in on my mother. She was propped up in bed in one of her silk nightgowns, the lace cuffs frayed, the white skin of her chest exposed.
“That friend of Lili’s is trouble, the one with the eyes. Watch her,” she said, and then she turned her attention to her FDR biography. She was still on page one.
With Lili and my mother tucked in, I climbed into my favorite flannel pajamas and joined Sam in the den for a glass of wine. “Give me news from the outside world,” I said.
He grinned with his pre-recession cockiness as he described a referral with a nice-size portfolio. “Doctor a few years younger than us with family money and no clue how to make it grow. We got to talking about his new house, and he wants to come over and see our porch.”
I took a sip of wine, its acidy sweetness fizzling on my tongue. “Sounds promising.”
“How about this weekend? Your mom will be back at Neil’s by then.”
I tensed. I didn’t have the energy to cultivate a new set of business friends, something that had always made me feel important to Sam’s success. I loved that our happy marriage instilled confidence in his potential clients, I loved how we looked reflected in their eyes, and I loved being the wife of a golden boy, but right now I was too tired to trot. “I think I’ll need to catch my breath.”
He grabbed my foot and started massaging it. “You seem to be holding up just fine.”
“Hardly,” I said. He could be so dense sometimes. But then again, how could I blame him for not tuning into my stress? I’d hid behind my cheeriness and made myself into a carbon copy of Rose and all those women who’d called my father’s office to schedule their children’s orthodontist appointments. I’d done it so Lili could have the kind of childhood memories Sam did: summer camp, Hebrew school, tennis lessons at a club whose membership consisted of Reform Jews who danced the Electric Slide at nicely catered bar and bat mitzvahs. But if I wasn’t really a Rose clone, who was I?
“Come on. We’re both exhausted.” He got up and held out his hand.
I took it, but I stayed put. “I’m sleeping down here.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to be able to hear our daughter if she calls out in the middle of the night.”
He crossed the arms I’d been admiring only hours earlier. “I think that’s overkill.”
God, how Rose and I had spoiled this man. “Sam, you’ll have to be patient for a few more days.”
I read once that couples fight over the same one or two things. Sam and I rarely fought, but we’d gone through a rough patch when his persistent optimism blinded him to Lili’s struggles in junior high school. “She’ll be fine, she’ll be fine, just like the colic, it will go away,” he assured me for months, and I believed him at first because that was our arrangement. My resentment grew during the weeks it took me to convince him that we needed help. Funny how quickly you can start resenting a person for the very thing that drew you to him in the first place.
I turned out the light and listened to the tick of Sam’s battery-operated clock in the shape of Bucky Badger. I listened for our neighbor’s dog to bark, as he did for five minutes every night at ten o’clock, and for Lili to moan for more pain medication. But mostly I listened for my mother to wander down our steps. Sure enough, she opened the door to Lili’s room just as the glow-in-the-dark small hand circling Bucky’s tummy hit the number eleven, the designated time when she used to slip out of the house to meet the Shabbos goy. I walked to the back door and waited for her, my heart pounding as wildly as it had the night I caught her in our alley.
The full moon shone through the slats of the blinds, illuminating her hair and the lace of her nightgown. Her eyes must not have adjusted to the dark, because she jumped when she saw me.
“You frightened me, Barbara.”
“Where are you going?”
“I can come and go as I please,” she said defiantly.
I stood in front of the door, the knob digging into the small of my back. “I’m taking care of you, and I’m not having any of your late-night adventures.”
She looked determined and confused, as she had when she was trying to set the dinner table. “Let’s get you back to bed.” I laced my arm through hers and turned her away from the door.
She pulled me back with surprising force. The fit of her bone inside the crease of my arm and the animal desperation in her eyes yanked me back in time, to our tug of war in the mikveh.
We stood with our elbows looped, like we were about to do-si-do, neither of us letting go. I leaned into her and whispered, “I don’t want to be here again.”
“Where?” she whispered back.
“Here. Chasing after you, worrying about you.”
“What are you talking about?” She looked at me coolly.
“The mikveh,” I said, my voice starting to shake. The mikveh was a code for everything: the Shabbos goy, the mists, my complicity in her lies to Mrs. Katz and everyone else.
“You’re being hysterical. I simply came down here for a smoke, for heaven’s sake.”
“Why did you smoke in the mikveh?” How many years had I held this question inside?
“I’m not going to the mikveh. I’m going out to the porch. Your dad doesn’t like the smell of smoke.”
She sounded so convincing that for a second I believed my father was alive and that she had her cigarettes with her, even though she’d quit smoking years ago after she was diagnosed with a heart condition. My father was long dead, there was no pocket in her flimsy gown, and she’d balled up her empty hands.
An intense weariness swept over me. The last thing I wanted to do was to revisit anything about the mikveh, the source of a current that could sweep us both away.
“Mom, no smoking tonight, let’s go back to your room.”
Her arm went limp in mine as I walked her upstairs. When we reached the top, I let her go, remembering how much she hated to be touched when she was in a mood.
I woke at dawn the next morning with a crick in my neck. The anger that had been sparking inside me bloomed into a forest fire, Colorado style, outweighing my embarrassment over using force against a tiny woman with stupid red hair. I downed one of Lili’s Vicodins to take the edge off.
I checked in on Lili, who was sleeping, but I could tell from the messy covers that she’d had a rough night. Sam was still dozing as I showered and put on a fresh pair of jeans and my favorite T-shirt. I felt better in a cute outfit and clean hair a
nd decided that my strategy for surviving today was to keep myself busy and medicated.
Felix had warned us that Lili would be in more pain on the third day after surgery, and he was right. My mother stayed in bed most of the morning and did God knows what. I started to feel guilty around eleven-thirty, so I made her tuna salad the way she liked it, with pickle relish and lots of mayo, and called her to join us for lunch. She showed up in the same outfit she’d worn the day before and greeted us brightly. If she remembered what had happened last night, she wasn’t letting on.
“Here, Mom, I made you tuna salad.” I tried to sound sweet.
Lili despised tuna, so I’d made her a turkey sandwich. I was too wired to eat. Lili took a few bites and then leaned back on the couch. In an hour, she could have another Vicodin. I’d already helped myself to seconds.
“You’re a trouper, Lil. Isn’t she, Mom?” I said, my words slightly slurred.
My mother was absently tearing off tiny pieces of her bread.
“Did you hear what I said, Mom? Isn’t Lili a trouper?”
Her eyes slowly shifted to me.
Washing the Dead Page 13