by Joni Cole
Later, I learned that “mezuzah,” which means “doorpost” in Hebrew, is a piece of parchment, usually kept in a small decorative case, and inscribed with verses from a Jewish prayer. Jews affix it to the doorframe of their homes to fulfill a Biblical commandment. But what did this have to do with me?
It turns out that my friend was referring to the time I told her that I was half Jewish on my dad’s side, though when I said I was half Jewish, what I really meant was that I liked gefilte fish. Growing up, my family didn’t have any religion, just twice as many holidays and warring sects of recipes—Christmas, strawberry-banana salad; Hanukah, kugel; Easter, ham; Passover, Manischewitz . . . When I was seven, my family moved across the country and away from my Jewish grandparents, so after that we were down to just Christmas and Easter, but those were about presents and chocolate, not religion.
But my friend got me thinking. If Jews weren’t my people, then who were? What ethnic or cultural group did I identify with? The obvious choices didn’t resonate. I’m white, for example, but I never really thought of myself as white so much as pasty, with the kind of lifeless complexion associated with corpses. My people were corpses? I don’t think so.
I’m also American, but unless you leave the country, that’s hardly a distinction. I have been to Canada a few times, and once to Tijuana where I threw up in a hot tub, which strikes me as a particularly American thing to do, but still, I don’t really think of myself in terms of my nationality.
I could just lump myself in with other middle-aged woman, which would mean that a lot of my people are experiencing the change of life, with its accompanying hot flashes, soul searching, and roller coaster of emotions. Frankly, though, between my own crying jags and inability to confront my mortality, I just can’t deal with a bunch of moody women right now, let alone claim them as my own.
After I learned what a mezuzah was, and that Jews had them and I didn’t, I felt jealous and a bit left out. It bothered me, this realization that I couldn’t readily identify my people. So I decided to look around for them. No matter, I told myself, that I didn’t feel an affinity with those big, obvious cultural or demographic groups. I would find other people, people with behaviors and characteristics that evoked in me a true sense of familiarity and kinship.
Shortly thereafter, I was in line at the corner drugstore, waiting to replace my prescription anti-aging face cream. My three cups of morning coffee were wearing off, and the woman in front of me was taking forever, jabbering on to the pharmacist and the teenage cashier about her eighty-four-year-old mother’s high blood pressure and water pills, all the while blocking the register and holding up the line.
“If she takes her pill in the morning, then she don’t get the dizziness,” the woman volunteered, “but if she forgets, or won’t do what the nurses tell her, then her ankles blow up and get all hard and shiny like them rubber doughnuts . . .”
The pharmacist listened patiently, offering a sympathetic comment now and then, while the hapless cashier avoided my glare. Adolescence had not been kind to the girl, I noted, a fact that she tried to disguise by wearing theatrical makeup, dying her long hair jet black, and inserting a metal stud just beneath her lower lip.
The woman in front of me continued on about her mother, “. . . so then we started giving her a pill in a tablespoon of apple butter, but that made her stools turn real soft, and you know those visiting nurses charge extra if she has the diarrhea . . .”
Ugh. I made a display of checking my watch and sighing as loudly as I could. This is exactly why the giant drugstore chains are putting the little corner drugstores out of business, I fumed. The chains know how to design a real pharmacy, with separate pick-up windows and mazes behind the counter to discourage all contact between the pharmacists and the public.
About six centuries later, the woman in front of me zipped her checkbook and other belongings into her fanny pack and left, happy as you please. Meanwhile, thanks to her and her crotchety eighty-four-year-old mother, I’d never be able to eat apple butter again.
At the counter, I must have looked as annoyed as I felt. “Sorry for the wait,” the teenage cashier said quietly. She took my prescription and scurried it over to the pharmacist, clearly eager to get away from me. Something about her anxious manner stirred a flash of foresight. In just a few short years, I realized, this could be my own reserved young daughter, except for the chin stud, of course, which would only happen over my dead body. But that’s when it hit me.
I was the type of person who intimidated cashiers. I was one of those people you see in store lines everywhere, acting all put upon when the old person ahead of them pulls out a clawful of coupons, or when the mom with her kindergartner lets the kid pay with nickels from his own allowance. My God, it occurred to me, my own elderly mother needed water pills, yet this was my behavior. So did this mean that these—these heavy-sighing watch-checkers—were my people?
The weeks following my trip to the pharmacy were filled with equally disturbing insights into the type of person I really was.
I caught myself lying to a fundraiser who was phoning on behalf of the Volunteer Firefighter’s Association, telling him that I wasn’t me and didn’t know when I’d be back. Money’s tight right now, I rationalized, which was true, but then I remembered my prescription anti-aging face cream, which costs ninety dollars a tube, and how careless I am with candles.
I did a load of laundry and knowingly used my favorite “ocean breeze” detergent, even though my husband has claimed repeatedly that it irritates his skin. Who gets irritated by ocean breezes? I thought defensively. But what if I was wrong? What if I really was giving my husband a skin rash?
I grew even more concerned as my list of bad behaviors just kept accruing. When a recently divorced friend poured her heart out to me over the phone, I secretly caught up on emails. I drank milk out of the jug and then put it back in the fridge. And in my heart of hearts, I knew that I really didn’t want Michael Phelps to win that eighth gold medal in the Olympics. Why should he get all the glory? I thought with resentment. Why can’t a bunch of corporate sponsors pay me millions of dollars to swim on TV, which would take a lot more courage than Michael Phelps, given how I look in a bathing suit?
I did, thank goodness, recognize at least one redeeming behavior on my part. In the grocery store parking lot, I returned my shopping cart to the drop-off area, something I never fail to do, even when I’m running late, even when my daughters were babies and stuck in their car seats in the broiling heat. This had to count for something, I thought, but not much, I knew, because I only did it out of paranoia that I was being secretly taped by one of those cable TV news exposés—Tonight on Fox 29: People with bad behavior and no excuses!
With a mixture of sadness and alarm, I confronted the ugly truth. So these were my people: a bunch of liars and sneaks who only act decently in order to placate their personality disorders. No wonder I’d never given them much thought before, I realized. I couldn’t stand a single one of them.
But then I fixed myself a lox and bagel sandwich and cheered up. Because who was to say that I couldn’t change? Who was to say that I couldn’t disassociate myself from all those obnoxious types in my past, and become a better, more patient, less jealous-type person?
At the kitchen table, I took a bite of my sandwich and raised my jug of milk in a gesture of resolve. Here’s to the future, I toasted, imagining all the ways that I would change my behavior starting today, or maybe tomorrow. Here’s to my new people, I thought with a fresh sense hope; people just like me, only different; people just like me, only better.
Almost a Clean Getaway
The news was disturbing, but not entirely unexpected: my mother had fallen into her kitchen sink. As she explained it to me over the phone long distance, she was standing on the sink’s lip, precariously stretched upwards to wipe the dust from the blinds over the window, when . . . well, when the inevitable happened. My mother was, after all, seventy-four at the time, and lacked depth
perception in one eye.
So down she went, somehow ending up with her left knee wedged against the faucet, her bottle of Windex bouncing off the kitchen counter and skittering across the freshly scrubbed linoleum.
My oldest sister—the only one of my four siblings with the maturity to speak the truth to my mother—went over to my mom’s house and told her she needed to hire a housecleaner.
“Bullshit,” my mother answered. She gripped the handle of her favorite Swiffer, using it as a cane-slash-wetmop. “I can clean my own damn house.”
Truer words were never spoken. My mother has always kept an immaculate home. When I was growing up, she Lysoled and Windexed and scrubbed everything—floors, pots and pans, pets. Every morning before going to her job as a first-grade teacher, she vacuumed and dusted and straightened the rooms, refusing to come home to a mess.
And like most clean-freaks and first-grade teachers, my mother expected others, meaning her poor, defenseless children, to abide by her housekeeping rules, as well as finish her sentences. “Shoes off. . .” she’d draw out the last word, similar to how the players gave clues on Password.
“. . . in the house,” I would finish for her, resentfully slipping off my grassy Keds by the front door for the minute or less it took to pee in the powder room, rinse my hands, and make sure there wasn’t any lingering muddy suds on the Ivory soap. Filth was my mom’s nemesis, and I’m not talking porn.
About six weeks after my mother fell into the sink, my husband drove me and our two daughters (ages seven and nine, at the time) to Pennsylvania to visit my mom for the long Easter weekend. Since my father’s stroke a few years earlier, she had lived alone in the same house where I grew up; or rather, she lived with her beloved dogs, Hannah, a small, reddish mutt with a sweet disposition, and Sir Isaac, an insane black Lab. As far back as I can remember, my mother has always owned black dogs and spotless white carpets, her adaptation of the feminist credo—Yes, you can have it all, as long as you’re a maniacal housekeeper.
Almost as soon as we arrived at her house, my mother, still limping from her fall, insisted on pulling up the leg of her jeans to show me her injury, even though I assured her this wasn’t necessary. The entire lower half of her left leg was swollen and dark purple, like an obscenely overgrown eggplant.
“Gross,” I said, but nothing more. Advising my mother to see a doctor—similar to the suggestion that she hire a cleaning woman—would not be prudent. My mother was a modern woman. She watched Judge Judy on the latest iteration of flat-screen TV. She used more profanity than a rap star. She was among the first in her town to be spray-tanned. Nevertheless, she hated doctors, and was convinced that they made things worse.
Despite the unsettling image of my mother’s injured leg, it was nice to be back in my childhood home. The April weather was warm, the crocuses and daffodils in full bloom. My mother had jam-packed the refrigerator with my family’s favorite foods. Beside my bed, she had stacked a selection of new, hardcover books from Costco, the kind of page-turners we both liked to read, though lately her eyesight demanded large print.
As usual, my mother insisted on buying me things.
“But I don’t need to go shopping,” I made a show of resisting.
“Bullcrap,” she responded. “You need new clothes. And get those little girls some presents from me.”
On the Sunday of our visit, the Easter Bunny came! Apparently, Steve and my mother, both early risers, had actually caught a glimpse of him hopping away. The girls ran around the house hunting for Easter eggs while Sir Isaac, contained in his travel cage in the basement, whined and barked in frustration.
“Isaac, Shut up!” my mother yelled. “I’m going to kill that dog.”
“Remember, we don’t say shut up in our house,” I whispered to my seven-year-old daughter. By now, we were standing in the kitchen, inspecting her Easter basket loaded with shiny, foil-wrapped chocolates, speckled robin’s eggs, and jellybeans.
My mother smiled as she peeled hard-boiled eggs for her “famous” potato salad. “I bet the Easter Bunny left you one more surprise,” she said to my daughter. As if on cue, my older girl came into the kitchen carrying a big box with her name marked on it in purple crayon. Inside was a hollow milk chocolate rabbit displayed behind the cellophane window.
“Help me look for my box!” my younger daughter invited. Her excitement brought back memories of my own childhood Easters. If we happened to find a sibling’s big chocolate rabbit, the rule was that we weren’t allowed to move it from its hiding spot, but of course my middle sister, who grew up to be an assistant district attorney and wire tapping specialist in the nation’s number one murder capital, usually found mine first and stole it.
My daughter and I searched for her rabbit in the bathtub, the laundry basket, inside the kitchen cupboards. From there, we moved on to more discreet hiding places, but something was amiss.
Under my mom’s bed, I found, not a chocolate bunny, but a dust bunny, all too familiar in my own house, but here in my mother’s spotless home? I also noticed something sticky—an overlooked spill?—that had hardened next to her bed. Downstairs, in the “formal” living room, the furniture showed a film of dust, and the carpeting—on closer inspection—looked more gray than white, the stair treads worn, with traces of black and reddish fur gathered around the base of the banisters.
“Here it is!” my daughter called excitedly from the dining room. She had found a box with her name on it hidden behind a large Ficus tree in a corner of the room. My mother had had this tree for decades, but I noticed now that the plants’ usually green leaves showed curled, yellowed tips. From lack of watering? I wondered.
Monday morning, it was time for my family to head back to Vermont. Steve loaded the car with our Easter goodies and new purchases and a giant cooler of leftover food. The kids ran around the front yard, while my mom insisted on writing Steve and me a check—if she could ever find her damn checkbook. Already, my mom had filled a bucket of suds and left it on the kitchen floor, in anticipation of cleaning after our departure.
In the front yard, Sir Isaac raced around, even more hyper than usual. The night before, he had eaten an entire bag of jellybeans left on the kitchen counter. Steve and the girls hugged my mom goodbye, while I tried not to show that I was crying. Ever since I moved away from my childhood home over two decades ago, I have cried when saying goodbye to my parents. Yet this time it felt like a deeper, real sadness, rather than just sentimental habit.
My mom and I exchanged a quick hug—we both felt awkward at goodbyes—and I caught a whiff of Lysol on the cuff of her sweatshirt. I got in the car and Steve started to pull out of the driveway, but not before my mom dropped a check for five hundred dollars through my open window and onto my lap. She had filled in the numeric amount and signed it in her shaky script, but left it to me to write in the rest.
“Don’t argue with me,” she cut off my lame protest, limping toward the house as fast as she could. I watched her go, followed by her crazy black dog, and told myself that everything, almost, was as it should be.
Strangers on a Train
Normally, I sleep peacefully through much of the eight-hour train ride from my home in Vermont to my mom’s house in Pennsylvania. I wake from one nap and the scenery is open farmland. Minutes, or maybe hours later, I doze off again to a backdrop of graffiti-scarred warehouses. It’s as if I’m unconsciously absorbing America’s Northeast Corridor in all its splendor and squalor, similar to how I used to go to bed with a dictionary under my pillow in the hopes of improving my vocabulary.
But the last time I took this eight-hour train ride my sleep was fitful at best. The day before my trip, I experienced the worst hangover of my life, either that or a case of food poisoning. I had gone to a Midsummer’s Night dance party under the stars. The food and drink table was poorly illuminated, just a row of Tiki torches to help me stumble my way to the multitude of open bottles of wine.
Around two in the morning as the party was winding
down (or maybe I was the last to leave), I stuffed down a hoagie from the picked-over sandwich tray. My reasoning was that this would offset any effects of the alcohol. Not that I was drunk, I told myself, as I sang my way to where I thought I had left my car.
On the train thirty-six hours later, my right eyeball still throbbed and my stomach continued to spasm, although by now it felt as hollow as a dried gourd. For the first time ever, I was painfully aware of the train’s confined quarters. The air smelled stale, like a close talker with a medical condition was exhaling in my face. A man seated nearby slept with his mouth open; his face bore the dull sheen of gummy bears. The woman next to him scratched her forearm, and I could see the spray of dead skin cells circulating my way. It was as if I had developed super-sensory powers, only these were the kind of super powers you would be given in Hell.
I tried gazing out the window, but instead of the usual soporific effect, the flashing scene-scapes only made my head hurt worse. A phlegmy cough erupted from somewhere behind me. Across the aisle, a woman bulging from her tube top faced me in one of those backwards seats. She tore open a Snickers bar and took a bite. Too late, I averted my eyes. With my new super powers, I could see in my mind’s eye the chocolate nougat (packed with peanuts!) filling the indents of her molars, then mixing with the half-digested contents of her stomach, still identifiable—ugh!—as the Meat Lovers Platter at Denny’s.
All my life I have suffered from a too-vivid imagination. To offset the mental havoc this can cause, I often try to soothe myself through deep breathing. Inhale through the nose. Exhale through the mouth. Today, unfortunately, this tactic was of no use, given that I was trying not to breathe at all. I needed another relaxation technique, something to empty my head of disturbing images and calm my overactive gag reflex.
Halle Berry!
Halle Berry’s face popped into my mind, maybe because she had recently graced the cover of People magazine. Looks-wise, I have always thought she is the most perfect person on the planet. Toffee-colored skin. Silky hair. A dazzling smile with any hint of saliva airbrushed away.