Was it perfect? No. Steven Shapiro left in the middle of the ceremony—and not quietly. He knocked over all the chairs in his row, and he made his mother cry. Eddie’s little boy stuck a finger in the cake before it was cut and messed up the whole bottom layer of icing. Would it have killed Carla Lefkowitz to wear a little makeup and smile a little more for the photographer? Ida should have made sure Albert was in the shade instead of, as usual, insisting on being in the front row and grandmother-of-the-briding all over the place. Josh had to rescue his father right after the kiss before he had heatstroke. I have honestly never seen a face that red. I would have preferred it if Jack Chandler had danced a little less with Debbie Shapiro. The thirty-two-year age difference had people talking, not that Jack cares. But that’s Jack, who claims to be Elizabeth’s godfather even though I have told him that Jews don’t do the godfather thing. If he wants to think he’s her godfather, let him think it; what harm can it do? Then again, what good? If I needed a godfather for my children, I wouldn’t choose Jack Chandler, who probably still can’t balance a checkbook and who still owes me a pair of diamond earrings. I know it was he, not Eulah, who took them. While showing off his disco moves, Brad Perry threw his wife into Bunny Walton, the wife of Josh’s senior partner, and made her spill red wine on her St. John dress.
But those are the bad things. The food was good, I am told, not that I had time to eat anything. I watched Josh and Elizabeth in their father-daughter dance, Josh so stiff and Elizabeth so perfect after years of ballet lessons; there was not a dry eye in the house when he bent to kiss her cheek. She has chosen a good man. Hank loves her, I think, and his family seems sane and stable and kind. Although what does anyone really know of someone else’s family? Still, happy families must exist. It’s just that no one gossips about them. What is there to say?
I would have preferred a Jew. Marriage is hard enough without having to debate whether or not the Messiah has come. But the days of disowning your child for marrying outside of the faith are gone. Did the Jews really marry one another to keep the chosen people pure, because the God of Moses said the world would crash down if we didn’t obey all those commandments, or was it because the goyim wouldn’t have us? It’s always best not to want the things you can’t have. That’s a talent my youngest daughter seems to have perfected. Anyway, we cooked the calf in its mother’s milk, and by that, I mean we had a buttercream cake and beef tenderloin, and look: the tent is still standing. The milk of the cow with its baby. When you think about it, it is cruel. In the small villages that rule emerged from, you can see the peasants guiltily wiping the blood from their plates under the giant-eyed gaze of their life-sustaining cow. Now that cow is far away, and the meat is packaged in plastic and Styrofoam. There is no blood on my hands, no blood on the hands of the caterer who prepared the meal. Everything gets diluted, the milk, the meat, the religion, and the relatives; everything spread into a thin film, almost invisible and powerless.
Out my window, I can see the caterers cleaning. They are gathering glasses still half full of champagne, plates smeared with icing, untouched slices of cake, vases tipped over, flowers crushed into the dirt. I sent people home with centerpieces, with lanterns, with extra dessert, with open bottles of wine that could not be returned; and still there is a colossal waste out there, the extra money to have white linens around the chairs, the stained tablecloths, the silverware that has landed in odd places, behind a bush, the front seat of Josh’s car, the bathroom. They are folding it up and taking it all away. The tent will stay standing until tomorrow, but the band has packed up their microphones, and the colored lights are gone. If—when—Ben gets married, tradition states this job will fall to someone else. Who knows if Katie will get married. In older societies, this marriage would not have been allowed. The youngest would have had to wait for her older siblings to make their choices. Maybe we could have convinced Hank to take Katie too, like Leah and Rachel. Poor Leah, poor Katie, cursed with a prettier, more graceful, and desired younger sister. Katie left before the party ended to go see some kind of concert downtown. I gave her permission. When Josh asked where she was, I told him that she had gone to join friends, and I watched him decide whether to be annoyed, but I stopped him. “She put on the dress and walked down the aisle,” I said. “It was enough. Be happy she has friends.”
I know these three creatures better than I know anyone else in the world, certainly better than I know their father. That is not to say that I know everything about them. I’m thankful that I don’t know exactly what Elizabeth and Hank are doing right now in the hotel that her father and I paid for since the flight to Italy leaves in the morning. The things that only grown-ups do, sex and cheating on taxes, these might remain dark to me, but I know the fundamentals of who they are, those you know in the first five years of life. That Ben was a dreamer, but one who preferred to hitch his star to the dreams of others, I knew that early on. He is a follower, but at least the ones he chooses to follow have lofty aspirations. There is nothing wrong with being an assistant. We all know the names of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, but someone read their speeches and offered comments; someone booked their train tickets. As a mother, I am not sad that he has chosen to stand next to greatness, not pursue it. That person is not the one who receives the bullet.
I also knew that happiness would not be easy for Katie. She was hard to comfort. When I held her close to me, she wanted to look out; when I faced her away, she clawed back to me. She was either born too early or too late. This is not the right age for her, and her spot in the world will be difficult to find. She will have to scrape and drag it into place, but lately she has stopped complaining and started seeking. She reproaches Josh and me. We should not have sent her to Mansfield High, a place of terrible conformity. We should not have given her piano and dance lessons. We should have seen that her fingers slapped the keys and her legs were too strong for an arabesque. She has taken to climbing mountains. She thinks it is our fault we did not know to make her a bed outside under the stars, but I did know. I knew she went to the creek with Emerson, the Labrador retriever we bought for her. For her, when she was nine years old. Ben was busy with the drums, and Elizabeth is not an animal lover, but Katie, Josh and I both knew, needed a dog. She is the one who loves the most, will be hurt the most, will care for us in our old age. Ben will drift away, as boys do. Elizabeth will write checks, bake banana bread, drive us places, but the dirty work, which I hate to think about but know will come, the doctors’ visits, the loss of teeth, the failing eyesight, the bruised skin, and worse indignities, the management of that will fall to Katie, who will do it dutifully if not cheerfully.
As for Elizabeth, she was an easy baby, a beauty from the minute she entered the world, the last one and the only caesarean section. Josh and I have said she chose the C-section because she didn’t want to mess up her hair. All my children were pretty, but Elizabeth was exceptional. She had big unblinking brown eyes, as sweet and gentle as a calf, and a face that seemed wise but was really just placid, accepting. Wherever I went, the synagogue, the grocery store, Ben and Katie’s preschool, people stopped to admire her. She gazed up at them with a serene smile, and no matter who held her—my mother, a complete stranger, the nurse at the doctor’s office—they all said, “Oh, she likes me.” That was Elizabeth’s gift; she didn’t have to nurture it. She was born with it, and I think it will probably take her further than genius or strength or courage, that ability to make someone feel loved and lucky, admired and safe.
My friend Rita once said that your children come to you perfect, and the best you can hope for is not to allow too much damage, from yourself first and foremost, and then from the world. I am not a powerful person; other than my children, I have almost no influence anywhere; but over them—when they were small, not anymore—I had a terrifying dominion. The harsh words I spoke, impatience, preferring one to the other, and the slightest inattention wounded them in ways that can take a lifetime to heal. All parents started as chil
dren, and it takes a combination of arrogance and amnesia to join this endless march of generations, to create offspring who will be totally and utterly dependent on us, on what kindness we can muster, on fleeting scraps of knowledge that have to pass for wisdom. All of us carry the imperfectly healed wounds of our childhood injuries; why then would we choose to try to care for others when we ourselves are still so in need of caring? Why is it that I can conjure up moments of regret so vividly that even twenty years later my stomach turns and I speak the dreaded words out loud or carry on a monologue of undoing, but I can’t recall joy through anything but a thick haze? Ben broke a Waterford Crystal vase at Bunny Walton’s house, and I pulled him into the backyard and called him an idiot. His face shriveled like burning tissue paper, and tears spurted from the corners of his eyes. Bunny Walton was an idiot for leaving a crystal vase on the coffee table when children were invited over, but I was so stupidly scared of her, of her husband, of her beautiful house with white furniture, and of her two sons who were aiming for golf scholarships that I took my shame out on my own child. That moment comes to me at odd times. It wakes me at night or rains down on me from the showerhead, gets served to me in a plastic cup on an airplane flight, my son’s disappearing face, Bunny trying to piece the glass back together instead of waving the whole thing off, the sudden realization of what I had done and the suffocating hug I gave Ben immediately after as if I could squeeze the memory out of him. My mother did the same thing to me, different house, different broken objet d’art (mud, Oriental rug, the Porters’ living room, the sharp knife of the sun through a sliding glass door, and my piercing realization that I could lose my mother’s love). The difference is: my mother never gave it a second thought. Her job was to provide food and shelter, teach manners and respect, give me a little encouragement on the way toward the right husband and a replication of her own life but with a little more luxury, a little more insulation from disaster. My safety was important to her; my happiness, not a big consideration, and if happiness was something I desired, like a beach house or a fur coat, it was my responsibility to obtain it.
From her perspective, I did well. I married a Jewish lawyer, and my education degree was the MRS degree she expected it to be. She herself never went to college, but you didn’t need college to help in the shoe store, and my father prospered, expanding to eight stores in small towns across Alabama. He moved us to Birmingham, the big city compared to Adams-ville, the town of a thousand residents where they were the only Jews, the town he dragged my mother to, away from New York and her family. She grew up poor, but being from New York, she always considered herself more sophisticated, more cultured, more knowledgeable than the Alabamans, even in Birmingham where there were old families of German Jews whose children attended the Ivy Leagues and ran banks and became neurosurgeons. She insisted on taking me to New York to buy my clothes at Bonwit Teller and Gimbels—failing that, to Atlanta where Rich’s and Davison’s at least had the good sense to copy the inventory of the New York stores. She said we had to set the tone for fashion in poor backward Birmingham, and before shoes became the craze they are now, before Imelda Marcos and Manolo Blahnik, she had a closet full of pumps and sparkling sandals, arranged on the floor under the matching dress by color from white to black with brown, beige, baby blue, pink, red, navy, and even lilac in between.
I do not think my parents loved each other, though I never heard them fight. My oldest sister, Jeanine, told me that my father stayed in France for a full year after World War II ended, and when he came home, he was different. She was seven when he left, and she remembered a man who liked to carry her on his shoulders, who took her out on the lake and rowed the boat with strong arms and practically caught the trout bare-handed. Jeanine told us that in the Adamsville store she was a princess and was allowed to clomp around in any pair of shoes she chose, with the salesmen calling her Miss Jeanine and joking with our father about fish stories and baseball games. He got richer after the war, in money, in children, but with each new possession came a loss of hope, of joy, of friendship, like some fairy-tale bargain struck in which the greedy man always gets the raw deal. It was a well-known family secret that he had had a lover in France, that he would have abandoned his family if my uncle Marvin, my mother’s oldest brother, rumored to have ties to the petty Jewish mafia—not Meyer Lansky but Lansky’s seventh cousin twice removed—didn’t finally go over to France and make him come home. From that entrapment grew a successful business. I guess my father figured he had nothing else to do. He stayed late at the store. He never hired an accountant, did the books and inventory himself. If one pair of Mary Janes went missing, he knew about it. Eventually, he had two kinds of stores in Birmingham, your basic family store and a fancy one for women only, which was next to his friend Henry Cohen’s furriery. He and Henry would fly to France to look at shoes and the latest fashions, and do who knows what else. Only as an adult did it occur to me that he could be seeing a lover or maybe something worse, prostitutes. My mother didn’t seem to care. Those were the weeks she took us to the city, and we stayed at the Plaza and visited her sisters and spent my father’s money.
They’re both gone now, now that I have so many questions for them. Did they have other dreams beyond the big house with two maids and the five well-married daughters or was providing for the next generation all they ever allowed themselves to hope for? Who were their parents and grandparents? The past moves away from us, a small boat on a swift river, and my children will forget their grandparents, and their children will not even know them, and my grandparents and great-grandparents might as well never have existed, at least as far as concerns this world where a wedding just took place and an empty tent is standing, devoid of chairs and tables, lights and guests, one loose panel flapping in the soft wind, sheltering only a few flower petals and an empty wine bottle.
My life is supposed to start now. As the old joke goes, the kids have moved away and the dog is dead. Nothing really changes for Josh. He goes to the office, golfs on weekends; the small hours he would have spent engaged with the children can be turned over to other things, mystery novels, bike riding, documentaries on PBS. For me, my life’s work is over. What did the pharaoh do when the pyramids were done? Build a new temple? Women’s lives are ruled by biology. I will not start on another round of children now. I suppose that biology makes sense; we can’t keep having children when we may not be around to care for them. If the pharaoh didn’t finish his temple, the next pharaoh could take over, finish the job, and carve his name into the stone. Temples are infinitely more fungible than children; kings will gladly take possession of someone else’s castle but not his offspring. I look around to see what my other friends are doing—throwing themselves into tennis and golf, shopping, volunteering at the synagogue and the hospital, shopping. These things don’t interest me, but I don’t think I’m smart or passionate enough to do anything deeper with my time. Growing up, I liked to write poetry, but I was an education major in college and thought I would be a teacher at least for a few years before marriage and children.
I never had a career. I got pregnant quickly with Ben, and though now I think that I could have worked, back then everyone with children stayed home. We had help, Eulah when we lived in the old house and then Betty when we moved to this one, but none of us had jobs. And yet we were so busy! We woke, and we dressed the children and walked them to the bus stop. We put away the milk, shook the crumbs from the toaster, sat down and drank coffee, read the newspaper. Betty came and did the laundry, washed and folded, swept and tidied; but I did the grocery shopping, walked the dog, maybe played tennis or went to the hairdresser. Before you knew it, school was out. We waited at the bus stop and walked home with the children, started dinner while they worked on homework. Betty set the table. When they were too small to be left alone, the children piled into my station wagon, and we drove Betty to the bus stop, then I bathed them. Josh came home. We ate dinner. They went to bed. Josh and I might have watched television or read for a whi
le. That was the day. Looking back on it, I feel so spoiled and lazy. How many more things I could have done in those hours—learned French, studied for another degree, grown my own vegetables, even started teaching when the children were in school. Those hours are gone. I am not going to mourn them; they felt full at the time, and even if I look back now and see all the gaps and holes, what does that matter? I must look forward.
I am only fifty-seven years old. I know I am invisible to everyone under thirty. Everyone says ma’am to me now, not just the polite southern-bred valet at the club but the tall coltish girls with foreign accents who seat us at the fancy restaurants we venture to for anniversaries and to celebrate promotions of Josh’s junior partners. There are sundresses that I will never wear, mountains I will never climb. I am not going to sit at a bar and be picked up by a stranger or dance until dawn, arms in the air and laughing the way Elizabeth’s friends did at the wedding, kicking off their shoes, no partners needed, dancing for sheer joy. We missed that, my generation, married before Woodstock, and if we got divorced, as many of us did in the seventies, we looked ridiculous trying to disco dance and snort cocaine when we had been young at a time of A-line skirts and sock hops, gin and tonics, and strict curfews. In New York there were young men and women listening to jazz music and destroying themselves with drugs, but that didn’t reach Alabama for ten years—my mother was right, it took ten years for styles to find their way south, at least in those days when flying on an airplane was still a privilege—among my friends, I was one of the only ones who had ever had such an adventure. We had to marry to have sex, and although we never talked about sex when we were younger and wanted it so badly, some years later my roommates and I, tipsy at our twentieth college reunion, admitted our wonder that anyone got married anymore now that premarital sex was no longer forbidden. It didn’t seem like a good idea to us then, at least not for women. We still subscribed to the old why-buy-the-cow-if-the-milk-is-free theory—and yet, here I am, significantly poorer after my daughter has donned a white dress—white dresses still de rigueur though virginity less so—and promised herself to one man for eternity, and he to her. Maybe love is purer now that sexual gratification is only one part of it. Or maybe no one really knows what love is; we think we have it, then it’s gone, and then it’s back again. It’s shy and slippery, and doesn’t like to stay in one place very long and doesn’t hold up well under a direct gaze.
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