This was such a horrifying thought that I ran to my room and threw myself on my bed, sobbing. I ignored Mom when she knocked on my door. I ignored her ten minutes later, when she offered to drive me to school. I put my Sweet Baby James album on at full volume to drown her out.
After she left with Jennifer, I walked to school, arriving very late. My red, puffy eyes sufficed as explanation and excuse—the universal alibi of female adolescent angst. The teacher didn’t even mark me late.
That night there was a typed letter on my pillow.
Dear Alice—I regret that I was so bitter and caused you so much anguish this morning. It is not you—but Paul—who angers me. However, I truly do not understand and may therefore be misinterpreting and distorting the situation. But I would rather be of help—than a source of grief . . . Mother
I’m sure she meant it, but she failed. I didn’t understand her. “I regret that I was so bitter and caused you so much anguish.” Yeah, I regretted that, too. What was wrong with her? I was the jilted one, but I got it. Paul went to college and his feelings changed. Out of sight, out of mind. I hated it, but I got it. Stuff like that happened; everybody knew that. She didn’t make sense. I couldn’t trust her. She was a source of grief, whether or not she intended to be. No, I didn’t think she could help me. I didn’t want her help.
“When my leg is lengthened, won’t my shoe lift be too big?” Eliana asks on our way to the shoe store.
“Good point.”
“Won’t we have to make the lift shorter and shorter while my leg is getting longer and longer?”
“I think you’re right.”
Buying shoes for Eliana is a challenge. We can’t buy her any old cheap shoes. They have to be high-quality, supportive shoes, made from a material that Herman the Shoe Lift Guy can work with. Herman will cut off a thin layer from the bottom of the sole and sandwich a customized three-inch lift between the shoe and the bottom of the sole. To further complicate matters, Eliana’s right foot is two sizes smaller than her left. For every pair of shoes she wears, I have to buy two pairs, in two different sizes. Her right foot fits into little kid sizes, and her left foot fits into big-kid sizes. Few shoe styles are made for both little and big kids, so our choices are limited. And expensive. At $50 a pair x 2 pairs + $130 for the shoe lift, each pair of shoes Eliana wears costs $230.
She chooses blue Nikes, red Nikes, and black Mary Janes, for which I purchase six pairs of shoes. Of the twelve new shoes we carry out of the store, six will never be worn. I’ll bring the three smaller-size right shoes to Herman after radiation tomorrow. His shop is a block from NYU Cancer Center, near da corner of Toidy-toid and Toid.
I still climbed the tree in our yard now and then (even though twelfth grade was considered too old to climb trees), to have some privacy, some peace and quiet; and to spy on the neighborhood. One day, I saw the Ramirez kids, Miguel and Rosalia, go in our side door and come out with an armload of food. I didn’t say anything.
Another day, from the tree, I saw Dad and Mom arguing in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could tell that Dad was trying to make light of the argument, as was his habit. He flashed a charming smile at Mom, but his charm wasn’t working today. He tried to hug her, but she pulled away. He looked hurt. He opened his arms to her and made a sweet, imploring face. She wiped tears away. He tried again to hug her. She pushed him away. Her eyes shot daggers at him. She shouted something. She was an irate wife. He hung his head and put his hands in his pockets.
Why was she so angry? What were they saying? It was like watching a silent movie. I imagined the captions to the melodrama playing out in the kitchen.
“You don’t love me anymore.”
“Of course I do!”
“No you don’t. Not since my operation.”
“Louise—”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Was there another woman? Dad with someone else? That would be weird. I was just guessing, playing detective. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know. Maybe she was just angry at him for sailing every weekend and never being home. Whatever the cause, I surmised that she was angry with him and taking it out on me. Her crazy, intense anger at Paul leaving me for another girl was her misplaced anger at Dad. Maybe. I should have been glad that she was arguing with Dad, so she would cut me some slack. No, of course I wasn’t glad that they were fighting. It made me sad. And mad. At Dad—I mean, if he was having an affair, and I didn’t know if he was.
Herman flashes his irresistible smile at me, as he walks slowly from the back of the store, carefully shifting his weight to accommodate his prosthetic leg. He’s in his forties, but his broad face is boyish and cherubic. He lost his leg at age six, when he was hit by a bus in his native Colombia. I think he’s heroic for choosing a career that allows him to help other people to walk. He makes brilliant shoe lifts for Eliana. No one is better than Herman.
“How ya doin’,” he says, giving me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He grabs a stool and sits across from me to study Eliana’s new shoes. He wears his customary white canvas work apron over a plaid button-down shirt, neat blue jeans, and running shoes.
“How’s my baby? You bring pictures?”
I hand him a photo of Eliana at camp, walking Alex the Llama.
“She’s getting so big! This one’s goin’ on my Wall of Fame.”
Herman’s Wall of Fame has photos, letters, and artifacts from his favorite customers, including a seven-foot-tall teenager from Illinois, for whom Herman makes size 20 sneakers; a little boy with a degenerative skin disease, for whom Herman creates soft, nonchafing shoes; a Barnum & Bailey Circus clown with bunions, for whom Herman makes customized clown shoes; and Eliana.
“I want to see pictures, too,” I say, and Herman produces snapshots of the foster babies he and his wife are caring for. I love this guy, for helping my kid and all these other kids, for being incredibly kind.
“What are we doin’ today?”
“Three shoe lifts. Next month, Eliana has that leg-lengthening surgery I told you about.”
“We’ll have to make the lifts shorter while her leg is getting longer.”
“That’s just what Eliana said.”
“Smart girl! That’s my baby. I’ll call you when these are ready.”
I SAW A wild turkey in the Ramble today. It was strolling on a patch of sundrenched grass where a group of orthodox Jewish preschoolers was playing kickball. I’ve never seen a turkey in the park before. He looked conspicuously out of place, big, ungainly, and vulnerable. I didn’t know there were wild turkeys in the park. I asked a park ranger, who said the turkey flew into the park a week ago, and all the rangers are worried about him because he’s alone and will never find a mate unless he flies away.
JULIA HASN’T RESPONDED to my assorted phone calls and e-mails. I finally snag her attention with a jokey e-mail subject, “JULIA, CALL NOW TO COLLECT YOUR PRIZE MONEY!” I happen to be at my computer when her e-mail comes in at one in the morning.
“Everything’s fine, Mom. Sorry I haven’t called. Princeton’s great. I miss you too, and yes, I’m coming home for fall break. Can’t wait to sleep in my own bed. But I won’t be home the whole week, just 2 days. Have to be back Oct 30 for crew practice. I made VARSITY! Can you believe it? Hardly any freshman walk-ons made the cut. Who knew I’d ever be an athlete?”
I grab the phone and call her.
“Hey, Mom, what are you doing up so late?”
“Waiting for your e-mail. Just kidding. What are you doing up so late?”
She laughs. “This isn’t late for me.”
“I knew that.”
“I have a paper due tomorrow.”
Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” plays in the background. I hear her roommate singing along. I picture Julia in her plaid flannel pajamas, sitting cross-legged on the narrow bed in her cozy dorm room, typing her paper, answering e-mails, listening to music, singing with her roommate, talking to me. She’s expert at multitasking.
“I miss you, Julia. It’s good to hear your voice.”
“You, too.”
“I should go to sleep.”
“I have miles to go before I sleep.”
Three weeks before I started college, we moved to a house on the other side of town, in Shore Acres, near the beach. My parents sold our old house on Wilbur Avenue to Charles Raymond, a well-known businessman in town. Charles owned The Record Shop, where Madeline had an after-school job in 1967, selling Joni Mitchell, Rolling Stones, Richie Havens, Simon and Garfunkel, and Joan Baez albums. He was the first black person to live in my old neighborhood. And the first mixed-race family—Charles’s wife was Swedish. Their two young, beautiful children had light brown skin and kinky, golden hair.
There was ugly racial hostility toward the Raymonds in our blue-collar neighborhood. I heard through the grapevine that the neighbors had circulated a petition to keep them out.
The banks had rejected the Raymonds’ loan application, even though Charles was a long-established local businessman. When my parents guaranteed the loan, the banks had no more excuse to reject him.
I was proud of my parents for helping Charles, especially after my mother’s years of civil rights campaigning in our narrow-minded neighborhood. But I was worried about their kids—if the neighbors dumped garbage in our yard and slashed our bike tires for being Jewish, what indignities would they concoct for the Raymonds? On the other hand, the Raymonds kept their lawn tidily mowed.
I was surprised that my parents could afford to move to Shore Acres. I was having an identity crisis. What social class did we belong to, now that my parents were moving to a more affluent neighborhood, with other Jewish families around? I felt betrayed, and like a betrayer. Fitting in here made me feel alienated in a brand-new way. It was a simple ranch house, nothing fancy, but I had to admit it was nice to be able to walk to the beach, from an address that gave us beach privileges. (It was a guilty pleasure: I remembered Mom leading us on a low-tide trek across the beach in Martha’s Vineyard, to fight for public waterfront access.)
Mom wasn’t so angry anymore. She was happy about moving. And I think she was happy about me leaving home, even though we weren’t fighting now—a tentative truce. She said she was proud of me.
“You’ll love college, I just know it. Keep making art. Study what you’re passionate about, that’s paramount,” she told me at breakfast in the new dining room (our old house didn’t have a dining room), with a picture window overlooking a gently sloping, neatly mowed lawn.
“But don’t forget that you’ll need to make a living when you graduate,” added my dad, enthusiastically slicing strawberries and peaches on his cornflakes and digging in with gusto.
My parents were still tense with each other. But Mom looked healthier, and she liked her new job, leading a seminar for nurses at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
“The nurses in my seminar are angry and frustrated because they have no power,” she told me, Jennifer, and Dad as she served dinner. While she continued her lecture, we feasted on peak-season corn on the cob, juicy beefsteak tomatoes, and velvety bib lettuce that Mom had bought at the local farm stand—she had an uncanny ability to choose perfect fruits and vegetables. “Doctors give their nurses huge responsibilities, but no respect. When a doctor makes a mistake, the nurse is often the one who saves the patient’s life, but doctors resent the nurses who correct them. They’re either ignored or punished for insubordination. And of course there’s the disparity in pay. All these unwritten covenants of discrimination, the conspiracy of silent acceptance. The exciting thing is that, finally, these nurses aren’t accepting the silence anymore. They insist on being heard.”
After dinner, Jennifer and I cleaned up, Dad practiced a Beethoven piano sonata, and Mom went into her study. She had the same old-fashioned typewriter, but she no longer had to type at the kitchen table. She finally had a room of her own.
When the dishes were done, I quietly entered Mom’s study, a serene room overlooking a tidal marsh, habitat to a large variety of birds, which of course she loved. Redwing blackbirds flitted between cattails, a white egret moved in slow motion toward its prey, a great blue heron soared over the tall reeds, showing off his impressive wingspan.
She was still working on her sociology dissertation for Columbia University, trying to get her PhD so she could advance from her low-paid, underappreciated adjunct professor status: she was teaching a smattering of courses at City University, Pace College, and Columbia Teachers College, as well as the nursing seminar. I surmised that the nurses might be the topic of her doctoral dissertation. She typed and typed, tearing out pages, sorting them into mountains—rough drafts, edited drafts, carbon copies, rejects. Now that she had her own desk, she could spread out and make a mess. The precarious mountains of paper resembled volcanoes, loose pages cascading like lava down the slopes. Her fingers flew over the keys, trying to keep up with her ideas, but her ideas came faster. Her right hand reflexively hit the return at the end of every line, then pulled the finished page from the typewriter with a ratcheting sound.
“Mom—”
“Yes, Alice?”
“I’m . . . I think I’m going to miss you. When I’m at college.”
She stopped typing and looked at me, surprised, as if she had just heard the word college for the first time, as if my going to college were an entirely new concept. “I think I’m going to miss you, too, Sweetheart.”
FOUR
Flipping through magazines in the waiting room, I come across an article about the increased risk of breast cancer for women who took Hormone Replacement Therapy. Blah! I was on HRT for fourteen years. And that’s just the latest chapter of my epic hormonal odyssey. I could write a book. My life, seen through estrogen-colored glasses:
PHARMACEUTICAL PHRANKENSTEIN MONSTER MASHUP
A memoir
by Alice Eve Cohen
Chapter 1: ITSY BITSY BABY (PART ONE)
Once upon a time, long, long ago (c. 1954), when I was but a wee little zygote, I was exposed to DES, the antimiscarriage drug my mother took when she became pregnant with me, after three miscarriages.
In the baby-booming fifties, the synthetic estrogen DES (diethylstibestrol) was routinely prescribed by doctors as the “pregnancy vitamin,” the silver bullet that would prevent miscarriage and ensure healthy, booming babies. Eli Lilly and the other drug companies soon discovered that DES was: (1) completely ineffective in preventing miscarriage, and (2) carcinogenic. But they hid the damning evidence and continued to promote the drug for two more decades, while DES wreaked havoc, causing birth defects, cancers in the reproductive organs, infertility, and increased risk of breast cancer—both in the mothers who took the drug (Exhibit A: Mom) and in their daughters (Exhibit B: me).
CHAPTER 2: BABY BOOMER ACTIVIST
When I was thirty, I joined a class-action lawsuit, which collectively attempted to sue Eli Lilly’s ass (Lilly only experienced a small pinch.) I collected a small out-of-court settlement for my infertility. I wrote a play about DES. My cervix became world-famous—videotaped for medical students, because my weird cells illustrated the classic DES abnormalities.
CHAPTER 3: THE INFERTILE ERA
From age thirty to forty-four, I was prescribed HRT to treat low estrogen, which, as it turned out, I didn’t need. (Exhibit C: my unexpected pregnancy with Eliana, fourteen years after being told that my estrogen was so low I could never, ever, ever, ever, EVER become pregnant.)
CHAPTER 4: ITSY BITSY BABY (PART TWO)
Once upon a time, long, long ago (c. 1999), when Eliana was but a wee zygote, she was exposed to the synthetic hormones I was taking, and continued to take for the first two trimesters.
Does this sound familiar?
Is this some kind of a family curse? Family legacy? Family joke?
Life-long exposure to synthetic hormones may have caused my breast cancer.
My mother’s breast cancer may have been caused by DES.
These strange symmetries
lead to strange asymmetries.
When my radiation treatment is over, I’ll take an estrogen-blocker for five years, which is ironic, if not funny, if not hysterical—from the Greek, hustera, which means “womb,” which is etymologically ironic.
After a lifetime of being pumped with estrogen drugs, my natural estrogen is going to be blocked for the next five years with yet another synthetic estrogen. I am a magnet for medical ironies.
This makes me really mad. If I get any madder, I’ll become a madwoman. I might become completely husterical. I bet I’m the only woman in history (hystery) to have sued for both infertility and fertility.
OH, GOD, HOW I wish I hadn’t inadvertently drugged and dragged Eliana into this, before she was born.
Oh, God, how my mother wished she hadn’t inadvertently drugged and dragged me into this, before I was born.
Oh, God, how I wish my multigenerational maternal legacy didn’t have such painful symmetries.
Oh, God, how I wish Eliana didn’t have such painful asymmetry.
FIVE
In the Ramble this morning, I saw a red-tailed hawk capture and eat a squirrel. He sat in a tree, pinning the live squirrel to the branch with his talon, using his sharp beak to rip morsels of flesh from the dying animal, without apology or self-consciousness. Forever wild. This is the real thing, not an imitation of nature.
But the wild turkey is confused. He doesn’t know his place in the natural world. He thinks he’s a dog. He follows people in the Ramble, as if he were a pet. He prefers to follow men who are walking dogs. He stops when they stop, and sits tall, neck extended, facing straight ahead, imitating the dog. When dog and master start walking again, the turkey walks alongside them.
“WHEN IS JULIA coming home?” Eliana asks at breakfast.
“Tuesday—”
“Yay!”
“For two days.”
“Aw, that’s such a short time.”
“I know.”
I wonder what it will be like having Julia back home. We’ve acclimated to being a family of three. She’s just across the river, but it seems like she’s so far away. I wonder if she’s been in touch with her birth mother. And if so, what’s that like? Is their relationship like a mother and daughter? Does it change how Julia sees me? I’d like to talk to Zoe, too, but I’m not sure Julia would want me to. What’s the etiquette here? I’ve always wanted to see Zoe again. I was at the birth, I was with her during labor, I just about fell in love with her. But that’s not the point. This is about Julia getting to know her birth mother. Another mother. A second mother, who was her original mother. Can we have too many mothers?
The Year My Mother Came Back Page 9