Love Is a Rebellious Bird

by Elayne Klasson

  “I love the dancing in shows, too,” I said. Mrs. Block’s apartment was so tiny, I thought, small like the woman herself. Then I realized that my own place, one floor down, was not much larger. I wondered if after I unpacked, my new home would also feel like a memorial to the past. I was not ready to live only with memories. I still wanted to make new memories. What had I done? What had I consigned myself to? I began to feel claustrophobic. “When did your son die?” I asked, trying to calm myself with social worker questions.

  “It’s a year this month. On the twelfth is his yahrzeit,” she answered and pointed to a little glass filled with wax, a Jewish memorial candle, on a side table.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Cancer,” Mrs. Block said in a lowered voice. “My husband went quickly, a heart attack a few months before Artie. He didn’t have to be there to bury our son. But Artie went slow.” She took a breath. “We watched him suffer a long time. And then, I watched him alone.”

  The apartment was quiet. “You must have been so proud of him,” I finally said, still looking down at the picture. “To be successful like that in New York. It’s quite an accomplishment.”

  “Proud?” Mrs. Block looked at me. She was different than she’d been earlier. She spoke haughtily, as if I was a child, or an unsophisticated rube. “I went to the Tonys every year. The Tonys.” She looked at me to make sure I understood. “We’d shop for my gown together. Artie always wanted me in a bright-colored dress, so if he won, he could see me from the stage. And he always won. You know what it’s like to see your son get awards like that?” She shook her head, lost in her thoughts. “He always dedicated it to me. When he was on the stage, he’d hold the statue up above his head and look right at me. ‘This one’s for you, Ma. Always for you!’ he’d say. Then he’d blow me a kiss, right there in front of all those people. On television, even, everyone saw him blow me a kiss.”

  I imagined it and it was exciting. I loved those award shows. I watched them every year, the Emmys, the Oscars, the Tonys. I’d seen the winners give those speeches of thanks to their mothers, their fathers, their wives and husbands. As Mrs. Block told me about her son, Arthur, I felt almost as if I was meeting a celebrity. I was starstruck.

  “You had all those experiences with him. He gave you so much,” I said.

  “But what does it matter now? I’m alive and he’s in the ground. If you ever saw Artie move, and then how he was at the end, it would break your heart. Artie never walked anywhere. Always leaping and moving. My husband tried to get him to study something else. He was opposed to the dancing. Marcy, his sister, she was the one who went to business school.” Mrs. Block pointed back to the picture of the family at the ocean. “But there was nothing besides dancing for Artie,” Mrs. Block said. Then she added, in a smaller voice, “Maybe food. Dancing and food.”

  “Your son liked to eat?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Block said with a wry smile. “Both of us. He enjoyed food like nobody else. We exchanged recipes. We talked every day about what we were going to eat for dinner that night. He took me to fancy restaurants. And holes in the wall, too. ‘Ma,’ he’d say, ‘you have to try the steamed buns from this place I found in Chinatown. A hole in the wall, but the steamed buns are fluffy, like a cushion. And the sweet bean paste filling. You’ll love them, Ma.’ Only, as you see in the picture, I didn’t dance, so the food went right to my hips. But not Artie, he danced away the calories. Long and graceful. Not a fatso like me.”

  I smiled and nodded. “Yes. I like to eat, also. Way too much.” I reflected on my own lifelong battle with food.

  Mrs. Block went on, “But I buried my baby. A mother is not supposed to outlast her child. You’re a mother?”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I have three.”

  “Then, you understand, of course. Why is he dead, when he was just beginning? Why am I, an old lady, still here?” Her eyes began to fill with tears again.

  “There’s no answer to those questions,” I said. “You know that.”

  “But I can’t eat his food. That I can’t do.”

  “‘His food’?” I asked.

  “Everyone thinks I’m crazy, but when I bring a spoonful to my mouth, I think about the food he loved. I can’t swallow. It doesn’t go down.” Tears began to fall again, but more slowly, not like at the dining table. “At the end, he couldn’t eat a morsel. He was shrunken, skin and bones.”

  I had a glimmer of this woman’s pain. “Today,” I asked, “was there something special about the dinner?”

  She nodded. “The soup,” she said. “When he worked on a new show, he was nervous. I’d make him my chicken soup. It would calm him. Sometimes, when he worked late, I’d come into town and bring him a Tupperware filled with soup. His friends laughed. They said he did his best work when he had my soup waiting for him. They asked if I would make them some.”

  I thought I understood. It was a form of survivor’s guilt, wasn’t it? I remembered when I’d read a book about the Holocaust, about the concentration camps where everyone was starving, I couldn’t bring anything to my mouth. In my mind, I’d see pictures of those living skeletons and gag, then push away my plate. How could I eat? I suppose it was the same for Mrs. Block.

  This was Mrs. Rosen’s table, my new dinner companions. Beautiful Adelle Rosen, who’d probably had her share of losses, and if she did not, then that was loss in itself. Then, Mrs. Saperstein, who’d lost the husband who adored her so much, a man who draped her in jewels. And finally, poor Mrs. Block, who was slowly starving herself to death to avoid eating food her son should be eating. There were no strangers to loss at Mrs. Rosen’s table. Somehow, I would make it a foursome. I’d tell Dolores that one of her worries was solved. I’d be the fourth at meals and I’d listen to their stories. There was little that the friendship of women couldn’t lighten—I’d learned that long ago. When the time came, and I knew it would not be too far off, that these dining companions discovered the truth of why I had come to Loma Alta, I hoped I’d be able to count on them as well.

  I moved to Mrs. Block and sat beside her on the couch. I bent and put my cheek close to hers and inhaled. She smelled good, not stale at all, more like fresh baked bread.

  It would be okay here, I decided. Eventually I would make the others in my life understand why I’d moved to Loma Alta, at the age of seventy-one and still healthy. And if they did not, well, I couldn’t worry about it.

  12

  Need

  The years are compressed. From childhood to old age, the single constant has been you, Elliot. I have known and loved you more years than I did my parents, my two husbands, or even my children. You have been before, during, and after. When I was in the middle of raising my children, it seemed as if there would never be anything else. But actually, the children were a blink; they were young, they needed me, then they grew up and were gone. Of course, there are vivid memories of each of them: Miriam and Evan and Joseph, bathing them and smelling their exquisite baby smell, watching them reach all the landmarks—sitting, walking, their first words. All three kids were precious, each approaching life so differently. There was Miriam with her no-nonsense competence, Evan in his constant thrum of motion and drama, Joseph carefully watching, making sure everyone’s needs were met. There were Halloween costumes, first days of school, trips we took, hours and hours of cooking, then eating meals together around the same bleached oak kitchen table. There was joy and hard work in raising each of the children, and I recognize that it is no small thing to have done it three times—much of it alone. I am proud they’ve gone out into the world, each doing interesting and useful things. Yet I don’t even wonder if they think of me nearly as often as I think of them. Of course they do not. It would be odd if they did. Only now, when I am old, do I have frequent thoughts of my own mother, long gone. I think of her and feel closer to her than I did when I was growing up. We even have imaginary conversations, she and I—the two of us sharing our astonishment at being old. When I
was young, she was an annoyance. Now, in my inner conversations, she’s more of a friend.

  The world is different than when we were growing up back then in Chicago. There are all those gadgets we are supposed to need—those miniature screens that are so difficult to learn and then, just as they’ve been mastered, get replaced by an upgraded version. But these are mere frustrations, not nearly as challenging as the hurdles my own parents faced. I don’t know how they did it—my mother immigrating from a shtetl one couldn’t even find on a map today, coming over on a rough crossing from Europe, and my father, fearfully keeping his life savings in a wrinkled green passbook from the neighborhood bank, always checking his balance, fearful of the next disaster. They came from such uncertainty, from such hard circumstances, yet, in spite of being plucked into a world full of differences, they managed rather gracefully. And your parents, Elliot—the way they had to cope with your mother’s mental illness, yet not having real tools to do it with.

  I’ve been back, through the years, to our old neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. There were family gatherings, weddings and bar mitzvahs and reunions. I don’t imagine you went back as often, Elliot. You had fewer good memories. The Jews are still migrating north, living in new suburbs, the towns created out of what used to be considered farmland. Our generation remains huddled together in these enclaves, just as Jews did in our parents’ and grandparents’ time. Despite horrendously long commutes, they seem comfortable, satisfied. It is surprising how many have married one another. Some got together in high school, others at the University of Illinois, where they met at Jewish sorority and fraternity parties, parties designed to safely connect them to each other, reducing the threat of intermarriage with the non-Jews. There are few divorces among our old friends. Families remain connected, shoulders cozily pressed against shoulders in suburban dining rooms, a room my own mother would have coveted, gathering for Passovers and birthdays and anniversaries. That could have easily been my fate, I think, perhaps not such a bad one. However, something, Elliot, made us go further afield. We weren’t satisfied with what most of our cohort had. We had outsize ambitions, you and I, for achievements and experiences.

  When I finally retired from my long career at Children’s Protective Services, I was still living in that gracious cedar-shingled place in the Oakland Hills, bought when Walt and I married long ago. No matter how flippant I seemed when I eventually sold it, greedily banking my not inconsiderable profits, I left a big part of me in that house. My personality was stamped in every room. I loved each window sash, scuff on the floor, even the drafts that caused me to shiver in summer’s fog. I thought I’d stay there until they carried me out feet first. It wasn’t just the memories; I didn’t need the house for that. But the house itself was a comfort to me. From the master bedroom, as I fell asleep each night, I’d look out at the lights of the Bay Bridge, which is not as much of a media star as the Golden Gate Bridge, but is a solid and utilitarian structure faithfully connecting me and millions of others from the East Bay to San Francisco and beyond. I liked living where I was. The hills rising above the city felt absolutely correct. Oakland is not a pretentious community, like some of the new money towns of Silicon Valley. Despite Gertrude Stein’s denigrating comments, there was most certainly something there. Oakland’s charms had embraced me from the time I moved in. Inside the house, there were soft down-filled sofa and chairs that had taken my shape. All the furniture in the large rooms had been arranged exactly the same way for so long that I could wander through the dark on sleepless nights, holding a cup of tea, my body knowing, without thinking, exactly how to navigate around chairs and tables so I never stubbed my toes or spilled a drop from my cup. I knew every inch of that house and could, even to this day, draw a completely accurate blueprint, each room shaped properly, each object in its place, down to the toothbrush holder on the granite bathroom counter or the order of spices in the wooden spice rack in the pantry. I’d assumed I would remain in this comfortable house for years to come, not foreseeing the events that caused me to leave it. So, it is understandable that when I sold the house and moved into the Loma Alta retirement community, everyone—all of my friends, as well as my three children—was astonished and puzzled. They’d all thought, as I did, that even after I retired, I’d stay in that cedar-shingled house in the hills.

  When I looked ahead to life post-retirement, I assumed there would be projects. What were those projects? I can barely remember what I imagined, for they seem so generic now, not really interesting at all. Like genealogy—a popular hobby that a lot of people develop a passion for when they get older. But after a few halfhearted stabs at genealogy websites, I found I couldn’t get excited about it. Those records from the small villages in Russia, most were burned or destroyed or maybe never kept at all. The Jews were outside of official record keeping, that’s the sense my mother gave me. Even if one went looking for birth or death certificates, what were our names before Ellis Island anyway? Certainly not my Sherman or your Pine. How would I ever find my people? Oh, just thinking about it made me weary, and I never got very far on the Sherman family tree.

  I considered helping foster kids. I thought I might take the training and become a court-appointed advocate for a child needing a voice in the legal system. Kids got shuffled and lost in the maze of hearings and custody arrangements. I was familiar with this maze and certainly I could be helpful. But wasn’t that very much like what I’d been doing for forty years? All that time I’d worked for the county, I’d been advocating for kids. What was the point of retirement, if you did exactly what you’d done in your job, only didn’t receive a paycheck for it?

  I decided to stop worrying about it. After so many years of raising my own children, as well as solving the problems of children in the foster care system, I craved some time that was unstructured. That was what would come first: freedom to read, to pull a chair out to the backyard and turn my face to the sun. I’d just wait a bit, confident that this next phase of life would appear to me in due time. And, of course, that is exactly what happened. My project appeared.

  On my last day at Child Protective Services, the staff threw a big retirement party for me. It was on the patio of a Mexican restaurant near the office, a place we’d been going to ever since I first started working at the dingy county building on Solano. Everyone ate tamales and drank too many margaritas and there were some lovely speeches. Some old-timers even came back for the party, for few people from my era were still working. The younger people, holding glasses with salted rims, stopped by and kept repeating the same question: “Forty years, Judith. My God, how did you do it?” I could only reply that forty years passed by quicker than they could imagine, knowing this must have sounded absurd to the young people. To someone starting out, staying in the same job for forty years seems incomprehensible. I suppose if you’d told me when I was hired at the County that I’d stay there my entire professional life, it would have seemed incomprehensible, too. I don’t know how it got to be forty years, I really don’t. The young social workers seemed not too interested in my memories, so while I drank my own margaritas and ate chips and salsa, I mentioned my upcoming trip to Hawaii. That was something everyone could talk about. Whether they’d been or hoped to go, visiting the Hawaiian Islands seems to be a goal for everyone.

  I did take a retirement trip to Maui and it was, indeed, wonderful. There were luscious hours spent floating in water the same temperature as my own body. How remarkable to stay at the beach as long as I liked, paddling aimlessly in the ocean, then lying on the soft sand, reading for hours, not compelled by someone else’s demands to eat or sleep or be amused. My skin was burnished to a perfect tan (among fatal maladies, I’m sure that skin cancer is not the thing that will get me, and I’ve been lucky about wrinkles, too, so, wisely or not, I refuse moderation in my intake of sun). I felt renewed and returned happy, quite pleased with my calendar’s relative emptiness. But, this was not to last. How could it? I never had the chance to get bored, because soon
after I returned to my cedar-shingled house, with little more than holiday cards to connect us, you phoned. It had been nearly a decade.

  “My goodness, Elliot. Is that really you? How great to hear your voice. It’s been ages.”

  “Has it?” you asked, acting as if it had been eight weeks since we’d spoken, not eight years.

  “It has. What’s new? Where have you and Lillian traveled to lately? I can’t remember where the last card came from.”

  “Lillian’s gone,” you said, no preliminaries or polite chitchat. “She left me.”

  This news caused such pulsing of blood in my head, that I was almost deafened. I took a deep breath and pressed you for details. Where had she gone? You just repeated the same words, she was gone. You spoke slowly, with some difficulty, as if you yourself had not fully absorbed the news.

  It seemed impossible to me that any female would actually leave Elliot Pine. Meredith’s death, of course, was a kind of departure, but an unwilling one. If there had been any other woman who’d ended a relationship with you, I hadn’t heard about her. You, Elliot, the one who was left? I couldn’t imagine it. Why would Lillian go?

  “Where did she go?” I tried again. “What happened?”

  Finally, in a flat voice, you explained that Lillian was moving back to Quebec. Without you. You spoke with so little inflection, it crossed my mind that you might be taking antidepressants. There were too many long pauses and you seemed to be struggling to recall the details, even correcting yourself a few times on the sequence of events. Serotonin uptake re-inhibitors? I was full of questions, but I didn’t push you, just listened. As you told the story, a bit of energy finally seemed to come back into your voice. You said that Lillian’s grown son, a chef, was opening a restaurant in Montreal in a neighborhood that was fast becoming a world-class food capital. Lillian was planning to help her son open this restaurant. Her other children were already in Canada, or planning to return there.