My mother is happy that I have Bobby, but she wants me to have more than just one friend. I tell her I have friends at school, but I like Bobby best. I don’t want more friends; what I want is a little sister or brother. I ask her if she could please have another baby, but she says what she always says: one of me is enough.
Later, in one of our heart-to-hearts, Grandma tells me that my mother had an operation, and that’s why she can’t have more children, and she feels very bad about it, so I shouldn’t keep asking for a sister or brother. Grandma tells me all about the hospital my mother was in, with a cross of Christ over the bed and all these nuns running around taking care of her.
“When I went to visit your mother,” she says, “I just didn’t look up.” And then she says, “Who knows, maybe Jesus on the cross even helped, because your mother got better and she came home.” Grandma tucks the blankets tight under the mattress, making me feel snug and safe in her bed. “Anyway, who’s to say? Whatever helped, helped. Besides,” Grandma adds, “maybe it wasn’t a shandeh that Christ hung over your mother’s bed, because Christ used to be a Jew, so maybe this time it was okay for your mother to be with the goyim.”
One day, after I have my Mallomars, I go into the bedroom to wake my mother so she can make my braids; this is our routine. She tells me to remind my father that he has a daughter.
“He knows that,” I say.
“Just do as I tell you.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Give me a kiss,” she says.
I don’t like the morning kisses. Mommy smells like cigarettes and smoke, but I give her a quick kiss and run out the door.
When I come home from school, Grandma is in our kitchen. This is very surprising, because Grandma never comes to Metuchen; we always go to Brooklyn. Something isn’t right. She’s wearing my mother’s apron. She doesn’t smile, but she does give me a big hug.
“Where’s Mommy?” I ask. Grandma purses her lips and looks somewhere else.
“She’s in the hospital, but she is going to be okay.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she says, meaning she’s not going to tell me.
“Is she in the hospital with the goyim?” I ask. “No, not this time.”
Grandma pulls something out of the oven and even through the pot holder glove, it burns her. She almost drops the pan onto the stovetop.
“You okay?” I ask. “Where’s Daddy?”
“Where’s your father? You tell me—where’s your father?” Grandma bangs the pan onto the stove. “I don’t know where anything is in this kitchen!” she says, and then turns away from me. I hear her sniffling.
“Are you crying, Grandma?”
“No, sweetheart. I just have a cold.” I can tell she is lying.
My mother comes home the next day, but she doesn’t answer my questions either. Grandma says to just let her be, so I call Bobby and ask her if she wants to go skating in the cul-de-sac. I want Grandma to sleep over so that we can have a heart-to-heart before bed, because I know if we do she will tell me at least enough to make me feel better. But she has to get home to Brooklyn.
It’s like magic. My father starts coming home at night. My mother makes steak and peas. We set the table and eat in the dining room. I look at my mother. My mother looks at my father. My father doesn’t bring the newspaper to the table. My mother asks him about his day. “Okay,” he says. She asks about orders for pocketbooks. “Okay,” is all he answers.
That night after Mom cooks dinner is the first night I have the dream. I am an astronaut walking in space. I am connected to the big spaceship by a long, thick rope. In the spaceship, I float up by the ceiling. I open the door and float out into the dark. I want to see the stars. Suddenly I feel a tug, hear a ripping sound, and the rope has broken. “Momma!” I yell for help. “Grandma!” I yell, but nobody hears me. I tumble and fall and somersault; I’m dizzy; I float. I see the spaceship move farther and farther away. I should never have left the spaceship. Everything is very, very quiet. Everything is very, very black. No one can hear me. No one can see me. I know now I’m going to float out here forever, alone in the dark.
Linda at age 4
outside the frame
There is a black and white photo of my mother and me, taken in front of our apartment building on Avenue H in Brooklyn—a six-story building with white, Greek columns as incongruous as my parents’ marriage. The apartment had two distinguishing features—a step-down living room or step-up dining room, depending upon your perspective, and a railroad El running outside our kitchen window. If the train was going slow, we could see the faces of the people sitting in the cars; if it was going fast, all the dishes in the cupboard rattled. I liked to sit in my highchair and wait for the choo-choo. I liked the whistle. I thought the train was a large toy, but my mother thought it was a noisy pain in the ass. My mother looks pretty in the picture—decked out in a figure-hugging suit with a peplum jacket and platform heels. You can tell by her stride that she is determined to get where she is going. Her eyes face forward. She is gripping the handle of my pram, a beautiful, sleek, black carriage with a large hood and spoke wheels, typical of fine baby carriages in the forties.
I am toddling after her, trying to catch up. A large sunflower bonnet hides my face. My legs are bowed, my feet pigeon-toed, which was how my mother always described my little girl body. I never quite believed that this particular configuration was possible. What the picture suggests is that this deformity was not necessarily congenital, but more likely attributable to the diaper hanging low between my knees. If you look closely at the photograph, you can see the head of a collie pup poking out from under the hood of the pram. The dog’s name is Penny.
Penny, preferring to pee and poop in the comfort of her new home, refused, despite my mother’s cajoling, to step one paw outside the apartment door. Taking me out of the carriage putting the dog in was Tessie’s ingenious solution to getting her out of the house—the next best idea was to get rid of the dog altogether, an outcome that would inevitably come to pass.
Penny was a rescue dog in the metaphorical sense of the word. My mother said she needed a dog like a loch en kup, a hole in the head, but she was desperate to please Gerry, and hoped that his desire for a dog would translate to a desire for her. She was willing to put up with the poop and the pee if her husband would just come home in the evenings. She imagined him sitting in his easy chair, reading the paper, smoking his pipe, and petting the dog.
This picture of what she imagined is not to be found in the family album. My father, after a long day wheeling and dealing in the garment center, preferred to spend his evenings where he knew he would be admired and appreciated—at Longchamps Bar in the lobby of the Empire State Building, where he fielded come-ons from women unable to resist his wink and smile. The only woman my father had trouble managing was Tessie. Hurt and angry that he didn’t come home, she berated him when he did, which drove my father back to the bar. It was a vicious cycle that no dog—or for that matter, no kid—was going to change.
I had an affinity for Penny. She and I were in the same sinking ship. Penny had failed in her mission as I had failed in mine. My mother often told me that I had been conceived to keep my father out of the army. When it turned out he was 4F, I wasn’t needed after all. My mother reinvented my purpose—if she herself wasn’t going to be the draw for my father, then maybe I would. To fulfill this role, it was imperative that I be both charming and beautiful. Making a scrawny, pigeon-toed, bow-legged little kid into a seductive beauty was not easy. The hope was that I’d improve with age, but she had serious doubts, and her anxiety was contagious.
My mother tried desperately to fatten me up, but I resisted. She cooked lamp chops and mashed potatoes for dinner and banana sandwiches for lunch, but I would play with my food and toss the bone to Penny. I wouldn’t poop either. Feeling at the mercy of her machinations, I exercised control wherever I could. Days would go by, and I’d refuse to cooperate.
“I’m throwing up my hands. I’m fed up to here,” she would say, slicing a finger across her neck for emphasis. “What am I going to do with you?”
She phoned her mother for help. My grandmother, a very practical lady, told my mother to calm down and give me some mineral oil. I don’t think it was the mineral oil that made the difference, but simply that I would do anything for my grandma. I loved her like no one else.
The one-bedroom apartment on Avenue H had been an excellent first apartment for the bride and groom, but not so good when the kid came along. My crib was placed at the foot of their bed. Freud would have legitimately argued that the seeds of my neurosis could be traced back to the placement of my crib. It was there that I languished for five years—the plastic baby mattress with the little doll print is indelibly etched in my psyche.
In the mornings, assuming he had come home the night before, my father would rush out the door. I would lie awake, sucking my thumb—legs dangling between the bars like skinny branches off a new tree, waiting for my mother to get up and release me from my pen. Don’t ask me why I didn’t just climb out and go about my business, whatever that may have been. It would have been easy enough, but something told me that my cooperation in the misadventure of my existence was imperative. It took a death-defying stomach virus and my pediatrician, Dr. Maslow, to finally spring me from my cage.
In the Jewish homeopathy of the day, the prescription for diarrhea and vomiting was lox. The logic was that salty lox would induce thirst, causing you to drink and not dehydrate. Unless, that is, you’re fed Nova—the non-salty lox. I don’t know which lox I was forced to eat, but at three in the morning, an emergency phone call was made to Dr. Maslow. He came with two bottles of intravenous fluid, stuck a needle in each dangling leg, and instructed my mother on one side and my father on the other, to hold up the bottles. Then he proceeded to berate them for keeping me caged like an animal. I was too distraught with my medical predicament to appreciate his calling them to task, but less than a year later, it was announced that we were moving to Metuchen, New Jersey.
I did not get the promised bed; I got a Castro Convertible. My mother hoped that a member of her family, preferably her mother, would shlep out from Brooklyn and visit us in God-forsaken New Jersey. She said it was imperative that my bedroom be a guest room-sitting room. The bed went back to the top of my wish list, followed by my desire for a pet—by this time Penny had been donated to the ASPCA where she, as had I, languished in a pen. I made do with a yo-yo that I pulled behind me like something on a leash. While the kid in the Castro commercial was fourteen and able to open the bed with ease, I was six, and every night when I hauled the cushions off the couch and yanked the bed from its casing, I nearly tore my arms out of their sockets. When I complained, my mother asked if I’d rather be back in the crib. This did not seem like a fair choice. In consolation, she bought me the desired Raggedy Andy doll, which sat floppily on the couch—a constant reminder of my cousin Louise’s four-poster. I might add that only once did Grandma come to stay at our house.
Throughout the six years we lived in Metuchen, I harbored sincere concerns that I might go the way of the dog. I was not turning into the beauty Tessie hoped for, and my father had as much interest in playing with me as he’d had in petting the dog. My anxiety rose to a pitch, and I kept tripping over my own two feet.
There is another picture in the album, taken in the cul-de-sac of our garden apartment. I stand leaning against my blue, Schwinn two-wheeler. I am about nine years old. My hair is cut too short, and my bangs are crooked, making my right eye look higher than the left. One leg of my jeans is rolled up, revealing a shin covered in scabs. I am holding a football. Maybe I’d decided that my best chance for longevity in this family rested in trying to be the son my father wished he had had rather than the daughter my mother could have done without.
In sixth grade, against my wishes, she registered me for Mrs. Maple’s dance class at the YMCA. She made me a black, velvet dress with a white, puritan collar and bought me a pair of little white gloves with tiny pearl buttons at the wrist. After the first lesson, I begged my mother for a reprieve. I resented having to sit, hands folded in my lap, legs crossed at the ankle, waiting patiently for a boy to come across the room and select me, bow cordially, and ask me to dance. I complained to my mother that girls should be able to pick their partners too, and, had I been given that option, I would never have been stuck dancing with William, the class jerk. Tessie said that I didn’t know how to act like a lady. I said that was because I was a kid, and I didn’t want to be a lady if that’s how ladies had to act. My attitude failed to improve, and soon the boys stopped asking me to dance. I became a wallflower, which was just fine with me.
When I was in seventh grade, my father’s fortunes went south again, and we left Metuchen and moved to a shabby garden apartment in Floral Park, Queens. I had two friends—sisters Inez and Daphne—whom I looked up to, but couldn’t compete with. They were from Latvia and seemed misplaced in Queens. They were blonde bombshells with big breasts and curvy hips. This was the time of the Marilyn Monroe pin-up—Twiggy had yet to arrive on the scene. Though I was fourteen, puberty seemed to have skipped over me, and the contrast between me and the Latvian sisters was almost more than my mother could bear. Her looks of anticipation changed to glares of accusation. Was I spiting her with my body—holding back now as I had when I was in diapers? In a panic, she took me to her gynecologist. Together they examined me. Why my mother was in the room, let alone between my legs, is beyond me, but together they decided that, although slow, my body was not hopeless, and that sometime soon I would be blessed with the curse.
Shortly thereafter, I ran to my mother with blood on my hands. I expected a big smile and a tight hug, but, in another inexplicable expression of Jewish ritual, I got a slap in the face. When asked why in the world, my mother, not knowing the answer, responded as usual, “Y is a crooked letter,” handed me some Modess pads, and warned me that I better keep my privates private. Tessie expected that when my period came, my resistance would go, and I would embrace young womanhood. I did wear poodle skirts and scream after Elvis, but my favorite outfit was still blue jeans and my father’s white shirt, rolled up at the cuffs. It still seemed to me that boys got the better deal: in gym, boys were given the choice between real sports like football and basketball, while girls chose between square dancing and home economics. I could master the do-si-do or boil eggs. My mother said I’d better learn to boil eggs, because she was getting mighty tired of cooking for a man who doesn’t come home. That didn’t make any sense but I didn’t want to argue.
In my freshman year of high school, the choices improved—girls could now play volleyball or half-court basketball, two dribbles and then shoot. These rules were meant to protect menstruating girls who were assumed to be in a weakened condition—another reason periods were a curse. I was considered tall at the time—five foot seven and still growing. My mother, sure that boys would be unwilling to look up to me, half-seriously suggested that I walk around the house with books on my head to stunt my growth. I refused and decided instead to use my height to my advantage. I tried out for the girls’ basketball team and became the center forward. I have no memory of either of my parents coming to my games.
No sooner had I settled into high school than it was announced that we were moving back to Brooklyn. Devastated to be the new kid on the block once again, I was promised a dog. Candy, the collie with colitis, became a fast friend. She was my pillow in bed every night. Whenever my parents fought, we huddled together for comfort.
As it turned out, the move wasn’t so bad. There were five other teenagers on the street, and four were boys. It was there that I met my new best friend, Phyllis, who was fully into the girl thing and pulled me right in with her. My feminist leanings went into dormancy, and all my energy was directed towards looking attractive and getting boys to like me.
There is a snapshot of me, taken by Phyllis, in the backyard of our new apartme
nt. I am fifteen. I am sitting, posed for the camera on a blanket, in a one-piece, hot-pink bathing suit. My hair is in a flip, and my headband matches the suit. My long legs are crossed at the ankle—back straight as a rod. I have big eyes and small features. Phyllis had the boys from the block drape around me like a lei.
It was around this time that Gerry discovered he had a daughter. He began to come home for dinner. At first my mother was happy—her project of shaping me into a seductive young lady capable of attracting my father had finally come to fruition. However, when she decided to join us on our regular evening walks, she was relegated to bringing up the rear. Her excitement for our newfound affection quickly waned. I, on the other hand, was thrilled with the long-sought-after paternal attention, though it was guilty pleasure. We would walk, and my father would talk about his business problems as if I were a smart adult capable of helping with difficult grownup decisions—I had become his confidante and partner. When my father invited me into the city to meet him at Longchamp’s, my mother objected.
“I thought you wanted me to spend time with her?” he argued. “So now I do, and you object. There is no pleasing you.”
My mother didn’t know what to say. I took the train into Manhattan. My father was a magnet. All the women wanted to be near him, but I was his date for the evening. He introduced me to Marge, with the long neck and red bouffant hair, and Sheila, who worked in his office, and others whose names I don’t remember. He never referred to me as his daughter; I was his young friend Linda. I soon realized that I was there for his enhancement and not my own. I never wanted to believe my mother, but the evidence in the bar was becoming too close to a truth I still wanted to deny. I became increasingly uncomfortable and began to feel sorry for my mother. It was sad to see that she had lost for winning.
The Tell Page 6