“Blue, mameleh? You want it should be a boy but you don’t know it’s a boy?”
Grandma held up little onesies, bibs, booties and soft little hats with cat’s ears and debated the price of each item. The gray-haired lady didn’t seem to mind. When we were done, both she and Grandma looked satisfied—a beautiful yellow layette with one token blue blanket awaited my baby.
Everything was done. The baby’s room was papered. The crib was assembled. The dressing table was in place. I had painted an unfinished rocker shiny white. It would be perfect for nursing.
“Why are you going to nurse? Who nurses in this day and age? Even I didn’t nurse. Take it from your mother, there is no reason. It’s primitive,” my mother said.
“Grandma thinks it’s best for the baby.”
“Grandma is out of date.”
“Dr. Spock thinks it’s best for the baby.”
“It wasn’t enough I had to put up with Emily Post for the wedding? Now I have to put up with Dr. Spock for the baby.”
“It’s not your baby, Ma, it’s my baby.”
“Fine, be that way until you need my help. Then it will be, ‘Ma, can you please come and take the baby,’ and I’ll say, ‘Okay, but leave me your breast.’”
Howard got a job working for my father, who got his job working for his brother-in-law Harry. Uncle Harry was the big boss. Harry wasn’t happy that he had to rescue my father. My father wasn’t happy that he was no longer his own boss and had to work for Harry. Howard wasn’t happy, because working for his father-in-law meant that he couldn’t get his own job, which was the truth. No one was happy, and I wasn’t happy either because by then it was October 22—one month past my due date—and the baby still hadn’t come.
November 8, 1964, my twenty-second birthday. I got through the last week by telling myself that the baby was waiting to give me the best birthday present ever. When midnight came and went, I began to cry. Was it possible I’d never give birth? Howard was sleeping. The living room was dark. I was standing at the window staring down at the street—crying in frustration and deep disappointment. I had decided that the baby had rejected me. He didn’t want to live in Brooklyn around the corner from his grandparents. He didn’t want a father who dreamt of killing his mother. I imagined him retreating to an embryo and then an ovum. I was lost in this grotesque fantasy when my water broke.
The doctor’s on-call service told us to wait until the contractions were ten minutes apart before coming to the hospital.
Howard said, “Let’s go now.”
“They said to wait.”
“I don’t care what they said, let’s go. We’ve already waited six weeks too long. Get in the car. Let’s go.”
I could tell that Howard was frantic as I moaned with each pain. He wanted his job over with. Once he’d delivered me to the hospital, his job would be done. He was ready for the hand off.
Admitting said we were too early and left us sitting in the waiting room until my mother walked in and raised holy hell.
“Why did you call my mother?” I hissed at Howard.
“Because she told me to.”
“I told you not to. That I wanted to do this without her.”
“She’s your mother, Linda; she belongs here.”
When the next contraction came, I let out a groan that was not commensurate with the pain.
Had I known what to expect, I would have rooted for the waiting room. The labor room was a small, rectangular room, with one light and a very small window up near the ceiling. For the next twenty-one hours, I stared at the cracks in the ceiling. A nurse with wide hips and a large Afro gave me an enema and shaved my pubic hair—then settled me in bed, put the railings up, and left. Periodically she would come in, look between my legs, shake her head, and pat my hand, as if, despite my efforts, I still hadn’t passed the entrance exam and, therefore, wasn’t ready for the big test. She assured me that the doctor would come when I was closer to delivery.
“Then I want to see my husband.”
“No one’s allowed in the labor room. Husbands are not allowed in the labor room,” she said.
By the eighteenth hour, a new nurse had come on shift. She took pity and let Howard come up. “Fifteen minutes. That’s it, fifteen minutes.” Howard had to lean against the wall to allow her to pass.
Howard, in an attempt to distract me, told me the husbands in the waiting room had a pool, and the first one to become a father would win the pot.
I screamed through the next contraction, no longer caring about being a disturbance.
“How many pots?” I cried.
“Four,” he whispered.
I’m sorry you’re a loser,” I said
“Your mother wants to come up.”
“Is she in on the pool?”
“No. She’s just pacing and smoking and muttering that you are an ungrateful daughter because you won’t let her up.”
“Tell her I’m sorry, but—” And here another strong contraction came and took the words right out of my mouth. David was born on November 9. He was beautiful. I was elated. Howard was elated. My parents were elated.
“He has red hair. Who has red hair?” said my mother-in-law. “You have brown hair. Howard has blonde hair. Nobody has red hair.”
I had a dream from the time I was a little girl that I would have three children. Having spent my childhood alone in my room pulling a yoyo by its string and saying, “Nice doggy,” I was determined that my baby would not suffer the loneliness of being an only child. I spent the next seven years pregnant or nursing. My second son, Jonathan, was born on March 16, 1967. He had ABO blood incompatibility. That meant that my blood and his blood were incompatible. I’d hoped that just meant his blood and not our personalities, but concerns for his survival trumped any other thoughts. A special doctor was called in, a tall David Niven lookalike with all the pomp. He arrived with six or seven eager young doctors in tow. They circled my bed, smiled wanly, and then pinned all their attention on him. As I lay on the bed, my lip quivering, fearful for my baby and worried that I might be going to a funeral rather than a bris, the doctor announced with absolutely no humility that he was the “font,” and that I was fortunate that he was going to be the doctor taking care of my baby. I didn’t know if he was strutting to give me confidence or if he really walked that way.
“Your baby failed the APGAR test. His bilirubin is going up as we speak. He needs to have his blood exchanged.”
“With what?”
“Donor blood. O positive blood.” He seemed annoyed that he had to state the obvious. “Fortunately, I’m available, and I will do it this afternoon. One cc in and one cc out. It will take several hours, but after the procedure is complete, he will be fine.”
I stared at Howard. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.
“Tell the nurse to bring me my baby. I want to see my baby before they drain his blood.”
The nurse brought Jonathan to me. His skin was the color of saffron. His little body stiffened when I tried to hold him. His legs were taut and his toes splayed. I couldn’t cuddle him. He would have none of it, as if he knew what he was about to face. The nurse took him. She gave me a gentle smile. I knew she understood how frightened I was.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I cried. “I’m sorry we were not compatible. I promise I will make it up to you. You can nurse until you are two or until you go to school. Whatever you want. You sweet little boy.”
That would turn out to be a false promise because, fearful that even my milk was tainted with antibodies, I would not be allowed to nurse at all.
Dr. Font turned out to be a wizard. Within twenty-four hours, Jonathan’s skin turned pink, his hair turned red, he passed the APGAR, and I was allowed to take him home.
“Looks like my Morris, only my Morris doesn’t have red hair,” my mother-in-law said.
On January 13, 1970, my third son, Robert, was born with red hair and blood incompatibility. The treatment protocol had changed since Jonathan’
s birth. They no longer exchanged the baby’s blood. Instead, they put him in an incubator under fluorescent lights. Robert stayed under the lights for eight days. Mothers had to put on sterile gowns and masks. The nurse would wheel the bassinette up to the window, and I would get to see my baby. I was not allowed to touch him. He couldn’t hear me through the glass, so I couldn’t sing to him. For eight days, I pumped my breasts, waiting to get him home, hold him in my arms, and feed him. By then doctors had decided it was safe to nurse, so even my mother stopped complaining that I was breastfeeding. However, my mother-in-law didn’t stop whispering that there must be another man because her son didn’t have red hair. Shortly thereafter Howard grew a beard. It was red. My mother-in-law finally shut up, although I was too busy to care. I was twenty-seven years old, and I had three children under the age of five. I was overworked and certainly underpaid. I’d looked around at some of my friends whose husbands, actively and happily, shared in childcare, and I knew that it wasn’t hair color that defined paternity.
The kids were great little guys. I loved them. I loved the hugs, the smushy kisses, the smell of their little bodies after a bath. I loved watching Sesame Street and reading books together—but it wasn’t enough. It was supposed to be enough, but it wasn’t. There must have been something wrong with me, or it would have been enough. Maybe if I’d liked being a wife? Maybe if I’d liked being Howard’s wife? What if going to the supermarket with two kids in the cart and one holding my hand was fun and not an exercise in courage? What if the fourth dinner of the week was salami and eggs, and it counted as a real dinner instead of a cop-out meal? What if I made a needlepoint that said HOME SWEET HOME over the picture of a house with a little red chimney instead of the one I designed that said FUCK HOUSEWORK in Roman letters over a broken broom? What if I could go to college at night and get a real job, one that paid a salary instead of a clothing allowance? Maybe then I would be a good enough mom. Howard and I fought. We fought all the time. He felt the weight of my disappointment. He knew he wasn’t living up to my expectations, but I don’t think he was living up to his own either.
When the kids got sick, and I couldn’t get out of the house, life became unbearable. One fall each of the kids got chicken pox consecutively. I’d been in the house for three weeks straight. I no longer bothered to get dressed in the morning. I’d been up during the night changing diapers. Giving meds. Begging them not to scratch their scabs. Kissing their foreheads. By the time Sunday came, I was ready for a padded cell or a great escape.
I fed them breakfast. Then I went into the bedroom and put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. A little makeup and lipstick. Came out and announced to Howard that I was going to the movies.
“You’re going out. I worked all week and now I’m supposed to babysit?”
“Babysit? They’re your kids.”
“You’re not going to the movies. Women don’t go alone to the movies.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
I walked out the door. I felt frightened and exhilarated. I was the teenage girl escaping out her bedroom window to meet her date. My date was Dr. Zhivago, Omar Sharif. It was a three hour and twenty-minute film, the longest I could find. I looked around and didn’t see any single women, but I didn’t care. I didn’t need a man to go to a movie. I loved every snowy moment of that film. When I got home, I got big hugs from the kids and silence from Howard. I went into the kitchen, made salami and eggs, and served them with a smile.
had i won at bingo
The church in Brooklyn was not near my mother’s apartment. She had to take two buses to get there. She said she didn’t mind—it was worth it. It was August 1970. It was hot and humid outside, but when I walked into the church, it was cool and cavernous with an unfamiliar smell of incense. I don’t know where the pews had gone, but they had been replaced by long aluminum tables that wound through the hall like metal scales on a silver snake. There might have been a hundred tables in the room and eight or ten times as many chairs, all facing the altar. Perched on the altar was a large glass canister filled with balls. Next to the canister was a microphone. No one was at the microphone.
Earlier, we’d been part of the throng of people gathered on the steps of the church, waiting for the carved wooden doors to open. At exactly 1:00 p.m. the doors majestically parted, and a stampede of women pushed their way in like they were trying to get to the sales tables at S, Kline’s department store. They should have shopped before they came, because mostly they were a sorry lot. They came in housecoats, some with stockings rolled to the ankles. They had unkempt gray hair, held in place by bobby pins. Resignation lined their faces. Other women were oysgeputst, over-dressed, with too much rouge and too-red lips. A few reluctant husbands straggled along behind.
My mother, as always, was dressed appropriately. She wore flowered capri pants, an orange belt tightened over her small potbelly, and a white nylon shirt. Her hair, colored and set each week by Andrea the hairdresser, was neatly combed into a beehive. She had worn wire-rimmed glasses for the twenty-seven years I had known her, but had recently traded them in for a new pair—yellow to match her hair, and shaped like butterfly wings, with rhinestones on the temples.
My mother, at fifty-two, could still be called an attractive woman, but her looks were dictated by her mood. When she was angry, she gritted her teeth, her eyes flashed, and her chin stuck out in defiance. She had a hard look like a tough girl who had grown up in a bad neighborhood. When she was sad, her eyes looked inward, her features disappearing into her face, her determination gone—she became invisible. But my mother also had a lively, fun-loving side. She would listen to Cab Calloway singing “Minnie the Moocher,” dance around the living room, and recount the days she had danced in the marathons.
“Your father and I were hot on the dance floor,” she bragged. “We could do a mean Lindy Hop. He’d throw me over his head and between his legs. We were something….” Her voice would trail off as her face lit up with the memory, and then, as if by a switch, the smile would go dim.
She was twenty-three when she married my father. In their wedding pictures, she looks triumphant. Grandma told me the bridal gown had been rented. “That’s what they used to do back then,” she said.
To Grandma, for whom there was no part of a chicken that couldn’t be eaten, turned into soup, or stuffed into cabbage, the idea of renting, rather than buying a wedding gown made perfect sense.
“What you supposed to do when the wedding is over?” she’d ask. “You should pay good money to storage so they should stick it in a freezer? You should pack it in a trunk with mothballs? You should think that maybe your daughter or future daughter-in-law wants not to be her own self on her wedding day but instead she should walk down the aisle looking like you … Meshugeh, the dress is just for a day—it’s the marriage that’s forever.”
I, on the other hand, was disappointed that the dress was gone. I loved that gown in the photo. I would have worn it when I got married, would have been happy to look like my mother. I wanted to feel as I imagined she felt before the disappointment and the bitterness set in.
Inside the church, my mother warned me of this woman or that, who might steal our seats. These were not assigned seats, but they had been spoken for by repetitive use. My mother had appointed herself to the fifth table from the front and the fifth seat to the center. She insisted that was her lucky seat. She held me by the arm, pulling me behind her, yelling over her shoulder that when we got to the table I should sit on her right-hand side.
I am eight again. She is dragging me across the green courtyard of our garden apartment complex, screaming something about what I did or didn’t do, or what I should or shouldn’t have done. I can’t hear her over my own wails except when she yells at me to shut up or she’d give me something to cry about.
“Just wait till I get you inside,” she warns.
I know I’m in for it. It has happened too many times before—no trial, no defense. Just punishment.
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It seems that I have embarrassed her by not wanting to play with her friend’s daughter. The mother complained to my mother. Her friend’s daughter is an idiot girl who wouldn’t share anything. I hated her. I try to explain to my mother that this is not a girl I should befriend, but she can’t hear me. She is yelling for all the neighbors to hear—they shouldn’t think that she did not have control over her daughter: “You are a mean, selfish ingrate of a child.”
When we make it into the apartment, she throws me down against the steps and, in a frenzy, beats my head, my arms, wherever her hands land. I know that this is no longer about playing with the idiot kid, it is about my father’s never coming home for dinner. I decide that enough is enough. I will myself not to cry. For a moment she hits me harder, and then, as if defeated, her hands drop to her side and the beating stops.
“Do you feel better now?” I ask.
She never hits me again.
There in the bingo church, I wrestled my wrist from her grasp.
“What is the matter with you?” I asked. I was hot and annoyed. “What does it matter where we sit?”
She looked at me as if I didn’t understand. She was right. I didn’t understand this whole bingo thing. I knew she went four, sometimes five times a week. She’d bribed me to go with her, offering to pay for a sitter, buy dinner for my family, and take me to the beauty parlor—anything as long as I’d go with her. But bingo was not my idea of a day off. Taking care of three little kids, to me an afternoon off would have been the opportunity to take a nap without the children at home, or to go grocery shopping without two kids in the cart and one on my hip.
I had finally given in because I was tired of the harangue, and I also wanted to make her happy. I had always wanted to make her happy. There were times I succeeded—once, I recall, when I let her teach me the rumba and then again when I had agreed to go to the high school senior prom with that kid Elliot—the first, learning the rumba, was a gift I cherished, the second was a sacrifice. My mother never went to the senior prom at Thomas Jefferson High School because she, like my father, had quit when she turned sixteen.
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