“Well, you’re not fourteen anymore.”
“Stop! You have to stop,” I cried. “You have to let him go.”
“Over my dead body,” she said.
“All right, then. Over your dead body,” I yelled back. “You can’t keep doing this.”
“Fine,” she said. “You want me to stop? I’ll stop.”
“I’ll stop,” she repeated, her voice gone cold. “Goodbye, Linda.”
Amazingly, the phone didn’t ring again until five o’clock that evening.
“How was your nap?” I asked.
“There’s five hundred dollars bingo money in the sugar bowl under the sink for you. I won the jackpot,” she mumbled.
I knew immediately what she was up to. I panicked. What to do? Keep her talking on the phone and try and get her to help herself, or hang up and call the police?
“Ma. Don’t. Please. I’m begging you.”
She said nothing.
“Ma? Ma?” I cried into the phone. I could hear her breathing, but she wouldn’t speak.
I whispered goodbye, hung up, and called the police.
“My mother’s killing herself,” I cried. The baby was on my hip. He kept wriggling and trying to grab the phone. I could hear my other two boys playing in their room.
“How do you know she’s committing suicide?”
“Because I know, damn it. Believe me. She’s tried it before. She’s doing it again.” My voice was shrill. These idiots, I thought. My mother is dying and they want proof. Her body will be proof if they don’t get over there.
“We can’t go into the apartment unless you’re there,” said the dispatcher.
“What? I have three little kids. I can’t—”
“Then we can’t.”
“All right. All right,” I gave in. “It will take me about twenty minutes. I’ll meet you there.”
I hung up, frantic. What to do with the kids? I couldn’t take them with me. I imagined them seeing a hanging Nana, a bleeding Nana, a screaming Nana, or an open window and no Nana. There was no time and no point in calling Howard—he was at work in Manhattan and not due home for another hour. I called my best friend, Susan, who lived nearby. Just as she arrived, the landlady came home. I left the kids with her, and Susan and I rushed to the car. It was cold and raining. Shivering, I realized that I’d forgotten to put on a coat.
My mother must have called her brother Seymour, because when Susan and I arrived at the apartment, a neighbor said that he and the police were already inside. Later, I would learn that there were so many bolts on the door, the police had to enter through the terrace—another twenty minutes wasted.
I banged on the apartment door and Seymour answered, looking like a crazy man.
“Stay out here,” he said, and slammed the door.
I was left standing in the hall like a stranger. It was dinnertime. The neighbors, unwilling to let their food get cold, brought their plates with them into the hallway so they could continue eating while they watched real drama instead of the television news. Their faces swam before me, distorted, like images in a funhouse mirror. I closed my eyes to make them disappear.
It took forever for Aunt Dorothy, Seymour’s wife to open the door.
“You can come in,” she said “but you’re not to go into the bedroom. I can’t let you in the bedroom.”
“She’s my mother. I want to see her.” I began to push through.
“You can’t. Please Linda. Just sit … please, just sit.”
Bewildered, I gave in and sat on the couch. Susan held my hand. I heard activity—muffled voices coming from the bedroom. A policeman came out.
“I’m her daughter,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a doctor in there with her,” was all he said.
All right, I thought. She’s alive. There’s a doctor in there with her. We got here in time. She’s going to be okay.
I tried to collect myself while I waited. I looked around the apartment. After twenty-eight years of living in near-empty rooms, my mother finally had an apartment with furniture. She had decorated it like a 1940s movie set with white carpeting, a gold couch, and glass curio cabinets. There were matching, hand-painted vases in each of the cabinets, which my mother had assured me were worth a lot of money.
“They’ll be yours someday,” she had said. “Along with the ring.”
“The ring” was one my father had given her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It was one of the years he was in the money, and she somehow managed to cajole him into this extravagant purchase—proof positive that he loved her, she told me. I thought it was more a measure of guilt than love. The ring looked like a diamond tiara. I told her it was beautiful, but I knew I would never wear it.
Seymour came out of the bedroom, vomit stains all over his shirt.
“Where’s your fucking father?” he screamed. “I’m going to kill him.”
From far away, I heard a deep guttural sound.
“Nooooooooo,” I moaned.
We sat shiva for my mother at Seymour’s house. The rabbi gave the immediate family hard wooden benches to sit on. According to Jewish ritual, mourners are not supposed to relax into the comfort of soft chairs. I thought, given the circumstances of my mother’s demise, we should have been given a soft chair dispensation, but no one was asking my opinion. My father, a.k.a. “the murderer,” was condemned to a far corner of the living room. In a declaration of allegiance, I moved my bench next to his, but that’s it, that’s all I remember of the shiva. I don’t know who came to pay their respects or what they said when they got there. For five days, it all swirled around me—I existed in that soundless space between the explosion and the scream.
After the shiva, I went back home and tried to resume my normal routine. I dusted the furniture, picked up the kids’ toys, and defrosted the chopped meat, but I was haunted. Every Friday evening at five o’clock, the time of her last phone call, I would reimagine her last day, December 18. Getting up. Brushing her teeth. Taking her vitamins. Would she have taken her vitamins? With calm, deliberate motions, I see her pouring a cup of coffee. Sitting down at the dining room table. Lighting a cigarette. The pills, like small vials of colored candy, are lined up in front of her. She opens a bottle and pours them into her hand. I’m horrified, but I’m also aware I don’t try to stop her.
She swallowed dozens. Who knows how long she’d been hoarding them?
She’d left suicide notes on little white squares of paper, taped to the kitchen counter.
Mine said: YOU HAVE HOWARD. GRANDMA HAS SAM. I HAVE NO ONE.
My father’s note said: I LOVE YOU. BE HAPPY.
The day after she died, friends and relatives rushed to her apartment and picked their notes off the counter, like place cards at a bar mitzvah.
I did not cry at my mother’s funeral. I convinced myself that someone else was in the coffin, a distant relative, a peripheral acquaintance, someone who had been very sick for a long time, and wasn’t it a relief that she was finally out of her misery? I sat in the pew, looked up at the stained-glass window, and thought of nothing. No tears. No expression. Numb like a corpse. You have a cold heart, said a familiar voice inside my head.
My mother-in-law came over to me in the vestibule of the funeral home.
“Linda, don’t worry,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I’ve told everyone that your mother had a heart attack.”
“Well, then you’re going to look like a liar,” I said, “because I intend to tell everyone the truth.”
She looked at me as if I were crazy. I didn’t care. I’d had it with secrets.
My mother had fiercely warned me from as far back as I could remember, that whatever went on inside the house was to stay inside the house. I was to pretend we had a happy home. I went through childhood terrified, never quite sure what I should or shouldn’t say.
Well now the word was out, and she’d given the family’s secrets away, not me. I was finally free to speak the truth
to anyone who asked. If they didn’t ask, I found a way to slip it into the conversation.
“Oh, how old is Eric now? Really? Four already? Geez, time goes fast. Did you know that my mother killed herself?”
Or “Sally, I saw Norman the other day; did he tell you that my mother killed herself?”
I was particularly excited to run into someone I didn’t know so I could tell it fresh.
“So nice to meet you. You may have heard that my mother killed herself.”
“Oh, my God,” they would mutter. “I’m so sorry. How awful for you.”
The brazen would ask for details: “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but how did she do it?”
“Pills,” I’d answer.
“What a shock! Who found her? Did you find her?”
I didn’t mind them asking. The more they wanted to know, the more I could go over it. I didn’t have to embellish the story, because it was gruesome in its own right. Their shock reflected my own. There was something in the telling and retelling that helped make it real.
A month after the funeral, Howard and I went to the movies to see I Never Sang for My Father, the story of a man whose mother dies, leaving him to care for a father he hated. The film opened with black letters on a white screen that read, DEATH ENDS A LIFE. BUT IT DOES NOT END A RELATIONSHIP, WHICH STRUGGLES ON IN THE SURVIVOR’S MIND, TOWARD SOME RESOLUTION, WHICH IT MAY NEVER FIND.
Oh my God, I thought, I’m condemned. It will never be over. She will haunt me till the day I die. I will never find peace.
The movie ended, the dam broke, and I began to sob. I couldn’t get out of my seat. Howard was embarrassed.
“Shush,” he said. “People are looking at you like you’re crazy.”
“Crazy? I’m not crazy. My mother was crazy. I’m not my mother,” I sobbed. “I am not my mother,” I pleaded.
“Let’s just go,” he said.
On December 18, 1971, at five o’clock—one year to the hour of her last phone call—I went to the kitchen, and stood before the yahrzeit memorial candle. The kids were with Howard. I had the house to myself. I recited the mourners’ Kaddish: “Yit’gadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba.” I didn’t understand the words, but I understood that if the purpose of the Kaddish was to honor her life and ease her way out of purgatory into heaven then I took issue with the Jewish law that denies mourning rites for suicides. I imagined the vast beyond to be impossible to navigate, even given a proper death. I lit the candle, finished the prayer, and began to talk to her as if she could hear me. I wanted her to know that by changing my life, I’d hoped to give meaning to her death.
“I’ve been busy since you left. It’s only been a year, but I’ve moved to New Jersey, started college, and separated from Howard. The kids and I are on our own now, Ma, and it’s good. It’s good to be free.”
What I didn’t say was how stupid I thought it was to kill herself over a man, and how angry I was that she left me.
I moved the candle to the corner of the counter, and shut the light. These candles were ensconced in thick glass, protecting the flame from going out during the twenty-four hours of remembrance.
Around two in the morning, I awoke, flooded with memories of our last phone call. Once again, I questioned my decision to get off the line and call the police. What if I’d stayed on the phone? Could I have talked her out of it? How many pills had she taken before she called? Was it enough to kill her? Did she know at that time that the deed was done?
I felt an urgent need to go downstairs and look at the candle. The house was cold. I was naked. When I got to the kitchen, I was relieved to see the candle still burning, but as I stood there, staring, it flickered and died.
There was no draft in the room. No open window. No explanation.
Just another way to say goodbye.
feng shui in the shtetl
Feng (wind) shui (water) is a Chinese system that uses the laws of heaven and earth to help one improve life in order to achieve harmony and positive qi, energy. You probably know that there is good qi and bad qi. Of course, everybody wants to have good qi. Bad qi is toxic, like a bad smell. Nobody wants to be around people with bad qi. You use feng shui to arrange your spaces so that you and your house will give off good qi. Here are a few feng shui rules: declutter your house, make sure you have good quality air and light, find out your birth element and decorate accordingly—if it is fire, make sure your fabrics are orange and yellow. Also, find out your lucky direction. For example, Jews know they have to face east when praying except when they are in Israel and get to pray at the Western Wall. For Muslims, it’s more complicated; from what I can understand the direction of prayer, Qibla, has changed over the years and created some confusion. I’m not Muslim, so I don’t know how to solve their feng shui problem. As for Christians, as far as I can see, their lucky direction is always up. Also, you should be sure that your house and your grave face in your lucky direction. I’ve no idea how to find your lucky direction or why qi even matters after you’re dead.
Feng shui was very popular in the suburbs in the ’70s. When women weren’t going to consciousness-raising groups where they discussed the pros and cons of walking around naked in front of their children or to masturbation workshops where they were comparing paintings by Georgia O’Keefe to photos of female genitalia, they were feng shuing their houses and getting rid of clutter. This process usually began by getting a divorce, which is still the best way I know to clean out closets. In the ’70s, in the suburbs, husbands were being tossed out like old shoes. On my block alone, seven husbands hit the curb, and as many closets were reclaimed.
My house was in a New Jersey bedroom community. (I ask you, what exactly is a bedroom community?) We were following the qi,energy, out of Brooklyn to the burbs. If we had known it was going to turn around and go back again, we might have just hung out and waited, because I can tell you that there was no good qi in New Jersey. We bought a split-level house on a road with more split-level houses, a faded gray with black shutters. It had a big backyard where the kids were supposed to want to play. It had a thorny, wild rose hedge that separated our backyard from our neighbors. This was definitely a feng shui hedge for us, because all the debris that blew down from the 7-Eleven store on the corner stopped on their side of the hedge. The neighbors wanted us to take the hedge down. We said, “What, are you kidding?” That was the end of good neighborly qi. I suppose they got some secret delight watching the crabapples drop off the big crabapple tree in our front yard, where they soon went soft and wormy. I didn’t want to pick them up and neither did my kids, so they rotted in the heat, wafting a bad odor through the kitchen window. Bad qi.
My husband Howard, having found another bedroom community, left me with the three kids and the house—the Kramer v. Kramer joint custody thing hadn’t caught on yet, so I was happily on my own and in full charge of our progeny. After he left, I looked around the house with a fresh feng shui eye. The small den-TV room had lime-green shag carpeting left by the former owner, with one white, ink-marked, swivel leather chair and one large, blue, beanbag chair. The white walls had recently been decorated by my three-year-old.
The living room wasn’t much better. It had gray carpeting, a mosaic-tiled coffee table missing some of its chips, and a red velvet, flocked couch with plastic seat covers. The couch was a hand-me-down from my mother, who made me promise I would not remove the seat covers. I explained that in winter the couch was cold, and in summer it made an embarrassing sucking sound when you got up. My mother was dead, but she still could play on my guilt. I could hear the conversation in my head.
Your uncle Seymour is in the plastic slipcover business. What’s he going to think when he comes out to Jersey to see you?
“Uncle Seymour has never stepped foot out of Brooklyn.” He’d come if you invited him. Two years you are in the house and you never had a housewarming. Now it’s too late. How warm is a house without a husband?
And then to rub it in: Grandma’s worried about you: she does
n’t know who’s going to want a woman with three children.
“Why do I need a husband?” I said as much to myself as to her, pointing to my T-shirt that said A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE.
My grandmother, who had spent her married life taking care of five children and a husband who wouldn’t lift a finger, and my mother, who had spent hers holding on to a husband who never held on to her, still could not imagine the joy of being alone. I promised myself that as soon as the house had good qi, I’d invite the family. She’d have had no idea what I was talking about.
That’s just an excuse.
I couldn’t argue. She was right. Our best conversations ended when I stopped trying to wrestle the alligator.
With the implicit support of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, I asserted my new will and took the plastic off the couch. I would have gotten rid of the coffee table, but I needed something to put a cup of coffee on and a place to put my feet up. I tried to color in the missing chips with crayons. It didn’t work, but you had to appreciate my resourcefulness and effort. Being separated gave me energy.
I believe that some people have an innate feng shui sensibility. If you knew what came first and where to put it, you didn’t have to hire a feng shui expert. In the ’70s everybody who thought they were somebody was hiring these experts. I don’t know where they found them. Maybe there was a feng shui directory. All I know was that I wasn’t buying. My qi fluctuated with my mood, and my mood seemed to fluctuate with who knows what—but my feng shui was solid. Here’s the evidence: I knew that a core feng shui principle comes with a less-is-more philosophy. It fits with the decluttering factor. I intuitively knew this, which is why I was able to convince my husband to spend more money on less furniture. We invested all of our wedding money on three knock-out pieces: a Danish teakwood dining table and six curved-back matching chairs with black leather seats; a hand-painted, green-lacquered, Chinese commode that was out-of-sight gorgeous and had natural China qi; and a large, cherry wood, crescent-shaped desk, with an inlaid leather top.
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