This Really Isn't About You

by Jean Hannah Edelstein

  I’m fine, she said, again and again. I’m fine.

  My mother was determined to do this herself, to shut down her life here in America, and I think I understood why. My mother was independent, like me.

  The strategy that my mother had chosen to clear out the house was to hire an auction company that specializes in liquidating the possessions of people like my mother: they come round and pick through your belongings, use stickers to designate their value, and put the whole lot on the internet. Once the auction started, I visited the page several times a day, because I wanted to know what these scraps of our lives were worth to other people. Who knew that all those years I’d been sleeping next to an antique nightstand valued at $40? Who would have imagined that those scratched-up Beatles records that we’d danced to on Saturday afternoons in 1989 were originals?

  My mother had already done some cleaning in the lead-up to the auction. A couple of months earlier I came down from the city to sort through my remaining possessions. Photographs that I’d taken on disposable cameras with chubby childish hands. Tatty pieces of costume jewellery. My elementary school report cards, which revealed that I was a joy to teach and very bad in gym class. Cut some time off your mile, the fourth-grade gym teacher wrote, in jaunty, legible cursive, and I thought: I had an asthma attack, bitch! and felt bad in an instant for thinking such a word about a young woman whose job it was to make children run faster. I took the report cards, though there was no reason to take them, except the thought that in twenty-five years I might look at them again and think: I had an asthma attack, bitch!

  On each visit, the house was a little emptier. The recliner was still there, some of the physics mugs, but other things were gone. My father’s clothes. Some of his books. His vinyl records stacked in an unruly pile, waiting for an auctioneer to pick through them, decide which are valuable and decide which ones don’t matter. No one in the family owned a record player any more. I took a Benny Goodman album because the cover was pink and because no one could stop me. For now, these things were still mine as much as they belonged to anyone.

  On Christmas Day my mother and I decided to mark the occasion in the manner of my father’s people. It was our second Christmas without him, so we had already learned that we could survive, but that didn’t mean that we were especially in the mood to celebrate. We had spent our family Christmases at home, for the most part, with Scottish traditions: presents in a pillowcase. Christmas crackers, pudding. Latkes for Christmas dinner if Chanukkah and Christmas happened to overlap.

  But we weren’t in the mood to do our usual things. At first we discussed going away somewhere: to the beach, perhaps. To a hotel. But we didn’t. And so we behaved like Jews on Christmas. We went to the movies. We went to eat Chinese food at one of Baltimore’s finest Chinese restaurants, or a restaurant that used to be fine. The staff were bustling and busy, but the room felt musty and faded. Families of middle-aged and elderly people sat around big round tables, pushing sweet and sour foods around on a Lazy Susan. Some of them had oxygen tanks. Some of them looked like they were pretty close to dying.

  I had no idea, my mother said, that this was really such a thing, Chinese food for Jews on Christmas.

  I bet these families have been coming since you moved to the US, I said, it was probably once a very fashionable place for Jews to spend Christmas in Baltimore.

  You may be right, my mother said.

  Everyone’s celebrating a dead Jewish person today in one way or another, I said.

  My mother and I laughed dry laughs. We ate dry spare-ribs, because Chinese restaurants were the only place where my father would consume pork. We did not complain that the shiny polyester tablecloth was faded and stained from years of use. We were not forming any attachments. This was our last Christmas in Baltimore. This was not a new tradition that we were starting: it was a kind of closure.

  Back at the house, my mother brought out her grandmother’s fur coat. It was wrapped in plastic from a dry cleaner, and she carried it draped over both arms, the way that mothers carry wedding dresses in the movies. It was not a way that anyone had carried a garment towards me before: it was reverent.

  Like any good left-wing woman I am a firm member of the no-fur camp. But then: in the darkest corners of my heart, I am one of those women who thinks that if you have the good fortune to inherit a garment made from slaughtered animals, maybe it’s OK to wear it. In fact, perhaps you’re obligated to wear it: so that the minks or stoats or raccoons – or in the case of my great-grandmother’s fur coat, ponies? – did not die in vain.

  Before I saw my great-grandmother’s fur coat, I imagined that I would wear my great-grandmother’s fur coat as I swished down the street on the coldest days in Brooklyn and people would look at me and some of them would think You murderer! but others would think: Fur is bad but let’s be honest, I would wear that too if I inherited it from a long-dead Glaswegian great-grandmother. And still others would think: She looks like an exiled Lithuanian princess or former wife of Roman Abramovich.

  So, said my mother, as she removed the plastic, I’ve tried it on already but it’s not . . . right for me.

  OK, I said, regarding it as it emerged.

  There was something clumped about the fur. There was something wrong about the shape.

  Try it on, said my mother, I’m not sure you’ll like it either.

  I shrugged my way into the coat. The collar was wide and made from a different kind of fur from the coat. The coat was cut as if to clothe a refrigerator. The animal skin, stiff and old, stood at a distance from my body, several inches away at some points.

  I looked in the mirror.

  I look like a furry refrigerator, I said to my mother.

  Hm, she said, yes.

  I turned this way and that.

  Not like an attractive refrigerator, I said.

  My grandmother was quite wide, my mother said.

  I see, I said.

  Yes, my mother said.

  I see how it must have been very special to her! I said.

  Yes! my mother said.

  I bet you could donate it somewhere, I said to my mother, it’s exactly the kind of thing that someone would like to wear in . . . a theatrical production.

  Yes! said my mother. We could donate it to a theatre.

  Or sell it on eBay! I said. There must be someone in the world who’d want this coat.

  Sure, said my mother.

  Well, I said.

  Well, said my mother, that’s fine then.

  She packed the coat back into the plastic with care. There was no place for the coat in our new lives, but she was still particular.

  Isn’t it something, I said, as I watched her put it inside, that something so important to one person can be so unimportant a hundred years later.

  It is, said my mother, it is.

  Later, I tried the coat on one more time. It was still hideous. I took a selfie: I was in pyjamas, my hair unbrushed and in a knot, my mouth pursed up as if I thought I was glamorous. I thought about how the coat must have made my great-grandmother feel glamorous, how she must have worn it on occasions when she wanted to look and feel more special than she usually felt. I posted the photo on Instagram. I took the coat off. My mother put it into the auction. I checked it every day online, to see if anyone wanted the coat. At the end of the auction, someone bid on it at the last minute and got it for $6. I wondered for only a moment about who they were.

  10

  There was one thing that I did want from the house. My father used to call it Nanny’s Magic Table. The table was magic because it folded up quite small but could also be extended to accommodate twelve people at a Rosh Hashana dinner that features both chicken and brisket, paired with Diet Sprite (for example). When my father was still alive he offered it to my sister, for her new marital home with her new husband, and when I caught wind of that from my mother I said: NO.

  I did not want the table to leave the country, or maybe I did not want to not have a right to the
table, just because I did not have a new husband or a new home.

  I insisted that I should have the magic table. I insisted that it should not leave America, and I insisted that I should be considered a worthy owner of the magic table even if I did not own a dining room to contain it, even if I did not have a family to dine around it, even if the chances that I would be inviting twelve people over for dinner might be sorely limited by the fact that I only owned three plates. I remembered helping my dad fold the table up at the end of those Rosh Hashana dinners at his Aunt Ruth’s place, pulling the leaves out and storing them in a cupboard, folding the table up so that it was the size of a credenza and replacing it in its rightful position, which was against a wall, under some paintings of Ruth’s children, with silver Shabbat candlesticks on top. My mother said that I could have the table: arranged for it to be trucked from Baltimore to Brooklyn.

  When the delivery men showed up in Brooklyn they rang the doorbell and looked askance at me when I opened it.

  It’s never going to get in, they said, it’s too large! and I looked at them and I thought: What is wrong with everyone who moves furniture in New York!

  I recalled the first time I moved in the city, when I hired movers from a company that was entirely staffed by artists, because I felt empathy for them, for their need for a day job. Those movers made me carry much of the stuff myself, especially after one of the artist-movers had an asthma attack when he was carrying half of my mattress upstairs. (Maybe you should do something else, I said to the artist-mover as he took his inhaler, instead of moving? and that was maybe true but also maybe not a very nice thing to say.)

  Really? I said to the movers who were saying that the table was too large, Really? I don’t think it’s that big! All of my other furniture got through the front door! I waved my hand at all of my other furniture and the movers said, OK, we’ll try, but in a tone of abject defeat. They returned to the truck. I waited.

  I waited, and waited, and they were taking ages, and so I went outside to see what they were doing. They were standing in the back of the truck. I thought, Be plucky, Jean! and I climbed up in the back of the truck with them, and it was then that I discovered that the reason the movers had been taking so long was because they were preparing to carry the largest piece of furniture that I had seen in my whole life. I don’t even know how to describe it: I guess maybe it was some kind of chest of drawers, a thing that existed to store other things in the most hideous way possible. It was wooden, it was highly polished, it was rococo, and it was the size of an infant rhinoceros. Maybe an adolescent one.

  For a moment I looked at it and I thought: Is this something that I forgot about? Is this a nightmare heirloom that my mother did not want to take with her to the UK? But then I remembered that I was sure: no way did this thing belong to me. No fucking way.

  What are you doing? I said. That’s not mine!

  The delivery guys said, Really? and I said, No way! That is the size of my whole apartment! I have never seen that thing before!

  The delivery guys laughed and I laughed and we all just stood for a little while in the back of the truck, laughing very hard. I doubled over.

  In between laughs the delivery guys started to gasp out: Thank you! Thank you! as if they were really grateful that I was not going to make them try to shove the rhinoceros up the narrow staircase of the brownstone that contained my apartment.

  They said, Thank you! and I said, No, thank YOU! and after they left and it was just me in the apartment, me with a small extendable table, I thought: I am so glad that I am not from a family where my legacy is a chest of drawers the size of a baby rhinoceros. I am so glad that I am from my family, instead.

  11

  My mother booked her ticket to fly out of America for the first Sunday in April. I went on the train to Baltimore one last time, to help her with the final stages. I made one last stop at the deli for one last pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese. I felt sad to be losing Baltimore. I had never lived in Baltimore, but now I didn’t think I’d have a reason to go to Baltimore again.

  I travelled light. The plan was for my mother to come up to New York City with me on the train. I’d help her with her luggage. She’d spend a couple of days with me in Brooklyn. Then we’d go to the airport. Arthur agreed to come too, for us to spend the weekend together, the remaining members of our family who live in America. In Glasgow, my sister and her husband and the baby would pick my mother up at the airport. They’d welcome her to her new life in an old place. As siblings we were not always aligned. But helping our mother get to her new home: this was a collective project.

  If it’s just me and Mum on my own, I explained to Arthur, when I asked him if he’d like to come for the weekend, I think it will be too hard and sad, but if you’re there, I think we’ll be able to do it.

  OK, said my brother, I get it. I’ll come.

  He booked his flights to New York.

  When I got to Baltimore, my last arrival to Baltimore, the house was nearly empty. I spent the night on a bed that was for sale in the online auction, on sheets that would be disposed of. In the morning, my mother and I drank coffee from mugs that would be left behind: the ones that did not hold important memories. Breakfast was brief, and then we left. My mother walked out of the house and locked the door and the neighbour who was driving us to the train station insisted on taking a photo. My mother smiled, and then when the photo was done my mother picked up her bag and she walked away from the house to the car, without a glance over her shoulder. I thought it was remarkable that my mother did not turn around. My mother just did not look back.

  That weekend, Mum and Arthur and I did Brooklyn things: we went to brunch, we went to the park. We spent time in the neighbourhood, looked in shop windows, drank cups of coffee. I showed them around. We walked the dog. I went to yoga classes while my brother and my mother slept late.

  It’s great here, they said.

  Thanks! I said. I was happy to be showing them at last where I lived: my home. We took a selfie on the street outside, and the three of us looked happier and more relaxed than any of us have looked for a long time. We did not talk at length about the past: we did not talk about the funeral, or how sad we’d been, or how sad we still were. We did not talk very much about Lynch syndrome. I had completed all of my appointments within the six-month cycle, and everything had again been clear.

  I think Dad would be happy with my plan to go to Glasgow, my mother said, during one of these conversations, and I said: Yes.

  She was right: he would be happy with this plan. Dad loved Glasgow. A thing that people say to you when someone dies is: He would have wanted you to be happy, and unlike the other clichés that people say when people die, that one is really true. Dad would want my mother to be happy. He would want us to be happy, too. That weekend, we were doing what Dad would have wanted.

  The weekend felt short. On Sunday afternoon, we called a car to take us to the airport. My mother’s belongings were packed into just two bags. It had been about a year since she had decided to leave America, and in that time she had divested herself of so much of what grows and collects when you are married for almost forty years, when you raise a family, when you have a certain kind of life. Now, the things that she was keeping had been shipped across the ocean, for the most part, and the rest of what she needed was here: compact.

  The ride to JFK took nearly an hour. We were all quiet.

  I remember, when I arrived here, my mother said, in the car, as it approached the long curving ramp up to the terminal departures entrance. Just me and little Arthur, coming to this unknown place, to this unknown life.

  We smiled. We didn’t say much else.

  It’s hard to get a direct flight from New York City to Glasgow, as if one of the cities doesn’t care about the other. My mother was flying with Icelandair to Scotland, with a stopover in Reykjavík. It’s a discount airline, so the better class of seat is called EconomyComfort. Arthur and I stood back while she went to get her boa
rding pass, to check in her bags.

  That doesn’t bode well for economy, I said to Arthur, pointing at the EconomyComfort sign. He laughed, a little. It was a joke that Dad would have made, if he had been there. But if he was there, if he was still alive, we’d be somewhere else. We would not have been bidding our mother goodbye, on her own, on a one-way flight to the place where she came from.

  It’s not that I was trying not to cry, not exactly, but I was aware of it as a possibility, a thing that could happen. We embraced Mum and then she went to stand in the security line. We watched until she went through. In the distance, she looked small, but we could still see her waving. This time, she did look back.

  Arthur’s flight wasn’t until the next morning. We had an evening to fill, together, even though we were exhausted. It had been years since we’d spent this much time together in just each other’s company. Maybe not since high school.

  What now? I said to Arthur. Shall we go to the city? To Manhattan? We can take a walk.

  Sure, he said, I don’t think I’ve been there since the time we went in the 90s.

  We got a car to Manhattan, which was stupidly expensive, but it seemed justified. We were tired. Our father had died, our mother had left us in one country to go and live in another. Arthur would return to his family in California, and I would return to Martha and Brooklyn, to my job and my friends, my dates and my doctor’s appointments. I would go back to being afraid of cancer. But for this moment, it was just the two of us again, Arthur and me, like it was when we were little kids, before our sister was born. After dinner, when we were maybe four and seven, or thereabouts, when our parents would snatch some time at the table to drink coffee together and talk about their days, Arthur and I would get down from the table and hide behind the sofa or in the closets in our adjoining bedrooms, whispering plots against our parents. Whatever it was that children in the single digits would plot: delaying bedtime, eavesdropping on their adult conversation. Now there were no parents to plot against; not in any proximity.