James Joyce’s Ulysses, written in a stream-of-consciousness technique he supposedly perfected, would overshadow Dorothy Richardson, who already walked as she talked as she wrote, making sentences open like blasting for river dams long before him.
Odysseus’s name means trouble in Greek, after the disastrous giving and receiving of misfortune throughout his wanderings. The word odyssey refers to an epic voyage in many languages. But what do you call a voyage with a constant fear of rape, of your story getting submerged? Every pit stop a landmine?
Inland bravery before shipwrecks.
I do not like travel writing, the doing or the reading. My own eye-rolls around women’s precarious safety and nauseating domesticity spat and cursed at within a lucid dream-state that is like the seasickness of trauma, my own cold case investigation—a childhood as the evidence locker—didn’t help my courage one bit.
Renata Adler’s work was compared to a strange type of travel writing, with little quips of observation in a touch-and-go manner of sketching a scene here, a restaurant there, impressions of people elsewhere. Instability. Velocity. Refuge. Disjointedness. The only kind of narrative in motion I can stomach—defamiliarized.
I cannot synthesize place and words, the two things I enjoy and struggle with most. Like bad plasma attacking the immune system. Let me describe Leningrad or Portland to you in detail and watch me vanish through expansion.
The fourth state of matter. A sense of place. Paradise. Hell. I choose a pregnant purgatory.
XX
A year after I last saw you I was ushered into some tavern attached to a cheap motel for my first breakfast in a new country where a beautiful bald woman sang on a television mounted in a dark corner like she was talking to only me. She had such well-formed, singular tears pulsing out of her eyes. There were jugs of Pepsi, clinking with ice cubes, and two kinds of cold cereal to choose between.
The people in this air-conditioned strange land seemed to be loose in the joints, seemed to be casual, seemed warm without any heat, seemed to be cool, cool enough to know that Sinéad O’Connor was in fact covering a Prince song, the name of which said two things at once: I compare nothingness to you, and I can only judge the square in relation to the round hole inside of it. “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
The lady in the black square box reminded me of you. I didn’t know what she was saying at the time, but it gave me swells and curdles in the belly. I wondered where you were, and I was also used to not wondering, so the feeling was of swimming through mud, of floating in something slimy, but floating nonetheless.
No one had asked me or knew that my underwear was part of an old bathing suit and hadn’t been changed in a week. That I smelled like souring, like expired food. I wanted the lady on the television to change my underwear. I wanted to know what clean felt like here in America without you.
I was told by my dad to lie and continue saying I was Jewish even after I found out in seventh grade, at the first school I attended in America, the Hebrew Academy, that goyim are the ones like me.
As I got better at reading and writing in Hebrew I learned that numbers tell a complicated tale of our legacy and there is a secret code that only a few men can formally study. We have our four mothers to look up to: Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel. Four children ask four questions while four cups of wine are drunk at Passover.
My own obsession with numbers was seeded at the Hebrew Academy when my dad insisted I drill the multiplication table with him. I kept fumbling, too slow with the answers. Dad sat down on the couch and put me on a stool in front of him. He explained that this is going to be a new game. I have a certain amount of time to come up with the right answer or he will knock me off the stool. My answers didn’t come soon enough. Four by four is sixteen. Five by five is twenty-five. Six by six is on the floor.
In junior high I understood enough English to discern that your Jewishness is carried through your mother’s bloodline. That a Jewish man like my father can go around impregnating all the Christian girls he wants and still not be properly fruitful or multiplying. That the penalty for goyim who secretly study the Torah is to be a slave building the wall of the messiah’s palace in their afterlife; that my father picked the wrong woman and now it was up to me to light candles as a fake, a good reproduction of a well-known painting snuck into a museum with the originals.
I liked to lie about you because I was used to closely watching the other boys and girls around me to see what felt right to imitate, what I could get away with. We are supposed to emulate our parents until they make it safe for us to reject them. Then we carve out our own shape from the boulders we once found at the feet of their mountains.
A lie is its own language, a skin graft. Roland Barthes proposed that “language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.” My deepest desire then is to cover you up where you are naked, to give you skin where you are invisibilized, because no one else dares to rub two words together to make you appear. Not least of all, my stepmother.
× × × ×
Luda was only twenty-five when my father reconciled with her. They had parted ways on the understanding that her chances of emigrating as a Ukrainian woman with no documentation of persecution, in-demand skills, or resources, save her connection to us, noncitizens, were scant at best. With the yoke of Communism all but ripped off, our old country was now in freefall. She flew in from Russia on a visitor’s visa to Philadelphia, shortly before we all moved to Brooklyn, and stayed on for good. Luda watched Sleeping with the Enemy and wrote out the details of their arguments in her diary, looking up from time to time to reassure me that we get to split things fifty-fifty, now that she had come back to lighten my burden. As long as I tell her everything, mainly any dirt I have on my dad. The secrets would spill out of her the minute he was back from washing dishes at the sports bar in between his TOEFL classes, our table flying in the air as he denied ever bedding those other women, mayonnaise jar going splat on the wall, dripping down, his head in hands as the brown carpet absorbed the grease.
She was my anchor, my rival, and a sister-mother-friend hybrid of sorts. She is only twelve years older than me, so whenever we used to lie about her being my real mom, the reactions—and our varying explanations—ranged from awkward to hilarious to downright sad. The new friends we made in America wished to know the secret of her unlined face, how she managed to look so fresh while having a teenage daughter. If she thought that becoming close with a person was a possibility, Luda would press my face into her stomach and whisper to the person about our situation of motherhood musical chairs, asking them to keep up our charade.
Luda was finally granted the chance to have a biological child of her own the summer between my junior and senior years at John Dewey High School. She was tired of grazing like a parasitic bee and wished to be “like any other normal woman.” I was instantly smitten with this pink rubbery scream machine and took on the role of a secondary mother when Luda struggled with a violent bout of post-partum depression, staring out into the darkness on the couch, eyes shining with terror like a shivering snare drum as the baby wailed on. I instinctively stuck him in a pram, which I pushed around our Bensonhurst blocks for hours before heading off to class.
Many years later, after Luda had given birth to a daughter as well, and my half brother learned to count, he added things up. He asked me how old I was. He knew how old she was. He did the finger math in front of me as we drove around the Connecticut countryside. The number he arrived at was twelve—extended pause. He didn’t believe that our mother could have given birth to me as a child, much like any girl in his class.
When I was twelve, I had just begun to get some perky little boobs while Luda was still decidedly flat chested. I once gave her rolled-up socks and told her to stick them in her bra so that we could match. It was an especially low blow since she didn’t even wear one. She threw them across the breakfast tabl
e and screamed that men can get by without boobs just fine. Knowing she meant Your dad gets along without boobs just fine, I put the socks in my own bra and strutted around the apartment making kissy faces at her.
Luda would primp in the mirror, standing on her bed with arms bent behind her head, tasting the fabric of new American cuts with her skin. I watched her from the doorway while drinking milk. “I wish there was a pill we could take that would make us feel full and pumped with nutrients so that our grocery budget can be spent on dresses and shoes,” she purred. “Milk has cholesterol in it. Actual pieces of fat floating around. Just know that when you lap it up every day.”
This was the beginning of our acrimonious sisterhood when I needed a mother figure most. Taking turns acting cruel and needy, we called each other whores one moment, then undesirable the next—eternal girls being looked at, but not really seen. Back when noticing my suddenly plumper thighs as I sat up in bed to put my slippers on shocked me into pinching them to make sure they were really mine. When she gave me a blue satin thong, hoping to inspire more glamour into my overall wardrobe, I found its implications so tyrannical and its shape so utterly useless that I hid it inside of an old boot.
And when I got my period at a birthday party minutes after a boy gave me a kiss on the cheek, I ran home to Luda pulsing on adrenaline, pimple scars covered by greasy bangs, thick and black. We traded some food stamps for cash and got the thinnest pads at the dollar store and had enough left over for two containers of Chinese food to share in bed.
Luda was jubilant and pragmatic, helping me get cleaned up and cuddling me in her bed after. And then came her usual words of wisdom: “Well, I guess you are now officially a woman.” Squinting at the sun reflected off her vanity mirror, I smiled and mushed my face into her neck. “And you must be careful, because above all, this means that your body is ready for pregnancy.” I scrunched my toes to numb and gritted my teeth hard.
Shortly after I got my period Luda and I walked across town, pushing on and dripping through the haze of a scorching summer day to get her an abortion. My father kept stalling her back then: he wasn’t ready, he already had a child, we were broke, and their fights were out of control.
On the way to the abortion clinic, one of us bled. Two on the way back.
XXI
Bernadette Mayer put out her The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters in 1994 while you begged for my address to write me, maybe please me. My uncle will claim that he was under strict orders to not give out our danuye—my exact whereabouts were to remain a secret, but she was allowed to look at the most recent photos of me.
It was in my father’s desk drawer, right before I left for college, that I found some pictures of you, including the passport photo he furtively kept there, the kind printed as a set of four.
I have another photo of you stashed in a book, hidden in a closet, buried behind some boxes. You are perched on a kitchen sink in a dark room with people dancing in the background, staring straight into the camera with your head cocked back. You’re smoking and reaching out toward the photographer, oblivious to being approached for a hug. In the corner of the frame we see the back of your little daughter wearing a tight terry-cloth jumper and running for your feet.
I began using a computer for the first time as a senior to manage the layout for a feminist quarterly Dewey miraculously supported and printed since its inception in the 1970s. I never had thought about email or going online. In fact, I arrive at The Evergreen State College having seen photos of the place only in a catalog.
Before I leave our apartment in Brooklyn I ship my favorite records and books ahead to my dorm in Olympia and pack my clothes.
America in the 1990s is: thigh highs. Orange velvet trench coat with wide lapels. Lee cutoffs from the five-dollar bin at Canal Jeans with ripped tights. Ringer T-shirt with the word BITCH written in myriad fonts. Navy-blue polka-dot baby doll dress. White turtleneck bodysuit. Nude-colored satin nightgown with bell sleeves from the 1930s. Army surplus olive-green backpack with patches. Doc Martin knee-high lace-up boots. White communion dress with cutoff sleeves and ripped hem. Plastic flowers tied to suede platform shoes. Brown acrylic men’s cardigan with holes in the cuffs. Fishnet stockings with crotch cut out, worn with legs for sleeves. Lilac-colored T-shirt with BIKINI KILL written in bleach. Black slip worn over white lace-trimmed slip. Red crepe ball gown cut above the knee. Boatneck striped long-sleeve shirt over ballet tights. Baby-blue sparkle halter dress soaked with sweat from the Limelight.
I get a work-study job at Evergreen as an office assistant to a woman in charge of campus security. She tells me to check her email daily and give her a digest of the most pertinent correspondences. I am too ashamed to tell her that I have never used email. I take naps on stacks of manila envelopes and wait for her to fire me, which she does, within a week.
I scan the back pages of the local weekly paper and circle an ad for a peep show. I am eighteen years old and have been speaking English without a Russian accent for four years. I worked hard to lose it by studying TV shows, The Bionic Woman, a favorite, and recording movies like Beetlejuice with a lo-fi cassette player, copying ironic, maudlin teenage sayings to fit in, and unironically wearing a Purple Haze Simpsons T-shirt with an American flag–printed blue jean miniskirt handed down by the family who sponsored our visa. In high school gym class, I told a girl to “not have a cow, man” when she face-planted trying to jump the horse.
She was red for me, and her redness lets me know I should be ashamed.
I had lived in America for only six years at the time of my arrival in Olympia. No one would ever suspect I was a foreigner, that I was infiltrating their scene with my Russian spy secrets covered up by an already changing Brooklyn accent, and that I was into reproduction art as a means of supporting my tenuous place on earth.
My friend B sold some of her paintings so she could afford to get her giant boobs cut off. As a butch woman in the nineties she was a most glorious “fake,” like the “fakes” who bought new boobs—all of us just sucking off each other’s discarded selves and making new ones—statue composites that have scars, stitches, and jagged outlines, and reveal the act of simulation, making us paranoid at being found out when someone doesn’t fall under our fictive spell. Interlopers as vulnerability experts.
She understood that forgery is the most authentic way to sign off.
During a visit home from college with a new friend brought along as my security blanket against the parents I seldom phoned or wrote, I began displaying new signs of missing you. On the staircase of my family’s old basement apartment in Brooklyn I showed my friend your picture and told her that this was my real mother. Years went by with my stepmother being icy to me before she confessed overhearing my conversation and feeling frozen out of my life. The silent agreement we had made to tell people that she was my only mom, that there was no one else, was fractured.
Luda had sacrificed her vanity during the ripest days of her youth, pretending to be older to make the lie of my legitimacy more believable. I collapsed the fourth wall of this act without her permission and she felt exposed and cast aside for a found relic excavated among her husband’s desk drawers.
× × × ×
In his posthumously assembled Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes attempted to privately express his grief over the death of a mother he knew so well that describing her was an act of violence he could not perform. He recorded ordinary quips about missing her on note cards, sometimes trailing off midsentence. Barthes left the saturation of visual detail to live on in the many photographs he kept on his desk and wrote about in Camera Lucida, in which he eulogized her properly to the public. He had searched through stacks of images of her long enough to uncover “the one” where she appeared most alive to him.
Sometimes I use note cards, completely uncataloged and strewn about in ten different purses, on two desks, inside books, old files, and nightstands. They are orphan drafts that I gather up and try to straighten out every now and
then, tell them they will grow up in my competent hands and become useful someday; that they will be known and understood, maybe even loved and cared for, spoken about, and not for. But I fail. I fail at this all the time. They get lost. For the most part, no one gets to know them. I lie to the note cards and to myself. An orphan has no past; a widow has no future.
I often think of Barthes, who used the card catalog for his writing practice—this handsome gay man avoiding parties at his desk, slowed by his mother’s death, getting up and deliberately placing each card where it belongs. That is so fascinating. Such purpose, such ego, such care. I believe that must be something his mother gave him: this importance, this belief, this organization of self and objects. His words are measured, unmoored by grief, but grounded in a place that tells me he was held and loved, that he was once properly managed, assembled by his mother into the person who worships her, who is unable to reduce her to a memory.
I have disparate parts of my writing hidden, lost to be found in old bags and notebooks because it mirrors my own process of mourning my mother, not in her death, of which I have no knowledge, but in what she did and did not provide me in life. Each fragment, bandage-like, papier-mâché, peeling on and off to smear balm and apply fresh swaths of gauze, dressing you like a mummy. The words that used to punch ribbon on a typewriter when I wrote you letters in high school now click away impotently but make pleasing little stacks on the screen.
He collects his thoughts on cards the way he was raised. I collect mine the way I was—the excavation process of the preverbal made solid. “Neither album, nor family,” Barthes proclaimed about the act of looking and collecting. He became obsessed with a photo of his mother as a young girl and decided that it was the only image worthy of memorialization. This old woman lives on best as someone’s daughter.
Mother Winter Page 7