A month ago, he had returned from a tour with his band, but the distance never shrank. He had to leave almost immediately after we got back from Russia on a reunification mission ill-conceived and poorly slapped together.
Building bridges is a nauseating job of defying altitudes and measuring for symmetry and I chose the wrong pillars for the beam.
Since we had met in college on the day of our mutual arrival to A dorm, my best friend has offered herself as a mother figure to me, but I didn’t take her to come find my mom with me. I wanted to go with a guy who moved to New York from Olympia and held me naked in bed and with whom I practiced being good, like a real couple. And real couples meet each other’s families. Real couples take their partners back to their childhood homes. He wanted to see what Russia was all about. We were Cold War babies staging an adult version of a foreign exchange trip, but with sex and romance and restaurants. Our frontal lobes had just barely grown in and we were going to travel like lovers would. Finding my mother may have been the excuse, but it felt like a side job.
× × × ×
I don’t want to admit that when we got back home and he left for tour I got drunk and cheated on him; that I lied about it when he found out; that I would later date, marry, and have two children with the person with whom I did the cheating.
Mother dear, will you kiss me good night?
XXVII
This is a new dream. You are an armless, white marble statue found at the bottom of the sea, the cracks slimed over by seaweed and barnacles still holding on to your torso like the hands of a small child pulling at the hem of a silk skirt, legs locked into triangles and butt sticking out for more leverage.
You were once sculpted and polished smooth, and came out screaming mutely in the image of the unseen and unknowable goddesses above. You were once a most greedy of guesses. For now, you are still the bed for the blankets of ships rubbing their bellies on centuries of rubble. For now, you continue to be lost out at sea.
When you’re fished out, you will go to your proper place in a museum to be admired by me only. I will polish your bronze name plaque, and I will be writing the small paragraph, printed on heavy card stock in a tastefully solemn font, about you as a priceless relic, a found shard, degraded, a puzzling piece of history. A head lost, bust found somewhere, a battered woman with blank eyes, erected by those who had infinite worship in their hearts.
People like me “more easily accept that this beauty, so remote from us and lodged in museums rather than in our homes, should be a dead beauty or a beauty made of fragments,” Marguerite Yourcenar writes of ancient Greek statues, restored to their “true” shape when fashionable and then broken up again to create a sense of authenticity. Most of these martyred and tortured-looking white stones, infirmed, castrated, and limbed gods in our museums, aren’t Greek at all, but are Roman replicas of the originals.
Some damaged goods are items that were expected to be in good or brand-new condition but were discovered to be poor, tarnished, or already open, a fragment of their original form.
The Hermitage suffered a great loss in the 1980s, when I was old enough to remember the missing painting. A mentally ill man attacked Rembrandt’s Danaë by splashing sulfuric acid on the canvas and cutting it twice with a knife. The streaked and torn-up nude lady in the painting was eventually restored and is now on display behind armored glass.
Goods are damaged often by no fault of their own.
All found art seems to go through four stages, much like the women in my family. Excavation. Restoration. Preservation. Forgery.
Nadezhda told us war stories, mined our family myth. Her daughter, Galina, kept us fed and ran the house. Her daughter, Elena, they tried to keep alive, even if just for show. Her daughter traced this lost image in her mind night after night, attempting to carve out a mother figure to imitate.
Studying a tiny crumbling picture secured by a piece of packing tape will not make a lost mother reappear, will not make her meaning easier to read, will not make her less ambiguous.
My other grandmother, Chaya, who was terrorized and brainwashed in Baku into becoming a stalwart Stalinist, believed that walking barefoot or sitting on cold surfaces, like marble, was unhealthy for the womb and could make you barren. Exposing any part of your lower torso during winter can swell up the kidneys and give you mysterious vaginal pain.
Every time Chaya observed me sewing she warned against leaving a loose needle around lest I step on it and it be carried straight to my heart, sucked in like my insides were a shower drain. I was instructed to always leave a thread with a knot on it after each use. This way she might be able to pull it out, wrestle it out of the river rapids of my veins.
Grandma Chaya worshiped Stalin the way one would worship a furnace repairman in a frozen town.
Stalin’s wife shot herself in the heart before their daughter turned seven years old. Svetlana is asked by her mom if she knows where her soul is. She is told that she will locate it when it aches. Svetlana recalls her mother drawing a square with her pointed finger on the right side of her chest and being instructed: that is where you must bury your secrets.
Svetlana Stalin ran away to America with hopes of finding anonymity but came back to the Soviet Union in 1984 only to leave again a couple of years later. Her brother drank himself to death at forty years of age. She was not so much drowning but building rafts for inevitable storms. Water, water everywhere.
Jane Jacobs says being a victim is rather wicked.
Upon one of their joint visits to our flat, my maternal and paternal grannies argued over the best method of healing the sores I developed from being left too long in soiled diapers by my mother. As the rancid white cloth was boiled in a gigantic zinc pot on the stove they played tug-of-war. Granny Galina brought over a box of powder to keep me dry while Grandma Chaya thought the stuff poison and insisted on iodine baths. It was a soak I needed. Water heals all.
I used to wet myself while doing scales at my music teacher’s house. I couldn’t ask permission to go. I wet myself when I held hands with a heavily decorated veteran with gold teeth who came to greet the children at my school—I felt his war.
I would wet myself onstage during a school recital wearing a light blue silk dress and a gray scarf a teacher gave me to cover up the choke marks on my neck. I played a cloud dancing in the background and held up the painted cardboard to cover up my bloodshot eye. I would wet the bed at boarding school and cover up the sheet with yellow and brown rings marking the previous nights like counting the years of a chopped-down old tree. I slept in the wet and walked in the wet like before, always like I was still with her.
There are mornings when I hear my name, and it’s your name, too, so I want to refract it back through my own porthole and keep lying here in bed, miserable, defiant, gone, and begged for. I want to be like you some mornings and only wipe my own face and ass and later be worshiped like a Greek statue by my hopeful-but-weary daughter. I want to drink here in bed until my piss warms my legs, long enough to make me shiver in the sameness of your river. I want to step in you twice as you run over heavy rocks.
XXVIII
The first time Mike asked me to marry him was before we ever had sex, the night I cheated on the photographer. He was firm and resolute, and I needed to be swept away, a blue moon, a full moon on a balmy August night in New York, bathed in someone’s liquid courage and anointed with their amorous, cavalier, and childlike fortitude. I wanted to live inside a giant blinking YES sign every time I saw him and lick the wires. We had animal sex, ravenous, move the bed, hands punching the air—abandon wilder than what I had ever known.
He was soaked in urine—he thought it was hilarious to piss his pants in the street after a bartender eighty-sixed him—and I gave him a blow job anyway. I was going to consume and worship his body’s wastes and gifts alike.
In the morning, when the deep remorse and hangover picked at my rib cage, I asked him to leave. I scooped his curls with both palms and kissed them. If he
had stayed I would become her. The drunken whore my parents described. If he left I could pretend. I could still change.
The photographer boyfriend came back from his tour, from which he seldom called or wrote, and asked me if I had slept with Mike and I lied. He made the choice to believe me. All of his friends, our friends, saw us leaving in the cab together, fingers out of sight. They were the ones to pick up the check after Mike ordered expensive champagne to toast our engagement; the cigar ring held up on my finger only if I made a fist. They knew what had happened. But pretending was closer to the truth for me then. I pretended it didn’t happen and everyone went along with this plan.
After the Fall of my birthday mugging, the photographer and I had a sad Winter. We walked through the dumb orange gates at Central Park and fought, broke up and made up, until he just didn’t want to come back from our newest break. We were in our midtwenties. We were having a boring crisis. I knew we couldn’t have had children together and so there wasn’t much of a future to fight for.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Mike. About corrections. About throwaways. About knowing a man, a tall, quiet, handsome man, with a huge Jewish nose and a German crooked mouth, a gnarled front tooth, calloused hands, elaborate hangover cures, silences so long they felt like dignified torture, distance like buried treasure, all mine, it was all mine to be had if I crawled for it.
I begged Mike to go out for coffee with me a few months after the photographer dumped me. At first, he said, “Why should I go out with you?” But I kept him on the phone and he relented. After coffee we had drinks, followed by goofy dancing and a trickle-syrup walk to my apartment on Ten Eyck. His chest smelled like clean laundry and David Bowie records and good manners and shyness with women and suddenly ancient drunken hookups and flowers growing from a crack in the asphalt and Marxist lectures and trips to Mexico, and our children. I smelled our future children’s dandelion scalps shedding in the bath all by laying my head on him.
I wanted his scent and his bear claws and his German children inside of me.
Five months went by until I got scared that I couldn’t commit, or that I’d lie again, or I’d cheat again—the hallmarks of Gabriel’s grievances with Elena. And he said, I give you my word, I will not tolerate you straying. And I said, yes, I need this line. This rope space feels grand. I’ll have this man, because nothing has ever been this urgent. Because after I couldn’t find my mother back in Russia I only had the drive to make life where mass graves were dug up in my body.
× × × ×
Two enormous shoulder blades poking out of a Barneys tuxedo days before the wedding—chalk marks, adjustments to be made, the tailor smoothing out his back has made a bed for my face. My head on his giant shoulders. Amen.
The first time I got to touch my future husband was when I broke my ankle doing karaoke on New Year’s Eve and he carried me down Avenue A on his back so we could keep partying at The Cock. I had not yet gone to look for my mother. The photographer boyfriend and I were doing well enough, but he didn’t offer to tow me around, and I had always had a crush on Mike. I knew I’d get something potent from that contact. I never felt more skin through two big winter coats. I couldn’t go home if he would piggyback me around like this. I ordered champagne and put my foot on the bucket of ice and watched him dance.
I understand the party-girl mom. I have battled the need for escape, the need to flee, the need to be unchained from a dyad, the need for a loud and raucous night that ignores the nuzzling rays of daylight. When I think of my mother getting dressed up and having a good time is when I have managed to carve out a safe space for my loss. I’m a party girl, too. I even have a matching tattoo with my two closest friends, in cursive, that says so. I can understand wanting a good time to last forever.
XXIX
I’m forced to think about what I believe in, through being forced to think about what others believe in. I believe in fear. I didn’t even want to drive until I was twenty-seven. I had been in enough car wrecks. A wise woman once said in letters, “I only worry all the time, I worry about my cervix, I worry about my uterus, I worry about my pleasant vagina and that reading too many books by women about things will turn me into an even more unbearable crank than the cranky poets who write hate letters.” Bernadette Mayer’s breathlessness is a hand on my stomach and pumps air into me.
My husband taught me to drive in the months before our wedding. My girlfriends remarked on how strange it was to see me behind the wheel of a car when I was taking them to the rehearsal dinner. They vaguely knew about my fear of dying in a car crash and the actual crashes I had experienced. Of how my father threatened to plunge us into the next pole head-on if my stepmother wouldn’t stop arguing a point with him or admit to her mistakes. The Camaro with the graying black paint was low to the ground and so loud that I could never hear what they were both upset about. I burrowed deep into the back seat and held my head, ready to roll with the car, imagining it would flip over, if only from the sheer force of his rage and the tension of her pleading.
My future marriage: we are driving. You are in awe of the mountain. You say the sky behind us is crazy. “Yes,” I say. “It’s on fire.” I barely look in the rearview mirror. It’s exhausting to be alert to the reds, to try noticing beauty, commenting on the heat when cold inside. I wish you would stop pointing out my blind spots, but that’s how you end up getting hit.
A friend of my father taught him how to cause accidents for insurance money without harming anyone. We would drive around affluent neighborhoods in Philadelphia and wait for the gardener to step out onto the road, unrolling his hose, and brake very suddenly in order not to hit him. Then I had to get out of the back seat and hold my neck, moaning.
We had to keep on doing this until all of the elements worked out just so. Later we would see a Russian doctor who was in on the game for the physical therapy that took mere minutes. I was just as embarrassed at having to act hurt in front of strangers as I was at how long it took me to exit the back seat of the two-door. The seat would stick and not roll forward, so I straddled it awkwardly and pushed my chest through the too-small crack, all the while squinting my eyes in the sun, demonstrating distress. It broke my concentration and I feared losing my nerve. I wasn’t asked to come on these trips after the first successful one. And I was never seen at the physical therapy office where I stared down at the shoes squeaking around on linoleum after my impotent X-ray.
My stepmother was scared of driving also but my father forced her to do it right. To practice. At night. Blue-black. Rainy. A kid in the back seat is holding her head. Lights. The woman pleads with the man to take over for her on the highway like Band-Aids ripping off. This won’t hurt, but if it’s fast. This won’t hurt, but will take off some hair. A bald patch to remind you. Air it out, window down to heal. A sucking sound of glue doing its job to keep. The tires go . . . Strip. Strip. Strip. Strip.
Wassily Kandinsky asserts that yellow is the color of life. It is also the color of a deep bruise in its final healing stages.
She gets them home to the brown-shag apartment above the Meineke shop by the abandoned field in West Philly. He tells her to never doubt him again. See, we made it?
White is blank, but not always a fresh start.
× × × ×
Wedding planning is usually mother-of-the-bride domain—her chance to fawn over her grown daughter amid rows of froth and fantasy. With my original mother missing from the picture and my stepmother and I cycling through our perennial breakups and makeups, I had run out of mothers to summon for this occasion. And so, it was my father who came to my final bridal gown fitting after I braved all the busy and condescending shops in NYC and settled on one that felt safest within my feminist guilt.
Dad walked into the place to much bewilderment from the all-female staff, save one deliciously dainty older gentleman, brushing away snow from the lapels of his long black leather coat and hugging several copies of dog-eared Russian Bride magazines with neon-colored sticky notes ma
nically swaying up and down as he approached the back of the salon. All of my girlfriends were sitting around caramel velvet chaise longues facing mirrored walls that reflected back champagne flutes illuminated by soft lighting. We all glistened and moved through the room like orange peels squirting fragrant oil on a flickering candle.
My dad got to work quickly, and within minutes the staff had all somehow begun hovering around him, looking at pages of pouty Russian girls with heavy lip liner showing off feathered and jeweled princess dresses of all sorts. I had picked out an off-the-shoulder cream duchess satin full-skirt dress with a nipped-in waist. I wanted a modest, or at least, less delusional, version of the gown Audrey Hepburn wore in one of the final scenes of Roman Holiday. My hope was to find something elegant but plain—no lace, no embroidery, no distracting details, no sparkle, to be sure.
My plan was to eventually offer my wedding dress to my daughter or to my son’s wife to do with as she pleased—the foundation was to be completely unassuming, inviting, and of sturdy quality. The fabric being a luscious cream color of timelessness, the already antique sheen inviting of wear and tear. The lack of embellishments would allow for a free pasture to roam, offering a springboard to launch her own path and mark that road map as she wished. Or cut the cloth to bits and start fresh.
The shape of the voluminous skirt was to be the abundance from which she could draw experience, expand or contract with the seasons. If my children and their spouses saw no use for it whatsoever, I planned on cutting off the ball-gown skirt, dyeing it a royal blue or lemon yellow, and belting it in with a crisp white men’s button-down shirt. I would wear this to my child’s wedding at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, if they found it as enchanting as their dad and I once did.
The dress got sleeves, the sedate neckline was embroidered with rosettes of crystals, and the cream cloth was swapped in for a pure snow-white. A second version of the dress, designed by my father and edited down by me—a symbol of our feuds becoming paranoid handshakes—was cut and sewn anew by the perplexed designer, who delivered it barely a week before the wedding. The wedding itself had to start late because my father left his freshly starched tuxedo shirt with onyx buttons and cuff links hanging in the kitchen, miles away in Connecticut, and had to run over to Macy’s to buy one off the rack in the middle of our broiling-hot photo shoot. In his speech he called on Mike to make a successful man out of himself within ten years. “I have lived in this country for fifteen years before I achieved my goals, and since you are from here you get a head start to make my daughter happy.”
Mother Winter Page 10