Dry Your Smile

by Morgan, Robin;

  “Sit down,” she barked, half covering the phone receiver with one hand. “I’ll get rid of this schmuck in a second. Eat something,” gesturing toward the open box of stale canoles on the cardtable that still served as her desk. Then back into the phone at high decibel, “No, dammit. I said sell the Marietta Mining and buy more of the AT&T!”

  The chairs had succumbed to the same fate as the sofa. There was nowhere to sit except on her bed, now plonked in the middle of the livingroom, and she was already on it. I chose to walk around. But the apartment was an emotional minefield.

  Bric-a-brac, furry with dust. More cherubs and cupids. Porcelain rabbits from the Danube Valley. A demitasse in a wooden stand. An open-box-displayed fake turquoise and silver bracelet. And an occasional eclectic intruder into this Kitsch City—a carved ivory buddha, a genuine Sevrès plate, a lone teakwood chess queen, a gold-plated tea strainer. It was a collection to no purpose and of no consistency. Some of the pieces she had been told were “valuable,” some actually were, some she had bought because they were “cute,” some were gifts, some she had kept out of sentiment or superstition. Most of all she hated to throw anything away.

  I turned to the bookshelves, the safest spot in the room. There they were, also dusty, leaning drunkenly this way and that, but their power still intact—the magic that had sustained me. My childhood books, which she’d refused to let me take with me, were jealously guarded here: the Alice, the Enchanted Garden, the Arabian Nights, the Dickens and Stevenson and Oxford Collection of Children’s Poetry. And the later treasures: my Complete Stories and Parables of Kafka, which she herself had once loved. And here, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, which she’d also cherished. And my first copy of Lao Tzu, which she’d given me, with her own inscription, “Let emptiness fill your life, and you will never be prey to greed.”

  I knew tears were on their way to stinging my eyes even before I felt them. What could you do to heal such a life, without going under in sacrificing your own again? Hundreds of women—strangers—you could help, but not this one woman. Shit! I whispered fiercely to myself, brushing at my eyes as I heard her bang down the phone.

  “So where have you been?” she started in briskly. “I could have died.”

  “I was here just day before yesterday, as usual. You look fine. Hello, Momma,” I said, moving to where she sat, a wasted buddha plumped on her pillows. Control and restraint, I told myself, that’s the key.

  I reached over to kiss her and was struck by the slightly sour smell of her flesh. Her housecoat was stained with food drips. Control and restraint.

  “Momma, you’ve really got to let me do something about the state of this apartment. Let me do a laundry, a big cleaning. Have the place repainted, even. Get the carpets cleaned and some exterminators in. Maybe even get you to see a new doctor? The works.” It came out in a rush, too brightly, lacking authority.

  “Leave it!” she snapped, as I stooped to pick up a used Kleenex by the side of the bed. “I know where everything is. I like it just this way. The last time I came home from the hospital and you’d done one of your ‘the works’ I couldn’t find anything for weeks. As it is, that woman you got to come in and fluff up pillows and bring groceries every day drives me crazy.”

  Long-suffering Mrs. Dudinsky. How she pitied Momma, but also how many pleadings, on the average of twice a month, it took from me to get her to continue, in the face of Momma’s abuse.

  “All right, all right,” I mumbled, my voice already taking on the vintage tone of pacification. “At least let me turn down the TV.”

  “Turn it off,” she commanded, “I never watch the thing anyway.”

  I switched off one of Paola Luchino’s soap heroines in mid-anguish, removed the bathrobe and the Annual Report of IBM dumped on a wobbly French Provincial chair, added these two items to the precarious paper Alps on the sofa, and lowered myself carefully to a seat.

  “You didn’t call today, Julian honey.” She settled in, feeling things were normal at last.

  “Momma. I call every day and come up every other day. You know that. Don’t you remember yesterday I said on the phone I’d be by as always today but I wouldn’t call this morning at the usual time because I had to go to Elizabeth Clement’s funeral?”

  “Oh yeah,” she mumbled with disinterest. Then, “You wore pants to a funeral?”

  “These are silk slacks, Momma. With a silk shirt. This is the way I dress up. These are in dark blue, even. Respect for the dead and all that. Nobody minded.” Not exactly the truth, since the president of the Actors’ League had raised his eyebrows at my forked legs and the Episcopal minister appeared to have mild indigestion as I mounted his pulpit.

  “Well,” she shrugged, “your life is your own.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “Ruin it as you choose.”

  Evasive action was called for.

  “Abe Gold was at the service, Momma. Remember him? The A.D. who was always so nice? He asked after you and sent you his love. You wouldn’t recognize him. He’s gone bald—completely, like Yul Brynner!”

  “So? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everybody goes bald. Or dies. Even that bitch Elizabeth Clement.”

  “Channel 2 was there, covering the service.” Sly boots, I knew how to pique her interest.

  “You’re kidding! Will it make the six o’clock news, d’ya think? Oh God, and you in pants.”

  “I doubt it’ll make the news, Momma. They were having some sort of equipment trouble.” Lift her up, drop her. Were most conversations between grown children and their parents war games?

  We paused for a breather. Then she was into the field again.

  “So. And how is he these days?”

  “Laurence is fine, Momma. Everything’s fine.” Why tell her we’d been up until three, crying together again over whether we should separate? Why tell her if it would only bring her pleasure?

  “You’re still living there? And you say ‘everything’s fine’?”

  “If you mean my home, Momma, yes, I’m still living where I lived day before yesterday, and for almost twenty years before that. And it still happens to be the Chelsea area. Oh come on, darling. You ought to be used to it by now! They say it’ll even be fashionable in a few years.”

  “I’ll never get used to it! Why should I? You live in a slum!”

  I glanced at the Collier brothers surroundings she had accrued in the middle of Sutton Place and thought of my polished wide-plank wood floors at home, the sunny loft windows, the Franklin stove crackling away with real logs, the whitewashed walls and exposed brick, the books neatly lining their shelves, the green masses of plants, the understatement and order.

  “Well, then, learn to laugh about it,” I answered instead. “Don’t you think it’s funny that every big financier talks about how he worked his way up from a poor neighborhood to Sutton Place—while I chose to work my way in the other direction?”

  She snorted. “I’m dying from amusement. ‘When the Tsar plays peasant, the peasants should watch out.’”

  “Well, let’s see … I know. Here’s something that will please you. I’m giving a poetry reading in Boston next week and they called yesterday to say five hundred tickets had been sold. In advance! How about that?” I wound up with a triumphant flourish.

  “How much are you getting paid?”

  “Well, actually, I’m not. It’s a benefit, Momma. For a feminist newspaper up there. But it’s a really good cause. See, these newspapers mean a lot to, well, just hundreds of women who depend—”

  “I’m not hundreds of women. I’m me. I’m your mother. ‘What’s done for free always costs.’ I don’t like people taking advantage of you. I don’t like it how that husband of yours doesn’t have a job, either.”

  “That’s not true, Momma. Laurence works free-lance, just like I do … Oh, and Momma, I might have an article accepted by Harper’s? And I finished correcting galleys on my new book yesterday?” She had managed to reduce my
statements to questions, as always.

  “Oh,” she answered, “that’s nice.” Her eyes glazed over with boredom, then came to life again as the telephone rang. Saved by the bell, I lit a cigarette, went and rummaged up a saucer from the kitchen for an ashtray, stomped another cockroach en route, and sat down again to watch her as she talked, animatedly now, on the phone.

  Once, she had been so beautiful. A delicately boned face with features exquisitely chiseled, huge dark-brown eyes, what I’d come to call her Nefertiti neck, and that incredible alabaster skin—her flesh so pale and fine-pored as to seem translucent. She’d always been overweight, of course, ricocheting from merely plump to quite fat, perpetually on one diet or another. Growing up, I knew when a lot of eggs appeared that we were going on The Mayo, when steaks filled the freezer that we were Doing Protein, when bowls of bananas sat on every table that we were embarking on The Bland. Still, she had been beautiful, and not only to a child’s perception. Even now, I could look at old photographs of her with adult objectivity but admiration. That luminous skin, those fawnlike eyes. The perfect teeth in a radiant smile. No matter what happened, her smile, when beamed full on its fortunate recipient, descended like a blessing.

  Now only the eyes were left—still large, black, clear. Her features had slid almost imperceptibly sideways since the minor stroke. Years of being overweight left sacs of loose flesh on her body, as she grew thinner from loss of appetite, lack of muscle tone, nerve degeneration. Bat-wings of skin swung from her underarms, the color of the flesh a light sepia, the texture like clotted cream. Worst of all were the tremors, because of what they did to her pride. The youngest daughter of immigrants—a former rabbi and his peasant wife, the girl with a lovely voice who had dreamed of becoming an opera singer until told that performing publicly was lower than prostitution, the woman who had been afraid all her youth of poverty and ignominy until a shining precocious daughter came into her life—all that woman ever had was her pride.

  Could she, then, have died of a heart attack—quick, clean? No, she had been cursed with a lingering degenerative disease that could take up to a quarter-century to run its course, one for whom the hallucination-inducing, blood-clot-provoking medication was almost as dangerous as the malady. None of this she acknowledged. She simply tremored. But the pride wouldn’t let her tremble in public—a coffee cup clattering uncontrollably as she set it down in a restaurant, an occasional dribble down the chin, the terrifying unmaneuverability of a street curb. Not quite a recluse yet, she nonetheless had made it clear, unspoken, that she was choosing this path, and when those huge eyes seemed to plead I can suffer pain but not humiliation, I committed myself to respecting her decision. For six years, she had consistently refused to accept the identical diagnoses of three separate doctors. And she still ignored medication. The shoebox kept under her bed brimmed with unfilled prescription slips.

  Now she was flirting by phone with her broker of over three decades. Surely he must know … or was this a reliable, compassionate game between them?

  “Well, handsome, before I go out for dinner with you, I’d have to buy something new and very special to wear, no?” She winked at me. Oh those eyes. I couldn’t help winking back. “And I’d need some better dividends for that, don’t you think? So look, you just be a lamb and do what I say, like always. I don’t care what boom might happen if Reagan gets elected in two months. I want blue chips, not those goddamned money markets, you understand? Don’t give me trouble. Don’t make me nervous.”

  Still the manipulator with the eyes of God. And I, a grown woman with a messed-up life of my own, still afraid of her, still afraid for her, still strung taut as a violin string with pity for her, still loving her hopelessly.

  I was grateful for the phone-call interruptions. Little atolls in a pacific of grief, they made these meetings bearable. In another hour I could go. Home to Laurence where nothing was resolved. Abe Gold was right: heavy day, kid. I got up and began to wander around again, as if the room might this time yield a secret exit I’d overlooked for years.

  But I didn’t want to go into the bedroom, where she and I had slept in twin beds right up through my adolescence until I finally left, penniless, but with a secretarial job and at least with a walk-up room of one’s own in Yorkville. No, the bedroom had been turned into some Luis Buñuel version of a shrine: hideous calf-length full skirts of the 1950’s, pastel Capezio shoes, pillbox hats, a dyed-blond beaver coat, a white mink capelet. The dresser boasted my Honor Student citation framed in rose velvet matting, the New York State piano competition medal for first prize (third-year students), two acting awards, a ballet competition trophy, the Golden Record earned by sales of my one and only recording, and the “Ideal American Girl” special citation from the American Federation of Women’s Auxiliaries. The doll collection was arranged on what had been my bed, all their glass and plastic and painted eyes still wide with unblinking wonder, their legs stiffly spread for balance, their arms rigid and outstretched. No, enduring the clutter of the living-room was preferable to entering the bedroom.

  She hung up the phone. But I knew I was safe when she began to talk about the market. I had long ago ceased to declaim, “But Momma! The rights of labor! Deforestation, strip mining, multinationals!” I had quite given that conversation up by the time I was twenty-three, exhausted. It was ceded terrain now, all hers. In that sense, safe for me. Now she was off on the bastard at Trackill et al. not having informed her in time about a hot new issue, and how she dropped a bundle on that one but was going to make a killing this time.

  “Make some tea, Baby,” she finished cheerfully, not waiting for my response. “You shouldn’t smoke. I have to call my other broker. ‘Never hide all the silver in one hole.’ Then we’ll have a nice cup of tea.”

  Washing the kettle, the pot, the cups and saucers and spoons before using—all this bought more time. I could hear her chattering cozily away on her life line, content that I was simply here. How long had it taken to learn such an obvious thing? That it was my mere physical presence she required, not who I was, most especially not who I had become. But the what of me still delighted her. She alone could see baby teeth in my adult smile, child-star long blond curls in my short brown hair, fear and love still fighting each other for supremacy in every glance I paid her. Danger to talk about anything, anyway: politics, religion, sex—all the subjects forbidden for polite dinner conversation in 1890—were still off limits with her in 1980. But so was her health. So was my writing. So were her friends (almost all turned away now from pride), my friends (“hippies and bohemians”), her liaison with my father, and my marriage to Laurence. The weather was a safe subject. Also Old Times—although less safe for me. Danger to think she’d ever be proud of anything I’d accomplished since Old Times. Danger to try to show her my writing. Whether she was afraid she couldn’t understand it or afraid she could, she would transform the shy gift of a manuscript into a bedtable coaster for her water glass; I could watch it lie there, gathering dust and accumulating glass-rings, pages beginning to curl, until I would by unspoken agreement quietly remove it when she wasn’t looking. A published book, on the other hand, would be propped up on the paper-strewn cardtable as if on display for friends who rarely were allowed to visit. A published book would at least be examined in my presence, the jacket criticized (“They could’ve printed your name bigger; you still have fans out there, you know, who might buy books”). A published book laid as an offering before the bedclothes of the throne would at least elicit a kiss, a “Congratulations, dear,” and momentarily misty eyes—though whether misty with pride or loss one couldn’t tell—before the advance copy was handed back.

  “But it’s yours, Momma. This copy is for you. See? I inscribed it for you, and—”

  “That’s lovely, Julian, that’s nice. Put it on the cardtable, Baby. I’ll look at it later.”

  Which would close the subject.

  Maybe standing in the kitchen and watching the kettle come slowly to a boil did it,
the water gathering heat so that its molecules whirled faster and began to break surface in small and then larger bubbles—like the circular-conversation battle with Larry the previous night, the duel with Paulie that morning, the millionth non-encounter exchange here with Hope. I began to get angry. A healthy, “empowering” emotion, all the shrinks said, but an emotion that somehow felt self-indulgent and counterproductive, one small step on the well-intentioned path toward nuclear warfare. Still, the kettle lid began to hiccup with contained pressure, and I decided Okay, Julian, Let’s Get Angry Constructively. Let’s go in there and say … what? Momma, you’ve got to see a doctor again. Momma, you have Parkinson’s, face it. Momma, one defense against getting sicker faster is to move about, try to live life as usual, hard as that is. Momma, you have to let me clean up this place and get somebody to help keep it decent. Momma, life is not just the Dow Jones Index and the constant television you claim not to watch. To hell with restraint and control, I told myself. You are a grown woman, Julian. How about firm?

  She was lying back on her pillows, eyes closed, when I brought the tea in and cleared away proxy notices from the cardtable in order to put the tray down. Then poured two cups and brought her one, with extra sugar, just as she liked it. I cleared my throat, nervous because I was sure what her reaction would be (no difficulty in expressing anger, not her), and because I was equally unsure of what actors always call “the motivation.” Elements of loving concern, common sense, and sadism were woven through any decision of mine to talk to her about The Illness. An especially treacherous ethical ground when one knew one could pull off an act of revenge via a gesture of ostensible caritas. Truth as a bludgeon. How expert Laurence and I now were at using that against each other.

  “Hope,” I began.