Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

  I pick up the telephone and dial Steven’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “Steven? It’s Aunt Nattie.”

  “Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling your house for days. And Christopher’s and my dad’s. I couldn’t find anyone. Where’re Shay and Amelia?”

  “Amelia’s here with me, Steve. In Minneapolis. Your mom asked me to keep her while she went to Atlanta for the convention. So I brought her out here to visit Marge.”

  “Aunt Nattie, what the hell is going on?” Steven wails. “I’ve gotta know where my daughter is. I know it’s not your fault, but I can’t believe the way my mother leaves Amelia all the time. With anybody. I don’t mean you, Aunt Nattie, but I gotta know when someone takes her out of Washington!”

  “Honey, I’m sorry. But, really, she’s fine. She’s been having a great time the last few days.”

  “Thanks, but … shit, what’s Shay’s problem?”

  “You’ll have to talk to her about that, Steven. It’s certainly not a new one.” Steven’s anger at Shay has grown with the years. “So? How are your classes going?”

  “Chemistry’s a bitch.” Steven’s voice is becoming sulky, just as it did during his childhood. “I’m hanging in, though.”

  “What would you think about Granny and me taking Amelia to visit Yvonne?” I ask hesitantly.

  “No way! I don’t want her to see Yvonne in a hospital and I don’t want Yvonne to see her. At all. No way, Aunt Nattie. Please.”

  “Steven, calm down. Of course we won’t do it if you don’t want us to—that’s why I called.”

  Silence.

  “I can’t believe this,” he finally says wearily.

  “Look, don’t worry. We’ll be back in place in Washington in a few days. Have you been able to watch any of the convention?”

  “A little. Well, listen—say hello to Granny for me and I’ll call Amelia tomorrow morning.”

  “Great. Good night, honey.”

  “So how’s Steven sound to you?” Marge asks as soon as I’ve hung up the receiver. “When he called me last week he seemed very tired.”

  Translation: Premed students are supposed to be exhausted. This is actually a great diagnosis from a Jewish grandmother:

  “He’s working hard,” I agree. “He’d never have been able to do this if he’d taken Amelia up there with him. She’s a handful.”

  Marge shrugs. Medical school versus being a good parent is a tough call for a Jewish grandmother. But being a father at nineteen puts Steven in a special category.

  “And how’s Eli?”

  Translation: How’s your marriage, or, in other words, your life? Are you doing all the things a wife should do to hold things together? Marriage is the center; are you making sure that your center will hold?

  “He’s fine. Working too hard, as usual.”

  Translation: He’s bored stiff with me, Mom. We’re coming to the end of our road together.

  “Can’t he take some time off?”

  Translation: Can’t you provide him with a home life that will keep him happy? Can’t you be a helpmate to him in a way that would make you indispensable?

  I am giving her the same rote answers I always produce over the telephone, but Marge likes to see my face when I deliver my lines. Saying the same things about the same people in the same way for decades is an important part of our relationship. My recitation is reassuring to Marge. It makes her feel close to me. Of life’s many mysteries, intimacy is the most profound one for her. But now she segues into her favorite subject, one so loaded with stress that she sometimes can’t even initiate it.

  “So. Have you seen much of Shay lately?”

  Translation: Has she been behaving herself?

  “Pretty often. She’s been traveling a lot, but she and Amelia spent last weekend at our house.”

  “Oh really? Goodness. How nice.”

  Our mother smiles.

  Our Demand-Feeding Mother of Eternal Forgiveness.

  Our Mah-Jongg Champ of Confucian Confusion.

  Our Hadassah Mother of Megacontradictions. Our Canasta Club Player, Our Beth El Women’s Auxiliary Vice President, Our Jewish Country Club Geisha, who tiptoes past the 19th Hole Men-Only Game Room so as not to disturb the male members playing cards, and who turns away so as not to see the combination when some lady opens her locker in the women’s dressing room.

  Although Marge still doesn’t believe she spawned Shay, she is genuinely happy when her daughters spend time together. In her eyes, I offer Shay a legitimacy that no one else can bestow upon her.

  “Is she … seeing anyone?”

  Translation I: Has she been sleeping around?

  Translation II: How can she bear to be so intimate, so close, with so many different men, so many different … bodies?

  Now Marge dons the facial expression that means Shay’s sex life makes her feel ill, dizzy, weak in the knees.

  Where did Daddy and I go wrong? her eyes ask me.

  What do people think of our family, of me, for having raised such a nonconformist, a person who observes none of our observances, who values none of our values? How did we raise such a promiscuous, totally unconventional, out-of-control hellion? What is going to become of her? From Marge’s perspective Shay did everything wrong from the very beginning. Marge saw Shay’s low birth weight as a preternatural prenatal act of defiance that set them at odds from Day One.

  “No. Not anyone special,” I say in a particular tone of voice.

  Translation: If she’s sleeping around it isn’t public knowledge.

  “Do you have any wine, Mom?”

  “I think so.”

  In an instant she’s up and rummaging around in Dad’s old liquor cabinet. Eventually she produces a bottle of Clos Robert Chardonnay and a corkscrew.

  “That should be a good bottle,” she says, which is what Dad would have said. “Do you want something to eat?”

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t think it’s good to drink wine without eating something.”

  As soon as I lose a little weight I gain a lot of self-control because I don’t want to lose my new “lightness of being.” I’ve probably dropped five or six pounds in these last, long days. I’m feeling lean and much too good about myself to indulge in a midnight snack. Uncorking the bottle, I pour myself a glass of wine.

  SNAPSHOT

  This is the last picture I took of Dad before he died. He’s standing in his leathery law office in front of his shelf of ivory Buddhas. We had just returned from a lunch during which he’d asked me so many questions about Shay I became furious. Back in his office, I continued to berate him for having focused on Shay, almost exclusively, during our teenage years. He defended his behavior, his struggle to contain her wildness. I said that he encouraged her acting out by paying so much attention to it. I said that by letting Shay sub for Marge at various country-club events, by entering the mixed-doubles tournament with his daughter rather than his wife, he’d inflated Shay’s sense of importance. I said, “Dad, you played a lot of mixed doubles together. Too much!” Then he came over, put his arm around my shoulders and pressed my head against his chest.

  “And how’s … poor Christopher?” Marge asks.

  His name emerges haltingly from between her thin lips. It is a difficult name for Marge to muster because it sounds so much like Christian.

  “He’s doing better,” I answer, deciding to change my testimony. “Actually, Shay is seeing someone. Someone sort of famous. Mickey Teardash. From the—”

  “Teardash tobacco family? My goodness. That is a very rich family. It’s maybe the richest Jewish family in America.” Marge seems to shrink a little at the contemplation of such great wealth. “I read somewhere that they own their own island off Greece. They bought it from the Greek government after the war.”

  Marge means the Second World War.

  “Like Aristotle.”

  Marge means Aristotle as in Onassis, not Aristotle as in Plato.

  “T
hey are very rich,” I agree.

  “So? Does it look … serious?”

  Marge has begun to flush a little. But this time it is not embarrassment that is coloring her face; it is excitement. I am shocked that Marge is so impressed. Although she always encouraged my stability, seriousness and sobriety, at this moment she seems charmed by Shay’s chutzpah, by our Fortune 500 hunter successfully landing a millionaire. Suddenly it appears that Marge, my main ally in life, is like everyone else when it comes to the rich and famous. She’s like my friend Angie, a serious political person who loves to hear stories about Shay’s frantic antics and extravagant escapades.

  But is it possible Marge has secretly been a Shay-supporter all along? Are all her condemnations of Shay’s unconventional behavior really only a cover for her vicarious pride in Shay’s outrageous deeds? Is Mom secretly getting off on Shay’s love affair and possible merger into the Teardash family? Doesn’t Mom, like everyone else, love a winner? And didn’t I experience the same sort of thrill from being in Mickey Teardash’s company?

  Who am I kidding?

  Still, this hurts. Marge seems to have shifted her emotional shekels from me to Shay. Perhaps my mother believes that if Shay’s sins are grand enough, sufficiently grandiose, they are more acceptable. Suddenly it seems that the thrill-seeking daughter is more interesting to the mother than the daughter she made in her own image.

  Like mother, like daughter.

  Maybe. Marge and I are both boring.

  Feeling a soft flutter of panic in my throat, I refill the goblet.

  Is this the same Marge Karavan I’ve always known? Is this Marge Karavan the same consummate consumer who carried carefully scissored discount coupons to the supermarket and asked the meat department for special cuts of lamb and veal? Is this the woman who would never wear brown with navy or silver with gold, who would never don white heels before Memorial Day or be caught dead in them after Labor Day weekend? Is this the woman who’d never appear in public without an “important piece of jewelry” and who carried colorless nail polish in her purse to stop runs in her nylons?

  Is this my mother?

  Is this the woman who decorated our shower curtain rod with fragile undies every night before she went to bed and who rinsed out new hose before wearing them? Is this the same Marge Karavan whose leather belts matched her leather shoes, which matched her leather purses, which she changed to match each different outfit? Is this the woman who never let her orange Pan-Cake makeup cake around her nose and who never rubbed her upper and lower lips together after applying lipstick because she knew their shapes were different? Is this the same woman who sent out thank-you notes for get-well cards, who never tried out a new recipe on company or wore brand-new shoes on an important occasion? Is this the same woman who safety-pinned Dad’s socks together before putting them in the washing machine and who’d never put a bra in the dryer?

  Had I been bamboozled, brainwashed and programmed into believing that good was better than bad just so I’d clean up after Shay, mop up her messes, just like I’d hung up the clothes she left drooling off the chair in our bedroom for nearly twenty years? And if Shay wasn’t the wicked sister, did that mean I’d been an altruistic asshole all my life?

  Marge stands up, walks around the table for no practical reason, returns to her chair and sits down again. She’s clearly winding herself up to say something.

  “Nat, I’ve always meant to ask if you’d ever discussed your … problem … your condition, with a specialist,” she says quietly.

  I have now finished my second glass of wine.

  “My problem?” I echo, filling the glass again at a measured pace so as not to attract her attention. “Wouldn’t you like a little sip of wine, Mom?”

  “No, not really. Well,” she says, flushing, “your problem of being … sterile.”

  I am beginning to feel the same sense of disbelief I experienced when I saw the burned curtains in my bedroom.

  “Whaddaya talking about, Mom?”

  Never before, not once, has Marge ever even alluded to the fact I have no children. Silence on this subject was par for the course since anything even distantly related to sex is a taboo topic for her. But now there is an expression on her face which announces that, after twenty-some years, she has learned about my abortion and the perforation of my uterus that sterilized me.

  My blood starts going crazy. Rushing through narrowed arteries like large lumbering trucks inside the Holland Tunnel, it is leaping and roaring toward my brain.

  SNAPSHOT

  That’s Shay and me standing beside the 1964 Ford Fairlane Dad bought us for commuting to the U. of M. Whenever I remember those distant days, I am seized by ancient spasms of alienation. Every afternoon I would wait for Shay in the student union and watch the smooth Scandinavian coeds come gliding in from the cold. With snowflakes clinging to their lashes and the mouton-trimmed collars of their storm coats, they would pause in the entranceway, full of charming expectation, as they searched the vast open lounge for signs of their mates. Then, singly or in pairs, the girls who let their straight blond hair rest like royal mantles upon their shoulders would approach the terrace, where a herd of tall, muscular young men from St. Paul or White Bear Lake huddled together like burly sheep in their darker-colored storm coats. There they would all come together and I would quicken and stiffen with a sweet-sour jealousy as the crowd shifted into couples and disappeared, strolling down toward the riverbanks to reclaim their snowcapped convertibles from newly plowed parking lots.

  “You know,” Marge insists. “What happened because of that … abortion.”

  “What did Shay tell you, Mom?” I ask in a pseudo-patient voice. “I mean, when did you two discuss this?”

  “Let me see. Maybe a month or so ago.”

  “How in the hell did it come up? I mean, that was twenty-one years ago. What reason was there to bring it up? I mean, why do you think she told you, Ma? Don’t you see she told you to put me down and stir you up?”

  Marge looks thoughtful. “Well, I guess she knew that I’ve always wondered why you and Eli didn’t have any children. I suppose she wanted me to understand you would have, if you could have.”

  “Mom, can’t you see she was only trying to make me look bad? Make you feel bad for me and about me?”

  Marge smiles uncertainly.

  Her sweet passivity is a red flag to me.

  “Mom,” I say, feeling the wine stir up old stubborn feelings, “what exactly did Shay tell you?”

  Then I fold my arms on the table and lower my head into the dark secret cavern created by my bent elbows.

  Oh, Mama, I never wanted you to know. I never wanted you to know I’d lost my virginity—voluntarily, eagerly—way back then. It’s so hard to explain why I wanted to have sex, why I wanted to own that experience. But I’d felt deprived for so long, about so many things, sex seemed like a dazzling, sweet solution. I didn’t know that a few minutes of confused pleasure would result in a situation that effectively took my past, my present and my future, crumpled them up like a sheet of typing paper and tossed them into a wastebasket. You might have expected Shay to need an abortion, but it would have killed you to know that I did. That’s why I never had the heart to tell you. So then I could never explain what my barrenness had done to me, what it felt like never having children. You’d only have felt worse about it, knowing how it happened. But I’ve felt so bereaved all these years, so useless. Because the truth is that Shay—for all her wild and wicked ways—at least produced Steven, who’s now produced beautiful little Amelia for you to love.

  My Abortion Act I

  There is no photo from that day, only the memory of a moody winter afternoon in February 1967, when I emerged from the Department of Social Work to encounter a strong icy wind rising off the Mississippi River flats. Slicing between the buildings, the wind slashed along the open quad, creating a gale-strength force that tried to rip the notebooks from my arms and a windchill factor that burned my face. So I’
d retreated into the basement of Folwell Hall, where I entered a garage that led into a labyrinth of tunnels beneath-the University of Minnesota campus.

  This subterranean chain of furnace-hot parking lots, filled with winter-dirty cars—bearing, beneath their fenders, chunks of blackened snow that melted throughout the day, covering the cement floor with filmy water—led to the Coffman Student Union. There stairs rose to the Terrace Cafeteria (controlled by medical students from the University Hospital across the street), where I stopped to have a cup of coffee before walking into the huge student lounge, where I always breasted my books in a spasm of self-consciousness.

  That afternoon everyone I saw looked ridiculously safe and secure to me, immune to the panic and despair I was feeling. The abortion I was scheduled to have at six-thirty that evening consolidated all the fears that had evolved in my first twenty-one years of life. The countdown had started early that morning and accelerated all day long, until now, as I waited for Shay and Eli, my anxiety was pumping like a generator. Something horrendous was going to happen to my body. Something savage was about to happen to the most intimate part of me. I felt a panic similar to the one I’d suffered during my initial sexual encounter that had resulted in this pregnancy.

  Combined with my physical anxieties was a brand-new terror about breaking the law. There I was, the nice girl, the dependable girl, the older sister, waiting to get her internal organs scraped out during an illegal abortion. Not only did I fear an inadvertent slip of the knife, I also feared the police crashing into the place to arrest the doctor and me. Guilty demons were hurtling through my head and I could not bury the demons, stop the clamor, the vibrations, the anticipation. Wrong, wrong. Wrong. What would be the end result of this wrong? Who would claim me for punishment, for disciplinary action, for revenge?