Any Place I Hang My Hat

by Susan Isaacs

  “And what did you say?”

  ‘“Not on your life, Phyllis.’ Then she made a threat.”

  My stomach did a somersault the way stomachs are wont to do at such moments. “What was it?” I asked in my gentle voice.

  Rose’s voice got softer, but not gentle. “She said I would have to choose between you and my grandsons. I don’t think she meant it. I think she was just, I don’t know. Beside herself.”

  I could hear her breathing faster. “Rose, if you had to make a choice, I know you would choose your grandsons. They’ve known you all their lives; I’m sure they love you and need someone like you. But I don’t think you have to choose. Your daughter is probably beside herself about a lot of things, like having her past lives intrude on the one she’s living now. And she’s probably upset about not knowing what to expect of me. Oh, and one more thing: She realizes someone other than herself knows that she left my father but never divorced him. She’s had two bigamous marriages. Trust me, she’s not going to keep a loving grandmother with that knowledge apart from her grandchildren. All three of them.”

  Strange, after being on the phone talking to my maternal grandmother about her daughter/my mother, the woman I dreamed about that night was Grandma Lil. Not Grandma Lil with a plastic-wrapped filet mignon in her coat pocket, and not Grandma Lil making me practice on our one unbroken chair how a real lady sits: No, no, no. For Christ’s sake, what’s so hard about it? If you can learn your times tables you can learn to sit like you got refinement. Amy, pay attention. I’m teaching you stuff you can’t get in books. All right, there you are, facing front, your back’s straight—come on, straighter. Chin up a little bit. Okay, now this is where it gets hard. Knees together to the left, ankles together to the right, so like your legs are making the letter ... Whatever. Z? V? You’re supposed to be so smart? Figure it out.

  In the dream, as in life, she had Alzheimer’s. Not in its early stages, when she got fired from Beauté after coming to work on the wrong days and not showing up on the right ones and burning clients with hot wax. I came home for a week in August after my summer job in Boston ended and found her sitting in a puddle of her own urine watching an oily-haired televangelist declaring, God wants to be the center of your life! That turned out to be the week from hell, taking her to doctors, calling Social Security, Medicare, and fifteen other agencies to start the paperwork that would get her help. I observed her trying so hard and unsuccessfully to get her lipstick on straight; she looked stricken, on the verge of tears. What chilled me was my sense that somehow she’d lost the physical ability to cry. I put on her lipstick for her and told her how elegant she looked.

  Joan Murdoch, my old caseworker, advised me on how to go about finding a place for Grandma Lil. Thus, a potential drawn-out, bureaucratic nightmare lasted six weeks. Between Joan’s help and a phone call by the stepfather of one of the guys in my house at Harvard—a man who had given up charity to take on serious philanthropy—I was finally able to find a place to take care of her.

  The dream I had was set after that awful month and a half, in the institution where she wound up. Institution sounds pejorative, but it was an appealing sprawl of buildings in which the people who changed her stinking diapers had the humanity to treat her not just with professionalism, but with fond detachment.

  Lilly, sweetheart, look who’s here! one of the aides says in the dream. Grandma’s wheelchair is pulled up to one of the long tables in the dayroom. It’s a place filled with sunshine, although the dream windows are more Ivey-Rush chapel than Gurwin Jewish Geriatric Center. Long rectangles of yellow daylight slant across the dayroom floor, and are crowned with the reds, blues, and purples of stained glass.

  Grandma Lil looks up and her face breaks into a smile the likes of which I never saw in all my years living with her. I know you! she says brightly. What’s your name? I tell her it’s Amy and she pats a chair beside her wheelchair and says, I can’t find my teeth. She’s fairly sanguine about it, smiles—oddly, with teeth intact—and hands me a spoon. As far as I can recall, the rest of the dream is me feeding her mashed bananas that she eats happily.

  For a short while, reality wasn’t that different. Until she dwindled into a mere organism, devoid of speech and personality, kept alive by a feeding tube, there were moments of surprising sweetness in her dementia. When I came home from college Christmas of my junior year, I had no home to go to anymore, so I stayed at Tatty’s. I took the train out to Long Island every few days. I’d meet Grandma Lil in the dayroom or in her room. At the sight of me she’d break into an enormous smile. I knew she didn’t remember me from one visit to the next, but there was something about me that delighted her. Once she called me Ma. You like my dress, Ma? She was in bed that morning, watching cartoons, wearing a blue hospital gown, one of those things that tie in the back. Gorgeous! I told her. You look like a million bucks.

  All during that winter break, I couldn’t get my father or Aunt Linda to come with me and visit her. I offered to pick them up. Nothing doing. I said, “You know, they really make it very pleasant for family members to drop by. It’s very clean. It doesn’t smell or anything.” My father said he couldn’t get away. He was busy. I offered to let him drive Tatty’s Jaguar, knowing he couldn’t turn down an offer like that. But he did. Aunt Linda said she couldn’t handle it emotionally. I tried one more time with my father. “Chicky, she’s your mother. Believe me, I know what she was like. But at least once, get out there. Show your face. Look, she’s getting great care, but it’s important for the people who work there to know she has family behind her.” He told me sorry, he was tied up with a million things and that there was no point in going because with Alzheimer’s, they don’t even know who you are.

  After she died, my memory, and nearly all my dreams of Grandma Lil, were mostly about the Lillian Lincoln with that dazzling smile. I wondered, as the disease progressed, whether it was stripping off the layers of her personality until she became her essence, a sweet girl with an eager smile who liked being fed mashed bananas. Maybe deep down I understood this was the true Grandma Lil, and that’s why she appeared in my dreams.

  Or was this tender child some entirely new person, one so far from snobbery and venality that the girl in the gorgeous blue hospital gown could never have been the woman who brought me up?

  I am always irritated when a character in a movie, wakened by the phone, appears dazed and gropes for it through four or five rings. It’s a performance by second-rate actors playing alcoholic cops, or actresses eager to display erect nipples under white satin. So when my cell phone and alarm clock went off simultaneously with dueling tunes, “Karma Chameleon” and the Muppets’ theme, it took me less than a second to spring into a sitting position, grab the clock, and put an end to the Muppets. People do get weird about early-morning phone calls, thinking it’s about dear Auntie Ethel, but my assumption was it was someone I’d interviewed who’d somehow gotten my number and been up all night worrying if he/she had blabbed too much. Or that Chicky had gotten arrested again, the thought of which frightened me, although it would not have made me reel in surprise. So, not in any panic, I allowed myself a full second to flip open the phone and say “Hello” to whoever would be calling me at six o’clock in the morning.

  “Hey, Amy. It’s—”

  “Hey, John.” I was too shocked to try for cool. On the other hand, I would have liked to avoid awkward. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen because I squawked John rather than said it.

  “I know you get up around now.” And are still sleeping alone. “I don’t want to cut into your running time, but I wanted to talk to you. I was sorry when I got your message that you wouldn’t come for Passover. But it’s great to know you’re getting someplace in the mother search. Look, I’d like to hear a little about it. And also, I thought that the last time we spoke ... I hope I didn’t sound rude or—I don’t know—mean. I didn’t want to end things on a sour note.”

  Even if I said, My search for my mother is none of your
damn business, and hung up on him, there was no way I was going to have a day without thinking John and practically getting the vapors, so I made the decision to talk. Briefly, courteously, determined not to drag it out. Besides looking pathetic, it would also be futile. What the hell: I wasn’t going to make my last note a sour one.

  “Well, to cut the long story about my research mercifully short,” I told him, “I came up with the address of where my mother had lived in Brooklyn.”

  “You know you’re talking to a pro here. Don’t cut it short. I want to hear all about the research. In as much detail as you remember. How about dinner one night?”

  I didn’t go through any of that Oh, this must be a dream, but his words sounded awfully light for a request that ought to have sounded important. “Dinner?” All those books about how men and women react differently in similar circumstances: I could not believe his heart wasn’t beating like the kettledrums in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m going to be direct, John.”

  “How unlike you.”

  “What does dinner mean, and don’t give me appetizer, entrée, and dessert.”

  “It means that I was glad when I heard your message. I’d like to hear what you found out. And to offer to do anything I can to help.”

  “You offered that before. Is it still the same friendly offer, emphasis on the word friendly?”

  He hesitated for a couple of seconds, and I knew that the answer wasn’t going to be what I wanted to hear. “As friends,” he said.

  “All right,” I breathed. “I need a minute to think about what I want to say.”

  “Now that doesn’t sound like you at all,” he said. “Where is the Amy Lincoln of the instant comeback?”

  I knew he was trying to avoid having the conversation get heavy, but it was my turn to talk. I didn’t want to toss the repartee back and forth like a game of Hot Potato—moving fast, not thinking, trying only not to get burned. I didn’t have the inclination and I didn’t have the energy. It may have been only a couple of minutes after six a.m., but I felt I’d already lived an all-nighter. Just being on the phone with him wiped me out, to say nothing of hearing him say As friends.

  “Are you up for ruthless honesty?” I asked.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Sure. You can choose to hang up.” He didn’t, so I gave it to him as straight as I could. “It’s like this, John. The breakup was awful for me, maybe even the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that, Amy. You’ve had some rough times in your life.”

  “My mother taking off, my father going to prison, maybe even taking the rap for her—all that was objectively traumatic, guaranteed to make any semirational person feel like shit. But you were on the other side of the universe from all that. You’re funny, kind, intelligent, interesting, all sorts of things. You don’t like sour notes. And you’re a hot guy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I guess that’s a compliment, but I mean it as an explanation. I loved you. I lost you.” I pulled up the covers to form a hood over my head. I didn’t know why. I’d always talked to John in bed, under the covers, but I’d left my head outside. Maybe I was trying to shelter myself from the realization that there would be no future under-the-covers business with him. If I got it going with Steve or with some other guy, I’d have to carry on our conversations from a different venue.

  “Do you think I was in the relationship just for laughs?” he demanded.

  “I know you weren’t. And I know there were plenty of times I let you down or hurt you. Being so close-mouthed, which I guess was a way of saying, I can’t trust you with this information. Leaving you so soon after nine-eleven. I was afraid you’d get tired of me or need your space, and I couldn’t bear to hear it. Instead I ran—without regard for what you wanted. I’m sorry for all those times. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I’m sorry I wasn’t a big enough person to trust you.”

  “Don’t take it all on yourself. I should have spoken up. I shouldn’t have dumped all of that on you the last time we were together, after my cousin’s wedding. It wasn’t fair.” I could hear in the flatness of his voice that he was seriously upset with the conversation and trying to maintain self-control. When he’d called, he probably saw himself as being a nice guy, possibly an interested friend, and he was getting more than he’d bargained for.

  “John, I can’t be your friend. Friendship would only extend the pain.”

  “You’re still not over it?”

  “I’m not sure.” I was tempted to add, Don’t worry, it’s no big deal ... but realized it would sound sarcastic, or even bitter. “Well, probably not over it yet. Look, if I were in your shoes I’d want to know what happened with the Great Mother Search. And I think you should know. So when I get some distance from all this, from you, from whatever happens or doesn’t happen with my mother, I’ll write you and tell you about it. At length. But here’s the deal. You can’t acknowledge the letter in any way. I don’t want to spend a week or month or however long thinking about what’s on my voice mail or what’s in my mailbox. I have to know it’s a one-sided correspondence, and I’m the one side. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Good.”

  John sighed. Not one of those weary man sighs, but the sigh of a kid who doesn’t have a clue about what to say next. Finally he said: “I was still hoping that maybe you’d change your mind and come up for the Seder.”

  “Is this some really subtle way of trying to get back with me that I’m not getting?”

  “No,” he said softly.

  “Okay. Then let me tell you about me and holidays. When I started at Ivey, I spent Passover with the rabbi and his family who lived three towns away or with one of the girls whose families actually practiced Judaism, as opposed to just being Jews. And for all the American holidays and Christmas and Easter, I was with Tatty, either in New York or their other two houses or with other friends. The same thing at college and J-school. I always found someplace to go.

  “But no matter where I went, I was always so envious. Even when it was a dysfunctional or twisted or some-kind-of-awful family—like Tatty’s, with her father so drunk he took a nap at the table with his check on his roast goose—I was jealous and resentful that I wasn’t part of it. Even if I was a regular, I was still a guest. I had no unconditional right to be there. All of which is a way of saying that aside from loving you, I loved your family. I appreciate the invitation and your persistence. If I went, I would be envious. And I bet I’d even be angry, because this was something I wanted and couldn’t have.”

  “You never acted angry or envious,” John said.

  “One of my talents is knowing how to get asked back. It’s only when you’re part of a family that you have the luxury of behaving badly. So many times in the last—I don’t know—five or six years I tried to get my father to come for some holiday, any holiday, Saint Swithin’s Day for all I care. But he was always with some woman or other who couldn’t know he had a twenty-something daughter. And Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky go to his family for all the holidays and they’re nice people, but there’s no chemistry, even though they’re Italian. I asked Linda and Sparky to come over once for a Seder, but Aunt Linda called at the last minute and went cough-cough, I have a bad chest cold so I wound up with four quarts of matzo ball soup and pounds of roast chicken and five people from the Weinberg Home for the Aged because I’d volunteered and they all turned out to be ex-communists who were still having doctrinal fights with each other.”

  “You had all of them in your apartment?” John asked.

  “Yes. The food was in the kitchen and when I cleared, I put the dirty dishes in the bathtub so it wouldn’t look messy.”

  “You never told me that.”

  I was so tempted to go into the story about how one of the men stood up and started shaking his knife at a tiny cotton ball of a woman, a Trotskyite. I was getting so comfortable with the normality of the conversation that I pushed the blanket off the
top of my head. Except this was what I’d told him I didn’t want to do. “John, I find myself falling into the friendship trap.”

  “Can I ask you, Amy, what’s so terrible about that?”

  “Because it’s over.”

  “You know, you’re the one who called me that time, asking if we could reconnect.” Although John occasionally blew up, most of the time, like now, his anger was low-key. “You’re the one—”

  “I know. Let me explain. I was having a really bad night. I’d just broken three ribs and I was in pain and probably scared. Whatever.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, for God’s sake?”

  “What would you have done? Come over and been very kind and taken me to the emergency room. And then what? You and I are history. I took myself to the emergency room.” I was so tempted to say, And I met a cute doctor who really came on to me. Instead I said, “John, I wish you nothing but happiness. If I accused you unjustly about that woman at the Mahler concert, then I’m sorry. And now it’s time to say good-bye.”

  “Did you ever see yourself being married to me?”

  “I didn’t allow myself a marriage fantasy too often, but when I did ... Yes.” Then naturally I asked: “Did you see yourself being married to me?”

  “Yes. I guess so. But then whenever I took a step toward you, you took a step back—”

  “Good-bye, John,” I said, and very gently hung up the phone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  JOHN WOULDN’T CALL again, I was positive of that. But just in case, I threw on my running clothes and sneakers and rushed outside. Another gorgeous day, not that I could see it from my apartment. To celebrate, I began to run as soon as I hit the park, daring any rib to slice through a lung and stop me. Once I didn’t drop dead, I did my obligatory nature check. Okay, the daffodils had done their bit for New York, and now their heads drooped from shriveled necks. They’d been supplanted by tulips and those giant pink and purple pom-pom flowers that grew on bushes. That was pretty much it for me and botany. As for zoology, I saw a cardinal, pigeons, and too many dogs wearing bandannas.