Wherever You Go, There They Are

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  A few weeks later, I make an appointment for a facial. Karen’s garden, normally verdant, looks a bit ragged, and the curtains are drawn in her husband’s home office, aka the guest bedroom of the house. Is her husband sleeping during the day? Could it be that her marriage is in trouble? Has his business gone belly-up? Maybe her WHY is more urgent than I realized? I quickly shut that train of thought down. The last thing I want to know is another WHY. I prefer to remain blissfully unaware and enjoy what is a completely satisfactory business transaction, hoping she’ll go both deep and wide as she exfoliates my face.

  My mother is making the great leap backward.

  going tribal

  Why didn’t I see it coming? I’m someone who views the future with a modicum of sobriety. When I saw a photo of Johnny Depp’s Winona Forever tattoo, I knew it should’ve read Winona for the amount of time actors typically spend together, which ranges between two and a half hours and the last day of shooting on the film we fell in love working on.* I’m always thinking ahead! That’s why I don’t have tattoos!

  For some, the parental role reversal is heralded with the first changing of the adult diapers; for me, it was a phone call announcing, “We’re broke.” When you grow up helping your parents avoid phone calls from the IRS, a call like this isn’t totally unexpected. Despite a deficit of income and a lot of creative bookkeeping, they had managed to get by, often with considerable panache. How they afforded this panache was something of a mystery. The sale of their remaining asset, my childhood home, revealed that much of their lifestyle was underwritten by multiple mortgages. Now that they’ve paid off the three remaining loans on the property and chipped away at the mountain of credit card debt, lines of credit, and outstanding taxes, there’s not much money left over and decisions must be made.

  My sister, Lisa, and I have been called in to mediate the stalemate over where they’ll live next, a decision that has reduced my parents to squabbling children. The choice has been narrowed down to two residences that are within their budget.

  When push comes to shove, people go tribal. Some ancient longing to go home stirs inside us; maybe it’s coded in our DNA, though in earlier centuries, when life spans were much shorter, you might have been thirty-three and toothless when you felt the call to return to your place of origin and be surrounded by your people. For most, that place would have been a few minutes or a few steps away, if not in the same house/teepee/hutch/lean-to/and before that, cave.

  But where is home? The intoxicating concept of manifest destiny, uprooting for jobs, relocating as a sign of economic mobility—it all adds up to America’s singular identity as a modern society on the move. When Bruce told Wendy, “We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run,” you knew Springsteen was urging her to flee from Asbury Park with an urgency that no one has ever used to suggest hightailing it out of the Fifth Arrondissement in Paris.*

  The year I left home to become a New Yorker and find my theater tribe, 1980, was the apex of internal migration in American history. Over the next years, both my sister and I moved further from our family. Our grandmother Rebecca lamented this uprooting, characterizing our “traipsing” from city to city in the most disparaging way she could think of: “Y’all are like two Gypsies!” Which just goes to show that members of one marginalized group can always find another, more marginalized group to feel superior toward.

  Since the late 1980s, the trend has reversed. When we do pack up, it’s to move closer to our blood relations. The combination of stagnant wages and a soaring housing market is resulting in more intergenerational households.

  Baby boomers are purchasing granny pods, something akin to a Barbie’s Malibu Dream Hospice, in record numbers. Prefab units can be plunked right down in your daughter-in-law’s backyard. The more luxurious models come equipped with sensors that alert for emergencies, video monitoring, and even a trolley suspended from the rafters that transports you from bed to bath, a geriatric twist on a sex swing.*

  Our children are also coming back home at unprecedented rates. My neighbor’s son left college to take a gap year that lasted for three. The biggest determinant of whether you’ll live near your family is not unsurprising: money. That college-educated professionals, the highest earners, are able to move further from home can be useful information if you’re the parent of a teenager who is slacking off.

  “You don’t like listening to my opinions? Fine, study more. People with lower incomes, on average, live only eighteen miles from their mothers, so crack a fucking book if you want to get away from me!”

  My parents have missed this window of opportunity. They’re unable to move closer to either my sister or me because they need to stay in Florida to be near their doctors.

  My mother wants to return to “her people,” only she doesn’t mean our family. Between cherished long-standing grudges and more recent perceived slights, she is on speaking terms with only a handful of family members. No, she’s making the great leap backward, aligning herself with our ancestors.

  My grandfather’s family, the Maisels, were teachers and rabbis. We would like to believe that the namesake of the Maisel Synagogue in Prague, a mayor who held office during the sixteenth century in the Jewish ghetto, was a relative. That’s about as much as we know about them, but we do know a lot about my grandmother Frances’s lineage.

  Menasha Lidinsky, later Anglicized to Moshe, and then Morris Laden, my grandmother’s father, fled the Ukraine with his wife, Sarah, when my grandmother Frances was five years old. Fleeing the pogroms, they came over on the Prinz Oscar, having made their way to Germany from Russia in 1913. Moshe’s profession was listed as dry goods salesman. My great-grandfather was what villagers referred to as a “swaybacked-mule junk dealer,” or peddler, trudging from town to town earning a meager living selling goods off of an ancient animal’s back. If we had a family crest it would feature a donkey, a potato, the one pot we had to piss in, and the family motto: “My feet are killing me!”*

  Bubbie Sarah and Zayda Moshe opened a dry goods store across the street from the famous Jewish Exponent newspaper on Pine Street in downtown Philadelphia. They had an apartment above their store, like many shopkeepers at the time. They never ventured far from their community, spoke mostly Yiddish, and lived in fear of that multitasking God who had enough time to concern himself with not only the workings of the entire universe but with whether a tiny subset of a single species on a spinning blue ball in the outer suburbs of the Milky Way dared to defy his grand plans by mixing dairy and meat.

  This is why the Tel Aviv Gardens is on our list of senior living facilities to visit this weekend. It’s on a twenty-five-acre campus with housing options that range from independent-living apartments to hospice care. My mother imagines that her mother, Frances, our nanny, would have felt at home there.

  Nanny never spoke of spirituality, but she did believe that Jews were a kind of chosen people—the tribe entrusted with the responsibility of keeping the planet spic-and-span. Cleanliness was not just next to godliness for her, it was a devout calling. In the same way that nuns see themselves as brides of Christ, Nanny pledged herself to Ajax, lord of germs, whose dominion covered the expanse of surfaces in her home and the domiciles of her offspring. Her idea of keeping a kosher kitchen entailed producing flavor-free food; at least that’s how it seemed to us grandchildren.

  A typical meal at Nanny’s might include iceberg lettuce, meat, and a starchy vegetable. Lettuce was scoured and scrubbed with so much vigor that each lifeless leaf emerged from these interrogation sessions virtually translucent. These were the years when lima beans were the most exotic item offered on dinner tables in suburban America. Not only was it a punishment to eat them, Frances seemed to want the beans to suffer for their own failure to be more appetizing. The legumes would be liberated from a can, only to be subjected to a pressurized moisture-extraction process that included several rounds of squeeze-drying
in layers of paper towels. Chalky and granular; eating them sucked the moisture from your mouth.

  Beef was purchased only from a kosher butcher, but you could never trust people entirely, so it was subjected to repeated rinsing and salting and then would be secreted into paper towels for additional dehydration.* Biting into it was like gnawing on particleboard.

  My mother never showed any interest in keeping kosher, but she’s pining for Nanny, whose personality she experienced as exacting. Death has conferred an almost saintly quality on her memory. My mother has adopted Nanny’s mercurial housekeeping habits and is reaching further back to Bubbie’s dutiful observation of holidays. My mother wants to attend the weekly religious services at the Gardens. She has started lighting Sabbath candles. She pictures her grandmother’s hands gently resting over her own as she mouths the words to the prayers recited in a language that she herself never bothered to learn.

  She’s also taken to needlepointing mezuzah covers and prayer shawl holders, which in my secular household become makeup bags. I have so many of these that my makeup bags have their own makeup bags. During my childhood, she crafted intricate Japanese designs, but her lotus flowers and white cranes have given way to mournful scenes of Eastern European village life. It’s all Chagall, all the time. The way she churns these things out, you’d think she was commissioned by an army of nomadic zealots who need carrying cases for their talismans. I tried to convince my son to take his lunch to school in a sack decorated with a forlorn goat wrapped in a prayer shawl playing the violin. He looked at me like I’d suggested he pack his sandwich in a moldy sneaker.*

  Mom rarely attended services during her childhood, and although my parents insisted on a Jewish education for us, after my sister and I left home, neither she nor my dad went back to temple. Not even once. Suddenly, forty years of secular life are immaterial to her newfound identification.

  What we are witnessing could be a sign of dementia, although it is also plausible that the impending reality of death is pushing her toward religion. Anyone who’s had even a small brush with health problems knows the comfort and sense of purpose that religion can offer. My friend Killian, who is on the road to recovery after receiving an early-diagnosed case of pancreatic cancer, believes that God or the Universe gave him just enough of the disease to serve as a wake-up call. I would like this Universe to give me just enough collagen to return my skin to its former buoyancy, but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t have much faith in the Universe’s disease-measuring skills since it gave my friends David, Susan, Robin, Jane, Conrad, Jim, Kathy, Taylor, and Steve just enough cancer to kill them.

  But Mom’s desire to return to the fold is convenient because the majority of care facilities in the U.S. receive financial backing from religious groups. It’s a challenge to find a place that isn’t funded by or associated with one sect or another. Even the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home, catering to members of the showbiz family, is affiliated with the Episcopal Church.

  One of the appealing things about Judaism is that if your mother was Jewish, you’re in. You want to become Jewish? Study with a rabbi and you’re in. And unlike, say, Mormonism, we happily welcome back those who’ve strayed, no questions asked. You haven’t been to temple in forty years? No problem. She hopes to claim her rightful place as a Jewish mother and grandmother.

  Both she and my father have been warm in-laws and devoted grandparents, flying across the country for baseball games and music recitals. Big Daddy never fails to come up with WAM, pronounced WHAM, walking-around money—cash that he palms into the hands of each of his grandchildren. Despite failed attempts to convince my husband to write a TV pilot about a female lawyer who moonlights as a dominatrix, Dad has been an attentive father-in-law. My mother is particularly enamored of Jeff because he’s got better housekeeping skills than me. Come to think of it, we should have seen my mother’s longing to return to her roots when she leapt at the chance to have her grandchildren call her Bubbie, as she called her grandmother.

  Sebastian Junger argues in his book Tribe that “modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience.” He cites examples of early American settlers who assimilated into Native American tribes, whose way of life offered a glimpse into the cohesive communities that sustained our earliest ancestors. Many of these folks didn’t want to return to “civilization” because the communal lifestyle fostered self-esteem, a feeling of usefulness, and a sense of belonging. “Women in particular,” Junger tells us, “have high levels of depression in (contemporary) Western culture, with our emphasis on extrinsic, not intrinsic, values.” My mother is the poster child for this research. It’s not hard to picture her enthusiastically sweeping a teepee with a broom made of sticks.

  Junger also offers the military as a model of a strongly bonded non-filial community, but he makes a serious omission by leaving out musicians. Even would-be musicians. My husband was in a band in high school called No Exit. The members pledged allegiance to cigarettes, Jean-Paul Sartre, and each other. To this day, he refers to the guys as his bandmates. Present tense.

  What’s most bewildering is that my mother was never a joiner. She wasn’t in the PTA, nor a member of the local Hadassah chapter. Shades of this latent personality trait surfaced a few years back, when she helped found a women’s empowerment group, WOMB: Womyn of Miami Beach. Members of WOMB advocated for women in crisis. My mother claims to never have been happier than in the WOMB, but the group disbanded after only a short time. Mom still wears the T-shirt with their catchphrase: “Uppity Womyn Unite.”

  In another surprising and possibly contradictory development, my mother’s vocabulary is now generously sprinkled with expletives. “She’s a royal bitch!” is one of her favorite sayings. “What an asshole” and “fucking this” or “fucking that” are tossed around frequently and wielded with glee. Who is this new potty-mouthed mother? I have no idea. Neither does my father, but that hasn’t stopped him from throwing down the gauntlet on where they’ll land next.

  My father has an entirely different scenario in mind for where they should spend the last chapter of their lives. Dad’s choice is a senior living residence called the Imperial Club, or the Ambassador Club, or maybe it’s the Commodores’ Club? I keep mixing it up. It’s something vaguely nautical that implies luxury and first-class treatment befitting the tribe he most identifies with: the wealthy country club set.

  The deal that brought our family to Miami and ushered in our country club years was one in a series of ambitious financial schemes that were sure to make a fast dollar. Not surprisingly, most of my father’s associates were disbarred attorneys or CPAs who’d lost their licenses. If you were looking to my father to raise capital, it meant you’d probably exhausted all other options. This first deal, somewhat appropriately, was an opportunity for him to build a fast-food empire. Dad was hired to fold a restaurant franchise called Jamie’s Great Hamburgers into another chain with forty-five outlets called Burger Castle. Jamie’s had a few joints scattered across the South and their hook was that they offered a hundred different dressings for your burger. Burger Castle’s hook was that people who’d had too much to drink might confuse them with Burger King. Burger Castle was sued by Burger King. I wouldn’t know if the brands were, in fact, too similar, but as someone who has worked in food service, I think those hundred dressings sound like a side work nightmare.

  The failed burger merger was followed by a multitude of gold-plated opportunities. There was the renovation of Union Station in St. Louis, a worthwhile project, but despite their best efforts, the train never left the station, so to speak.*

  Next, Dad lit upon an idea for H. R. Pufnstuf creators Sid and Marty Krofft to create a puppet theme park that went up in a puff with, sadly, no stuff. A foray into distributing lithographs by famous artists like Peter Max brought in boatloads of cash that wealthy people were trying to hide until the IRS decided to shut do
wn this kind of art tax shelter.

  In the mid-1970s, Dad got back in business with another cousin from Mobile. Cousin Meyer, who went by Mike, was an entrepreneur who had a reputation not dissimilar from my dad’s but had the benefit of being born into the part of family that not only liked to spend money but had money to spend. Mike bought a few movie theaters in Alabama and New Orleans, but his American dream was to be a big-shot film producer. Mike sank his own money into a low-rent Deliverance type of story starring Peter Graves. He tried to get the schlocky “King of the B’s” movie producer Roger Corman to distribute it. Corman declined and warned him of the dangers of self-funding: “You’re going to end up poor white trash.” Mike promptly changed the name of the film to Poor White Trash and it made enough dough to provide entry into the film distribution racket. There was even a Poor White Trash part deux.*

  It helps to sigh, “It was the seventies,” when noting my dad was able to buy the film rights to unrepentant Watergate burglar and CIA operative E. Howard Hunt’s life, because Hunt was the Eglin Air Force Base cellmate of Dad’s best friend, who was serving time for embezzling money from nursing homes. After Hunt was released, a dinner was scheduled. The night before he was expected at our home, Hunt phoned to say he was worried our house might be bugged. My father assured him he knew people who could handle it. I was assigned to do the “sweep.” I did what any teenager who’d watched Mission Impossible religiously would do. I raced around, peering into light sockets and unscrewing telephone receivers. “All clear,” I reported back to my father. Hunt had both the appearance and charisma of a wax figure and the movie never got made. The company went bankrupt distributing The Silent Partner, a thriller starring Elliott Gould and Christopher Plummer. It was the one decent film they ever acquired.