Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

by Bess Kalb

  She’d storm out of the house and stay out overnight with her friend Jane—or at least that was the story I got. She refused to cut her hair and it went all the way down her back. I didn’t dream of mentioning it.

  I would lie awake at night fuming about her. I’d hit your grandfather in the arm and say, “Hank, what am I going to do about Robbie?”

  He was soft. He doted on her. Always checking in from hotel lobbies and regaling her with stories about various cities and odd foods he ate. “Rob, you’d hate it. They eat nothing but frogs and snails!”

  But he knew she was killing me. He told me, “Bob, if you can’t beat her, join her.” So I tried. When she insisted on wearing pants to school, I said, “Fine.” I took her to Bloomingdale’s in White Plains and I showed her the racks of beautiful corduroys and bell-bottoms and women’s trousers. She was absolutely miserable. She stroked the cashmere twinsets and said, casually as anything, “Oh, look. Prison uniforms.” She wouldn’t try a single thing on. She marched out the door and waited sitting on the hood of the car, fuming.

  Apparently Bloomingdale’s was part of the “bourgeoisie” enemy that she was so desperately fighting against. She thought she was the first person to read Karl Marx and consider herself a revolutionary. She wasn’t subtle. She’d call my high-heeled shoes “foot bindings,” and when I complained my feet hurt, she’d say, “Men design them because they want us to limp.” I’d say, “Isn’t it nice to be so right about everything?” and she’d say, “It’s agony.”

  On the way home from Bloomingdale’s that day, I pulled into the parking lot of the army-navy store on Central Avenue and handed her all the cash in my wallet. “You want to look like a hippie? Look like a hippie.” She got back in the car with a garbage bag full of moth-ridden clothes that smelled to high heaven. Stiff dungarees and men’s sweaters and a ridiculous tweed blazer. She was ecstatic. Her whole wardrobe that year cost twenty-five dollars. Fine.

  You wonder why she went to college at sixteen? It wasn’t because she was some kind of genius—it was because she was angry with me. When she announced at the dinner table that this would be her last year at home, I was overjoyed. I admit it.

  I’ve told you a million times by now how she made the deal with the principal. How she studied like a maniac and got a perfect score on the SATs, and he had no choice but to recommend her. But there’s more to that story, Bessie. A lot more.

  She made her announcement at the breakfast table over a pile of eggs and toast: “I’m going to college in the fall.” I looked at her and I said, “Robin, if you want to go to college, then you’re going to the best college.” She was floored. She just glared at me, but she didn’t put up a fight. She was as ambitious for herself as I was for her. You get it from both of us.

  So I made some calls and I loaded her into the station wagon, and we drove up to New England for an eight-day road trip. One college a day. I bought her two suits, one gray and one navy blue, and she’d alternate them every other day and I’d always air the other one out by hanging it up in the backseat. Not a bad trick. It kept her dignified. Promise me you’ll never wear the same thing two days in a row, even if nobody will notice.

  It was 1971 and many of the schools hadn’t integrated the girls, so I brought her to Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe—ha—Jackson, Wellesley, and, finally, Pembroke. She fell in love with Pembroke immediately—the tour guide had armpit hair so long you could braid it. There were blond boys playing guitar out on the quadrangle with no shirts on. Heaven.

  And she went back to Ardsley and went straight to the principal’s office.

  She told him, “If I get a perfect score on my SATs, you’ll write me a letter of recommendation to Pembroke.” She didn’t ask. She told him. He laughed her out of his office. When he called me at home, he was still laughing. But by the end of the semester he was mailing the letter.

  A month after that your mother got a thick envelope in the mail. “Congratulations, Robin Bell. You’re in the first class of women admitted to Brown University, the class of 1975.” She’d applied to one school and gotten into another. When I asked if she was disappointed, she said, “I’m euphoric,” and walked out of the room.

  When I drove her up to Providence that fall, we didn’t speak the whole way. And when I dropped her off at the dorm, she slammed the door, got her duffel bag and her suitcase, and didn’t look back. Her long black hair in a braid swinging behind her. I drove down the hill and wept in the parking lot of a gas station for an hour. When I got back to New York my eyes were bloodshot and my throat was hoarse.

  Your grandfather’s face went white when he saw me. “Bobby, you look like you’ve been to war.”

  “Oh, Hank. I have.”

  VOICE MAIL, OCTOBER 2012

  Bessie, your mother says you’re angry with Charlie for keeping his job in San Francisco. You’re being ridiculous. You’re not going to stay in Los Angeles forever. You burn in the sun and you’re a terrible driver. And you really have no idea how long the Jimmy Kimmel job will last. They could fire you. Your mother says there are only two other women on the staff and you’ve never written for television before. What do you think you’re going to do? Become a comedian?

  Though it’s true that when you were a little girl you used to do a comedy routine by the pool in Florida. It was very good. You must have been five years old. You’d walk up to the old people on their lounge chairs with their families and say hi. They all knew you: “Robin’s daughter”—already you had the exact same face. So you’d say hi and they’d ask you how your year was going, and you’d smile very sweetly and say, “Funny you ask. I learned to say the alphabet backward.” They’d be in shock. You were this little imp with these big blue eyes, very sincere. They always took the bait. “Really? Can you do it now?” You’d grow very serious, clear your throat, turn your back to them, and say the alphabet.

  Anyway, don’t be angry with Charlie. Wait it out. Mark my words: he’ll move for you just like you moved to San Francisco for him. One of the things you got from me was your ability to hold a grudge. We don’t tolerate being wronged. It isn’t a good quality. It won’t serve you. Let it go. That boy loves you. He loves you even though he knows who you are. He worships the ground you walk on and he’s exactly right.

  Rebook your ticket to Oakland for Friday.

  THE MEXICO STORY

  On Christmas Day 1968, your grandfather and I left for Mexico City. We intended to stay for three weeks.

  Five days in I got a call from your mother. “Mom? I think I’m in trouble.”

  It was the year after the Chicago Seven rioted at the Democratic National Convention and got arrested. A group of seven boys so opposed to the Vietnam War they decided to start a countercultural revolution. Your mother was a sophomore in high school and she had become enamored with them. It’s no coincidence your father looks like Tom Hayden. And all throughout that fall semester, she and two of the boys in her class had been organizing on their behalf. They had a cause. They had been trying to raise money for the legal fund. Can you believe it? Three teenagers from a Podunk town in Westchester thought they’d lead the brigade to free the most notorious political protesters of the year from jail. Of course I supported the cause—I was the one who protested the war in Washington—but I think there’s a way to do it without winding up in jail. Your mother disagreed. What else is new?

  You have to understand. Your grandfather worked to get us out of poverty. Five years before your mother was born, I was wearing your grandfather’s dungarees to the grocery store in winter because I couldn’t afford nylons and a long enough coat. Twenty years before, I was eating gristle a cousin had stolen off a truck in the Meatpacking District. A generation before that, my mother was on a boat clutching her sack full of tinned fish without two nickels to her name. And in 1968, we had finally made it, Bess. Assimilated almost completely. And here was your mother, u
ngrateful at every turn, threatening to throw it all away. It wasn’t her politics I opposed. It was her hubris.

  And it was hardly original. This was 1968, and kids were taking hallucinogenics and smoking marijuana and getting on buses to San Francisco and never coming back. In her mind, she was being some sort of revolutionary. Really, Bess, she was following the pack. Right over a cliff.

  Back at the school, your mother and her friends made pamphlets. They had buckets to collect coins set up in the cafeteria. They gave speeches in study halls about the injustice and the “military-industrial complex”—her words—and they were pissing off whomever they could. Shouting in bullhorns in the teachers’ parking lot. Imagine how my father would have loved her.

  The high school board in Ardsley at the time was run by very conservative Methodists and Episcopalians from the town. Word had gotten around and they weren’t thrilled with what your mother and her friends were doing. There was talk of expulsion. What your brilliant mother was doing violated every imaginable policy: she and her little gang were raising money for a political cause on school grounds.

  By the end of the semester, she had contacted the lawyer representing the Chicago Seven. The actual lawyer. At the time he was with the ACLU. She wrote him a letter on behalf of herself and her friends explaining the situation—how they were sacrificing their education for the cause. They were so proud of themselves. The lawyer wrote them back immediately. He loved them, these high school kids. And he had an idea. Your mother and her gang would be a test case. He told them to keep doing what they were doing, to write a manifesto declaring their intent to keep beating the drum for the Chicago Seven’s release in violation of school policy, and once expelled, he would help them sue the school board.

  Can you imagine? Bell v. Board of Education. Robin Ellen Bell. A sacrificial lamb marching proudly toward the slaughter.

  She drafted the manifesto in one night. I read it later. It was soaring—very pompous and completely inflammatory. She called the president of the board a “capitalist pig.” All that from a child who lived in a big house on a full acre abutting a gated, neighborhood-only swimming pool. She wrote it up and was ready to mimeograph it and post it all throughout the hallways the next day.

  That night, as I was putting on my earrings in our room at the Gran Hotel Ciudad, we got a call from the front desk. “Mrs. Bell, someone named Robin just called for you, but she hung up.” She used her first name. Not “your daughter.”

  So I took the stairs down to the lobby in one earring and my bathrobe and my sneakers still muddy from our hike, and I shut myself into one of the phone booths in the lobby. The answering machine picked up. I had never been more infuriated to hear my own voice. I called again. And again. And on the third try, she answered.

  “Mom?”

  “What have you done?”

  “What do you mean ‘what did I do’? Nothing!”

  “Robin. Spit it out.”

  She told me about the Chicago Seven—which was ridiculous; I’d given them money when they were the Chicago Eight—and she told me about how she’d convinced those two poor kids to go along with her and how she wrote the manifesto and about the lawyer and everything.

  My voice was very calm, but you should have seen me, clenching the phone in a half-open robe, gritting my teeth so hard they should’ve turned to dust.

  But I sounded very even. If I hadn’t, she wouldn’t have listened. She wouldn’t have stayed in school and aced her exams and gotten into Brown and had her first marriage and gone to Israel and gone to Paris and gone to medical school and met your father and had you.

  “Well, Robin, it sounds as if you’ve made up your mind to sign it.”

  “I’m not sure if I should sign it.”

  “Oh, really?” I was practically singing.

  “I don’t know?”

  “Why wouldn’t you sign it? You feel so passionately—”

  “You’re being condescending. I’m hanging up.”

  “Go right ahead!”

  There was silence. Then I heard her sigh so loudly I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. It was all very dramatic.

  “I’m not signing it.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I want to get into college and get the fucking hell away from you.”

  I wanted to hop in a taxi in my robe and fly back to New York and wring her neck. But I did something much worse.

  I said, “Good. Go.”

  She didn’t sign the thing. And she went.

  PHONE CALL, DECEMBER 31, 2012

  GRANDMOTHER: Happy New Year, Bessie!

  GRANDDAUGHTER: Happy New Year, Grandma!

  What are you and Charlie up to?

  We’re in Mexico. We’ll just have dinner at the hotel and probably just go to bed early.

  Is it a nice hotel?

  It’s beautiful, but it’s very rustic. It’s a yoga retreat and there are open-air little huts right on the ocean. Our friends are working there for the season and so we got a discount.

  I don’t even know where to begin.

  What do you mean?

  You’ll be eaten alive by mosquitoes sleeping in the open air.

  There’s mosquito netting! Anyway, what are you and Grandpa—

  You’re sleeping in a net and anyone can just walk in off the beach and take what they want.

  It’s in a very remote area.

  Perfect. No police. Not that it matters. It’s all cartels there now.

  You’re scaring me.

  Good.

  Anyway, I’m doing a lot of yoga. First thing in the morning and every evening at sunset. I’ve never done more exercise in a single week.

  [PAUSE]

  That’s excellent.

  Yes, it is.

  Bessie.

  What?

  Go stay at a normal hotel. Stay at a resort. Use my card.

  Grandma, we’re staying here. I don’t want to stay at a resort. That’s not our vibe.

  “Not our vibe.” I have no idea what you’re talking about. When they come at you with machetes, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  I’m more terrified of you than the cartels.

  That’s the first smart thing you’ve said all day.

  THE ANNULMENT

  I know you know that your mother was married once before your father. She was a kid, barely twenty-two. Two years out of college. She was tough. She wouldn’t listen. She didn’t care what I thought about anything until she had you.

  She met this man just after she got back from living on the kibbutz and almost dying in Paris. I’ve told you about how she decided to become a doctor in that hospital in Paris and I told her I’d help her. Your grandfather was furious. He wanted her to go into urban planning. But there was no sense in arguing, and so I drove her to Harvard to take night classes in chemistry and biology at the extension school. She hadn’t taken chemistry since the tenth grade, and there was no way she’d get into any decent medical school if she didn’t know the subject. But she was brilliant, fortunately, and in a few months she hardly needed to study to do well in the class.

  That year, she kept coming across this very handsome young man all around campus. He’d be at the library when she was there. He’d be smoking Parliaments outside the biology department when she left class. He and your mother would go to the same falafel place, and she’d see him eating out of his pita pocket with a knife and fork.

  His name was James. He was from the Upper East Side of Manhattan; his father was a big-time newspaper editor and his mother descended from someone on the Mayflower. A real WASP—square jaw, upturned nose. A blue blood. And he noticed your mother. She wasn’t like the other girls in their twinsets and peacoats. She wore her hair in a long br
aid and she always had these terrible silver bracelets clanking around her wrist and clunky army boots. And he wasn’t anything like the boys your mother went with at Brown. He’d never gone two weeks without a haircut in his entire life.

  Do you want to know how he got your mother’s phone number? He stopped her on the street and demanded it. Like a stickup. He didn’t ask for it; he said, “Today is the day I get your phone number.” Bessie, beware of men who have gone their whole lives without hearing the word “no.”

  He was studying to become a doctor in the same program and he was working as a lab assistant at a hospital at night. They rarely saw each other through the whole courtship, and they dated for four months and he decided they’d get married. He decided. He announced it to your mother: “Robin Bell, you’re going to be my wife.” They never lived together before that.

  James got into Columbia medical school at the end of your mother’s first year, and she dropped out of the program and the two of them moved into a cheap apartment in Riverdale with an air conditioner that leaked water all over the floor. Did you have any idea that when you went to high school up there she used to drive right by the building every morning, never saying a word?

  They settled into their apartment and he was to be the doctor and she was to abandon all her premed studies and get a job and support him and be his wife. She wanted desperately to be a doctor, but she loved him madly. He was the great genius, the great man. She cut her hair and straightened it every day and started taking an aerobics class at the YMCA. She once mentioned to him she’d go back to school when he was established in his career and making a salary, and he laughed and didn’t look up and said, “You’ll have your hands full with the rug rats by then.” He really said that. Rug rats. Imagine being as smart as your mother and not seeing a single warning sign?