Growing Up Golem

by Donna Minkowitz

  Perhaps slowly, slowly, slowly, like a tree growing from a tiny acorn under time-lapse photography, my arms began to get better. “Little by little, step by step,” Dr. Sing used to say to me confidently, several times a year. Everyone else seemed impatient with the excessively languid pace at which my RSI was improving.

  Strangely, I was less impatient. For myself, I had decided that getting better from RSI was half my job. The other half was writing. As long as I could advance along both paths, I was making progress.

  I did notice that some point, I had stopped being in pain all the time. Dr. Mayhew attributed this to my judicious refusal to do all the things that were bad for my hands. And I did spend least half my time doing work to save my strange little baby. Acupuncture, physical therapy, biweekly massage, swimming, sessions with an “ergonomist” who figured out how tall my desk should be. Most of my money now, too, seemed to go for the care of the ghostly creature inside me.

  This was the same few months, reader, that my mother began to get as if magically worse. Do you know the William Blake poem in which a very young man and a very old woman take turns binding each other down upon rocks? They bind each other down for their “delight,” and also to feed off each other. “She lives upon his shrieks & cries, and she grows young as he grows old.” Had I allowed my mother become a kind of voodoo doll for me? Did her decline make me grow?

  My mother wrote a poem I found unbearable around this time, called “Never-Ending Stories.” It was about, er, how horrible it is to keep living when you’re in pain. I had to hear it many, many times, because the visiting music therapist from Cabrini Hospice was often in my mother’s apartment when I came by, setting my mother’s poems to music.

  Sarah, the nice young music therapist, had seized on this particular poem, and she would sing it whenever I visited. (My mother, no longer able to talk, would nonetheless avidly conduct, a skill she had learned at Hunter College High School, the school for the gifted I had gone to, too, where every student is required to learn how to do this in the first-year music class.)

  Never-Ending Stories

  In my house are passages,

  hideaways,

  and corners,

  one door leads to another,

  and another,

  and another…

  In my house I hear sweet music

  coming from the walls,

  angels hover in the attic

  singing Hallelujah praises.

  I am bleeding,

  I am falling,

  life is measured out in hours

  ‘though the moments last forever.

  I see through darkened windows

  Morning’s reprisal,

  each new day deposing

  another,

  and another...

  I was confused by the fact that, now that my mother was getting weaker and sicker and therefore had much less capacity to hurt me, she seemed to be trying to avoid the behavior that had hurt me in the past.

  For example, she finally seemed to have noticed (or perhaps, to care) that I did not want her to get undressed in front of me, which I’d been telling her with urgency for years.

  Now that I did not mind her taking off her clothes when she was uncomfortable because she was so ill and it was hard for her to move around, now she finally wanted to protect me from it. She had the home health aide hold up a sheet just for me.

  It was similar with the commode, which she kept near her bed so she would not have to walk the few extra feet to the bathroom. Now that she was ill enough that it seemed quite practical and understandable that she would sometimes go in front of us, she would gesture to me (but no other family members) to leave the room so that my delicate sensibilities would no longer have to be offended by seeing my mother on the toilet.

  When she could still talk, my mother said to me once, “I would really like to see you more often.” This was at a time when I was seeing her once every week or two. When I replied I was honest but also not overly tender: “I see you as much as I can see you, Mom. This is as much as I can see you.” Even at death’s door, even moderating herself, my mother was still too frightening to visit more than once a week.

  I felt guilty that I couldn’t see her more. My sister Josie was furious that I couldn’t. In our distinctly different golem socializations, poor Josie had been the more conventional of us by far. She had become the best servant in the family, like a sort of preternaturally perspicacious butler.

  It surprised me how she turned out, because when we were kids she was the scrappiest one. She actually fought back against my mom so forcefully when we were small that my mother put Josie into little girls’-therapy, where I never had to be sent. Josie actually got mad, screamed at Mommy, slammed doors and tore off down the street.

  But when we were grown, it was Josie who ached to be a good daughter.

  Not me. I myself hated the word “good,” and I cringed when I thought about how disgustingly good I had been through the years.

  Josie became, as they say, my mother’s primary caregiver. She hung out all weekend long with my mother, every weekend, and usually several nights during the week, especially when my mother was finding it especially hard to breathe. Josie had become a sort of Mr. Fix-It for my mother, whether it came to her oxygen hookup or the picture on her TV, like a replacement for my father in all his two-sided grandeur. Josie, the only straight woman amongst the daughters, had become the butchest of us all. She had long been the handiest one with a power screwdriver and a saw, and the only one who enjoyed rousting the young hoodlums who were trying to steal her car. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she would say to them laughing, belligerent, happy to have caught them in the act. “Get away from my car!”

  Pure aggression gleamed in Josie’s muscles and smiled in her fat. She was a curiously ambiguous figure, and still occasionally bullied my mother and snapped at her, just as often as she was a helpful servant. Josie is the most changeable being I have ever known, and I have always felt ambivalent about her. Our relationship seesawed wildly. One week we would be on the outs, and the next almost in love.

  She loved to give embraces, though they were not always nice ones. She was like the 8 year-old boy who enjoys giving wet kisses to all the other children on the playground, and then punching them hard and pulling them under the sprinkler. (Then the boy wipes his snot on them.) When I adored Josie, I would ignore the violence seeping out of her like coffee from a leaky paper bag and treat her like Clifford or Big Bird, a polymorphously perverse big cuddly hunk o’ love and warm support and steadfastness.

  And she was that, too. When I’ve been close to her it’s been the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me, it’s like having a lover right up against you with no conflict or difference whatsoever for three million years. It’s like dating Barney, warmer than anything. She just switches back and forth, that’s the problem.

  Aggression vacillatedwith icky-softness in my sister, as though she were a giant jellyfish. Perhaps it was merely a consequence of being a golem, because our kind must always vacillate in some way between softness and attack. But Josie clung to those poles more obviously than most—much more obviously than me, for instance. She had made collages of Looney Tunes characters that I found terrifying. Daffy Duck and Porky Pig smiled at the viewer maniacally, and Yosemite Sam sneered happily as though he were about to crush a gnat in his humongous hands. Next to them on her wall were giant photos of kittens and babies I found just as frightening. Josie’s sweetness, when present, was so cloying that it was hard for me to ever find it authentic—although now I wonder. Perhaps she was simply a person cut in half.

  She liked to ask me, during those interludes when we spoke every night, what I had just had for dinner. “Tun-y fish?” For of course she liked to talk in baby-talk to me. “Want some sod-y? Want to take a drive-y in the car-ry?” Even when we were “being close,” the baby-talk repelled me, and I would try to change the subject. “Duney,” she would say, calling me
by one of my family nicknames from childhood, “don’t you love it when you make a nice big fart and it smells so good?” Or she would describe the nice big doody she had made. Even when Josie was being pleasant she always felt too intimate to me, as though she were trying to burrow into my colon.

  But I, of course, felt wildly flattered sometimes anyhow when she wanted to be nicely in my colon. For golems, having anyone come that close is rare, sweet reader.

  I saw love, most of the time, as something that couldshift back and forth, on a dime, betweensweetishconversation and anal rape. It had always been that way for me, except with Aphra, and she’d left home early.

  Yet sometimes Josie was genuinely compassionate to me.

  When I was a little kid she was kind enough to take me with her to her junior-high-school friends’ houses—for I never had friends of my own until I was twelve. Once when I was nine, she actually frightened off a would-be child molester trying to make friends with me in McDonald’s. I was eating a burger, by myself, when my sister turned up and spoke harshly to the man who was chatting me up in the most flattering way. I’ll never forget how annoyed I was at the time, but I am quite sure she saved me. A couple years later, when I got my period the first time, my mom was several hundred blocks uptown at Columbia grad school, so it was Josie who showed me how to use sanitary napkins (they were the old kind, without adhesive, that you really had to be taught how to use). And for years after my mother went back to college, it was Josie, in middle school, who used to make dinner for herself and me every night by combining Campbell’s Tomato Rice Soup and Campbell’s Stewed Tomatoes. I felt the love in that. It was so much better to eat them together, as food that somebody had combined with intention, and partly to take care of me.

  Still, I’d always seen Josie as a member of the same species as my parents. She was someone who threatened often to hit me, just like they did. And she did hit me sometimes. Because they all had black or nearly-black hair, I believed for a long time that if only I had black hair, too, I would become a powerful person like my mother and father and sister, able to get angry, and to get whatever I wanted from other people.

  (Early on in my RSI journey I did dye my hair black for a little while, reader. I was thinking that my recently dyed blonde hair was maybe an all-too-disgusting and obvious sign of my good girlness—or fairyness—whatever it was that had made me unprotected and injured. It didn’t work though. All I got was one of my writing students commenting, “Nice Goth look!”)

  When I was twenty-seven, though, Josie had suddenly gotten a very serious health problem. I was jolted to realize that even my dangerous sister wasn't impenetrable. I was shaken, and made a special effort from then on to never notice the bad parts.

  In high school Josie, a compulsive eater, had used to put a heavy chain on the refrigerator at night with a lock only she possessed the key to. She put a lock on so she wouldn’t devour everything in the middle of the night. This meant that I couldn’t get a soda from the fridge when I was thirsty, but Josie would break her own lock so she could eat the contents of the refrigerator. At the time I felt like I was living with a dangerous beast that needed to be restrained but could break every restraint put on it.

  So I teeter-tottered for years between these perspectives. Josie would kiss me sweetly and then suddenly come out with, “When you were little you had such a bad speech impediment that you sounded really stupid. We all laughed at you.”

  Every now and again I would ask Josie if she’d be willing to talk about our relationship. Her response had always been the same: “I don’t have time for that!”

  Is it “Brownian motion” in physics where dust particles suddenly move one way, then another? And the stream of dust keeps going back and forth, maddeningly and endlessly. This motion, on my part at least, finally came to an end a year and a half after RSI had started to change how I related to other people.

  It was September—precisely, it was September 2001. It had been a difficult summer. I had bad asthma attacks from allergic reactions to all the mosquito bites I got walking in the dank Ravine at Prospect Park, my attempt at a staycation. My oven emitted noxious fumes, and my landlord refused to fix it.

  I could not go away because Josie had announced that she was going away to a weight-loss program at a spa in Sedona for the whole summer. “I’d like you to stay in Brooklyn for all of July and August,” she said, so that one of us would constantly be on hand if Mommy had any problems.

  Whether I went or not, the three home health aides would be with her around the clock the whole time.

  Also, the trip I wanted to take would have been a very close one, to the Hudson Valley, two hours away. But Josie wanted me to stay in the five boroughs. I was feeling guilty that she took so much more assiduous care of my mother than I did, so I agreed.

  I had only enough money to go away for two nights anyhow, though I had yearned to spend those two nights away in July or August—when everyone else in the sweltering city was gone.

  I didn’t go. I saw my mom every week in July and August. She was not doing particularly well. She could still talk, but barely, and seemed quite absent, I believe from the morphine.

  I arranged to take my two-night vacation in September, when Josie would be back and be able once again to supervise my mother constantly.

  When Josie returned from the spa, I did voice some frustration to her. And I made a request: “Please don’t make plans for staying away the whole summer again without asking me about my plans, if you’d like me to stay in the city during that time.”

  Josie grumbled, “Donna, Donna, Donna, you don’t know when to fucking shut up.”

  Then, right before I was to go to Mohonk, September 11 happened. Reader, everyone in New York City, including me, was traumatized. The office where I now got physical therapy was only a block away from the World Trade Center, and I had sometimes ducked into the towers just to buy a soda in the mornings. Afterwards, there was an enormous evil-smelling, dark-gray cloud in the sky over Brooklyn for months from the things and the people that had been burnt. I am not exaggerating about how long it lasted— it was months, reader. For a day or two, I wore a surgical mask so that I wouldn’t have to breathe the choking smoke. I tried going to the physical therapy office, which the owner, Winston Carroll, LPT, assured me was absolutely safe, but the air was so much worse in the financial district that I decided to switch to Winston’s uptown facility, 130 blocks away at the other end of Manhattan. Afterwards, it came out that many persons eventually died just from breathing the air around the first office, and that Christie Whitman, head of the EPA, had lied to the public when she said it was safe to breathe on Vesey Street.

  After September 11, I felt like I needed even more intensely to go someplace green, and I was actually glad that I had postponed my summer vacation till the following week, when I would take the bus to New Paltz and hike in the mountains. I pedal-boated in Lake Mohonk and was startled to find I was strong enough to steer a boat. Then, swimming on my back in the water with my trusty aqua-jogger around me to support my arms, suddenly I felt the Lady and Lord of the Lake holding me up, heard them whispering affection. Please just go with me here: the Lord and Lady are the powers that protect the trees, keep the water as pure as they can, and try to hold everyone who falls in. They held me, both of them, this time, and I felt their big, delicate damp fingers on my face, like a poppy.

  When I got back to the city, Josie, my mother and I all went out to brunch together at a glitzy Long Island restaurant. I’d been trying not to see them together, for they were worse as a pair. With my mom these days, Josie acted like a husband who’s obeyed his wife so punctiliously for so long that he wants to smack her. (The Josie-husband wanted to smack me too, feeling I’d gotten off scot-free from all the work he was stuck with.)

  But Josie and my mother both liked—if, that is, my mother still “liked” anything—going out all three of us to brunch together, like they thought American families were supposed to. I told you Jo
sie was conventional in her outward preferences; even my mother, the old lefty, shocked me on this day by wearing an American flag lapel pin because of the attack.

  I came in the car with them. I am the only non-driver in the family, reader—not just because of my arm injury, but because of, perhaps, my essence.

  For years, I had been stuck in cars with either Josie or my mother as they either screamed abuse at me or insisted on taking me someplace I did not want to go.

  Now, I had gone in the Pinto with them to this schlocky, overgilt restaurant in Nassau, far from any bus or train. There were dying chrysanthemums in a big vase; there was frozen shrimp for the price of fresh. Josie pushed my mom in her wheelchair inside; I held the door. Josie made a sour scowl at me because I myself couldn’t push my mother’s wheelchair forward by as much as an inch. In the car, Josie had made a face whenever I had spoken.

  My mother could only use her poor weak lungs to utter about four words per hour, but we all ordered brunch, affecting to be cheery. I got the jumbo shrimp, which unfortunately were too large for me to pick up without serious hand pain. I wanted to ask Josie to help me cut or lift them, but didn’t because it would annoy her. So I changed the subject to a more neutral topic.

  “He didn’t mean to kill them!” my sister said. “They only got killed by accident!”

  We were debating about George Bush, who had just bombed Afghanistan, accidentally killing thousands of civilians.

  Josie and I seldom argued about politics—for indeed, she was a moderate-liberal, a right-winger only in the context of my family which spanned from left to ultra-left. (When she'd unexpectedly had to deal with homeless addicts as part of a job, however, she did have the unfortunate habit of referring to them as “subhuman pieces of shit.”)

  I said, “It doesn’t matter if he didn’t intend to kill them! He did kill them!”