Tension was lingering in both of us from the summer, and 9-11 had made us even edgier than usual. Both of us were avid for a fight, the same way 9-11 had made all of us New Yorkers want to stuff ourselves senseless with food and drink and fuck until our heads came off.
Josie said, “But he’s like Hitler!” referring to Osama bin Laden.
I said, “But we already killed 3,000 people, more than died on 9-11!” We fought about the war, over my shrimp and Josie’s crab-stuffed flounder. (Both of them were in fact delicious, reader.) Though we were actually mad at each other, it was also rather fun to fight that day, and we let it loose much more freely than we usually did.
Then we got on the subject of my two nights at Mohonk.
I said how much I loved it, how healing it had been for me to swim in the lake.
“How much did it cost?” asked Josie, not quite casually.
I blinked briefly, trying to find the question noninvasive. Then I smiled, thinking my hesitancy must be my own fault. My old therapist, Edna, had taught me to interpret all the feelings of fear I felt in Josie’s presence as mere symptoms of my inability to love.
I laughed, putting it all on me. “I’m a little afraid to tell you,” I chortled at myself, “because for some reason I have a fantasy that you might judge me,” and I giggled at myself, making clear that I considered this fantasy one of the silliest I had ever conceived in my silly little brain.
But, “You’re right, I do judge you!” Josie said stonefaced. “Tell me how much you spent!”
I was shocked. The same way, reader, I had always been shocked whenever Josie started pushing me around. Regardless of the circumstances, I always, always reverted to assuming Josie was going to be loving and kind with me. Golemhood for me had sometimes amounted to a curious innocence, like a caul that covered my eyes and nose and ears.
My sister and my mother had been asking me how much I spent on things for years, just as they always wanted to know other intimate details. Now I chuckled nervously. “It’s kind of personal,” I said. “I’d rather not tell you.”
Josie exploded. “I can go to the Internet myself and see how much you spent if you don’t tell me!”
Actually, she couldn’t. Mohonk Mountain House, the admittedly expensive, quite odd 19th-century Quaker lodge where I had gone, had occasional great bargain offers, one of which I had seized on.
But why did she think she had a right to know, in any case?
Josie shouted, “People who borrow money shouldn’t go on vacation!”
I had, because my treatment cost so much, borrowed $500 from Josie at the beginning of the summer, with an agreement to pay it back in October, when Salon would pay me that much for a book review. It was now September 29.
“But we agreed that I’d pay you back in October! It’s not October yet!”
“People who borrow money from others shouldn’t go on vacation!” she repeated loudly across the table. Josie earned about $135,000 a year, which included her work income as a real estate agent plus the dividends from our hotel property. I earned $35,000.
My mother ate her scrambled eggs slowly, keeping her eyes down.
“You know what a horrible year I had. And I only went away for two nights. You went away for two months. You’re saying I didn’t deserve to go on vacation?”
“No!” my sister shouted triumphantly.
I wanted to clarify further. “You’re saying I don’t deserve to go on vacation??”
“No, you don’t!” Josie said with considerable satisfaction, as she grandly stalked off to go to the bathroom.
Now I did what I had never done before. I left. Even though I didn’t have a car. I said goodbye to my mother and I asked the maître d’ to call a taxi for me. She was very gracious about it.
The cab to the nearest Long Island Rail Road station cost about forty bucks, but I did not mind handing the driver the two prodigiously fresh, newly minted 20s I had for some reason garnered from the ATM that morning. Though I was hurting for money, it was worth it.
My relationship with the other oldest living golem of all time changed forever then. Reader, I ended it.
Chapter 13
I felt alone, though. Josie had been good for a conversation after work, for cooing noises on the phone.
I went to Prospect Park and saw the places we had gone together in the past ten years: the lake, the beautiful boathouse, the sprawling hedgerows on the eastern side of the park, not far from the skating rink. We had had picnics. She often used to say to me encouragingly, “You’re a good person!” (she used to say “You're nothing but a piece of shit!” just as often).
The previous May, on my birthday, Josie and bitter Betty Pill had taken me out to a fancy restaurant together. I’d had the rack of lamb and chocolate soufflé. Betty Pill had broken up with me the following month, an act for which I was extremely grateful. I hadn’t even been attracted to poor Betty, who wore button-down clothes and sensible lipstick. I’d dated her because she seemed as sweet and unthreatening as Elmo, but the girl had had a mean streak like a straight razor.
I felt lonely, snooping around the Oriental Pavilion in Prospect Park, sword-dancing with my sister’s ghost on the colored, polished tiles. Right over here we had seen the ducks, and there, one day, we had gone to the zoo. Reader, I was finally done with being shocked. I had lost a kind of virginity around my awareness of maltreatment. I didn’t think I would ever be able to become unenlightened again. It was a mindblowing gift.
That caul or hymen was gone forever. In Gnosticism, the gnosis that is achieved is perhaps best translated as “becoming fully acquainted” or “deep familiarity.” It is an act of joyous reception, whether or not the thing one is finally becoming familiar with is good or bad. “Every act of becoming conscious,” Adrienne Rich wrote about this spirited transformative process, “is an unnatural act.”
In Gnosticism, eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was a good thing. The serpent encouraged us to do it because he was on our side. I could not believe that I had allowed Josie to be such a destructive presence in my life for so long. But I felt powerful because I had cut her, finally, from that precious place.
Soon she left a message on my answering machine in baby-talk, singsonging, “Duney, let’s let bygones be bygones!” I told her I wanted to do something different. “Let’s talk about our relationship and work on it seriously together.” Josie yelped, “I don’t have time for that!” She wanted to be “friends” again but only if we stayed blind and deaf and numb, and quite silent.
She also inquired, with not a little resentment, “How did you get away from the restaurant?”
My mother had to go to Cabrini Hospice in Manhattan for a month that fall—much more convenient for me (if not for my mom) because it was easy to get to by subway. I also liked Cabrini because it had kind volunteers and staffers who didn’t mind setting up a chair for me or putting things where I could reach them, unlike my mother’s main home health aide.
My mother sometimes tried to wrestle her clothes off at Cabrini—I think she felt overheated—and the staff folksinger, who strolled around with a guitar and took requests, thought he was being kind by refusing to let her strip and smoothing her pajamas back down again. I argued with him—I thought she should be allowed to wear or not wear whatever made her physically comfortable—but it was a battle I could not win and I decided to focus on other necessary struggles like making sure she got her meds and showing up for my mother even at those times when I’d miscalculated and Josie was already there.
For the baby-talk had turned definitively back to abuse: when I was sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, stroking her hair, Josie came right up to the edge of my body and said, “Move.”
I said, “Usually, people say ‘excuse me’ in circumstances like this when they want to be nice.”
Josie said, “I don’t want to be nice.”
My mother died six months later, surprising us all who had expected her to die at least two
years previous.
Four days before, I’d visited—mom was back home again in Great Neck—and had a run-in with the chief home health aide.
“You have no problem with your hands,” Reyna said again to me (my mother loved her), “you just want me to carry chairs and work for you all day long. But you’re not paying my salary! Josie’s paying my salary!”
Reyna was overjoyed to have intuited that my sister and I were no longer friends.
My dams burst. “What exactly is your problem? I’m just trying to visit my mother and I have a disability, and I don’t always want to have to sit on her bed!”
My mother, for a change, grew quite alert from our shouting—looked very alarmed, actually—hoisting her head and shoulders up from the bed and gazing at both of us. I felt guilty when she died a few days later, as though my shouting had pushed her over the edge and made her feel finally unwelcome in her own apartment.
How I would like to avoid telling you about the funeral. Josie called me in the morning to let me know my mother had expired in the small hours. Without consulting Aphra or me, Josie had immediately sent my mom into the mortuary assembly-line and ordered a funeral like a pizza for the next day.
“Can’t we wait a couple of days?” I asked.
“No!”
She’d planned all the particulars without asking us. The most salient was that we wouldn’t be able to see my mother. Josie had requisitioned a closed-casket parting.
The next morning, a bleak Monday, thirteen of us are gathered at an enormous hole in ugly Floral Park, New Jersey, to usher my mother to the other world.
Aphra and I and my aunt all want to see my mother one last time before she slides into that hole for good, so we must somehow cajole the surly cemetery boy to open the coffin for us.
“You all gotta come right now,” he says, pissed. “I ain’t opening the damn thing more than once.”
I ask Josie if she wants to come and she sneers lightly, “I’ve already seen her.”
Somehow, she’s been buried without makeup, without a change of clothes even, because there is a spatter of red bloodstains on her nightgown. My mother, who never left the house without gorgeous colors on her face, is yellow-brown everywhere I can see, the exact color that my bruises turn.
She has become a thing, much more so than any of the other funeral bodies I’ve seen: tremendously and unmistakably dead, like a poor large roach found in the kitchen.
She is deader than the frogs and worms I’ve been given to cut up in school, deader than the deer that I’ve passed on the road.
Aphra and I have to compete for time with her. I’m afraid the boy is going to shut the lid at any moment, and I want my crack at her. I try to be a good sport when Aphra gets there first. My sister looks like a version of me—gray hair to my dyed blond, short hair, glasses, lesbo profile, regretful expression. We’re both cyborgs copied from the prototype my mother found in Kabbalah.
Aphra left home early, but she has hated and loved my mother all her life, just like me. Now she mutters low to my mother, and touches her. I am crazy with envy, frustration, desire. I know my arms will not be able to reach far enough into the casket to accomplish a touch, not even to fleetingly edge my mother’s yellow hand. If only there were someone here I could get to move her arm closer to me, or to lift and push me close enough, right into the coffin.
I don’t have a good enough relationship with anyone in the family to ask them to move even part of a dead body for me, or even hoist me a little. Aphra keeps communing with her for what seems like years, decades, eras, finally I actually interject, “May I?”
I am cutting in, at a ballroom: I am the most handsome serviceman in a 40s movie, sure that the lady will prefer me. I am a fake English gentleman enforcing my will with a fake English accent, a phony Oxbridge birthright. (I am the one who speaks the poshest, of my sisters; I’m the one who thrilled the pants off Mom with Yale.) I’m a smiling upper-class, freezing my sister to death at the coffin.
Aphra looks upset and waves her hands around ineffectually, walking away. I pounce on the newly empty space by my mother's side.
I'm glad I get to look at my mother's sweet face, but it's agony that I can't touch her. Her hair, which she has dyed jet black assiduously since I was six, is gray in the coffin, and I feel sorry for her.
In my zeal to tell you about her husk and what we do with it, I have neglected to describe the entire scene for you, reader: On a bare hill, as we wait for the cut-rate, mail-order rabbi, I'm the only one in a colored coat—mustard yellow, almost like my mother's face now. (There was no time to buy a black one.) It was her coat, actually, which she gave to me because I didn't have a good winter coat. So I feel like I am wearing her skin.
I, the golem, walk about on the hill and no one speaks to me. When I arrived I tried to kiss each of my sisters, but Josie just grinned fakely and turned her face away, and Aphra pulled away so hard that my lip just grazed her cheek for a twentieth of a second. An impregnable halo of isolation surrounds each of them. Does one surround me, too? My mother's brother, his wife, my mother's sister and her daughter will not speak to me, either. Are we all islands in this family, or is there something about me in particular that drives all my family away?
I can't believe I have no one here to hug me. Am I leprous, when I need people most? How did I get to this pass?
In the cold wave that emanates from everyone I feel my own inner terribleness confirmed, as though they have discovered I'm the murderer.
Chapter 14
When Josie and I were still friends, we had fantasized with so much pleasure about going to the funeral together in a big black limo. On the voluptuous leather seats, we would drink good coffee and eat artisanal chocolates cast in the shape of my mother’s face. They were going to be called “little chocolate Mommies.” Waiting for her death hadconsumed so much of our lives that we were determined to mark the occasion with a big bang.
We had loved planning aloud the details together, like girls imagining a coach made out of a pumpkin and mice footmen.
In the end, Josie was upset when I would not travel to the distant cemetery in the limo with her. (I took another car service, one that cost $240 round trip, but at least I could come and go as I pleased.)
I did not feel like commissioning a patissier to make the chocolate Mommies (and as it turned out, there was also no time).
The first two days after my mother was dead, I went to the park to commune with her. There is a stand of old voluptuous cherry trees at Grand Army Plaza, at the very northernmost entrance to Prospect Park, and although it was March and they did not even have their leaves yet, much less their insanely puffed pink flowers like enormous breasts, they were still beautiful with all those wildly lashed-together branches, and I spoke to her there, under the biggest tree.
I was comforted, honey. She could see me from inside that tree, from inside the crazy black branches and roots, and I could see her, and I knew she wished me well.
That day a lovely acquaintance of mine from college, Erin Knightley, baked me a savory cheese pie and delivered it. And though it gave me diarrhea, I really, really appreciated it.
Then three days after the funeral, Josie took it upon herself to mail out a bit of my mother’s late writing. There was a letter to Aphra, Josie, and me that my mother had written in the fall, designating which of us should get which of the twenty pieces of jewelry that would still be warm on her corpse at the time of death, as though anticipating that we would be picking over them. And there was an undated bit of her personal writing, not addressed to anyone.
The note assigning the jewelry was full of contrasting personal asides, as though my mother could not contain herself while denominating who got what. To Aphra: “SOMETIMES you need a lot of patience. I have never stopped loving you.” To me, next: “I wish you success in all areas of your life, good health, and love.” Finally: “Josie, you have been wonderful to me, always here when I needed you, giving me love, support, nurturing. I
love you so very much. You made my long sickness bearable. I pray for your health and long life, and wish for you all good things.”
Wonderful. My mother had accentuated this unequal list of blessings by giving Josie eleven items of the jewelry that had lately touched her skin, me five and Aphra four.
“I don’t want to be a petty, jealous person,” my mother wrote in the other letter, the little personal essay. “Which I think I used to be.”
Then she said, “How good a mother could I be if two of my children keep away from me? Wouldn’t they want to be with me more if doing so would be good for them?” I was one of the two children she meant who kept away from her. Apparently, visiting once every one or two weeks when she was ill was a sign of my utter repudiation and rejection.
As to why Josie decided to copy and send those letters to Aphra and me immediately after the funeral, you'd have to ask her. Neither of us had called and demanded, “Who gets ‘the milky white star-sapphire ring?’" as my mother had described it in her final accounting.
I know I myself have never felt as competitive with my sisters as I did just then, or as ravenously angry at my mother. It was as though she had taken all the love I’d lately felt for her and turned it into hunger, competition, naked need. I felt like Cain and Abel, Joseph and all of his eleven brothers, all of them simultaneously.
Her ghost seemed mysteriously to be getting my sisters and me to scratch and tear at one another for her love even more now than she had while still alive.
In life, she’d certainly directed each of her three golems away from one another as soon as we had stepped off her pottery table. “Josie’s very jealous of you, you know.” “Aphra’s a very sick girl.” I don’t know what she said to my sisters about me, but she’d always shared with me secrets and lies about them, histories of their sex lives, who had been torn to pieces how and when.
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