Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  Sweetness said, “Nothing here is even close to my vision.”

  “It’s a start,” said her husband, as always unscathed by this harridan’s acid tongue.

  “Banal,” Sweetness said.

  Les pushed two color chips together. The husband said, “Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re making some progress.”

  “Echh,” said Sweetness, turning her head as if to hawk into a spittoon.

  “How can he stand her?” I asked when Les and I were back on Butler Street.

  The wind had picked up, and I could feel grit between my molars as we trekked past the dark brick storefronts—tax preparer, bank, bar, luncheonette selling lottery tickets. I felt wiped out. Done.

  When had that happened? In fear or distress, not done was what I’d always thought. When shown to my seat on an airplane, not done. When instructed to “draw my attention to the safety features of the aircraft,” told to “fasten my seatbelt by inserting the metal tab into the clasp,” and “lift the clasp to release,” to “wear the belt low and tight across your lap.” When the huge bird began its ascent—the most dangerous time, I’d been informed by Tom, who did not think it a freakish miracle that planes could fly—I had always thought, Spare me, I’m not done yet! Now, it was as if I’d sprung a leak and the life force was trickling out. Done, done.

  “Dude’s crazy about her,” Les said.

  “Please. All that pursing of the lips and flipping of the hair. She’s awful.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. She does the dirty work for them both. Dude’s happy as a clam.”

  It was a welcome distraction to imagine the clam, with its wide, toothless smile and its inability to feel pain, or so it was said.

  Les was not as happy as a clam. His list of achievements had expanded over the years—illustrator, designer, manufacturer, mentor, teacher, landlord, winner of industry awards—but he seemed no happier. His grown son thought he was a jerk. His back ached. The standing desk he’d bought had helped but not enough. His doctor had suggested yoga but Les wouldn’t take a class at the studio upstairs because yoga is for pussies.

  So when I asked, “Could you be as happy as a clam?” I did not believe he might say yes, and was surprised when he said, “If I found the right woman.”

  “Then how come you reject every woman you meet? What was wrong with that grant writer with the great froggy voice? She was smart and attractive. I thought she was great.”

  “She lives in Wexford.”

  “That’s what disqualifies her? That she lives twenty minutes away?”

  “Forty minutes.”

  “You liked her. You told me she was really nice.”

  “Nice isn’t everything. Harley’s nice, isn’t he? He threw that party for you. Flew your mother in from Israel. That’s pretty damn nice, if you ask me.”

  A burly man burst out of a pub called Hambone’s. We veered without breaking stride.

  “It wasn’t nice, it was manipulative, and it wasn’t even my birthday, which you knew. You’re my friend—why didn’t you say something to me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell him you don’t give a shit where he lives? Or take your mother to the airport yourself?”

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and held out my hand. My tough-guy partner shielded his eyes so he didn’t have to see the swollen thumb with its chewed-off nail. We continued our walk without speaking.

  Back at our office, we drifted into separate corners, and I went to work on gift bags for an upcoming trunk show at a clothing store in Shadyside. I’d show the owners a matte paper bag, dark brown, gold logo, trim, ribbons, frou frou. And a second bag, metallic brown with pale blue. The brown bags would reinforce the branding we’d established for their store, though I’d throw in a glossy bag, too—cream with brown and gold. I considered sneaking in an opaque plastic bag (yellow, blue, and brown) that could be repurposed as a little lunch bag, but their clientele cared nothing about having a bag that could be reused. It was something I liked, and I knew this, because I could separate my desires from theirs, could please my clients, could satisfy all their design needs.

  While I was making these decisions, everything else vanished—Sweetness, Harley, my mother, Amber Chatsworth, frustrated that her baby was difficult to feed, my throbbing hand, the jagged pieces of my past I could not seem to assemble. Kayleigh, the former intern we’d just hired, announced she was leaving. Then Les rose and said, “Life,” and I said, “Do you mind taking me home?” and waved my hand.

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of my house. “For instance,” he said, as I was unbuckling my seatbelt. “You could have called a taxi.”

  I thought he meant me and was truly grieved. Then I got out of the car, saw my mother standing on my porch, ancient brocade suitcase at her feet, and realized he meant “taxi to the airport.”

  Seven

  Oh, look at her, I will think, years later, remembering the way I’d tottered up the driveway, mincing in a tight skirt, arms flying, pointy-toed slingback shoes click-clicking, crying, “Ma! Mom! Mama!” Hopping up the steps to the porch, breathless from exertion. “How long have you been out here? What happened to your flight?”

  Then trying to coerce her to step inside my house: lifting her suitcase, Mom wrenching it from my grasp, demanding I take her home. The two of us sniping and tussling over her bag like cartoon characters, as if nothing profound and unspoken boiled beneath our grievances.

  The memory goes on like a flickering movie: Begging her to step inside the house, to sit. Her coat exhaled naphthalene. When I slid it off her shoulders, I saw the label was from B. Altman, a store that closed in the 1980s, and I said, “You saved this coat?” “Why not?” said Mom. “It’s a perfectly good coat!”

  I was hanging her coat in the closet when the backdoor lock clicked open, and the air filled with the oily, garlicky scent of takeout Chinese food. I hurried into the kitchen, just as Harley was setting out the containers. “What’s going on?” I asked. “She was standing outside with her suitcase. Why isn’t she on her flight?”

  Mom walked unsteadily toward us, reaching from doorframe to counter.

  “She is not okay,” Harley hissed.

  “Whose house is this?” Mom asked.

  As Harley put out bowls and plates, he told Mom all he had done to set up the guest room for her: retrieving the space heater from storage, choosing this chair and not that one; taking the bulb from the floor lamp and putting it in the table lamp. He fretted about the room temperature and went on at length about his search for her favorite foods, all of which he’d procured, he thought, though standing in the aisle at the Giant Eagle, he’d found himself stymied, not knowing the difference between hot chocolate and cocoa. It was as if our silent evenings had been in preparation for this dinner, and he had struggled not to squander his words so he could go on and on for this special event.

  I went upstairs to retrieve a sweater for Mom and Harley followed, watching as I went through my drawers.

  “I know this is hard for you to accept, but she is not okay,” he said, when I settled on an oversize cardigan. “No way could I have left her at the airport and let her fly alone to a foreign country, and you know what? You wouldn’t have either. No matter what you say. It goes against everything I know about you. Everything. My lord.”

  I couldn’t admit there was a kernel of truth in his words, because that kernel was wrapped in so much other stuff it was like one of those prize-winning balls I’d seen in Ripley’s Believe it or Not; a rubber band ball as big as a house, its addled creator grinning beside it. I said, “You’re the most manipulative human being I’ve ever met.”

  Harley draped the cardigan over Mom’s shoulders, poured the egg drop soup into a bowl, and I followed behind with plates and utensils as if this was just another night. He unfolded a napkin and put it on my mother’s lap. When the soup was in front
of her she said, “I have no appetite,” then finished the soup and a hearty serving of the gelatinous entrees, and when she was done told Harley about her interest in the nature of hearing. She told him about the Federal government’s disastrous decision to break up AT&T in 1984, the way those bastards destroyed the greatest research facility in the world, sandbox for Shockley and Bardeen, Sessler and West, Penzias and Wilson. Harley listened to the arcane detail about the Baby Bells that formed after the monopoly was broken, and her own contribution to developing the electret microphone, occasionally checking the phone on his lap, then looking up to say, “You had a remarkable career, that’s for sure.”

  Then, “Where am I?” Mom asked, after recounting her history with such fluency. “I’m so turned around, I haven’t the foggiest notion where I am.”

  “You’re in Pittsburgh. We thought you’d stay with us until you get your strength back. Maybe you’ll decide to move here.”

  “Pittsburgh!” she said. “Why would I move to Pittsburgh? I don’t know anyone there.”

  I raised my hand.

  When Harley said, “Tonight we have oranges and fortune cookies,” I excused myself and went upstairs. The person who looked back at me in the bathroom mirror seemed like a stranger. I reached out, touched the image, saw the arm extended. The hand, with its long, thin fingers and carelessly trimmed nails I recognized as mine, and yet seeing the familiar hand against my cheek was confusing. It was like being a dog that sees its own reflection in a mirror and thinks it’s seeing another dog. I knew it wasn’t another woman, of course, but could not identify the woman I saw as myself. I imagined transporting this not me the way one carried a small dog in a little bag, to take the yapping not me wherever I went, the way women toted their Chihuahuas.

  Later, after my mother was set up in the guest room, I called Mindy, because she had known my mother, had known our house, was the only one in my life who did. She was a family therapist and had taken care of two ailing mothers, so I took notes when she gave me advice. Assisted living, PGH. Gerontologist, hard to find. My own PCP okay. Book group friend w/cousins in Israel. “Time to be the mother of your mother.”

  I made an appointment for my mother with my doctor and called three local places for “senior living.” She would not see my doctor, though her nose kept bleeding. She would not have lunch with some seniors at Weinberg Terrace. She would not step outside on a sunny day to see the burning bush in my garden, had not the slightest interest in going to a movie or shopping. A drive to the New Jersey town where we’d lived was crazy. She cared not one iota about our old house, had no use whatsoever for my father’s cousins who also lived in New Jersey—two heavy, bosomy, lugubrious women who’d hefted themselves upright some forty years prior to emigrate to the U.S., then settled back in their club chairs, rising only to make kneidlach, or p’tsha, (galleh, to my mother), a garlicky gelatin made from calves’ feet that was both revolting and sublime.

  On the second morning my mother slept at my house, or the third, or the morning when the basement flooded after a hard rain, or the morning the maple leaves turned scarlet and the air smelled like wood smoke—on one of those morning, I shuffled outside to get the newspaper, and saw that a nest had fallen from the crab apple tree and inside was a small blue egg, empty and unbroken. When I held it, I thought of the Yiddish proverb, “He who has not tasted the bitter doesn’t understand the sweet,” and for an instant was lifted from all the confusion and discord. Then I heard the shrill syllables of my name, and the frantic cry of someone locked in a dark room. “Let me out! I want to go home!” I went inside and saw my mother standing in my kitchen in a thin nightgown. Bouquets of violets floated across the fabric; dried blood was smeared across her cheek.

  “Why did you put me here?” she cried, freshly enraged to find herself in this alien dwelling where she did not want to be. “I want to go home.”

  I ran the water until it was warm, dampened a paper towel and handed it to her, taking in her multi-colored hair, yellow toenails that needed to be trimmed, my grievances so trivial it shamed me to recall them. I touched my face to show her where to wipe her cheek, and said, “Tell me what I can do to help.”

  “Take me home,” she said.

  “I’m working on it, Ma,” I told her.

  Seeing her in my kitchen, barefoot, in a thin nightgown, a crust of blood on her cheek, I wanted to reach out, knew I couldn’t touch her, and stood, rooted at a distance, hoping at least to reassure her. “I really am,” I said.

  And she said, “I want to go home so I can die.”

  The condition of the clothing she had packed for her three-day trip made my heart ache—ripped pantyhose, underpants with stretched-out elastic, a stained blouse. Late one afternoon, I drove to a discount store on the Waterfront to buy her something to wear while she was incarcerated in my house. As I looked through racks of unacceptable garments, the Beatles sang, “Obla-Di, Obla-Da, Life Goes on, Bra.” The chorus that once had perplexed and amused me now reminded me of the days when my mother washed her silky undergarments by hand and hung them on colorful hooks from the shower rod, when her closet was packed with suits, silk blouses, and expensive pumps in cordovan and black, clip-on earrings, gold chains, expensive lapel pins, and tiny gold wristwatches with unreadable faces. My mother examining the seams of a garment to make sure that the design matched perfectly, scrutinizing the lining of pants, rejecting a jacket that had machine-made button holes. The swish of her stockings rubbing together. Her good legs. As a child, I’d liked when she stroked a calf and said, “I’ve always had good legs.”

  Standing beneath the fluorescent lighting, hearing “obla-di, obla da,” I realized I had no idea what size she wore, could not guess her height or the shape of her body, because I did not know her body, had long been forbidden from touching her, could only summon up memories of the garments she chose to cover it.

  A large?

  Even in her present state, she seemed formidable. I examined a pair of black velour pants in a furtive way. They looked comfy, with their drawstring waist. It was dinnertime. The store was quiet. In my head she was saying, Why don’t you stop with the nagging and the burning bush and leave me be? The bloody nose is nothing. Don’t you have work? Why are you pushing at me, pushing, pushing. Go!

  They were hideous, these pants. I put them back on the rack.

  When I was at work I worried about her. Before I left her alone the first time, I’d written my phone number in black marker and tacked it onto the fridge. The large digits had offended her. “I’m not senile,” she’d said.

  “I know,” I’d said. I didn’t know. “Just pick up the phone when it rings. Indulge me. Okay?”

  I held up another pair of pants. Black, polyester. Could anyone actually want this garment? I stretched the elastic waist. It looked as if it had been manufactured to cover the mortal flesh and nothing more.

  I hung the pants back on the rack.

  Sewn by a girl. A child. Who barely saw the light of day.

  I checked the label. Cambodia.

  I dropped the pants into the rickety cart and wheeled it to another section.

  It was hard to concentrate, knowing my mother was alone in my house. At work, I spent hours doodling, playing with my oyster pail, unable to think or dream. I called home. No one answered. Tried again, worried she was standing on my porch in her ancient coat, or sprawled on the floor, calling, “Help!” as she did each morning, the blood crusted on her cheek, all alone, no one to hear. I opened the flaps of the oyster pail, lifted the carton by its thin wire handle, turned it onto its side. I called and listened to the phone ring.

  Mindy was right, but it was hard to be the mother of this particular mother.

  “She’s going to say no to everything you suggest,” Mindy said. “You need to just bring her a coat, if you want her to leave the house. Help her on with it, walk her to the door. At this point, you’re the one wh
o knows what’s best for her.”

  I recognized this strategy. It was the way Harley had “managed” me. Humor her and do what you want.

  The Carpenters were singing, “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Poor starved-to-death Karen Carpenter.

  Lacking Harley’s gifts, I’d tried and failed. Mom would not slip on the coat. Would not walk to the door. “What am I supposed to do, throw her in a sack?” I asked Mindy, when I failed to get her to have lunch with the seniors. “She wants to go home. This is not home. ‘Pittsburgh? Why am I in Pittsburgh? I don’t know anyone in Pittsburgh.’”

  “Then you’ll have to take her to Israel and get her settled there.”

  “Israel!” I could hardly listen. “Why did she even move there? It’s not like we’re Jewish.”

  “I hate when you do that,” said Mindy. And later: “I know she’s really, really hard.”

  In a section called Active Wear, I chose a fleece jacket (lavender, zippered) and some T-shirts.

  A woman in Mindy’s book group had family in Israel. I thanked Mindy for the contact information, but I could not imagine going to that fraught place, where buses, coffee shops, and market places were blowing up, or how I could actually arrange for an acceptable situation for Mom with only a stranger’s name and number. I didn’t know anyone there. My father’s cousins were no longer alive. Their daughter, Ronit, who once spent the summer with my family, might still be in the country. I had no idea where she lived or if she still spoke English.

  Israel meant sirens and the wail of anguished parents. I could not imagine it as a country where people went about their everyday lives, where they bought groceries or danced in the back of hotels. I couldn’t imagine a woman in an editing room or a man in a research lab. It was true, that old proverb, “You cannot imagine what you cannot imagine.” I could not imagine getting on a plane with my mother and going to this place. At the same time, this impossible trip had begun to feel inevitable.

  Someone’s cart had been left beside a rack of cotton cardigans on sale. Scented red pillar candles, jeweled slippers with upturned toes, tube socks, a chartreuse salad spinner, a ceramic picture frame with glazed dog bones at each corner. A woman returned, wagging a beige sweater with a huge fake fur collar and shrieking with pleasure. “Elvin will hate this!”