Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  * * *

  —

  Photograph: 1971. My cousin Beth’s wedding at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Greenwich Village. My mother and I wear matching lace mother-daughter jumpsuits; she rests her hand lovingly on the small of my back. Tall and wraithlike, she smiles at the camera, her blond hair pulled back tightly in a George. My father, in his tuxedo, shifts toward his beautiful wife, the right side of his face obscured like the dark side of the moon, filled with astonishment and pride that this woman, his wife—his wife—is so stunning that every man in the room stares at her, coughs, and claps my father’s shoulder like football players in a locker room. Two months after a bicycle accident that nearly killed me, I stand in front of them in the lower left corner of the photo. Although I am dressed like my mother, I resemble my father—I am the image of him, a scaled-down, female replica with long blond hair and his round face. I am eight years old, smiling maniacally, my right cheek partially shrouded in bruising, my eyes squeezed tight against the impossible joy of it all, the three of us posed together in front of a camera. A record of a single happy day, my mother’s lovely face, dewy with makeup, in the spotlight: The camera loves her and finds her full-on. We, her husband and child, hide in the penumbra, partially seen and partially not.

  A light here requires a shadow there, said Mrs. Ramsay.

  We arrive at the party hopeful for love: dressed identically, a beautiful young mother in her early thirties and her eight-year-old daughter. We are jubilant. We dance a vigorous hora while the bride and groom are thrust high into the air on wooden chairs; our circle of family careens violently in one direction and then the other. My father’s sister, the stately and formal family matriarch, older than he by five years, her hair teased into a tall auburn aureole, dances a slow Russian sher with her sisters-in-law. My father’s father, an Orthodox cantor with one foot in the old world and one in the new, slices the celebratory challah and says the motzi.

  “I was once a star,” my mother tells the guests who mill around us in a throng, drinking whiskey sour highballs and crimson Shirley Temples and eating pigs in blankets by the fistful.

  It’s true, I insist, as if the fact of my mother’s talent might dare be questioned by anyone in the room. I am her protector, her keeper. I swing off her arm like a much younger child; she smiles down at me and cups my chin, and a rush of warmth fills my heart.

  My Lissie, she says. My darling Lissie.

  The main course arrives. The photographer makes his rounds with a massive Polaroid medium-format camera and snaps a picture. My mother asks my father for a cigarette; she is suddenly nervous and fretful, and her hands quiver. He gives her one of his Parliaments, leans across her untouched plate—chicken breast and green beans amandine, perhaps, which are now getting cold—strikes a match, and lights it. She smokes it halfway down and stubs it out hard into a glass ashtray. She is no longer smiling. The air around her suddenly crackles like a hot wire; so much joy, and then a plunge. I shiver. If she is not asked to sing with the wedding band, to coil the microphone cord around one hand the way she once did so expertly years earlier when it was her job, the joy of the day will wither like an autumn leaf, and the mood shift from celebration to catastrophe.

  My mother taps her foot beneath the table and grows antsy as a child waiting for Christmas morning; she squirms, hoping for someone to ask her to get up. I cross my fingers under the table. Please, someone, ask her to sing, I pray. Please. She couldn’t possibly ask the bandleader herself—that isn’t for a lady to do, and at this point in her life, after the television show and all the awards, all the things she gave up to be here in this moment, at this time, she shouldn’t have to. As the meal draws to a close and we are picking at the wedding cake, a distant relative—a dentist we see only at weddings and funerals—comes along, leans over, and whispers in her ear, just as she’s given up all hope that it will ever happen. She nods; she smiles. I leap from my seat and clap. My father, so proud of her, catches the eye of his sister, who glares at him from across the room. My mother stands and straightens her jumpsuit. I watch as she walks to the bandstand—it seems to take forever for her to get up there—her eyes cast downward and humble—Who, me? Why, thank you—while the room grows silent. My father and I sit on the edges of our chairs, in awe. She is ours; she belongs to us. We belong to her. Someone—a waiter? an aunt?—whispers while my mother begins the opening notes of “Life Is a Cabaret.” Her eyes scan the room for the offender; she stumbles over the words. She falters and shakes her head; a disaster. The light around us fades.

  I used to have a girlfriend known as Chelsea. With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea.

  Elsie, I whisper. Ma, it’s Elsie.

  She nods at me and winks, finishes the song, and strides off the bandstand. Cousins roar with applause and delight, but she doesn’t hear them. She gathers me and our things—we leave the table flowers behind (she’s allergic); she stuffs a blue crushed velvet yarmulke into her purse—while my father pulls the Buick around in front of the awning. I kiss my cousins and my grandparents goodbye. My mother tells them she is feeling unwell. We leave quietly and drive home in silence. When we arrive, she removes her makeup with thick white dollops of Noxzema, weeping over her bathroom sink at the futility of it all. Why does she even bother. She closes the bathroom door. The lock clicks.

  “I will never sing again,” she cries. “I will never be a performer.”

  “But you’re so good, Mom,” I say, sitting on her bed while my father is out walking the dog. “Everyone loved you—”

  Never again, she cries. Never. My life is over.

  My first small death. She will never recover from this; her life is over, she said. The ache in my stomach—as though my core is being peeled apart, layer by layer, like an old onion—is the distillation of grief. I want to save her, to reassemble her soul like the pieces of a shattered vase. I want to make her whole the way she once was before all this, when she was in front of the camera, in the publicity clippings that sit in an album in the hallway closet, from long before I was born. I want to return her to herself.

  My mother is beauty and she is music, and I love her to my bones. If she is broken, we are both broken. If she is whole, we are whole.

  * * *

  • • •

  I GREW UP IN THE way immigrant children do, caught between the lexicon of two worlds, the language of the past and the present. I metabolized the foreign syntax of resentment and unfulfilled appetites that my mother spoke in every sentence; I secretly yearned for the mundane and the serene, the tedious B side to an extraordinary universe whose angry dialect fell from my young lips like a dying native tongue.

  To be the child of such splendor and love and rage—to be kin to it, its daughter—is to live in a world of magical thinking, with the belief that one has the power to right the ship and straighten its course. It would take me a lifetime to understand that my mother was at the helm of her own craft, and that she alone could sail it into the wind or run it aground.

  And so, in these quiet years of my midlife in Connecticut, two hours from my mother, I have started to run, and its markers—time and distance—have become my healers, my lodestars. The passage of time repairs the heart; distance sharpens the lens of clarity. A serious athlete in my younger years, I habitually pushed my body to the point of collapse in order to free it from the constraints of psychic ownership and claim, to remind it that it belonged to nothing and no one but its actual owner. One afternoon in Connecticut while writing my second book, I stood up from my desk, laced on a pair of old running shoes I found in the hallway closet, and ran around our cul-de-sac. I panted and perspired and felt as though my heart was going to explode out of my chest. A week later, a half mile became whole, and one mile became two. My lungs filled with life, and pain became pleasure. I run to flee our story, to groove a new habit.

  On this autumn morning in 2017, a year after my mother’s ac
cident that will cause a seismic shift in our lives, I kick off my sneakers in the entryway of my home and walk into the kitchen and make myself a cup of coffee. An ordinary workday in late fall. Petey, our rescued terrier mutt, waits at my feet for his breakfast; he stares up at me intensely, unblinking. Susan is on the train, on her way to her job in Manhattan. Outside, the vegetable garden is beginning to die. My days here are contented and quiet.

  After the accident, I became consumed by my mother’s physical needs where I had once only been consumed by the ferocity of her love. Two surgeries and months of rehabilitation and I was sucked back in by a force that had taken me decades to escape. A moral obligation, I called it. The right thing to do. She gave you life, my friends said. My mother’s only child, now in my fifties—we are all that remains of our small New York family—I fought for this life with Susan and our home in the hills of New England. Some would say I ran.

  While the coffee drips into my Chemex, I sift through a thick rubber-banded stack of my mother’s bills and statements, letters and notices: the reduction of a kaleidoscopic world of need and promise to the purely practical—facts, figures, numbers—of which I am in charge. I am now her keeper. I say yes, and I say no.

  My left hand holds my right, to steady it. The phone rings.

  2

  “THIS IS NOT HOW MOTHERS and daughters behave,” my father says.

  He is sitting at our breakfast counter, reading the paper, drinking Sanka out of an orange melamine cup, eating a soft-boiled egg into which he is dunking a narrow slice of crumbling diet white bread.

  It is early in the morning, a school day. It is in the late fall of 1974, eight months after Patty Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The word cult has entered our vocabulary; there are stories everywhere of children running off, disappearing, vanishing without a trace. My father has installed a series of extra locks on the door; the weather is getting cold.

  My mother and I are morning warriors. Neither of us likes to leave our beds—we still don’t; morning is so unpredictable—and our sleep, in rooms across a narrow hallway separated by a bathroom, is fitful. My father is an early riser, lighthearted and optimistic—Good morning, girls, he bellows—a hunter-gatherer of bagels and lox who walks our Airedale while listening to the news on a tiny plastic transistor radio that he carries in his suit pocket. My mother and I wake dry-mouthed and drunk with the assumption of regret; we open our eyes and expect recrimination. We have little else in common. We are genetically disposed to surprise and suspicion when the morning is pleasant and the air sweet.

  “School, honey,” she says, shaking my shoulder. I lie in bed, eyes open, unblinking, staring at the ceiling.

  “Get up. Honey. School.”

  * * *

  —

  Coffee and eggs, Hawaiian Punch, a vitamin in the shape of Wilma Flintstone. My mother has left a tiny brown Bloomingdale’s shopping bag of makeup samples on my bathroom sink, where I can’t miss it, on top of a box of caramel-flavored AYDS diet candies. I wash my face with a special, expensive black soap. I leave the makeup untouched. I choose an outfit for myself from the bowels of my closet, which is overstuffed with tiny fake Pucci dresses, blue suede miniskirts, rabbit fur vests, see-through voile blouses, and high leather boots from an equestrian shop in the city. I shove everything out of the way, put on a dark brown double-breasted tweed suit, and appear in the kitchen. My mother stands at the sink and scans me up and down.

  “Eat your breakfast, darling,” she says, turning away.

  She bites her lip and shakes her head. She squeezes her eyes shut. My father eats in silence and reads the paper. I sit down next to him.

  A white rubber spatula, crisp and brown around its edges from years of flipping our fried eggs, cartwheels through the air past the glass percolator and careens off the kitchen wall clock in the shape of a daisy. I jump off my breakfast stool. My father grabs his coffee cup and pushes himself away from the counter.

  Dammit, Rita—

  “I’m sorry, Lissie—” she cries. “Sit down and eat.”

  “I’ll miss the bus, Mom—”

  Dammit—my father says. Dammit—

  “I’m only human,” she says.

  She composes herself. She’s been reading a new book about Transcendental Meditation; she is wearing a mood ring that is stuck on orange, the color of anger. She takes three deep breaths.

  “Forgive me, honey?” she says, looking down at me. “We’re all adults, and adults make mistakes. But that outfit…I am going to die.”

  There are tears and screaming and cold washcloths pressed against swollen eyes.

  “This is not how mothers and daughters behave,” my father says to her, putting his coat on.

  “Don’t you dress her like a boy!” she screams back at him. “For spite you do it!”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE FIFTH GRADE, I have become a woman.

  “Just like me!” my mother says. She proudly points to herself, thumbs to her chest, while I step behind her, apoplectic with shame. She tells anyone who will listen—a neighbor, a stranger on line at the dry cleaner or the bank, the grocery man whose Holocaust survivor wife has a number tattooed on her arm in green ink.

  A minhag: a Jewish custom without reason.

  She slaps me on a bright Sunday morning after finding blood on my sheets. Gaga did it to her, and Gaga’s mother did it to Gaga. No one knows why. It comes as a surprise: a sucker punch. I weep ugly tears that make my eyebrows swell. She grabs me in a loose hug. I hang limp as a ragdoll.

  “Oh, darling, stop crying already! You’re a woman now! Think of the boys—”

  She shoves into my arms a small box of adhesive minipads that she has stashed under the sink in her bathroom; she has been waiting for just this occasion.

  “Don’t tell Dad—please, Ma—”

  “Cy! She’s a woman—” she yells, and my father races out of the bathroom wrapped in a damp towel, half his face covered with a meringue of Barbasol. He wraps his arms around me.

  “Mazel tov, my beautiful girl—I’m so proud of you,” he whispers in my ear, as though bleeding is an extraordinary feat at which a young girl might succeed or fail.

  * * *

  —

  I am able to produce babies at eleven years old. I am no longer the bony, narrow child my mother used to lovingly shake into her tights like a pillow every morning before school, the one who she was sure would grow up to be tall and lanky and cool: her clone. I hear the words zaftig and busty spoken in low whispers around me. The Life Cycle Library shows up gift-wrapped in my bedroom, sitting on my dresser. The card says Ask me anything, I’m here for you, Love Papa.

  May the tribe increase! he proclaims at the end of a family dinner at his sister’s house on Long Island, twenty of us seated around my aunt’s formal mahogany dining room table. My mother snorts and rolls her eyes; she gets up and excuses herself. My premature puberty is cause for public celebration; there will now be plenty of time for me to have babies. My shape, suddenly round and fertile and so very different from my mother’s ectomorphic skeleton, becomes a topic of conversation; a punch line.

  “Well,” my father says when I try out for the local swim team, “at least you’ll never drown.”

  “You’re the lucky one,” my mother says, sitting on my bed and watching me change into my play clothes after school. A ribbed turtleneck and brown corduroy jeans lie in a pile at my feet; I’m wearing nothing but a training bra and days-of-the-week underpants. She gets up and gently pushes a strand of hair out of my eyes; she puts her arms around me and we stare together like best friends, side by side, into the mirror.

  “You got what the men want,” she laughs, “not what I got. Flat as a goddamned pancake. Just look at me. Tits like yours and I could rule the world.”

  “But I don’t want to rule
the world,” I say.

  “You will,” she says.

  My mother poses with her hands in the belt loops of her hip-huggers. She turns to the side, gazes over one shoulder and sucks in her cheeks, thin as a reed.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON THIS SCHOOL MORNING IN 1974, I have dressed myself in a very special suit that my father has brought home from the city. One day after work, he secretly carried a black vinyl garment bag into my bedroom and hung it up in my closet before my mother could find it. My father believes that boys’ clothes are made better, and will last longer, than girls’, and he slips them into my wardrobe quietly, subversively, when my mother isn’t looking. Severe and angular with massive pointed lapels, my new suit is fashioned from heavy English tweed of the sort that might be worn while walking on the moors with a dog and some sheep. It quietly thrills me, and when I pull it out of the closet, reaching past the technicolor dresses and the suede miniskirt and the rabbit fur vest, I am delighted; it is a small coat of armor and I wear it as though I am heading into battle. I use the bathroom, leave the bag of makeup samples on the sink, dry my hands, and button my jacket. I stuff my books into the heavy black belting leather briefcase that my father has also bought for me, the kind a middle-aged actuary might use, a utilitarian nineteen-fifties remnant acquired at a dusty midtown luggage store. Dressed like this, I will have a good day, I think; a safe day. I come down the hallway for breakfast.

  “That’s a man’s bag, honey—” my mother notes, as I drag my briefcase into the kitchen.

  “—leave it,” she adds, taking a drag off her cigarette.

  I let go of the handle.

  “Take it,” my father says, putting the newspaper down and climbing off the kitchen stool.