Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  “Mom—” I whisper. “He said that in front of you? Who says that in front of their child? I’m sorry—”

  “You’re ugly, he said, and I thought to myself, Go to hell. I’ll show you.”

  This child—this sad-eyed error, the result of a single, wedding night of combustion between two people who married because they were older and people were beginning to talk—starved herself to prove her father wrong. She really was beautiful and worthy of love; if not her parents’, then everyone else’s. She secretly sold her school lunch in order to stockpile makeup. Reapplying it obsessively at the first sign of its fading, she produced a different face, a mask. At Performing Arts High School, where she was one excellent young singer in a sea of talent, she lived on black coffee and cigarettes to lose the weight she was prone to; it tumbled off her. She morphed, before the world, into a stunning young woman who became a regular at the Stork Club and 21 and El Morocco. Life was her chess game: Every move she made was practiced and strategic as a guided missile. She would be beautiful and she would sing, and men, if not her own father, would worship her forever.

  She was not pretty enough for her father; I was not pretty enough for my mother. A coil of grief rises into my throat and stops; I stand up from the couch and look out the window at the Upper West Side, the spires of the San Remo on Central Park West, and the park just beyond.

  “More tea, Ma?”

  She nods and I go into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

  * * *

  —

  By the time my parents met in 1962, my mother had spent a season singing on national television; she was recognized on the street and regularly stopped for autographs. My father’s well-off and formal family could find no fault with her. He had set eyes on her and had fallen in love; they married within months. After their first date, he took her back to her mother’s apartment in a taxi for which he inadvertently didn’t have enough cash to pay the fare. He was embarrassed; she was kind. The next day on his lunch break, he went to his family’s jeweler on Forty-Seventh Street, bought her a tiny gold ring into which he stuck a rolled-up ten-dollar bill, and messengered it to the fur showroom where she was modeling, along with a note of profound apology.

  “He was adorable and smart, but I should have known right then and there”—she told me years later, waving her index finger in the air—“he had a little problem with money.”

  A collision of hope and entitlement, hunger and expectation: My father wanted her to be the smiling trophy wife of his dreams, the sort of bombshell for whom he and thousands of men just like him had won the war. The prim heat of June Cleaver crossed with the smolder of Ann-Margret, hanging off his gabardine-suited arm as they careened around Kennedy’s Manhattan, the world suddenly at their feet. He assumed that after a few years, they would move to the suburbs where they would live in a colonial with a deep backyard and produce a flock of children and grandchildren. There would be vacations and music lessons, a country club membership, a longtime career from which he would retire as senior vice president and creative director from his advertising agency with a company pension. Children were blips on my mother’s radar; she lusted for the things that made her beautiful and desirable and that would stop time. My father longed for a sense of place, and we spent every weekend of my young childhood visiting the model houses his company advertised, in communities called Levittown and Lake Success. I grasped their hands as we left my father’s Barracuda idling in recently paved driveways all over Long Island and swung myself across the clear-plastic-carpeted thresholds, feet in the air, like a small bride on her wedding night.

  But we would never leave Forest Hills; my father would become a publisher and his business would go bankrupt. My mother would turn her attention to men of greater success and possibility.

  * * *

  —

  I am all that remains of them. I look like my father, with his sad, dropped brow and square build. I sound like him, and when I cough I can feel his presence around me, although he’s been dead for sixteen years as I write this, longer than they were married. I have his gait and his laugh, his smile, his temper, his humor, his tendency to melancholy. When my mother asked him to leave, he remained a specter in her life, a ghost; I so resembled him that I was a constant reminder of her ex-husband in manner and countenance. Once he moved out, she made herself scarce. She began to date Ben, her boss from the fur showroom where she modeled and one of the most eligible bachelors in the city. Every night, I was left in the care of Gaga, a broad-boned, old-fashioned woman, white-blond, who had shaken her fist at the Hindenburg as it sailed west to its doom over her Brooklyn home in 1937. Gaga sat hour after hour in our apartment while my mother was out with Ben at Studio 54 and Plato’s Retreat. I adored her; she fed me a simple dinner, returned to her chair, and waited for her daughter to return home.

  My sleep was fitful and I stumbled into the pitch-black living room at two in the morning to find her sitting there, eyes closed, chin on her chest.

  “Where is she, Gaga?” I whispered, touching her arm.

  “Your mother forgot to come home, Elissala. Go back to bed.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON NOT long after the divorce, my father took me for lunch to the sort of place my mother would have refused to set foot in; she would have waited for us in the car. He fetishized it as slumming—it’ll be fun, he said. We sat side by side at the lunch counter at Brennan and Carr, a sliver of a restaurant in deepest Brooklyn, surrounded by cops and firemen on break, hunched over tiny jus-soaked roast beef sandwiches that dripped down our chins. Someone mopped the floor with Ajax while we were eating. The doors to the place were flung open and the stench of the city permeated everything like acid through plastic: meat and steam and ammonia and garbage and hot concrete.

  “I want you to remember,” he said. “Someday, she’ll be your responsibility.” He wiped his face with a napkin. “You’ll never be able to give her what she wants. I tried. But someday, she will be your job.”

  We had been eating in silence; he had been thinking about it. We were a newly divorced family. She was not yet married to Ben. My father would not meet Shirley, his second wife, a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College with a thriving private practice specializing in the treatment of trauma victims and survivors of war, for another four years. I was making a list of colleges, all of them far away: Colorado, Berkeley, Stanford. I didn’t discuss my plans with my mother and she never asked.

  Was my father predicting the inevitable? Did he foretell a future in which her money would drip dry, the open spigot of need destroying her from the inside out, the desperate hunger for a past in the spotlight clinging to her ankles like a street urchin? Could he know that someday, forty years into the future, I would be faced with a decision based on moral obligation, primal devotion, and the vain hope for redemption and resolution: to rescue her, to find a way for us to heal.

  “The Fifth Commandment,” my father said that afternoon. “Honor thy mother and father. No matter what.”

  10

  THE DISPATCHER DOESN’T CALL IN the accident as an emergency, and it takes half an hour for the ambulance to arrive. She isn’t having a heart attack or a stroke. She hasn’t fallen in the street. There is no blood. She’s conscious. My mother is sitting on the floor near the front door to her Upper West Side apartment, one foot twisted grotesquely out of joint. A bit of light brown bone nudges through the taut, papery skin. The other foot, the good one, is slowly swelling from a metatarsal fracture.

  She had spent the day walking. She stood, she said, and that’s all she did: Both feet were asleep. They caught, tangled, and twisted when she got up from the couch where she was watching Joan Fontaine in Rebecca.

  * * *

  —

  It’s nearly Christmas. The performers’ club where she sings every week is having their holiday party. A few
years earlier, Abe Vigoda had begged her to be his date.

  Please, Rita darling, please, said the familiar deep voice on her answering machine while I stood there listening to the legend ask my mother out. She shook her head at the phone, eyes clenched tight with dramatic regret as though Abe himself could see her through the wires.

  “Absolutely not,” she moaned to me. “They’ll all think I’m ninety.”

  But on this night, being at the club for the Christmas party is all she can think about.

  “I wanted to go so bad,” she wails loud enough for the dispatcher to hear her. “I wanted to sing tonight—I must sing. I was practicing ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’—”

  “Is she having trouble breathing?” the dispatcher asks me.

  “She passed out twice while we were on the phone with her,” I say.

  “Don’t you lie to them!” she yells from the living room. “You’ll lie to them! I can hear you from here!”

  “Is she abnormally agitated, Ma’am?”

  “Not abnormally, no—”

  “And her breathing is okay?”

  “It is.”

  “Chest pains?”

  “No chest pains.”

  My mother, fully made up from her day, is the color of a bleached bedsheet. When I hang up with the dispatcher, the signs of shock come back to me in a vague rush from my Red Cross training days when I was the teenage lifeguard my father said would never drown because of my outsized breasts.

  “Ma, are you nauseous?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “I didn’t eat anything,” she says. “Maybe there’s a cookie?”

  “Are you cold?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “Am I gonna need a operation? Because I don’t want a operation—”

  Her voice is high and reedy. Her words come out unadorned, her grammar mangled. A slip of a moment: I want to take her in my arms, like an injured child. My stomach falls. I can’t.

  “We don’t know yet,” I say, bending down to her. I put my hand on her knee and she stares at it. It feels alien, disembodied. I remove it.

  “—and I can’t have a operation because I’m allergic—”

  Which is true: Since I was a small child, she has suffered from allergies to the world around her. One huge allergy, unwieldy as a tuba, to everything from the dyes used in soap and shampoo and every brand of makeup except for Clinique, to the elemental and natural: dirt and sun.

  “Just give me an ice pack,” she says. “No surgery.”

  I position the living room table lamp above her so that it’s shining on her without her knowing. I look at her pupils.

  Years earlier, when I was a camp counselor in the early nineteen-eighties, I was in charge of ten eight-year-olds for two months, and one of my girls suffered a compound fracture of her wrist while playing kickball. In the middle of a grassy field, mosquitoes humming around us, she shook in my arms. I asked about her puppy. We waited for the ambulance to arrive. She shivered; I held her. She went into shock. Her eyes went black. My mother, at eighty-two, her foot dislocated nearly behind her, was deciding whether to take a painkiller.

  “Gimme a Tylenol,” she says to Susan, who goes into the kitchen and comes back with two capsules.

  “Just one,” my mother says, holding up her index finger.

  “Take two,” Susan says, bending down to give her the pills with a glass of water.

  “One—”

  “Two—”

  My mother screws up her face.

  “Not the pink one,” she says, shoving Susan’s hand away. “I can’t take the pink one. You should remember that. Get me a tablet. White.”

  “Rita, the capsule will get into your system faster,” Susan says.

  “I. Am. Allergic. To. The. Color. Pink. What is wrong with you?”

  Susan goes back into the kitchen to get her the single Tylenol—plain; white—which will do for her injury as much as a sugar pill, and is the only thing my mother will take for the pain that she is not entirely sure she feels.

  * * *

  —

  It takes thirty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. Wanda the EMT, built like a small refrigerator, is all business, no bullshit, and trained not to appear shocked. We learn on the way to the hospital that she is an Iraq War veteran, a medic. She has seen her friends explode like water balloons after driving over IEDs. Wanda looks at my mother’s ankle and gasps.

  “How much discomfort are you in, Ma’am?”

  My mother shrugs.

  “A little.”

  “What did you take for the pain?”

  “A Tylenol. The white one. I’m allergic to the pink one. I swell up like a fat cow.”

  She puffs up her cheeks and pats her belly.

  “Do you have anything stronger? Percocet?”

  My mother straightens up. Her eyes bulge. She winds up like a pitcher.

  “Why the hell would I have that? Are you accusing me?”

  She glares at me. She wags her index finger so furiously that I’m certain it will snap off and cartwheel end over end across the living room to the piano, where it will land in the silver loving cup she won for a singing competition in Brooklyn when she was thirteen, right after the war was over.

  “Did my daughter tell you I’m a druggie? Did she? Her father—now he was the hypochondriac. He’d take anything he could get his hands on.”

  “For Chrissakes, Mom—”

  “Don’t you start with me—”

  “A lot of people have it in their house,” Wanda says to her. “Dental work, surgery—”

  “I will not take anything more than a Tylenol white,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “I am not like her father, the bastard. He was the hypochondriac. Not me—”

  Wanda pulls me into the kitchen while her partner settles my mother onto the stretcher and straps her in.

  “Tough old bird. Dementia?”

  “No—” I say.

  “You sure? Agitation comes with dementia. Maybe a UTI?”

  “She was born like this,” I tell her.

  “Anything else? Cancer? Mental illness?”

  “No—”

  Wanda stares at me over her glasses.

  “This is her normal,” I say. “This is who she is—”

  “Really?”

  “Really—”

  “Because this much agitation can take a physical toll if it goes on for a long time.”

  “Forever—” I say.

  “Falls?” Wanda asks.

  “Two years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were in San Francisco over Christmas. We got a call on New Year’s Eve morning from the emergency room at Mount Sinai.”

  “Hip?”

  “Dehydration. She fell through the plastic shower door in her bathroom and scraped up her face. She hadn’t eaten in days.”

  We had raced home from the West Coast. I drove to her apartment as soon as I could get there. She greeted me at the door in full makeup—thick pink swipes of blush, heavy chocolate-brown eyeliner, black mascara, Red Red Red Clinique lipstick—her face bruised, her eyes nearly swollen shut like George Foreman’s after a round in the ring. She’d refused lidocaine for the stitching.

  “Why didn’t you bite on a fucking bullet, Ma? It’s not the movies, forgoddsake.”

  “Allergic—and anyway I didn’t feel anything,” she shrugged, holding an ice pack to her cheek.

  “St. Luke’s,” Wanda says to her partner, walking back into the living room.

  “New York Hospital,” my mother says, cutting her off. “I’m only going to the Upper East Side.”

  “We need to get you to the closest one,” Wanda says.

  “New York. East Sixtieth or I’
m not going anywhere.”

  “But—”

  “My kid was born there,” she says, looking over at me. “So that’s where we’re going, or I’ll scream.” She folds her arms across her chest. She’s the decider.

  We collect her things: wallet, handbag, makeup case.

  In the ambulance, the second EMT takes more vitals: blood pressure, pulse, blood oxygen level. Unremarkable.

  “Who’s president?” he says.

  “That animal. I made his first wife a fur coat.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixty.”

  The EMT stares at me.

  “But you have Medicare,” he says.

  “They made an exception for me,” she says.

  I stand at the nurse’s station outside her room in the emergency department on a late Saturday night. Gurneys charge past us. Gunshot wounds. A stabbing. A meth overdose. Two heavily armed police officers flank the triage area. A priest races down the hallway, his black loafers squeaking on the linoleum. The smell of blood and shit and ammonia fill the stagnant air.

  “We’ll need her papers,” the nurse tells me. “Living will, healthcare proxy, any other directives. Do you know her wishes?”

  “No idea,” I say.

  “She never told you?” the nurse asks, looking up from her computer screen.

  “Not a clue.”

  Years earlier, Susan and I had our papers drawn up. Susan is my healthcare proxy, I told my mother, hoping that acknowledging my own mortality would compel her to acknowledge hers. Shouldn’t you have one too? I asked.

  You’re trying to kill me, she screamed. You’ll have a bad day and shut me off, just like you did your father. Flip a switch.

  He was brain-dead, Mom—