Motherland

by Elissa Altman

—

  I look up to see Ben waiting outside the court. He is a nice man from Pennsylvania, all tie and loafers and old-fashioned manners. Beyond being, as my mother likes to call him, The Most Important Furrier in the City of New York, Ben’s claim to fame is that his cousin, a well-known Los Angeles animator, was the creator of Mr. Magoo, modeling the bumbling, half-blind character after him.

  He looks really familiar, my friends say when they meet him, but I can’t place him.

  It is impossible for me to dislike him.

  Ben waves me over while my mother is sitting on the court bench fiddling with her purse, pulling open her Vuitton makeup case, rummaging around for her lipstick.

  “I don’t know what it is with you two,” he says. “Stay, please. We’ll have a nice lunch. She’s just frustrated.”

  “About what?” I ask. “That she had to hit a ball? Why did she even want me here?”

  “Just stay,” he sighed. “Please—we’ll have a nice lunch.”

  We sit together in the country club’s pub room in silence. She stares at my hair. Ben stares at the television. Hot dogs turn on a rotating grill behind the bar, sending up clouds of gamy porcine grease into the air. Ben orders a beer and a burger. I want a beer and a burger. My father, when we spend our weekends together, always lets me order alcohol: wine, beer, Slivovitz when it’s freezing, cognac when it’s not. We joke that I have a hollow leg; my capacity for a good lager, chilled down in an ice-rimed pitcher, is boundless.

  “She’ll have a small salad and a Tab,” my mother instructs the waiter, nodding over at me. “I’ll have a bagel, scooped out, fat-free cream cheese on the side.”

  * * *

  —

  She never sets foot on a tennis court again.

  “She just doesn’t want me to play,” my mother stage-whispers to a woman in the locker room while I change out of my whites a few feet away. “I embarrass her,” she says.

  “They’re all embarrassed at seventeen,” the woman says.

  That morning at the club—just like every morning: at the school bus stop, on the subway platform, putting makeup on in the bathroom—my mother posed hard and jutting, her legs at a sharp angle, her left foot leaning on its arch, bent out of shape. Her ankle is a fulcrum for her beauty; it bears the weight of vanity and loveliness and time.

  “I stood up,” she told Svetlana in the hospital recovery room after her surgery, “and it was asleep.”

  She rolled it, and after so many years of pressure and stress, it snapped.

  12

  IN 1985, I RETURNED TO New York City after graduating from college in Boston and lived with my mother and Ben in his boxy white-and-Lucite-festooned postwar high-rise apartment on the Upper West Side. When the weather grew chilly, Ben and I left her at home in bed watching old movies and went shopping together so that I could cook him the rich, comforting dishes of his Pennsylvania childhood: goulashes and stews and briskets and roasts. He double-parked their Volvo sedan in front of Fairway while I went from aisle to aisle with other women ten years my senior, new mothers pushing metal carts overflowing with food, sleeping infants strapped to their chests in colorful Snuglis. Hours later, lured by the smell of caramelizing onions or crushed tomatoes cooked down to a garlicky jam, my mother emerged from their bedroom while I stood at her stove, wooden spoon in hand, wrapped in a ruffle-edged Playboy apron left behind by Ben’s last girlfriend.

  “I know you know how to cook,” my mother whispered in my ear one cold afternoon. “You don’t have to be so obvious about it.”

  * * *

  —

  Pictures taken at the time show me unsmiling and glassy-eyed and looking vaguely as if I’d swallowed a handful of Quaaludes, dressed in clothes that I allowed my mother to select for me because it seemed only right and gave her such pleasure: I was living under her roof rent free and making a salary that made independent life in nineteen-eighties Manhattan impossible. She dressed me as herself: Gorgeous four-inch brown suede Italian pumps that I walked in as though they were stilts. A gold brocade double-breasted custom-tailored suit that looked like curtains torn from the windows of a Borscht Belt hotel dining room. The two-sizes-too-small silk blouses that she brought home from Lucille, who still worked in the garment center.

  With tits like yours, it pays to advertise, she’d say, unbuttoning them as low as she could while I stood with my hands at my sides, like a mannequin.

  Together, we played house; their friends became my friends. At twenty-two, I was married to them, an appendage meant to dress, look, and act like a scaled-down version of my mother, tacking down the seams of our life as they frayed. On Super Bowl Sundays, I mixed up Tiffany crystal pitchers of stiff Bloody Marys, to Ben’s friends’ delight and shouts of You’re hired! and You shoulda married her! Holiday meals were spent dining around tables for ten in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons and Mr. Chow. Ben’s friends, men thirty and forty years older than I, some dining with the longtime mistresses I assumed were their wives, slipped me their private office numbers under the table while their women rolled up delicate slices of lemon chicken in lettuce leaves and talked about their hairdressers, who were all, suddenly, dying.

  “Animals—you can’t even use their fucking toilets anymore,” Ben’s friend Harry Stein said. He ran his hand up my leg under the table while shoveling Day-Glo sweet and sour chicken into his mouth. Grains of rice clung to his lips; his belly popped open the middle button on his black silk shirt. He leaned forward, mouth wide, barking like a pit bull, one hand waving his fork in the air, the other under the table up to his elbow, groping around for my crotch.

  “Bernice,” I said to Harry’s hair-sprayed wife, “tell your husband to get his fucking hand off my thigh,” and he did, and we all howled with laughter.

  * * *

  —

  Side by side, we rose in the mornings, drank our Mr. Coffee black and sweet, and went off to work—my mother and Ben to their downtown fur salon where she spent her days modeling sable and mink for the wives of O.J. Simpson and Willie Nelson, me to my desk job as a publishing assistant—and afterward met for dinner with their friends at an old-school steak house famous for its piano bar. While my colleagues were snorting coke in the bathroom at Canastel’s and the Limelight, Ben and I sipped the first of our drinks and someone handed my mother a Shure 58 microphone and she snaked the cord through her left hand, performance style, and belted out show tunes with a voice so loud that the restaurant’s artwork rattled against the wall.

  Head thrown back, eyes closed, brow furrowed, heavy makeup dewy under the hot halogen lights, my mother was transformed into a woman from another time and place, who once stood on a soundstage on live television for two purposes: to look beautiful and to sing. Every night after work, we went out and my mother sang and sang, song after song, surrounded by Ben and me and a throng of middle-aged men, gazing at her like a pack of drooling jackals while their wives and mistresses stood around snickering. Ben’s friends wanted to steal her from him, to woo her away, to give her whatever she wanted. Their wives wanted to strangle her. Her accompanists wanted to be her. Every night after work I watched my mother through a slosh of cold white wine, bursting with the same sort of chaotic pride that one has for a gifted young child playing a piano recital.

  I’m related to her, the pride says. That child with the microphone is mine.

  * * *

  • • •

  I LIVED IN HER APARTMENT for two years, amid the Lucite and the Baccarat, the nightly performances and the weekend Bloody Marys, until a series of ruptured ocular vessels began to regularly flood my eyes with blood, and my doctor made moving out a medical necessity.

  “You’ll have a stroke by the time you’re twenty-five if you stay,” he said.

  When I finally left, I moved into a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in a seedy section of the city that I knew she’d never visit. She wo
uldn’t climb the stairs; she wouldn’t step over the vagrant living in the vestibule with his spent crack vials. She hated my roommate and the piles of smoky quartz crystals and incense holders and Creative Visualization tapes that Julie brought to the apartment with her.

  “Come over and have brunch with us,” I said, inviting my mother to visit shortly after I moved in. I had set up my first kitchen with my father’s help, and we filled it with heavy French copper pots, a long butcher block island on wheels, a wall of cookbooks, and small Duralex glasses out of which one might drink wine or eat chocolate pots de crème. I wanted to cook for my mother in my own home, as though the act of feeding and nurturing her would unravel our rage like a kinked phone cord.

  “I don’t need to see that girl,” my mother snarled. “There’s something about her I just don’t like. But you can come here. I’ll order a chicken. I have a little surprise for you—”

  That Saturday afternoon, I crossed Central Park and arrived at my mother’s before noon. She opened the door and there she stood, smiling broadly, dressed in an outfit identical to what had become my late-eighties uniform, which I had worn practically every day since moving out of her apartment: narrow khakis, a white Gap T-shirt, a strand of fake pearls, a stack of black rubber gasket bracelets on my wrist, a cropped black leather Schott motorcycle jacket. I was looking at a full-length fun house version of myself, living and breathing, tall and narrow as a blade.

  “See?” she beamed, her eyes wide with delight. “If you won’t dress like me, then I will dress like you.”

  She backed up, sucked in her cheeks, sank her hands deep into her pockets, and spun around on one heel, exactly the way she did in the showroom.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVERY WEEK BEFORE MY THERAPY appointment, I stop at an Italian restaurant with damp, sticky floors. The place—West Eighty-Sixth Street, all glass and mirrors and black enamel—is empty; “Hungry Like the Wolf” blasts on the sound system. It is late in the afternoon, any Thursday at four, 1988. Every week for the better part of five years, I arrive for my appointment an hour early, climb onto a barstool, and drink two fishbowl goblets of screw-top René Junot white wine. Because it is happy hour, I leave a ten-dollar bill for the two drinks. I thank the bartender, cross the street to a Gothic prewar apartment building, ring a buzzer, sit down on my therapist’s brown corduroy couch, and stare out the window toward Riverside Drive and the Hudson River in the distance. Cars honk. I am certain that Anna, seated on an old brown Eames recliner and separated from me by its ottoman, will not notice, even though my breath stinks like the 5:07 Metro North bar car to Greenwich.

  I drag my fingers back and forth along the worn fabric of the couch; it is starting to lose its nap. My fingertips tingle. The feeling drains out of my hands; they are numb and heavy. I forget where I am. My legs wobble; my feet go cold and I can’t feel the couch beneath me. I can’t form words. I begin to shiver. I can see, across the ottoman, that Anna’s lips are moving, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. She sounds like a record played on the wrong speed.

  On this particular afternoon, Anna and I enter the territory of psychopathology, maternal grief, metabolization of long-term trauma, the DSM-III, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  “She was wearing the same clothes as me when she opened the door.”

  “So if you won’t agree to be her, then she’ll have to be you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So your life is not your own. You’re the same person.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you’re a different person, she will hate you for abandoning her.”

  Yes.

  “Do you ever think about having a family of your own? Maybe a child? What would that look like for you?”

  I stare out the window. It’s dark now; rush hour. The lights in Fort Lee, across the river, are beginning to twinkle.

  “Who are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you ever known?”

  “I don’t know.”

  13

  “IT’S A MOTHER’S HEART,” SHE whines. She looks down at the table and blinks slowly. Her eyes fill with tears.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I ask, shaking out my napkin.

  She points to the top slice of black Russian pumpernickel holding my smoked salmon and cucumber sandwich together. I move it to the bread plate. My mother’s slice-of-bread rule: one or none.

  We are having lunch together at a restaurant a few blocks from my office. She has walked south down Broadway and east on Central Park South, stopping at Bergdorf, all the way from her apartment on the Upper West Side. On this day in 1997, we’ve met in the middle. She usually comes to the breezeway downstairs from my office, but I’ve been giving her excuses to meet me elsewhere. Lately, she’s been flirting with the building security guard who lets her upstairs to see my gorgeous boss, Sloane, whose outfits she loves; I come back from the ladies’ room, and there will be my mother, standing in my office, in conversation with lovely, beautiful Sloane, who is too polite to extricate herself. I blame it on a last-minute meeting, construction on the ground floor of my building, a need to stretch my legs after sitting all morning at my desk, where I am working as an editor.

  “It’s a mother’s heart—” she says over lunch. “It’s killing Bea. Lance is her only son.”

  She does the dramatic shiver. Her eyes are closed, she gives her head a quick twitch as if she’s having a short seizure.

  “Did you know?” she asks. She cocks her head like a puppy.

  “Of course I knew—”

  I motion to the server. I order a glass of wine, breaking my no-alcohol-at-lunch rule. My mother scowls.

  “So why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it’s nobody’s business but his. Lance is a grown man. He’s a lawyer—”

  “But it’s her son—it’s her heart.”

  “What does that even mean? It’s not like he’s committed murder. He’s gay—”

  “Shut up,” she whispers, cutting me off. Her nostrils flare. “Just shut up, you’re making a scene.”

  My mother’s eyes dart to the next table. She mouths I’m sorry to two young suited guys in their twenties, engrossed in quiet conversation, not looking at her. A diversionary tactic meant to result in shame; it is an implication to the outside world that her lunch date—her daughter—is crazy or ill-mannered or both, and that neighboring diners are disturbed by my bad behavior. I’m sorry for her behavior, the diversion says. She’s not well. I know…me too. I’m so embarrassed for her too. Often, I look over to the recipient of her apology, and the table is empty.

  “You’re shushing me because I said Lance is gay?”

  “Can you please not say it so loud?”

  Her eyes dart from side to side.

  “You’re the one who asked—”

  She pouts. We eat in silence. I pick at my pumpernickel. She shakes her head. She processes the news that this man—a close friend’s son—prefers men to women.

  “So does he have a friend or something?”

  My mother cannot bring herself to say it: partner, boyfriend, girlfriend. Lover, which means there’s sex involved, makes her head explode. So it’s friend: Lance has a friend.

  “His name is Dragon. They met on a cruise.”

  She stares at me over her breadless turkey and pesto sandwich.

  “Bea’s son has a friend named Dragon? Lance and Dragon?”

  “He’s from Croatia.”

  “Not Jewish?”

  “First it’s the end of the world that he’s gay and now you’re worried that his boyfriend isn’t Jewish?”

  “I don’t believe it,” she says, shaking her head. “Maybe he could change, for the right girl. I’m sure he’s just bisexual, like Paul. It would just take a good wo
man.”

  A drop of pesto clings to her lips.

  “He’s not going to change, Ma, so don’t even go there. And Paul is gayer than Liberace.”

  “He is not. I know he’s interested in me. I catch him watching me all the time.”

  “He’s just looking at your makeup,” I say.

  “He wants to go out with me—even Ben says so.”

  “Paul’s had a partner for twenty-five years. He’s your accompanist. You’re paying him by the hour—”

  …like a hooker, I mumble.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing—”

  “It’s a terrible thing,” she says, shaking her head, her eyes filling with tears. “It’s a mother’s heart.”

  “It’s his life, goddammit—”

  “He can wait till she’s dead. And then she won’t know.”

  “She could live to be a hundred—”

  “That’s his problem.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN MY EARLY THIRTIES, TEN years after being not quite in the closet and not quite out—Your closet has a revolving door, my friends said—I fled with a vengeance. I told cousins, close friends, some colleagues. A mentor from college, who had become a good, trusted friend.

  “Does your mother know?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Of course she knows,” she said. “How could she not know? She’s your mother.”

  I told my father and Shirley over Indian food on Third Avenue. Tears spontaneously erupted from my eyes; I couldn’t control them. My father got up from the other side of the table, sat down next to me, and took me in his arms.

  “Does your mother know yet?” he asked.

  “No—” I said.

  “You have to tell her,” he said. “You’re a separate person—she needs to know that, to understand it.”