Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  MY MOTHER SPOKE ON THE phone in hushed tones to her few friends living in our building in Forest Hills. A Danish woman, Inga, whose magician husband was prone to roving and who herself had quietly taken a boyfriend of her own, a factory worker she called Hawkins. Melanie, a svelte woman in thick blue-lensed aviators, whose husband, Stan, was not her husband at all, although he was the father of her two children. Vicky, formal, tweed-wearing and cashmere-turtlenecked, whose handsome older son, Don, had filched the bicycle storage room key from one of our inebriated doormen, copied it, and fucked the bored and horny neighborhood women on the dank basement floor amid a tangle of Schwinn wheels and clouds of Clorox.

  I hid at the edges and corners of my mother’s life. I strained to hear her on the phone every day, listening for clues that I would follow like a trail of crumbs.

  “That’s what Hawkins likes to do?” my mother laughed on the phone to Inga while I stood just out of eyeshot, tucked behind a kitchen louver door. “Lucky you. I’ll call you later.”

  It is 1975 and my father comes home from work, pours himself two double Scotches, and drinks them in rapid succession. My mother has given up cooking for a job in the city; the act of sustaining is in the past. Every night, we pile into the car and drive to a nearby mall that reeks of patchouli incense and Fryolator oil. We set a time to meet, giving ourselves an hour apart. My father has a cigarette and then another, sitting alone near a fountain that shoots recycled water up into the air and down into an atrium pool. I find the record store, the candle shop, the sporting goods store. My mother tries on clothes at a boutique and buys me a succession of skintight T-shirts with white iron-on block letters that spell out my name. Convening in the atrium, we ride the escalators up to Cookie’s Steak House on the top floor and eat our meal in heavy wooden chairs designed to look like small thrones; my mother and I sit in the queens’ chairs, my father in the king’s. They stare at each other over heavy Hall china plates laden with salad bar chickpeas and Bacos and baskets of crumbling Southern fried chicken.

  “I need a small procedure,” my mother says, picking at her salad.

  A mistake, she says, has been made. A little problem.

  My father looks away and lights a cigarette.

  She goes into the hospital for an overnight. My father stays at a nearby hotel and brings her home the next day. She takes to her bed for a week; the shades are drawn. Gaga comes over to cook. Inga brings her magazines, wedges of low-fat Danish cheese, bottles of Soave.

  “Tell me about school,” my mother says when I get home and run into her room to make sure she’s still there, that she hasn’t vaporized while I was in math class, that this all somehow hasn’t been a ruse. That she was planning on leaving all along, going back to singing. Walking out, like my grandmother.

  She sits propped up against a stack of pillows lined against the wall, overlapping like dominoes. The pillowcases are crisp and ironed by Gaga, as if illness or infirmity can be fended off by tidiness. She is wearing fresh linen pajamas, tailored and striped, a top and a bottom, like a man’s; she is made up as though she is about to go out for the evening, surrounded by books and magazines and her makeup bag, the television blaring The Mike Douglas Show. A cup of cold coffee is on the nightstand next to her. She looks well, very well, I think, and if I asked her to do something she would love to do—Take me shopping? Try out some makeup on my twelve-year-old face? Get up and sing?—I am certain that she would spring out of bed. What has happened to her cannot be seen; she has lost something internal, something vital, a part of herself like her blood type, or the color of her eyes.

  She pats the end of the bed for me to sit down next to her. I stare at her. Her vulnerability frightens me.

  “Stay with me, honey,” she says. “Talk to me.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say.

  “Stay with me—”

  * * *

  —

  “So, there were two pregnancies?” the doctor asks me.

  “Yes.”

  He stands up and opens the door.

  “Get dressed and meet me in my office.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “YOU WILL HAVE FIVE CHILDREN,” a medium once told me.

  For my birthday in 1988, Julie gave me the gift of a natal chart reading. I sat like a supplicant on a brown leather Moroccan pouf opposite a large triangular woman perched on a dusty batik-covered daybed set a foot off the ground on a dark wooden base. She was pale as snow, the size of a mountain, and topped by a mass of cherry-red hair the consistency of cotton candy. Every surface in the apartment was covered by books or magazines or cats. Between us on a narrow altar she spread out the findings of my reading, based on the information supplied to her: Cancer with Pisces rising. Date of birth. Time of birth. Place of birth. Father’s date of birth. Mother’s date of birth.

  A lover of water, friends, family, babies, music, art. Nurturing. Intensely loyal. Easily distracted. Prone to melancholia. In need of safety and assurance. Security. Guarded. Will hide if threatened. Possessed of a sensitivity disconcerting to others.

  Five children.

  “Do cats count?” I ask.

  “No,” she laughs, “they don’t. Are you involved with anyone?”

  I think of Oren. The vegetable man. Julie.

  The medium hauls her girth forward from her seat and traces a line on the chart with the tip of her finger. Her orange polish is chipping, her nails bitten and ragged. She follows the shape of a constellation.

  “You will have a tendency toward poor health and excess. You will put someone first. A mother or a child.”

  “Which?”

  “Not clear.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN JULIE MOVED TO CALIFORNIA to begin her fellowship, I settled into a small, dark, beautiful East Side studio apartment which my mother and I co-owned—I couldn’t have afforded it without her help; a Faustian bargain, my friends said—and where I would live for the next decade, until I met Susan. It was a midway point; a rest stop between the past and the future. My mother, delighted by my moving to the East Side, her favorite part of town, eagerly helped me decorate the space: a massive bookshelf occupied one wall, my Irish pine dresser another. Instead of both a couch and a bed, she suggested a sleigh bed that, with the addition of decorative pillows, would function as both; she had seen something like it in Metropolitan Home. She generously bought it for me and had it delivered the day I moved in; it was carved and delicate and slender as a tongue depressor, a single bed in which I could comfortably sleep alone.

  Once Ben died, our weekends were spent together as a matter of course. We had brunch in silence, sitting opposite each other over platters of bagels and lox at Barney Greengrass or Burgundian omelets at Madame Romaine de Lyon. She liked to go shopping after we ate, and I sat in the man chair, tired and exasperated as a husband, while she took mounds of clothes into the dressing room, stepping out to model them for me, spinning and twirling the way she had for so many years in Ben’s fur showroom. After Ben’s business shut down, my mother had gotten a job as a secretary to a Fifth Avenue pediatrician a few blocks from my apartment. I often came home to find her waiting for me in the lobby at the end of the day, her arms folded across her chest.

  “Why didn’t you send her up?” I’d whisper to the doorman. “She has a key.”

  “She didn’t want to invade your privacy,” he’d whisper back.

  Living in my small apartment with its bed for one, I was quietly involved with both men and women, as though sleeping with the former might mitigate my attraction to the latter. We worked around the problems presented by the furniture. There was a tall midwestern advertising executive who had shoulder-length hair and a collection of ties from the fifties and left me every Saturday morning to play soccer in Central Park. A Long Island commercial real estate guy who looked like Wood
y Allen, and the lovely man from work who got us both drunk on sake in order to consummate what had been a years-long office flirtation. The Greenwich Village social worker who chained her elderly Bichon to her radiator, just out of reach of her water bowl, to keep her from wandering around her apartment all night and peeing on the loveseat. The CNN newscaster who made love like an angel and forgot to mention her wife.

  I would not consider settling down with any of them. I was not single; I was taken. I was married to my mother.

  I was her child; I was her spouse.

  * * *

  • • •

  “DO YOU KNOW HOW OLD your mother was when she went through menopause?” the new doctor asks me.

  Susan is at work in Manhattan, so it is just the two of us in his cluttered office. Pictures of his family are propped up on the credenza behind him: a tall blond wife standing outside her real estate office. Two blond children in soccer uniforms. A golden retriever with a tennis ball in its mouth. Diplomas from Cornell, Chicago, Hopkins.

  “I don’t,” I say.

  “You never thought to ask her?”

  “We don’t have that kind of relationship. Why?”

  “Because you’re in menopause.”

  “But I just turned forty-one—I’m still getting my period—”

  “I’m seeing women going through it younger and younger. We can start with Clomid injections. We can teach Susan how to give them to you. Are you okay with needles?”

  I nod. I shiver. I look down at my hands. My left one instinctively holds my right. The doctor opens his desk drawer and removes a heavy black three-ring binder. Donor listings from a local Connecticut sperm bank.

  “What are the side effects?” I ask.

  When I lived in Manhattan, I saw scores of women in their late thirties marching up Park Avenue pushing multiples in Italian strollers that cost as much as a Volkswagen. Clomid babies, I called them.

  “Do twins run in your family?” the doctor says.

  23

  MY FATHER, WHO HAD FLOWN planes off a moving aircraft carrier at night in the Pacific during World War II, was running an errand two miles from his Long Island home on a sunny August morning. He was broadsided by a bunch of teenagers in an uninsured, speeding Honda, with his second wife, Shirley, sitting next to him. She, with lesser but still severe injuries, was taken to one hospital, he to another. After twenty years during which they were inseparable—they saw each other through surgeries and the loss of parents, the illness of Shirley’s son and the birth of her grandchildren, job changes and retirements, house moves and my father’s depression that flowed through their lives like a slow stream—she would never see him again.

  This is the work of the living, of the child for the parent, the partner for the partner. These are the things that are done; the unextraordinary. I planned my father’s funeral while he was still alive; It was decided when and under what circumstances I would end his life support. I wrote the obituary and filed it with the paper; a flag for his casket was secured from the Veterans Administration. I thought of things for him to take, as though he were going on a journey: the rubber pocket comb that he was never without, a picture that he carried in his wallet of us together in New Hampshire, a linen handkerchief, his Navy wings, the gold heart charm that he had made for my mother in their earliest days—CY LOVES RITA engraved on its back—and that he begged her to give me after the divorce, which she did. I conspired to arrange these things around him in his simple wooden kosher casket the way an Egyptian pharaoh might be surrounded with necessities for the afterlife, tucked beneath the traditional shroud that he was buried in; it would have been forbidden. Grieving in the Jewish tradition lasts for a year; those left behind say the Mourner’s Kaddish every morning. Beyond that, Jewish death is a journey of simplicity, of light travel, of dust to dust. No matter how beautiful we are, how wealthy, how tortured, how loved: we come with nothing; we leave with nothing.

  * * *

  • • •

  “WAS THERE ANYTHING—” MY MOTHER began to ask when I told her that her ex-husband was gone. She stopped herself.

  I couldn’t speak; I didn’t answer.

  “He’s gone, Ma—” I said, finally.

  * * *

  —

  For a month after my father’s death, my mother gave me a wide berth: Instead of three calls a day, there was just one. Are you okay? You have to remember to eat. Don’t drink too much. Get your highlights done. You’ll feel better. Do you need some things? Call me back. You’re making me nervous.

  She did not expect me to drive to Manhattan to see her for dinner more than once a week. Her proximity to her ex-husband’s affairs of the dead felt precarious. The boundaries of my grief frightened her. I had been my father’s only child in the way I am my mother’s: It had been my responsibility to sit with him in the last comatose, morphine-addled week of his life, to make sure his needs were tended to, to bury him, to finalize his life, in the way I would someday have to do for her. But at night, when I awoke in bed at three and four, the tentacles of sorrow squeezed the air out of my lungs; they wrapped themselves around me and splintered my rib cage like chicken bone. Out of a deep sleep, they forced me to the floor of our house in a heap, where I sobbed and heaved in breathy gasps until Susan brought me back to bed.

  There was a jungle of sorrow that I crawled through, hand over hand, that tripped me when I least expected it—in my sleep, going for a walk, making dinner, making love—and left me blind with an unpredictable kind of mourning that terrified my mother.

  “You just need a new look,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the salon.”

  I went, and she sat in the chair next to me, scanning my face in the mirror, begging me to smile.

  Please, honey; please. Just once. You have such a pretty face. Let’s do a makeover.

  She could not comprehend my grief; it was alien to her. My hard-won relationship with my father enraged her. Even dead, the fact of him incensed her; when his name was on my breath, she was not at the center of my world. She had always believed that I had chosen him over her. Our little family was simply a competition that he had won.

  * * *

  —

  In the weeks after he died, in the silence and space that my mother allowed me, I spent endless days at my desk, staring out at our garden. My father consumed my work—his life, death, the fact of depression and grief and how they can be inseparable—took over my days and obscured them. I considered what it meant to be an adult daughter, an only child who, late in the life of one parent, becomes that parent’s friend. And what does it mean for that parent to become a friend to his now-middle-aged daughter. Our relationship had shape-shifted over the course of our forty years together: He had grown kinder and softer with time and the love and steadiness that he found in the last third of his life. I unclipped the anger that I carried for him as if it were a torn, useless rigging, and I let it blow away. It was no longer relevant. I no longer needed it; I replaced it, somehow, with love.

  If it had been possible with him, I thought, it could be possible with her too.

  * * *

  • • •

  A MONTH TO THE DAY after his death, after the papers were filed and the insurance claims made and I began the work of living the rest of my life without him, my mother had had enough. A month was all she could take.

  The phone rang in my office at dusk. It was hot out; Susan and I were sitting on the deck, facing the garden, drinking a strong concoction of fresh-squeezed lime juice and two shots of dark rum stirred together with palm sugar, invented by my friend Sally’s husband, William, who in the late seventies put himself through school by tending bar. Susan made them in massive Italian highball glasses, and we sipped them gingerly. They were deadly, and drew bees.

  The edge in my mother’s voice caught and then stopped, like a serrated knife. It was a familiar sound, one
that was as recognizable as my own face in the mirror.

  “Elissa,” she said that night on the phone.

  Elissa.

  The small window air conditioner blew gusts of wet, cold air at my face while I stared out at the garden, the phone cradled against my shoulder. The room was decorated in Depression-era pictures of Susan’s family in rural Connecticut, all of them women.

  “It has been a month since he died,” my mother said. “And now it’s time for you to focus on me.”

  The sliver of time between stimulus and reaction.

  “Mom, I have a question for you—” I said.

  “Yes—” she said.

  “I was at the doctor. He wants to know—when did you go through menopause?”

  “What the hell kind of question is that! Are you thinking about having a baby—?”

  “I’m just asking—” I said.

  “You’ll be fat as a house,” she said. “Who’s gonna pay for it? You?”

  “When, Mom—I just need to know.”

  “I was done at thirty-nine,” she said.

  Thirty-nine?

  “You never thought to tell me?”

  “It never seemed important,” she said.

  I put the phone down on my office chair; I could still hear her voice. I walked away, down the hallway, through the kitchen.

  I went out onto the deck, past Susan sitting in an Adirondack chair reading, the dog at her feet. I walked across the yard and into the bursting vegetable garden. We had no money that year, and every meal we ate came from the earth and was composted back to the earth. I sat down at the edge of a box, the one in which we had planted spinach, chard, masses of kale growing on thick stalks. I raked my fingers through the damp soil until heavy lines of it lodged under my nails in black stripes. I forgot the lone screw at the corner of the box, which had come through the wood when we built the garden. I caught the back of my hand against it, scraping it hard. A ribbon of red snaked between my pinky and ring finger and into my palm.