I felt nothing; I watched the blood drip into my hand as though it belonged to someone else.
24
EVEN NOW, THIRTY-SIX YEARS AFTER her death, the essence of Gaga hangs in the bowels of my mother’s living room closet, among her silver-fox-tipped cashmere shawls and her mink reefer coat, her Norma Kamali jackets and Ben’s Armani tuxedo with the crisp round cigarette burns on the cuff from a wild party at the Friars Club. In the darkness behind the foil-and-peach-wallpapered sliding doors, Gaga is there, her Jungle Gardenia and Youth Dew suspended in a cloud of the Aqua Net that she sprayed and sprayed, shellacking herself inside a carapace.
When Gaga died, during a freak spring snowstorm when I was a freshman in college, my mother got rid of most of her things, parceling them out to friends and neighbors. A dressing table went to the granddaughter of a friend who liked to play dress-up. Her ornate marble-topped coffee table went to the niece of my mother’s friend Olga in New Jersey. My mother kept the Persian lamb coat her mother had rarely worn, and the purse she was carrying at the time of her death; she kept a few pieces of her jewelry and, on a small end table in my mother’s bedroom, Gaga’s dressing set that she’d been given when she turned sixteen: a horsehair brush, a yellow Bakelite comb, and the long-handled mother-of-pearl makeup mirror in which my mother still applies her lipstick every morning, over and over, as if Gaga can see her from the other side. As if she can tell exactly how beautiful her daughter has turned out, against all odds.
* * *
—
The ghosts of lost family members with unfinished business make their presence known this way, and when my mother sent me back to the apartment to pick up clothes after she went into rehab, I inhaled the combination of flower and earth and aerosol particulate that my grandmother had become, living like a phantom amid the stuff of our lives. Although I am not dead, my own ghosts are in there alongside hers, in my locked brown tweed college suitcases that haven’t been opened in thirty-five years, in the Associated Grocery cartons of my childhood that my mother dragged into the city when she married Ben, packed with ancient textbooks and bags of Kodak Instamatic photos, the athletic awards for the feats that made me popular for a few delicious seconds after they happened. But everywhere, wrapped around us like a shroud, is Gaga. And when I push open the closet door to look for the clothes to bring to my mother in the rehab where she would spend forty-one days and nights after her accident, I am overcome.
* * *
• • •
THE CLOSET HAS OVER THE years become a time capsule, a portal, an architectural dig site. On the top shelf of the closet sits the disintegrating, carved-wood 1950s publicity scrapbook that Gaga assembled when my mother was on television before I was born. When I was very young and my parents went out for dinner on a Saturday night, I sat next to Gaga on the couch and we read my mother’s publicity clippings aloud together, like a children’s story; she was teaching me to read. RITA ELICE’S COPACABANA DEBUT; RITA ELICE WINS SILVER LOVING CUP ON WPIX COMPETITION; CHOLLY KNICKERBOCKER SAYS FOLLOW THAT GIRL!
Never forget that this is your mother, Gaga would say, carefully turning the heavy black scrapbook pages one by one. She was once very famous, a long time ago.
I consider packing up my mother’s scrapbook that Gaga had so lovingly assembled and bringing it with me to rehab; I decide that it is too fragile, that if it is lost or damaged, it will be irreplaceable for her. On the shelf beneath the book is the white-and-silver garment box that holds my mother’s ivory lace wedding gown and pillbox headpiece.
It’s a Givenchy style, Gaga would say when I was a child, and you will wear it down the aisle when you get married. She’s saving it for you.
In my mother’s wedding photos, she towers over my father by more than six inches; for years, I try to envision myself wearing the dress—masses of ivory Dupioni silk hemmed up to accommodate the massive difference in our heights, the pillbox bobby-pinned to the top of my head, my face obscured by a full veil as required by Jewish law. My mother’s wedding dress is a family talisman, a guarantor of life and future, of more children and the continuation of our family and our bloodline, mother to daughter.
Collecting my mother’s requested items to bring back to rehab, I stand on her old wooden ladder and nudge the dusty lid off the garment box; I reach in for my mother’s wedding dress, to feel the fabric and touch the person she once was, before I was born. The box is empty.
* * *
• • •
BY THE TIME I KNEW her, Gaga was no longer an attractive woman. Her white-blond hair had never once been colored, and with age it had gone directly from the strawberry blond of her childhood and middle years to platinum when she turned fifty. Since the early 1930s, she had combed it straight back and rolled it into a tight French twist bobby-pinned and shellacked into place with hairspray, rendering it immobile even in the most ferocious of storms. Broad and boxy, she was stout and shaped like an old-fashioned round-edged Frigidaire, with a heavy sagging bosom and belly that she secured with a massive girdle that closed with twenty hooks and eyes. Twenty, I know, because one day when I was ten, she called and asked me to go down to the newsstand on the corner and get her a paper. I let myself into her apartment while she was in the bath, found the girdle on her bed, and counted them, hook by hook. The piece was massive, old-fashioned, with bone supports that ran the entire length of it, like armor.
Turn around, Elissa—don’t look, she said, stepping out of the bathroom in her yellow chenille robe. I faced the window and the Long Island Railroad tracks outside until I heard the robe drop to the other bed, then sneaked a glimpse over my shoulder. Gaga gazed at the floor, the girdle around her waist inside out and inverted so that the bra portion hung down to her knees. She hooked all twenty eyes, turned the girdle around, and slipped her massive, pendulous breasts into it. I looked back out the window, but not quickly enough.
“You saw,” she said, her voice angry and low.
“I’m sorry, Gaga—I didn’t see,” I said, still facing the window, my back to her.
“You don’t need to see such an ugly body, Elissala,” she said. “This is what old looks like. Old is not pretty. Old should be dead. Pushing up daisies, Mamale.”
“Don’t say that—”
My words choked me.
“Well, what do you think? That I’ll live forever?”
* * *
• • •
I SEARCHED THE CLOSET FOR the clothes that my mother requested. I pushed and pulled hangers to see what I could find but came up with nothing except a silk crepe dressing gown that had been shoved all the way in the back, its belt creased and snaked through low loops so that its owner could tie it around her hips; mauve and dusty blue, it was meant for a tall, thin woman from another era.
“It’s Gaga’s,” my mother said when I called her to describe it. “From her flapper days, when she was still beautiful. Lay it across your face and breathe. It’s like she’s still here.”
25
I WANT TO KNOW.
I want to understand.
* * *
—
No family likes having a writer in their midst, says a close friend. With eleven books to her name, she knows this. No family ever says Yay. A writer.
My office is piled high with journals that follow me through childhood—the earliest is dated 1976, when I was thirteen—into high school, college, the years I was living with Julie. The last entries are dated in the nineties, when I knew that it was time for me to leave New York, and that in my simply knowing this, simply understanding it, I was reclaiming my own life. My journal entries all ask the same question: Who is she? Where did her mania come from? Why the paranoia, the jealousy, the temper tantrums? Why the beauty that itself was so furious, a painting created in fear, like Starry Night, whose wild brushstrokes are a direct translation of the churning mind that created them? I want to know what happened to
her, and in doing so, what happened to us. What had I done wrong? What could I have done differently?
If I can understand her, I can love her better, while there is still time.
These are the last years; I want to change our story.
* * *
• • •
“HOW ARE THINGS TODAY?” I ask Dora.
She looks lovely, this petite woman in her forties, this caregiver for other people’s older parents. This is the new tribe, the new potlatch: We pay strangers to care for the people who raised us—shitty job or not—at the end of their days, and every day becomes a ceremony of routine. The joyous coffee; the wonderful book; the favorite movie.
“She’s good—we did her exercises this morning, Miss Elissa.”
“Did she eat?”
Dora laughs and rolls her eyes.
“She’s refusing again.”
“Did she say why?”
“Because she says she ate yesterday. That’s what she does: gorges one day and starves herself the next. She says she doesn’t want to be homely.”
“Homely? She used that word?”
Antiquated verbiage, a remnant from another time, an ancient bit of vocabulary, meaning two separate, conflicting ideas: comfortable, relaxing and ugly, unattractive.
Dora shakes her head and laughs.
“Your Mama could never be homely. She would never let it happen. She got more makeup in the mail yesterday. She said it was Mother’s Day and she was buying herself a present. I said, But it’s not Mother’s Day, Mrs. H., and she said, Every day is Mother’s Day for me.”
“I hear you talking about me!” my mother shouts from her bedroom.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Dora says, walking me down the hallway.
* * *
—
My mother is propped up in bed, in her leopard print robe and full makeup. The television is on. She’s watching Casablanca for the tenth time this month. She pats the duvet cover.
“Sit with me,” she says. “Come, honey. You look beautiful. Let me see what you’re wearing.”
I freeze.
I gaze at the mirrors that line her bedroom walls.
Slim jeans. Suede winter boots. An oversized navy blue turtleneck sweater. Before my mother’s accident, I wore contact lenses; she hated my glasses. But now I’m wearing tortoiseshell frames. Big tortoiseshell frames that are, I realize, smaller versions of hers.
“You look terrific, sweetheart—”
“What’s the catch, Ma?” I say.
Instinct: deflect, fight, flight.
“Already you’re starting with me? You just got here—”
She laughs and pats the middle of the bed, the demilitarized zone between her side and Ben’s.
“Come, honey,” she says. “Sit with me.”
My mother’s side of the bed, near the window and the bathroom, has collapsed with time. It sags a good four inches below Ben’s side, which is piled high with music, the Times, old bank statements seven years old, flowered makeup bags overflowing with samples.
I can hear Dora in the den, talking on her cell phone to her husband in Jamaica.
“Do you need me, Mrs. H.?” she yells.
“I don’t need her!” my mother shouts back. “Like a hole in the head I need her. She eats my food.”
“She doesn’t eat your food, Mom—she has her own food. She’s living here. She has to eat something.”
“I found a chicken leg missing. She twisted it off the roaster I ordered from Fine and Shapiro. Just tore it right off, like a handle.”
“Maybe you ate it during the night?”
“Are you calling me a liar? You always take her side—”
“Okay, Mom—” I say. “Stop. You need her.”
“I don’t need her.”
“I need her,” I say. “I sleep at night because of her. How would you cook for yourself? How would you bathe? How would you get back and forth to physical therapy?”
“How’s the dog?” she asks.
“You do need her—Jesus, Mom—there’s no air in here.”
I look around. The windows are sealed with thirty years of city dirt. The radiator is pumping hot, dry air into every room in the apartment; plants die here the moment they arrive. The ficus tree she and Ben once bought at a street fair on Columbus Avenue instantly wilted in the living room. She decided it needed more sun, so she lashed it with a shoelace to the terrace fencing, where it eventually blew away, across West End Avenue and into the Hudson River.
Standing in my coat, I’m starting to sweat. I pull at my turtleneck; my neck is damp.
“I’d get along without her very well—” my mother says.
She throws her head back, like she’s onstage; she begins to sing.
I get along without you very well
Of course I do
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves that I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms
“You sound good, Ma—”
“Stay with me, sweetheart. Come sit—” she says, patting the bed.
I bring a stack of magazines over to her.
She reaches up to me. I bend down. Her arms are like twigs that could snap in the hands of a child. She wraps them around me, barely making it the width of my shoulders. She strokes the back of my neck. I’m distant, careful. She feels my reticence. How could she not.
“I can’t stay,” I tell her.
“Of course you can’t,” she says, pulling away from me.
She looks out the window.
“Take your coat off. Let me make you something—”
“I ate already, Mom—”
“An egg—”
“I don’t want an egg—”
“You should eat an egg. All protein—”
She reaches over and touches my stomach.
“Can I get you a coffee?” I say. “I’ll run over to Starbucks.”
“Sit—” she says. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”
I think about what to say.
She opens Vogue and flips through it, page by page.
* * *
• • •
“DO YOU REMEMBER THE VERUSCHKA article, honey?” my mother says, tossing the magazine off the bed into a basket filled with other magazines. She picks up Harper’s Bazaar next.
“Of course I remember,” I tell her. Even as a child, I found Veruschka oddly compelling. In the images, she reclines languidly; her gaze is soft, her right hand to her temple in ennui or sadness, a white porcelain cup of tea—it must be tea; she is hurtling through Japan in a first-class carriage on the Shin Tokai-do in this 1966 Richard Avedon fantasy—resting near her elbow. Wearing a short pale mink jacket casually tossed over brocade sashes and voluminous, flowing knickers, Veruschka is the quintessence of effortless grace, texture, and wistful longing.
The Veruschka article, torn out of a 1966 issue of Vogue, sat on our entryway table, on our breakfast counter, in my parents’ bedroom. I was three years old when the twenty-six-page story appeared in the magazine. “The Great Fur Caravan,” starring Veruschka, was a talisman, a reminder, a beacon of hope and possibility for my mother, who had stepped off the runway, out of the Stork Club, and away from the television stage in order to raise me and be the wife she was expected to be by my advertising executive father. The greater the distance from who she had once been, the more obsessed with Veruschka she became, studying her as though cramming for a test; the easy posture, the sulky splendor, the lyricism, and the coats, the capes, the skirts, the mittens of fox, chinchilla, mink, and lynx that she herself would have modeled before her marriage and motherhood, and the mere thought of which transported her back to the safety and elegance of her former life, if only for a few minutes.
Stuck in suburban Queens, my mother funneled every ounce of unwavering energy into fashion and beauty and fur; by 1970, she had amassed four fur coats and assorted hats, muffs, and wraps—fox, mink, ocelot, and nutria filled her closet, as though she herself was embodying the Great Fur Caravan—and taught my seven-year-old tomboy self to identify them, a test she would repeat through the years so that I could tell the difference between a sable and a mink when I grew up.
Years later, as a teenager, I feigned interest if only for the attention; my mother misinterpreted it as curiosity, and while my own first fur wouldn’t arrive for another ten years—a full-length Japanese raccoon polo coat that enveloped my five-foot-one frame and made me look like a short yeti—she was certain that I loved them as much as she did.
Just like Veruschka, she said when I tried the coat on in Ben’s showroom. Happy birthday, my darling.
Her dream had come true: My mother had left the suburbs, moved back into the city, and, in her forties, was a model again. And now her daughter, whom she had always wondered about when it came to fashion, to life itself, was wearing a fur coat just like hers.
Twins, like twins, she said. Wear it slouchy, just like Veruschka.
I wore it; I hated it. When it got spray-painted outside Mr. Chow’s one night in 1988 by an antifur protester, I was secretly delighted.
* * *
—
I ask her, on this morning, her caregiver in the other room, old sacks of makeup piled up around her like pirate’s booty, why. Why.
Motherland Page 18
