“No, it’s not,” shouted our teacher over the classroom rumblings.
“What’s wrong with the word period?” I asked, chafing at the divide between American and English culture. Our teacher was unable to tell me.
“Ask your mother,” was the best she could offer. The term “full stop” was then discussed for a short moment before we returned to our lesson.
When she returned home from a long day at chambers, I asked my mother for the meaning of a “period.”
“Once a month you have blue blood,” Mom responded flippantly, chortling loudly for reasons I could not fully ascertain. Only after I asked my grandmother on one of her monthly visits, did I obtain a straight answer.
March 1975
It was in that detached townhouse on the edge of the Epping Forest that my mother entertained her boss, the head of a distinguished chambers and remote friend of her father’s, who would eventually go on to become a Queen’s Counsel, or judge. That early spring afternoon the house was filled with a bright winter light. I remember peeking in on my mother and her boss as they sat together in the living room: viewing his long thin legs crossed in the pinstriped pants of his profession, his pale complexion strikingly contrasted by the graying, immaculately coiffed hair. It wasn’t common for my parents to invite people over, let alone colleagues. At the edge of a bright red and orange ombré shag rug, the stately looking employer sat in one of the chrome-framed white leather armchairs that my parents had had shipped with them from America. While my mother did very well hosting her superior for tea that afternoon, she would not succeed in maintaining her position at the chambers. After the initial trial period of six months was over, she was not rehired.
Very soon a dark pall fell over our home. My mother’s class privilege would not be enough to protect her from certain injustices. She could not find a position at another chambers and grew more frantic with each passing month. One afternoon the phone rang in our downstairs hallway, and I made the unwitting mistake of answering. This was to be that fortune-changing call. The one final opportunity that was botched because of the rushed way I had answered the call. The rude inflection of my voice when I answered, “Hullo.”
That afternoon on the carpeted floor of my bedroom, my mother unleashed her frustrations, sobbing, kicking and pummeling me for what felt like hours as the sun went down and the small room was engulfed in twilight. At ten years old, I had apparently lost my mother her final opportunity to flourish as a working professional. As the light of day churned into night, we would become inextricably bound by frustration, fear, and unparalleled rage.
Optic horror
“It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper. It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell!… The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell.”
The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Like in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist tale, our house on Hazelton Road soon took on the semblance of a tortured mind. As her prospects worsened and my mother teetered ever closer to the brink of psychosis, the walls of our northeastern London suburban home began to spring large, unforgiving cracks. We were soon to discover about our uniform subdivision of fifty or so houses that things were not as uniform as the developers had wanted us to believe. The result of an ill-conceived plan, our foursquare brick townhouse, set at the bottom of a sloping road, had been built over a small stream. During the winter rains, the stream became swollen, shifting the footings of our house’s foundation that had been embedded in clay. By spring of the following year, the hairline cracks that had first appeared in the corners of each room began to swoop in horizontal branches across the walls.
The “optic horror” was all the proof my mother needed to sell the house back to the developer. Among our neighbors, my mother was the first to recognize the problem and the first to sell her home. With our full investment returned, my mother promptly set course back to America, where she would once again pursue a career in law inexplicably withheld from her in England.
2 “UK | 75 Years of Women Solicitors.” BBC News, BBC, 19 Dec. 1997. Web.
3 Roberts, Marcus. “A Brief History of Jews of Oxford.” Oxford Chabad Society—Serving Oxford Jewish Students, 2005. Web.
4 Also known as schistosomiasis, this disease is spread by parasitic flatworms released by infected freshwater snails.
3
a room with a darker view
September 1975–1994
While her husband’s career in astrophysics took him all around the globe, once again my mother hit the books. Returning to our tract home in Berkeley Heights that we rented out during our absence, in under a year she passed the New York bar, and then in another, the New Jersey bar. She would reinvent herself as an American criminal defense attorney, hoping to obtain the same elite standing in America as that of a criminal defense barrister in England. She simply ordered the right books, sequestered herself in a heavily draped bedroom and pored over the material day and night.
Again my mother struggled to find a permanent position. She was passed over for permanent hire at Legal Aid in Manhattan after a trial period of six months. Even when she offered her services for free, she was unable to maintain a position for long. Either she was not in possession of the right social skills or was considered too old, at thirty-seven, to be worthy of employment. I often wondered about my mother’s struggle for social acceptance. Was it due to her age? Her immigrant background? Gender? An apparent lack of emotional affect?
Despite the demeaning lack of interest on the part of employers, she would continue to pursue a career in law. Shortly after being let go at Legal Aid, she opened an office in Brooklyn. It was in a building I would pass years later on the way from where I lived on Dean Street in Boerum Hill to the subway en route to New York University, where I was attending graduate school in creative writing. Glancing across the street from her former office, over my shoulder appeared the glinting gold statue of a blindfolded Lady Justice atop the Brooklyn Court Building, and I would consider my mother, wondering what justice there might be for her. Here in Brooklyn and from a second office in Jersey City, my mother worked as a court-appointed 18-B lawyer for adults facing criminal charges who could not afford a lawyer of their own, while helping undocumented immigrants apply for amnesty, a program implemented by President Carter in 1977.
Glass Ceiling Report
As it turned out, women’s employment prospects in the U.S. legal field were not much more promising than in England. In the U.S., women have struggled historically to attain positions in large law firms. While today, according to a 2017 Law360 Glass Ceiling report, women make up close to thirty-five percent of lawyers at firms and are still fighting for parity, the statistics were far worse for women looking for work in the same era as my mother was.5 Cynthia Grant Bowman of Cornell Law School notes that it was only in the late-1970s when activist and feminist lawmaking demanded the enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that law firms began “to admit women into practice on allegedly equal terms with men… when (women) entered the profession in immense numbers, like a pent up stream.”6 Bowman relates some astonishingly depressing statistics regarding the prospects of Jews, African-Americans, and women in law in the 1960s (my mother attended Oxford law school in the 1950s). Apparently, it was not uncommon for women to be ranked by recruiters to be the best candidates for entry-level positions only to be turned down by firms, who actively announced in interviews their preference for male candidates. Bowman relates, “What these women faced was encapsulated in a headline in the Harvard Law Record in December 1963, six months before their graduation: ‘Women Unwanted.’” A survey of law firms reported in this article made it abundantly clear that women were rated the least desirable candidates, beneath the lower half of the graduating class in men, and lower than that of African-Americans. “The r
easons firms supplied for their negative rating of women candidates included: ‘Women can’t keep the pace’; ‘bad relationships with the courts’; ‘responsibility is in the home’; and ‘afraid of emotional outbursts’,” Bowman cites.7
To bump headlong into statistics that point to the routine denial of the employment of African-Americans as a means for explicating the difficulties white women faced attaining work is bracing at best, and at worst indicative of rampant societal bias. Apparently being Jewish in the 1960s was also a liability. Bowman relays, quoting sociologist Erwin Smigel, “‘Women are discriminated against to a greater degree than are Jews.’ NYU reported that 90 percent of the law firms contacting its placement office refused even to interview women.” 8
Late 1970s
My mother’s attempt to find employment during the giddy years of the late 1970s had unsurprisingly failed. She was never going to be “one of the guys” and probably had little access to a female mentor. Despite her slim prospects, she published her appeals in the New Jersey and New York Law Journal, the thick paperbound books that piled up in dizzying stacks about the study, her bedroom, the dining room, everywhere around the house much like the thick white astrophysics journals that would arrive for my father each month. These appeals were written on behalf of indigent clients who were accused of burglary, rape, and a variety of other crimes, whose civil rights may have been violated in one way or another. Publication did not result in convictions being overturned necessarily. Toward the end of her career, my brother relayed the dismaying story of a final offer of employment. A top divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, had hired my mother for very low wages to run errands and run the Xerox machine. Rather than perform these less than desirable duties, and under the influence of a persistent psychosis, she spent her afternoons at the bank checking on her accounts, convinced she was being robbed.
1972–2018
Despite a career being of great importance to my mother, on the subject of relationships between the sexes, she often made baffling, contradictory statements. She would say, I should have married a rich man when I had the chance. Or, I can’t be bothered with housewives. They are far too boring. When she went back to work, the neighborhood women were designated the enemy. They were all suspect, too trite to engage with.
The remedy would have been to establish ties with working women. This, however, seemed far from her mind. Beyond the one woman with whom she shared an office briefly, there was no mention of working with women, of a fruitful solidarity with a displaced and dismissed gender, as far as I recall. As many of my college-aged students today report of their own homes, feminism was not a term used in our household.
Latchkey kids
Shortly after our return from England in 1976, my brother John and I had become quintessential latchkey kids. After my mother’s disappointment with nannies and sitting services, we were left to our own devices. When we were not in school, we were restricted to playing by ourselves at home. Friends were not allowed in our yard. Overly conscious of a litigious society, our mother was convinced we would be sued if anyone were hurt. Impossible strictures, we rebelled with the anticipated negative consequences.
Over time my mother’s rules became more and more stringent. I was rarely allowed to socialize, and my overt rebellion was of great concern. It didn’t help that in junior high I was somehow accidentally tracked with a group of students who had no intention of graduating from high school. Hanging around after school with my classmates, whose academic failure carried no repercussions at home, I began acting accordingly. Cutting classes. Drinking in the woods. Shoplifting. At the end of eighth grade, my mother’s recourse was to have me enrolled in a private all-girls school. It was clear from my extracurricular activities that I had lost my way.
My new school came as a welcome relief from the over-whelming confusion of a large public school where differences were openly derided and bullying was acceptable practice. At Kent Place, academic expectations were much higher, camaraderie more easily attained, and socializing less fraught with peril. The one peculiarity of this institution was the vocal and persistent sense of superiority on the part of the student body. While commuting between our small suburban homes on the trains and in the train station, it was not uncommon for private school students to comment on the attire and diction of the public school students as inherently inferior. By virtue of our entrance into a private school, which was based more on financial capabilities than other criteria, we were of an elevated stock. A gross sense of entitlement permeated the place.
“Senseless laughter”
As I commuted back and forth by train the short distance between Berkeley Heights and Summit, to the only all-girls non-parochial day school in the state, proudly underperforming during the day (ecstatically listening to the early rap music of The Sugar Hill Gang on my small Panasonic radio late into the night), my mother knocked herself out working long days, leaving the house before seven not to return until seven or eight at night. The difficult commute back and forth between Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City began to take its toll. My mother’s sleep patterns became more and more erratic. Sleeping less and less, often turning in to bed at midnight with a cup of hot instant coffee in her hand to rise as early as 3 a.m., before, finally, she stopped sleeping altogether.
Alone and unprovoked, my mother would laugh uninterrupted for hours at a time. In the evening after work, she would stand in the small downstairs bathroom adjacent to the rec room, where my brother and I languished mawkishly before the television set, and stare in the mirror, gazing and laughing as if responding to the most hilarious joke. I always imagined that these marathon sessions were when she played out rich revenge scenarios, in which she was Manhattan’s reigning legal mind. The “senseless laughter” became a regular feature of our home life. In the midst of great bouts of laughter, my mother would lie in bed for hours at a time among a sea of legal briefs and books. The unceasing hilarity would reverberate throughout the chaotically furnished, two-story tract home.
Whenever I was on the telephone (another forbidden act), if my mother was in the midst of one of these inexplicable bouts, the door to her bedroom shut, I would stretch the long cord of the kitchen phone into the hallway to catch the sound of her laughter over the receiver. This was as far as the long coiled yellow cord would reach. From here, whoever was on the other end of the line would assent: Yes, I hear her. I would then try to find words for what I could not explain and had yet to understand. She’s really neurotic, I would say, committing an act of extreme disloyalty. No you don’t understand. She’s really, really neurotic.
Generational divide
My mother took her profession seriously, buying the latest suits each Fall at Saks Fifth Avenue in Millburn or Lord & Taylor in Short Hills and favoring blue tweed and tan corduroy. She seemed to have multiples of each in her large walk-in closet. These suits varied in the length or flare of the skirt or the width of the corduroy band. I evaluated these clothes on a regular basis, somewhat envious.
My wardrobe paled by comparison if not for the simple reason that, at thirteen, my mother deemed me too fat to warrant the purchase of new clothes. Perhaps this would have been impetus for me to lose weight if I suffered from a weight problem. But this was hardly the case. I was five-foot six and weighed 132 pounds. In light of my mother’s pronouncement, my father took up the task of clothing his children. Unmoved by fashion or material acquisition in general, my father took my brother and me to Korvette’s, a forerunner of the big box store, to purchase our clothes. The shopping trips felt sour to me, as I had always equated Korvette’s and Route 22, its location, with the purchase of tires and other such unglamorous goods. At some point we graduated to the Livingston Mall, where we purchased lava lamps and hypnotic black velvet posters. Here Dad would grow annoyed if I didn’t shop the discounted rack. “Why can’t you buy something on sale?” he would say. Further proof of his lukewarm feelings for us, I determined, tainted by 1970s run-amok capitalism.
A
strong generational divide existed between us. Unfamiliar with scarcity, we found our parent’s disinterest in material goods confounding. Having grown up during the blitzkrieg, my father was unaccustomed to the demands of a throwaway society. Whenever my brother and I insisted on the purchase of new clothes, from where he sat, my father would lift a shoe for us to get a close view of its bottom, repeating the same discouraging mantra: I’ve worn these shoes for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Why do you need new shoes? And yes, it was true. Under the thinning leather sole of his right shoe appeared the slow beginnings of a hole. My father was that classic clichéd scientist type. He uncomplainingly wore whatever his mother sent to him from England—the wide-legged polyester pants, stiff button-down shirts with the useful front pocket, year after year. Later when he began research on a telescope of his design atop Mauna Kea, much to the chagrin of the native Hawaiian population who did not condone building on their sacred summit, but who would eventually be coaxed into relinquishing their land rights for jobs promised in numbers that never materialized, he began purchasing Hawaiian shirts like other CalTech scientists. He tended to favor a bright orange one, which I found puzzling. With dazzling sapphire eyes, a crop of wavy dark hair, my father looked most dashing in any shade of blue.
1978–1979
My father’s unfettered climb in his field, in an era when scientific research was highly regarded and well funded, meant there was never a fear of impending financial shortages. It was this security that afforded my mother her foray into a less than remunerative self-employment. As her illness escalated, my father would often return from California, or wherever else it was he had been, to find a staggering heap of unopened mail on the black tile of the foyer floor. My father would go ballistic once he opened the mail. The bank statements were a special sticking point.
A Room with a Darker View Page 4
