“You think you could maybe pull your car into the garage a little less tight, so I can get to the trash cans for once?” Or, “Elizabeth Claire, if I see one more wet towel on the floor, no one’s getting new Keds, not today or ever.”
Dad would ignore her, pretending he didn’t hear, which would infuriate her even further, until she’d stomp her foot or slam the refrigerator door or empty the ice tray with a sonic boom. “Goddamnit, Herb,” she’d scream, “are you listening to me?” followed on many nights by, “Kids, if I’m not in my room tomorrow morning when you wake up, you’ll know I’ve finally left!” and then the five of us would start crying, the verbal ones begging her not to leave, the preverbal ones throwing spaghetti off their high chairs, and then she’d turn to my father and say, “See what you’re doing to them, Herb? See what you’re doing?” before grabbing a new pack of Carltons and a lighter and heading back up to her room for the night.
“You’re mother’s having a hard day,” Dad would say, or he’d make some joke about how the Kotex box had reappeared on the bathroom floor, and we should all be on our best behavior.
Those ominous purple signifiers were long gone now, as were the mood swings they presaged, but even so visits with my mother these days were like cloudy days with a slight chance of rain: you never knew whether to carry an umbrella.
“So did you figure everything out?” Mom asked, as I involuntarily hung my coat from the now empty, waist-high rung of pegs that had once held yellow slickers and school backpacks. It was Daisy who accidentally let slip that I’d be coming down to Potomac for the day, and my mother had insisted I swing by for lunch. I tried explaining to her that my schedule would be too packed, but I didn’t have the energy to argue. Or to deal with the inevitable repercussions of turning her down. “What are you doing?” she was now saying, seeing the hem of my coat hit the floor. “You’ll get the bottom all dirty.” She took the coat and grabbed a hanger from the closet, eyeing its frayed sleeve and torn lining and making a face like she’d sucked on a lemon. “I can sew the missing button on, if you have it.”
“I lost it. But thanks.”
“They have button stores, you know.”
“Not in my neighborhood,” I said.
“So would it kill you to jump in a taxi?”
I smiled a weary smile. “No, Ma. It would not kill me to jump in a taxi. And no to your first question, too. I did not figure anything out. I figured nothing out. Did you know Mavis Traub?”
“With the new house off Tupelo?”
“Yes, her.”
“No. I don’t know her. But her husband moved his practice into the same building as your father’s a few years ago and paid seven times the rent for the same amount of space, can you imagine? And she wears that mink coat just to go to the Giant. I told your father he should have gone into orthodontics.”
“He liked being a pediatrician.”
“And look what it did to him.” She turned away from me to walk into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Chicken salad okay? Or we could heat up some meatloaf.”
“Either’s great. But, Ma . . .”
She dropped her head onto the crook of her arm, still holding the refrigerator open, and began to cry. She did this so often now, I sometimes suspected she did it more out of habit than grief. And each time it happened, each time she crumpled over, she seemed more and more diminished.
“Aw, Mom. Come on. Stop it now . . .” I tried to put my arm over her heaving shoulder, which felt even bonier to the touch than usual. She shrugged it off. I sat down at the kitchen table. My father had passed away over three years earlier, but she had yet to reconcile herself to this fact. She still listened for his car in the driveway. She’d cook two pieces of meat for dinner instead of one. For as turbulent as their marriage had been when we were young, by the time my baby brother left for college, the two of them had settled into something resembling an amicable truce. They bought a condo on a golf course near Chestertown, so he could spend the day whacking balls while she browsed the shops in the quaint villages along the Chesapeake. Once, when they were visiting us in New York, I even saw them holding hands, in their matching L. L. Bean fleeces, as they rounded the corner, a sight as shocking to me as if the two of them had suddenly stripped naked and started dancing the frug. “Ma,” I said now, “you can’t blame pediatrics for his death. He had a heart atta—”
“Oh, yeah?” She turned abruptly and slammed the refrigerator door shut. I noticed her eyes were dry. “You weren’t here for all those three AM calls, for all those mothers with their croupy babies. ‘Oh, Dr. Burns, help me, please. I think my baby’s dying!’ “
“Ma, stop it. Dad didn’t die from being on call. He died because he was out of shape, overweight, had high cholesterol and a family history of heart disease. You yourself said that after the last bypass he kept sneaking those Krispy Kremes. So one day, his heart stopped beating. End of story.”
“At sixty-three?”
“Yes, at sixty-three.”
“Who dies of a heart attack at sixty-three?”
“Lots of people, Ma. Even healthy ones who don’t kill themselves with Krispy Kremes.”
“He didn’t kill himself with doughnuts. Don’t you say that about your father, Lizzie Claire.”
“Sorry. You’re right. I forgot. He killed himself with brownies and chocolate chip cookies, too.”
“Lizzie!”
“Okay, okay. I’ll stop. Anyway, you know that’s what Mark’s working on right now. Mortality rates.”
“Is that so?” She was distracted, speaking by rote. Still standing immobile before the shelves of diet sodas and Tupperware.
“Yeah, he’s trying to figure out a way to predict the precise hour of a person’s death, using neural networks to . . .” I could tell she wasn’t listening to me. “You sit. I’ll fix lunch.” I stood up to take her place.
“No,” she said, now suddenly switching into high gear. “That’s okay. I’ll fix it. I’m still your mother, I can fix lunch.” Filled with a newfound vigor, born of feeling needed, she spooned the chicken salad onto two slices of rye, laid some pickles out on a bread plate and poured us each a small paper cup of soda, their domes of fizz threatening to spill over the sides. “I’ll tell you one thing. Mothers of kids with broken retainers don’t call Mavis Traub’s husband at three AM. Here. Eat.”
“So. Mavis . . .” I took a bite of my sandwich, the mayonnaise eclipsing the chunks of chicken by a ratio of two to one.
“Oh, Lizzie.” My mother took a miniscule bite of hers then pushed it aside. “Why do you want to dig into that awful old story? It’s so depressing.” She took a sip of her diet soda. “Are you sure it’s even true? I don’t remember this Avery—”
“April.”
“April, Avery, what’s the difference? I don’t remember her, and I knew all your friends.”
“No, you didn’t, Ma. Josh was an infant, and Becca wasn’t yet one, and Lisa was about to turn two, and Ellen was still in preschool, and you were barely coping, let alone asking me about my friends from sch—”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault your friend was murdered.”
I shook my head and took a deep breath. “No. I was just saying that everybody was focused on Watergate, and you had all these kids underfoot, and postpartum depression—”
“I did NOT have postpartum depression.”
I stared at my mother, incredulous. “Right. You just preferred to lie in the dark on the floor of your bedroom all afternoon with the shades drawn and a cigarette dangling.”
“Everybody smoked then.”
“That’s not my point.”
“I did not have postpartum depression or any depression of any kind. End of story.”
“Okay. Fine. You weren’t depressed.” I took another bite of my sandwich. My mouth still full of mush, I muttered, “And you don’t smoke anymore, either.” I could smell the cigarette smoke that must have been blown out the window five minutes before my arrival, even
though my mother always insisted she’d been smoke-free for over a decade.
“What did you just say?”
“I said, ‘And you don’t smoke anymore.’ “
“I don’t smoke anymore.”
“I said you don’t. And anyway I don’t care if you do or not. I was just making a point about denial. Let’s drop it.”
“You brought it up.” She grabbed the pickle off her plate and held it suspended in midair, pretending to study it so she wouldn’t have to meet my eye. “My window guy smokes, if that’s what you’re talking about. He was just here this morning.”
I rolled my eyes.
“What, am I supposed to make him go outside in the cold? No. I say, ‘Here, take an ashtray. Enjoy yourself.’ “
“That’s very nice of you.”
“I’m a nice person. You might not think so, but I am.”
“I never said I didn’t think you were nice.”
“But you did say I smoked,” she said, sliding her right hand, with its nicotine-stained middle finger, into her lap, like a child hiding a cookie she’d just snatched. “Anyway, what were we talking about again?”
I choked on my tiny cupful of soda, the fizz rising up into my nostrils and making them burn. “Suicide.”
“Right.” She placed the pickle back down on her plate, untouched. “You’re not eating.”
“Neither are you.”
Over the next half hour, in between bites of chicken salad sandwich and more digressions, asides, and the airing of old grievances too numerous to mention, I was showered with the following unconfirmed facts and unsolicited advice:
1) My mother’s best friend, Shirley Seymour, told her that Maureen Kupferberg once told her she’d seen Mavis Traub leaving the Holiday Inn in Rockville with a man, not her husband, one day when she was parking her car in the lot of Shay’s Hardware. I should call the hotel. Maybe they have a record.
2) Lenny Morton, of Blendercize fame, divorced his wife when he realized he was gay, not because the two weren’t getting along. My mother saw him interviewed on a 20/20 story about AIDS a few years back, “the one where they were talking to that angry guy, the playwright, what’s-his-name, Larry Something-or-Other.” As far as she could remember, Lenny was living in New York, HIV-free and alone (“His boyfriend who died,” Mom said, “the AIDS activist-slash-lawyer, used a condom when they were, you know . . .”), and currently working as a personal trainer. Although she wouldn’t personally want to be trained by someone who could potentially have AIDS, because even though they say it can’t pass through the sweat, you never know.
3) None of her friends had ever known Adele Cassidy, although Shirley Seymour had had a “little flicker” when my mother mentioned her name and seemed to recall that Adele Cassidy had been murdered by her husband, not taken her own life. Which could have just been gossip, granted, but she thought I should know what people were saying when she mentioned April’s mother’s name in polite company.
4) And finally, if I was so interested in mothers who kill their children, why wasn’t I doing a documentary about that crazy woman who drowned her kids in the bathtub in Texas, the one with the five kids, just like her, kunna hura, instead of digging into an old story that may or may not even be true?
“It’s true, Ma.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have a police report. And some newspaper clippings. And as of this morning I now have Mavis Traub, who remembers it happening.”
“I just cannot see how I would not have heard about this kind of thing when it happened. A mother who kills her children and commits suicide in Potomac? In 1972? It doesn’t make any sense. Are you absolutely sure?”
“I’m sure.”
In the twenty minutes before my next appointment, I went up to my old bedroom, looking for anything to jog my memory. The room had been turned into a gym/guest room after I left for college, with a treadmill and a blue foam mat. All traces of Scotch-taped drawings and field-day ribbons had been scraped from the walls, which were now covered in a cool shade of gray. In the corner, by the window, was one of my mother’s ashtrays. Left there for the window guy, no doubt.
In the closet, shoved in the far corner, were two large moving boxes full of my childhood mementos, which my mother had been bugging me to go through and “throw out already.” But I don’t want to throw them out, I’d say, to which she would respond, so take them back with you to New York, what do I care? But I have no room for them, I kept telling her, with my two daughters shoehorned into a tiny bedroom and my dining room table pushed up against the living room wall. I don’t know how you can live that way, she’d say, because she grew up “that way” in deepest Brooklyn and escaped, and I’d say, I like the city, I’m willing to give up space to live there. And she’d say, mark my word, your children will move to the suburbs when they’re adults, that’ll show you, and I’d say, perfect!, then you can hand down my boxes to them.
Sitting on the closet floor now, I pulled back the packing tape sealing one of the boxes and opened up the flaps. Inside was a ragtag time capsule of my youth: my stuffed animal dog, Dog, his once glorious coat of synthetic brown fur all but gone; a Lucite piggy bank, Lucite hand, and a Lucite jewelry box with a never-worn star of David necklace still inside. Atop a pile of books sat my dog-eared copy of Island of the Blue Dolphins, the novel I was rereading at the dinner table one night, instead of eating, when my father called to say he’d been held up late at the hospital again, which sent my mother into a rage that ended with a lukewarm hot dog being shoved down my throat. At the bottom of the box, buried under a thick layer of camp photos, taken with an Instamatic camera that required an endless supply of Magicube flashbulbs, were various diaries covering the years from 1973, when I first became interested in recording the details of my life, through 1979, when all those disco Bar Mitzvahs and Lucite presents and hormones kicked in, and I happened to catch my mother reading my November 12, 1979, entry about going to second base with Darren Ekholtz behind the Yahrtzeit wall at Beth Shalom. Which lead to the final entry of the diary, November 13, 1979, in which I wrote, eighteen times, as there were eighteen lines to fill—a chai, I remembered thinking—“I hate my mother.”
The words were placed there not only because I felt them at the time, but so my mother would read them, too, and when she did, she punished me not in the usual way, like taking away TV privileges or sending me to my room, but by never letting me forget my transgression. “I was going to take you shopping for a new diary,” she said one Sunday, “but since you hate me, I guess you wouldn’t want that.” Several months later, when I wrote her a Mother’s Day poem, she read it, folded it back up, and placed it on the kitchen counter without saying a word. “Why are you crying?” I’d said, eager for a bone. I was proud of myself for having rhymed “mother” with “another,” as in, “You are my lovely mother / I’d never want another,” which felt as honest as the final diary entry at the time I composed it, but Mom just sighed and said, “Well, since you hate me, I don’t know how much of this I can believe.”
I vowed, from that day forward, never again to put my true feelings into writing. Love, hate, they were simply too dangerous, especially if you felt them both in tandem. Cool objectivity became my new god; the school newspaper office my new place of worship; black and white the only two shades of truth.
“Lizzie, sweetheart?” It was my mother yelling from the bottom of the stairs. “Isn’t your next interview sometime soon? You should get going. College Park’s at least half an hour away.”
I looked at my watch. Shit. It was 1:45. Adele’s sister was expecting me at 2:00. I must have lost track of time. “You’re right. Thanks.” I shoved my first-grade class picture inside my purse and ran down the stairs two by two, instinctually reaching for my coat on the low-lying pegs before remembering its placement, with a reprimand, in the closet. “Bye, Mom,” I said, giving her a kiss on the cheek that made her flinch. “Thanks for lunch.”
“Drive safe,”
she called after me, which was, I was learning to accept, as close as I was ever going to get to an expression of love.
CHAPTER 10
I ARRIVED LATE to Trudy Levine’s apartment, part of a 1970sera, warrenlike complex near the University of Maryland campus. “I’m so sorry,” I said, referring on one level to my tardiness, on another to my sudden intrusion into her life.
“Are you kidding?” She laughed, undoing the chain. “In my world, you’re on time. Do you know how many of my students run here, panting, weeks after a paper is due?” She opened the door wearing a patterned green caftan, which hung like a tent over her plumpish frame and made her look not unlike a bunch of grapes. Her gray hair was cut short, her eyes framed by wire-rimmed bifocals. “Come in,” she said. “Don’t mind the mess. I’m a bit of a pack rat.”
Trudy was a bit of a pack rat in the same way the Marquis de Sade might have been a bit of a sadist. Bookshelves were placed like topiaries in a maze, Xeroxed articles lay scattered over the floor, and stacks of old newspapers and magazines lined every wall and covered every surface, filling in each available crevice and nook. Even the two windows looking out onto the parking lot were almost completely covered by piles of old New York Review of Books and recycled food containers, blocking out nearly all natural light. A single clamp-on lamp gripped the lip of Trudy’s desk, illuminating the corner like a shrine. “Wow,” I said, “You must be a prolific . . .” (hoarder!) “. . . reader.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. We paused for a moment in front of the desk, as she rummaged through papers and a stack of videotapes. “I read a lot. You know, the whole interdisciplinary thing. You have to keep up. I also monitor several hundred blogs and watch a hell of a lot of TV. If I’m going to rail against the status quo, I have to know what the status quo is now, don’t I?” She winked. “I found an old segment of yours in one of these piles, in fact.” Trudy was the Elsie W. C. Parsons Professor of Sociology in the Department of Women’s Studies, where she was teaching a course on violence and gender. (“We start out with Freud, Plato, Foucault. And then we basically rip them to shreds,” she’d said with a snort.) “Here it is!” She picked up off the floor the story I’d produced on Shirley Lipscomb, who had recently been pulled from life support after years of unresponsiveness. “Shirley Hart Lipscomb,” she read off the Post-it she’d attached to the cassette. “Devoted mother, PTA treasurer, Planned Parenthood volunteer, walked around for fifteen years with bruises on her face before being beaten into a vegetative state by her husband, Brian.”
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