by Alan Shapiro
What did she owe her mother anyway? She had had a tough life, sure. But she was hardly a mother, really. She had made a lot of money and had once taken Miriam to New York to see a show. But mostly she had never been around, off living her “real” life with Mr. Perez. And even when she had been around, she had seldom been available. Maybe Tula had had her reasons. But the fact is, she had left her only daughter for other people to raise. Her mother pretty much had done whatever the hell she had wanted to do. Miriam was the last thing she had ever thought of. Really, when it came right down to it, her mother had never known the first thing about being a mother. But Miriam, her daughter, she had learned the hard way what it meant to be a mother. She knew the meaning of sacrifice, devotion, and loyalty. She knew what a mother was supposed to do, and now, once again, it was up to her to do it. And she would do it. How could she not? She’d show her mother what a mother was.
HER MOTHER MOVED in, and it seemed to Miriam that everyone retreated from one another. Sam, of course was Sam, off in his own little world. But now Ethan, too, like Julie, was hardly ever at home. When he wasn’t performing, Ethan was out with friends. Julie had gotten into Antioch on a full academic scholarship and would be leaving in the fall, but really it felt to Miriam as if she had already left. At dinner, both kids would wolf down their food and bolt. Her mother’s obesity and incontinence disgusted them; it embarrassed them to bring friends to the house, because she was always there, always complaining, always demanding this or that, or wishing she was dead already. Miriam couldn’t blame them, but out of respect for her, couldn’t they treat her mother with a little kindness, if only to make her life easier, so her mother wouldn’t be at her as she always was whenever she got home from work? They’d roll their eyes at all her pleading and disappear into their lives.
“Can’t you see what’s happening?” Curly asked one night, as he was getting into bed.
“So what am I supposed to do?” she responded, laying her book down on her chest.
“Put her in a nursing home, for starters,” Curly said.
Across the room in the mirror above her dressing table, she saw herself, her face, beneath the South Pacific poster—just over her head, Emile de Becque was singing as he held Nellie Forbush at sunset under a palm tree on a Polynesian beach—the vibrant reds and blues, the incandescent whiteness of the sand made Miriam’s face seem paler by comparison; her face looked ghostly, she could almost see right through it.
“Miriam, are you listening to me?”
“What?”
“A nursing home—we should put your mother in a nursing home.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s not the point,” he said. “She’d be safe there. There’d be people, professionals, to take care of her. She might even make friends.”
“Would you dump your father in a nursing home?”
“Look what she’s doing to the kids,” he said. “They can’t stand to be around her.”
What song was Emile singing? “Some Enchanted Evening”?
“Miriam,” he shouted.
“What?”
“We can’t do this, I can’t do this. Tula won’t give us a penny to help out. You got your girl Melba coming twice a week now, which we can’t afford. And for what? I’m telling you, I work too goddamn hard to come home to her, to this. This is tearing us apart. The kids are suffering.”
“You never answered my question,” she said.
“What question?”
“About your father—what you would do if it was your father we were talking about.”
“Well, it isn’t,” he said. “And my father hasn’t had a stroke and doesn’t shit and piss everywhere but in the hopper.”
“So we’ll move out, okay, my mother and me. Will that make you happy?”
“No comment,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. Forget it.”
He turned out his light and she turned out hers.
Some evening, she thought. Some enchanted evening.
HER MOTHER HAD called Miriam just as she was leaving the studio to tell her to pick up mouthwash and dietary candy on her way home. She also had to pick up dinner, and Curly’s dress suit at the dry cleaner, and she was running late as it was. But what the hell could she do. Only later, as she was leaving the pharmacy did she realize that she had left her Gershwin songbook in the studio. She was supposed to find a number that Ethan might use in his callback for a summer stock production of Funny Face.
The studio was locked and dark. The darkness and the quiet soothed her as she climbed the stairs to the office. She would just sit here for a minute. It was already way too late to forestall the bickering in store for her when she got home. “Party girl,” her mother would call her; Curly would start with her, too, about the little “faygela,” and the kids, the kids would be at one another’s throats by now. She couldn’t stand it anymore. She wanted to just sit there for a little while. She wanted to think about songs for Ethan without Ethan and his temper tantrums getting in the way; she wanted to sit there, as she was doing now, in the dark office, with the desk piled high with songbooks, with the shadowy studio through the window in front of her, here where there was no one to feed or fend off, no one to fight with, or appease.
The phone rang and she woke. How long had she been sleeping?
“Where the hell are you,” Curly was shouting.
“I was just, um . . .”
“You were just what? Why are you still there? What are you two doing? You’ve got a family, for Christ’s sake!”
Staring straight ahead, she held the phone out from her ear; Curly’s voice was a far-off insect buzzing. She wasn’t listening; she was watching something moving in the studio, a shadow by the piano, no, two shadows, one taller than the other, and thinner, too, both bending over, moving, picking things up, putting things on, dressing, as they hurried out. She could hear the footsteps running down the stairs—was that Stuart laughing?—and the door slam.
Did she dream this? Was she dreaming now? She could still hear Curly’s tiny shouting as she hung up the phone. Dream or no dream, whatever it was, it was not to be looked at, not to be thought of. That much she knew. And the sensations that came and went almost too swiftly to be felt—shame, fear, revulsion, humiliation, excitement (why did she feel shame? what had she done wrong?)—what were they but the disintegrating traces of a bad dream from which she would eventually wake up?
To steady her breathing, she tried to think of nothing. As if nothing had happened, as if pretending as much would make it so, she walked slowly out of the office and down the stairs. For the second time that night, she left without the Gershwin songbook, though this time she wouldn’t remember what it was she had forgotten, what it was she’d come back to the studio to get.
THE NEXT DAY she did not show up for work. When she didn’t show up the day after that, Stuart called.
“Miriam, my pet,” he said, as spritely as ever, “are we under the weather?”
She couldn’t think of what to say. She put out her cigarette and placed her free hand on the kitchen table to keep herself from trembling.
“Miriam? Are you there?”
“Stuart, listen,” she finally said.
“I’m all ears,” he said.
“I was at the studio two nights ago.”
“What a coincidence,” he said. “So was I.”
When she didn’t say anything, he added, “Miriam, what did you expect? What do you think I do for kicks, go home each night and listen to ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’? What do you think, I just pretend with you all day?”
“I didn’t think that, at the studio . . .”
“That what? That I’d ‘use’ the studio? Desecrate the inner sanctum?”
“But what would people say?”
“What people?” he said. “No one else was there.”
“I was,” she said.
“Yeah, you were, and
what are you going to do, break it to the press?”
“But someone could,” she said, her voice quavering, “and then what?”
“Then this,” he said.
“What?”
“Just this. The two of us talking.”
“There’d be more than just the two of us talking, you know that. Think of the scandal. The repercussions.”
“Come on,” he said. “We’re grown-ups, aren’t we? You pays your money, you takes your chances.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I have a family to think of.”
“Maybe you do, dear,” he said. “But let’s be honest. It isn’t ‘the family’ you’re thinking of.”
Miriam was silent.
“Sweetie,” he continued, “tell yourself whatever story you need to tell—but don’t give me a song and dance about your family. I’m a fag. I’m not an idiot.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” she said.
“How about I call myself a man’s man, a regular guy, one of the boys? Curly would approve of that, wouldn’t he?”
“Was that Paul with you?”
“What difference does it make, stage mom? Should I have been with Ethan?”
“How could you say such a thing? How could you do such a thing? I thought, I thought . . .”
“Your problem, Miriam, is you don’t think. You dream. Everything you love’s a dream.”
“The sooner I wake up from this one, the better.” She slammed the phone down.
Her mother was standing in the kitchen doorway watching her. “Who was that?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Why were you yelling?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Lucky you,” her mother said. “A regular Madame Butterfly.”
WHEN ANYONE WOULD ask her why she had quit her job, she’d tell them what she told herself (as if pretending it were so could make it so): that Ethan would be moving to New York soon, and since there wasn’t much more Stuart could do for him, there was no real reason for her to stay on. She could make more money doing something else. Then she’d shrug and change the subject. She couldn’t imagine telling anyone the truth, certainly not Curly, or any of her friends. She wouldn’t know where to start, or what to say, what language to use. In every imagined telling of the story—“I saw two ‘confirmed bachelors’ committing sodomy,” “I saw two homosexuals having intercourse,” “I saw this naked faygela I used to worship fucking another faygela, his student, up the ass”—she didn’t recognize herself. It was like someone had changed scripts on her in the middle of a scene, and so it wasn’t that she couldn’t remember what her lines were, but that there were no lines, none anyway that she’d been trained to say.
SHE WANTED CURLY to touch her only when they were in public, and not because she wanted everyone to think they were a happily married couple but simply because she couldn’t stand the thought of being talked about. She wanted him to hold her hand when they were out with friends, or put his arm around her or even kiss her on the cheek in front of others, so they would think her marriage was the same as theirs. That way, other people, what they said or how they saw her, wouldn’t matter. She was tired of other people mattering. Creating the impression that there was nothing wrong was how she kept the world from entering her mind.
Home, however, meant being left alone, home was where she had no reason to be touched, because she didn’t have to care about what anybody thought.
The night before, after everyone had gone to sleep, he slipped into her bed. Oh, she did feel sorry for him. She knew how unhappy he was, how much he craved the physical attention she was incapable of giving, especially now. He deserved a wife for whom intimacy wasn’t such a fearful chaos, a wife who was able to love him in all the ways he needed, who didn’t lie there like a mannequin in bed. She wasn’t the “cold bitch” she imagined he imagined her to be. She understood his need for consolation if not relief. The falling-out with his brother over money, and his new job at Lord & Taylor which paid even less than she was making, temping as a secretary at a nearby college—all of this drew him to her bed more frequently these days, for all the things she couldn’t find it in herself to give. Whatever he might have thought, she got no pleasure from his disappointment.
He said, “Sweetheart, it’s been so long, couldn’t we, tonight?”
“I can’t, Curly,” she said. “Please, forgive me, but I just can’t.”
“Why not? What did I do? We’re married, aren’t we?” His hand rested on her shoulder, heavy as a mallet. She slid out from under it.
“It’s just too late for that,” she said.
“Too late, as in tonight,” he asked, “or too late, as in for good?”
“Tonight,” she said, “but . . .”
“But what?”
“I don’t know, maybe; I just feel it’s just all such a mess. I don’t know what to do. I’m sorry.”
“So what are you saying?” he asked. “You want a divorce?”
“No, not that. The kids, my mother. The family. We are a family. No, I don’t want that.”
“Then what?” Now he was leaning over her. “What about me? What am I supposed to do?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”
She wanted to tell him that she loved him, and that—that what? That he deserved to be happy, that she’d always tried to make him happy? That she had never thought, never dreamed that marriage—not just theirs but any marriage—could be like this, like being trapped inside a scene that just won’t end the way she wanted it to although, just then, if he asked her what it was she really wanted she could not have said?
“I just thought with Stuart out of the picture . . .”
“Stuart has nothing to do with this.” She turned away and pulled the covers up over her shoulder.
He threw the sheet off roughly and left the room, slamming the door behind him.
She lay awake for hours trying to make sense of what had happened—but she couldn’t make sense of it. She couldn’t make sense of herself, of anything. All night she lay there thinking, nonsensically, that Stuart was out of the picture because he wasn’t; that he wasn’t out of the picture because he was.
Scene XIV
From the end of the hall, Sam could hear the whir of shuffled cards, and then the slap, slap, slap on the Formica table. As he came down the dark hall, he could see through the kitchen doorway, in the lamplight, her hands turning over card after card. He had wet the bed again and come downstairs to find her. Everyone else in the house was sleeping. His grandmother snored and murmured from what used to be the upstairs playroom, the room next to the bedroom that he and his brother shared. To get downstairs, he had had to leap over the nightly puddle of pee she left outside his room, the little accidents she had because she couldn’t move fast enough to make it to the toilet. Between his grandmother and him, his mother often said, the house smelled like a flophouse, like a sewer. His mother wouldn’t be happy to see him. She would say, what am I gonna do with you? When are you gonna grow up? Don’t I have enough to do already?
Anger shrank the house. You couldn’t turn around without getting yelled at. She and his father fought about her mother. She and her mother fought about hairspray or brands of coffee, or whatever it was his mother was supposed to get for Tula and didn’t or got wrong. She and Ethan fought about his voice, his practicing. Julie was never around anymore to fight with, which was what her parents fought with her about when she was around. Sam tried to stay out of everybody’s way. But the house was shrinking. During the day, the only hiding place that remained was good behavior. He had stopped caring about his shirt and shoelaces. Even though his throat hurt when he cut his food, he cut his food. He was quieter now. He didn’t ask so many questions. He tried to do what he was told and not get in anybody’s way, but every night the wet bed dragged him out of hiding. He said, “Ma, I need you.” She stared down at the cards her hands were flipping over and movi
ng from column to column; it was as if her hands were independent of her body, moving by themselves. Next to the cards, there was a cup of coffee; next to the coffee, an ashtray with a cigarette leaning against the grooved lip. Little curls of smoke were rising from it. “Go back to bed,” she said in a flat voice, not even looking up. It was just a body, not his mother speaking. Where she had gone, he had no idea. “Go back to bed before I scream.”
From that night on, he no longer left his bedroom when he wet the bed. He’d strip the sheets off and slip free of the damp pajamas. He’d find a thin edge of mattress that wasn’t wet and lie along it on his side, trying not to move as he fell asleep with the house shrinking all around him.
UNABLE TO SLEEP, she’d sit at the kitchen table playing solitaire for hours, slapping the cards down on the Formica table, sliding the cards from one column to another, watching and not watching as the columns grew and shrank, and shrank and grew, while the cigarette she never lifted burned down to nothing in the ashtray, and the coffee cooled. And as she played game after game long into the night, shifting the cards by suit or sequence, the royal families broken apart and struggling (by her hand alone) to reunite, fragments of memories flashed randomly before her from the near and distant past: there was Stuart at the piano, singing as he played, his face at once exuberant with pleasure and somehow menacing, bright lit and shadowy, giving way to Curly’s face, his handsome, loving face, the face he watched her with the night they met, becoming suddenly his needy face, his disappointed face, one moment sorrowful, the next enraged, changing, in turn, into her mother’s face reflected in the window of a train, young, beautiful, so charming to the world, so harsh to her only daughter. And there was Sam’s face crying, or Ethan’s pitching a fit because he didn’t want to practice, or Julie’s staring at her with that blank, infuriating, you-can’t-do-anything-for-me expression that Miriam couldn’t help but hate, and hate herself for hating. Only God knew how much she loved them. Only God knew how terrible the world could be, how vulnerable the children were, and what it took to get them ready for the trials that surely lay ahead. Only God knew she never meant to hurt them, and when she did hurt them sometimes (she wasn’t perfect, who was?), when she spoke too brusquely, when she shook them harder than she meant to, or ignored them, or responded coldly or impatiently to pleas for help, to pleas (oh God) for love, yes, only God knew how much she suffered when they suffered, how indelibly into her heart their pain was stamped.
