The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  “You mean bring her here?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got to bring her back to Washington.”

  She thinks for a moment. “I can cancel my Thursday class,” she says. “I’ll try to get a flight out tomorrow.”

  —

  Sarah and Ed sit in a pair of chairs in Dr. Stephen Klein’s office. For Sarah, the scene is vaguely reminiscent of certain meetings with the assistant principal of Woodrow Wilson Junior High School concerning their son, Ben, and his academic progress.

  “Well, I have spent at least an hour with her in private consultations each day of her stay here,” Klein is telling them.

  “And these were the sessions where you…? What did you do exactly?”

  “I listened to her. I talked to her about dependency, addictive behavior—”

  Ed interrupts. “All I know is that my mother looks terrible, she’s lost weight, you’ve run her ragged.”

  Dr. Klein shakes his head. “Remember, you haven’t seen her for at least six months. And she is recovering from a massive overdose.”

  “Massive overdose!” Ed’s face reddens. “Is that the way you like to dramatize it to your patients? Look, my mother is eighty-seven years old. Spare her the shock therapy. You’ve got her out at Santa Rosa in a program with a bunch of teenage junkies. I thought this was the age of multiculturalism, mutual respect, universal access, emancipation of the elderly. You’re sitting here rubber-stamping an elderly woman, putting her onto the therapeutic conveyor belt with no regard to her age, her cultural background—”

  “Can I show you something?” Klein asks. He puts a videotape in the VCR and turns on the television. “Rose?” a woman’s voice asks. “May we have your permission to videotape this conversation for you and/or your family to look at later?”

  “All right,” Rose replies. She is sitting up in a hospital bed looking small and gray, an I.V. in her arm.

  “Now, Rose, tell me, how are you feeling—on a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten the best.”

  “I feel lousy,” Rose says.

  “But on a scale of ten, how do you feel?”

  “One is the best?”

  “One is the worst, ten is the best.”

  “Ten is the best?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what’s the worst?”

  “One. Rose?”

  “I have a one.”

  Sarah smiles in spite of herself, but Ed bursts out, “Can—can you turn that off?”

  “Why?” Klein asks.

  “Because we are having a conversation here!”

  “I understand that, Ed, but I thought the tape was relevant.”

  “It may be relevant. However, I am not going to watch my mother being interrogated, okay? It’s ugly.”

  “Addiction is ugly. It’s also complicated, and really I think this is something you should consider—not now, when you’re upset, but later on. I think counseling as a family would be very valuable for Rose—and for you.”

  “Oh, my God,” Ed snaps.

  “I see a lot of anger here,” Klein points out gently.

  “Damn right.”

  “No, I don’t mean the anger at me. The conflict is between you and your mother. This isn’t about me at all.”

  “Oh, yes it is,” Ed fires back. “This is all about you and your indiscriminate diagnoses, your mismanagement of an elderly patient’s prescriptions, and the fact that you railroaded her into entering a totally inappropriate treatment program.”

  “That’s—that’s a serious charge,” Klein says. “I repeat that it was her decision to enter the program. I have her signature on all the paperwork.”

  “You can give me the paperwork, because you are no longer her doctor,” Ed snaps.

  “I’ll be happy to release the records to you as soon as her account is clear. I know that you’re worried, I see that you’re upset, but I can assure you I have given Rose the best treatment I knew how to give, and I have been generous with my time. I’m not even charging you for our session here today.”

  At this, Ed stands up, turns on his heel, and strides out of Klein’s office through the reception area and out the door.

  Sarah turns and walks out after him, but she stops at the desk of Klein’s receptionist. “Do you take Visa?” she asks.

  —

  For the next three days, Ed and Sarah pack up Rose’s apartment in Venice. They phone Goodwill and several of the Jewish agencies to try to give away the washer, the dryer, and some of the big furniture. “You know, it’s telling,” Ed says to Sarah. “Now you have to pay a collection fee to give things away.”

  “Well, sure,” Sarah says. “They have to come with a truck. They have to sort the stuff.” She imagines the warehouses with piles for everything that comes in: REHABILITATE, SCRAP, SMITHSONIAN. A triage system, something like the Santa Rosa treatment center? Now that Rose is home, she looks much better. She is frail, of course—thin—but her color is back, her eyes bright. The apartment is bustling. She is going home with her dear son and daughter-in-law, and she will not be alone anymore. She is supervising the movers as they pack up her china and her little cut-crystal liqueur glasses. She is being swept away to a new place, beginning a new chapter, and this is something she enjoys. But Ed and Sarah look terrible. Disheveled, exhausted from packing, paperwork, and schlepping. Each night they drag themselves back to the Sea Breeze Motel and collapse with muscles aching. The motel has bars on the windows and, in the bathroom, tiny white towels that seem to have been put there mostly for symbolic value. They picked the place because of its location near Rose, and it turns out to have one other advantage. For fifty cents they can get the bed to vibrate, and this soothes their aching backs. At the end of the day they try to unwind, lying on their backs, feeding quarters to the bed, and watching C-SPAN on television.

  On the third night, they are lying there on their backs watching the Prime Minister’s Question Time, the bed vibrating beneath them, and Ed is talking on the phone to his brother, Henry. “Well, of course we’re giving away the secretary,” Ed says. “We’re giving all the big furniture to Hadassah. That’s what Ma wants. What? What?” He turns toward Sarah. “He says he wants the secretary.”

  “So let him ship it to England,” Sarah says.

  “It’s a very fine piece? No, okay. No, I would call it a—nice piece, not a very fine piece…You want to ship it to England, you go ahead…What—are you crazy? Where are we going to put it in D.C.?” He looks over at Sarah.

  “If he really wants it, he can ship it to England,” Sarah says.

  “What? I can’t hear you,” Ed talks over her into the phone. He turns to Sarah again. “Henry says Ma will want the secretary in Washington. She may not want it now, but she will later. And she’ll want the lamps with the silk-shantung lampshades.”

  “He may be right,” Sarah says. “She’ll want them later.”

  “Henry, have you seen those lampshades in the last five years?”

  “Ed, maybe we should get a container and ship everything to D.C.”

  “What did you say?” Ed asks her. She repeats what she said. “All right, fine.” He hands her the telephone. “You and Henry work it out, I’m getting an Excedrin.” He takes another couple of quarters off the Formica nightstand and feeds them expertly into the meter on the headboard.

  Henry is still talking, unaware that the phone has changed hands. “Now, the carpets are simply not worth shipping. They aren’t really Chinese carpets, you know. We could very well give those away, but the lamps could be considered antiques in a few years, and silk-shantung lampshades are almost impossible to find anymore. They just don’t make—”

  —

  Sarah teaches the first class after her return home in a haze of jet lag. She had given the students an assignment to do while she was gone: “Write a midrash about the crossing of the Red Sea in a genre you have not yet used in this course.” Now, as she listens to the students, she finds that the results are mixed. Mich
elle has written a short story about a young Jewish girl who is in love with an Egyptian and has to watch her lover fall with his horse and chariot into the sea. Naturally, she refuses to join Miriam and the other women as they sing and dance in triumph after they have crossed to safety. Instead, she writes her own song to sing by herself to the desert air. Brian has written an essay of questions, hypotheses, and test cases in true Midrashic fashion. It begins:

  It is a mystery why it says in the Torah that after all Moses’ pleas, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Why would God want to make it harder for the Israelites if he was on their side? Was it a test? Or is this some kind of mystical metaphor? I, being of philosophical inclination, take it as such. I think these phrases in the ancient scriptures are invitations to us to ask questions about the nature of human agency and its interactions (reactions?) to God as a historical agent in the world.

  After hearing only seven pages of this, Debbie looks at Sarah and asks, in her blunt way, “Is this creative writing?”

  Sarah is annoyed. “Let’s let Brian finish,” she says.

  “Sorry,” Debbie mutters.

  When it’s Ida’s turn, she shakes her head. “I apologize,” she says. “I wasn’t able to complete the assignment. I’m still waiting for an idea.”

  “Don’t censor yourself,” Michelle advises her.

  “Yeah, I used to be really bad about that,” Debbie says. “Do you ever try brainstorming?” For her part, Debbie has written an autobiography of Pharaoh’s sacred cat:

  I with my green eyes have seen three hundred generations. My dam was the Upper Nile and my father the Lower Nile; my older sister the Great Sphinx, who taught me the riddles of man.

  When Debbie finishes, Sarah nods her head. “That’s very—strange and compelling,” she says. She hates it. Rose is staying in their daughter Miriam’s old room. Sarah has been taking her to look at residences. Every day she drives her out to see them, and every day Rose insists she could not possibly live in one, and that the only times she was ever happy were when she was in the midst of the family.

  “I was wondering,” Michelle says to Sarah, “would it be possible for us to do an assignment that isn’t a midrash? Because, for me, it’s hard to connect my feelings to the Bible all the time.”

  “It’s really hard,” Debbie agrees.

  “Could we just try to write a story set in modern times?” Michelle asks.

  Ida adds to this, “I’d like it if you would bring in a midrash of your own that we could look at.”

  “Have you ever written one?” Brian asks.

  “Yes, I think I did one years ago,” Sarah says. “I could look for it. But I want to remind all of you that creating art is hard work, and that the artist sees restrictions as opportunities. Now, for your next project, your first restriction is that you cannot use the word I.”

  “Oh, jeez,” Debbie groans.

  “What about using me?” Michelle asks.

  “But we can use all the other pronouns?” Brian asks.

  —

  Sarah makes hamburgers that night, and the three of them sit down for dinner—Sarah, Ed, and Rose, who eats her burger plain on her plate with a knife and fork. “I heard you didn’t like the Helena,” Ed says to his mother.

  “The facilities were gorgeous,” Sarah says.

  “Were they gorgeous, Ma?” Ed asks.

  “Cold,” Rose says.

  “What? You said the air-conditioning was wonderful!” Sarah says.

  “I mean the atmosphere was cold. It was institutional.”

  “Well, it’s an institution,” Ed says.

  “Yes, it was no home for me.”

  “They had a lovely swimming pool.”

  “I don’t swim,” Rose points out.

  “And they have buses to the Kennedy Center for all the performances.”

  “You could go to the symphony and the ballet, Ma. And the theater.”

  “I didn’t like it,” Rose says.

  “What’s not to like?” Ed demands.

  “The people.” Rose taps her head. “Not all there.”

  Sarah shakes her head. “They were lovely people. Cultured people!”

  “You see what you want to see,” Rose tells her.

  Ed takes another burger under Sarah’s disapproving eyes. “Your furniture is coming, Ma. We have to settle you in.”

  “You know, they have chamber music there every week,” Sarah tells Ed.

  “Look, I’ll tell you what, Ma,” he says. “Sarah and I are going to move to the Helena, and you can stay here. How would that be?”

  —

  Sarah sits down at her desk after dinner. She tries to work on one of her overdue book reviews, but her heart isn’t in it. She is too tired, her mind full of too many other things: the knowledge that in order to get any work done, she and Ed need to settle Rose in a residence. They hate pushing her into it, but Rose is not going to leave their house happily. They are going to have a fight about it. Ed will be miserable. The knowledge that her class is not going well. These particular students do not work well together as a group. Discussion is fractured. All sniping and defensiveness. The chemistry is wrong. She told them today she once wrote a midrash of her own, but she does not know where it is. It was a little piece about the Biblical Sarah and about her own feelings about becoming a mother. She picks up the King James Bible that she had assigned as a class text along with Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry, and Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, and she turns to Genesis 21. She reads: “And the Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did unto Sarah as he had spoken. For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son in his old age.” And her eye skips down to where it says that Sarah said the child’s name is Isaac because “God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me.” As she looks at these verses, she sees them differently now from the way she saw them in the past. She is fifty-six years old, and she has four grown children, and it occurs to her that she is not much like the Biblical Sarah in that respect. She did not have a child in her old age. She has certainly never had any problems with fertility. She has pined, but not for children. She has pined to have a literary career, to have her work discovered by the world. This has been her dream since her school days, when she discovered John Donne and felt suddenly and secretly clever, as if, like a safecracker, she could find the puns and hidden springs in his poetry. And when she wrote her essays in college about this image and that metaphor, what she was really wondering was how to become like Shakespeare—without seeming to imitate him, of course. When would she be called into that shining multitude of poets and playwrights, mainly Elizabethan, who rose in shimmering waves before her at Queens College? She wrote her M.A. thesis in English Literature about Emma Lazarus—not about the poem on the Statue of Liberty but about her major and forgotten works, the verse plays and poems.

  But she did not have enough time to be poetic. She had her small children, and she had Ed’s career to think about. Her professors warned her of the time and the sacrifices she would have to make if she pursued a Ph.D. One old codger had even suggested that if she got a Ph.D. and an academic position, she would be blocking the career of some talented man with a family to support. Of course, that idea never went far with her. But she did have the idea that a Ph.D. would be hard to get. And a job harder. She decided against it. The truth is, it was easier for her to worry about Ed’s career. She did not have to face the possibility of failure.

  She had wanted fame, not classes at the Jewish Community Center; she had wanted to write dazzling poems, not just for her friends and relatives, but for the world. She was thirteen when she lay in bed in her parents’ house, read Hamlet, and wanted to be as good as Shakespeare. And now that she is over fifty, if the Lord came to her in a dream and said, “You will achieve what you desired,” she would laugh, certainly. If an angel or an agent came down from New York and said, “You, Sarah, will write a great novel, a best-seller. Not a pulp romance, but a good book, wise and
luminous, with a future movie bursting from its pages,” then she would laugh for all to hear—although she would take down the phone number of the agent just in case. In the meantime, she has her book reviews, her class, her children, her mother-in-law. She gets up from her desk. She has written none of this down, and so she will have no model for her students when she comes in to the next class. She can tell them that she looked in her files and couldn’t find the midrash she wrote. Or she could tell them she thinks it is important for them to find their own voice, and that she doesn’t want them to look at her work, because it might cramp their style.

  “Knock, knock,” Rose says at the door.

  “Yes. Come in,” Sarah calls back.

  Rose opens the door. She is wearing a pink quilted robe and matching slippers. “Sarah, dear, do you have any books? They packed all my books, and I can’t find any.”

  “Oh. Of course we have books. Downstairs.” Sarah adds absentmindedly, “What kind of book do you want?”

  Rose considers the question. “I like trilogies,” she says.

  “You know, I think the only trilogy in the house is Ed’s Gulag Archipelago.”

  “Nonfiction?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Ed never read fiction. Do you have a novel? I like any kind of novel, not too sad. About a family—with some romance. But well written. It must be well written.”

  On a whim, Sarah opens the closet and hunts around on the floor for the box where she keeps copies of her own novel. “Here, Rose, why don’t you read this?”

  “Irises, Irises.” Rose ponders. “Oh, that’s your book. Sarah Markowitz. I’ve read that already. Of course. Years ago. Do you have a sequel?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You must write a sequel.”

  “Well, I have to come up with an idea.”

  “The next generation,” Rose says immediately.

  “Well, maybe you could reread it and give me some advice.”

  Rose takes the book, and the two of them walk down the hall to Miriam’s old room. Sarah mentions that there is a literary discussion group at the Helena.