White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  “Mom, please.” It was so tiring convincing someone to live.

  “Why do you call, if you don’t even care? Are you even my daughter?”

  She didn’t trust me, like Bubbie didn’t trust her, screaming when Mom had tried to get her help, forcing Mom to call ambulances to take her to the hospital.

  “I don’t know.” I seethed and hung up, wondering why I kept seeking validation and what warped version of me she saw, if she saw me at all.

  • • •

  PASSOVER, AND ANOTHER trip to Montreal. This time, I could barely open the door to the den, let alone find a place to sit, let alone lie down and watch TV, escape into fictional worlds, as I’d done when I used to live here. It had gotten so much worse. The room was completely overrun with plastic bags of files, stacks of tape-recorded conversations, tomes about tax law. And then there were the dozens of clocks—bright blue and orange, pink and green, thick silvery hands and thin gold numerals, flashing digital and faux grandfather, each set at a different time, the congregation asynchronous and thus tracing not only the seconds, but the seconds between the seconds, one long allegro of passing, a blaring metronome with no pauses, calling to mind our internal clocks, the fragility of our rhythms, the ease with which it could all go terrifically wrong.

  The sofa had been moved away from the wall and the seat cushions lifted so that items could be stored in and behind it. Even the furniture was exploding. My father’s reclining chair was in a cleared-out patch by the window. He’d razed a thin path from the door and marked a place for himself like the outline of a victim at a murder scene. Now, he lounged in his nest, casually crossed-legged, reading his paper, glancing intermittently at the news, as if he wasn’t sitting in what felt and sounded like a ticking time bomb.

  “Here, why don’t you sit on this?” My mother pushed a low-to-the-ground swivel chair toward me. Its seat was lopsided, hanging over on one side.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I need a walk.” I had just arrived that afternoon and already I was desperate for air. It made no sense how I often felt so homesick and yet at home, I just felt sick. Where was the home I was sick for? I walked to the door.

  “Wait!” my mother shrieked.

  “What?”

  “I need to release the alarm,” she whispered. She’d already enlisted the services of half of Montreal’s locksmiths, with hundreds of locks throughout the house, but an alarm?

  My mother punched a few buttons on a keypad behind one of the doors—I hadn’t even noticed it amid all the junk. A loud voice bellowed: “System disarmed.”

  She thought someone would break into our dilapidated house?

  But I knew not to ask her. I did not want to be prisoner to her hour-long rants about the people she was convinced sat outside watching her so that she’d taped all the blinds to the walls. I felt sick. Each time I saw her, her grasp of reality seemed more undone. I noted the pink plastic container filled with Valium bottles perched on the edge of the dusty TV table. I looked away. She was dissolving.

  I glanced at Dad, bedecked in the Montreal Gazette, and thought about his theory. Paranoia, he’d said, could be interpreted as a form of extreme narcissism, of needing to create a world in which you are at the center of everyone’s attention.

  But he never said: Mom’s paranoia. Or Mom’s desire for attention.

  I looked at my mother’s swollen face, her eyes reeking with melancholy. Screaming: get me out of here.

  Get me out of myself.

  I couldn’t bear it. I stepped across the threshold.

  “Let me in when I get back,” I said, half joking.

  • • •

  MOM WAS CONSTANTLY on guard, ready for an attack.

  Then one actually happened.

  I was walking to the museum, just steps outside my front door, when people began to crowd the sidewalk, exiting the tube station instead of entering it. A queue appeared at the bus stop. An electronic traffic sign read: INCIDENT. The paparazzi arrived outside the nearby hospital gate. Then, the ambulances.

  We’d been waiting. Ever since 9/11 everyone expected a bomb. It was a question of when, where, how. No one on the street seemed surprised; they moved quickly as normal. Brits rarely showed vulnerability, and, honed by years of IRA threats, they certainly did not panic. I, however, had less of a Blitz mentality, and more of a blintz one. “What’s going on?” I barraged fellow pedestrians, energized by the drama, which made me feel like part of something. “What happened?” Sirens blared.

  My fellows were, predictably, less fellowish. They shrugged, didn’t answer.

  They didn’t have to. I went immediately into my genetically-garnered warzone mentality, even if I’d spent two and half decades running away from those implanted hydrogen bonds. I ran to the grocery store to stock up: water, scurvy-fighting pineapple chunks, calorie-heavy baked beans, and cash—as much as the machine would let me take. The shopping list I’d subconsciously rehearsed my whole life. I barely felt the ridiculous weight of the bags and quickly lugged them back to my apartment. As I got my passport ready near the door, I made the call I’d practiced for years. Despite the fact that it was five a.m. in Canada, my mother answered on the first ring (of course she slept by a phone—she had dozens).

  “Something happened in London,” I said firmly, confidently, as I’d learnt to talk to my parents, to not freak them out. I imagined their house, the gulag-style precautions, the hundreds of 1980s videocassettes stacked like brick walls to protect them, Billy Crystal on guard. “But I’m fine.” With them, there was no room for me to be not-fine. “Don’t worry,” I repeated. “I’m really fine.” I turned on the TV to watch the news anchor plot a map of the bomb locations; my mother turned on CNN in her attempt to connect to me. I told her of my shopping and waited for her to be proud, panicked and insane.

  “I’m so glad you’re OK,” she said, shocking me with her calmness. “Thank you for calling.” The woman who freaked out about hepatitis when I had a manicure and worried that at every meeting I’d be raped (Erica Jong was seduced by a publisher, she’d warn) was now a pillar of solidity and oneness. We stayed on the phone for over an hour, watching the TV together, Mom cool, reporting headlines, comparing this to other real and literary disasters. My unexpected lifeline.

  “I’d better go,” she said eventually. “Dad and I are getting new tires for the car.”

  “What?” I thought I’d misheard. Tires? At six a.m.? I was in a war.

  “Tires. Thanks for calling, sweetie.”

  Of course, it had never really been about The War. Tragedy was no problem. The anxiety was all in the anticipation, preparation.

  • • •

  LATER ON THAT uncharacteristically sunny morning, already known as 7/7, double prime, odd, Andy texted to make sure I was OK. He wanted to see me; I smiled. On 7/8, we met for lunch near the museum. (Everyone, of course, had shown up for work. Blitz this.) I could hardly believe it had just been a day. Time swells with drama.

  Andy needed to talk. About taking a break—from us. About this show we’d been planning to do together that just wasn’t working out.

  Wasn’t. Working. Out. The words ran through my mind like a scrolling ticker tape newsfeed. “We just haven’t found the right focus yet,” I pleaded, referring to the show, to us. Deferring the inevitable. I knew things weren’t stellar, but I hadn’t imagined he’d actually turn on me, in an instant, now of all times.

  “Just a break,” he said. “Not a breakup.”

  He smiled at the blond waitress. I felt sick but ordered a salad and half listened to him, not at all concealing his good mood, as he described how he’d go on with the rest of his life—without me. I was afraid to speak, afraid of what might come out. I pretended to be at home, in bed, imagined the feel of my pillow on my cheek. My view drifted to a TV screen above us. A new incident. Police were searching buses.

 
My heart stalled. I tried to read the running headlines. I heard a rumbling around me, small whispers. I turned. The buses were on the street, parked right beside us. “Holy shit.”

  Andy was calm. “It’s nothing,” he read from the TV. “They’re telling us explicitly that it was a false alarm.”

  Still. I wanted to say. Still. It’s all going on right here beside us.

  He offered to walk me home. Most streets were closed to pedestrians, so we were rerouted the long way around, and during our extended journey, Andy’s phone rang. The comedy promoter who used to ask me to audition for competitions was now calling him. While everyone, everything was turning on me, he was being invited onto a radio show. “Of course!” He was elated, and bubbled along as we walked to my apartment, among alarms and police, plastic barriers, yellow lines of wavy uncertainty.

  • • •

  I TURNED ON the TV. It’s what I always did in times of upheaval, of entropic, irreversible change. An inherited habit.

  The set, a mere twenty inches, felt like it took up half my flat—it did. It showed fuzz. I stood and watched it.

  Then I maneuvered my saucerlike antennae, waving it in the air, trying to pick up public channels until, at last, a picture emerged. Two men were being interviewed, but their talking heads were covered by scarves, disguised, like victims of hangings. Their muscular arms gesticulated, angry. I couldn’t find a place to position the antennae so that the image remained still, so I stood and held it above the TV, surprised that the news was showcasing anonymous opinions.

  “What is your feeling about the incident?” asked the journalist, whose serious white face was visible.

  I balanced the saucer on the side of my tiny table. As long as I perched on the right edge of my futon, the reception lasted. I had to squeeze my expanding derriere in between piles. The provisions I’d picked up the day before filled my minuscule kitchen, and leaked into my living room, which was still stacked with papers: the towers of photocopied articles for my half-written PhD; the pile of notes for my eight-minute stand-up set that had taken me to the national level and taught me that my dreams could be curtailed by my nose. I reached up to touch it, and covered my face with my hand.

  What was I doing here?

  The reception on the TV wavered for a moment, and a trail of color swooped off the unvisaged characters’ heads, as if their brains trailed behind them.

  My brain trailed behind me. My apartment was starting to look a lot like my mother’s hoarded mess. My comedy career was dreck, my relationship nearly over. I was blowing up. I’m fine, I heard myself tell my mother. Fine.

  “The government must go down,” said one young man in a British accent. “This country does nothing for us.”

  “Nothing,” repeated the other. “I support the murderers!”

  A chill helixed down my spine. This is what they meant by homegrown terrorism. The parasite within.

  I stared at the anonymous voices and veils, and couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something familiar about the Atwoodian image. Was it the uncharacteristic sunlight? The background? Yes, there was something recognizable about the blue door they were standing in front of. Its inner frame, its peeling paint, its slightly run-down edges. Where had I seen that door? Why would I recognize a door?

  I felt the pulse in my eyes. I jumped up, opened my dusty front window, leaned fully out, and checked out my front door.

  This interview about the end of Western civilization had taken place—literally—on my doorstep.

  A bad joke. A terrible punch line.

  The eternal sense that had always festered in my DNA rushed to my surface: Nothing is safe. The walls I’d tried so hard to build were collapsing on me. I might have been sitting at the center of my flat, wearing my snug one-bedroom costume, but I was still so far from being at home.

  For the first time in years, I sobbed, cries deep and rich.

  Please, Bubbie, tell me where to go.

  • TEN •

  26 WEEKS: TUNA OR NOT TUNA

  New York City, 2011

  We usually think that events determine our emotions—that good things lead to happiness and bad ones to despair—but it can be the opposite. Sometimes our feelings come first, and determine how we react to events.

  Walking up the grimy subway stairs, trying not to brush any urine-stained surfaces, I could hear my heart beat against the roaring Manhattan traffic, feel it pounding against my skin alongside the baby’s kicks. Excess blood, panic, or both?

  But as soon as I was tucked into my serene apartment, about to put my feet up, I noticed four missed calls. Before I could call back, it buzzed on its own accord. “Did you get my messages?” Mom asked, whispering, in that hushed tone that made her feel paper thin to me, like she could blow away or disintegrate at any second. “I researched tuna for you. On the Internet. It’s serious.”

  My muscles tensed. Where had this dramatic turn come from? Mom had been thrilled about my pregnancy. She was the first person I told after Jon, and, as I’d expected, she exploded in screeches of delight (“This is the best thing that ever happened to me!”). Since then, she’d been excited during our calls, and diligently checking in to inquire about how I was feeling and how the fetus was faring. At first, I was resentful—she was suddenly interested in every detail of my well-being, and it wasn’t even because of something I’d achieved. But with time, I began to appreciate her concern, grateful that she tried to curb her stress around me. Over the past few weeks, we’d been talking frequently and pleasantly, having long conversations about her pregnancy with me. “I also got pregnant immediately,” she’d recently divulged. “I also had sore breasts, horrible cramps.” I’d listened eagerly to these tales, reminding myself that we were genetically tagged—she was talking about my birth. But I didn’t like today’s panicked tone. And I probably didn’t want to know what she found out about tuna.

  A few days earlier, I’d received an urgent message from my OB. I called back during a meeting, pacing the edge of a coffee shop as I was passed along a network of nurses until I finally heard my doctor’s German accent. (This one was German-Israeli.) “I vaz chasing out of ze hospital zis morning at your visit, but you didn’t turn back. One test result iz not good.”

  Cardiac arrest.

  “Your mercury is through ze roof. Enough with ze tuna.”

  It wasn’t coffee, alcohol, or drugs that would get me and my fetus—it was tuna.

  I could barely and yet totally believe it. “If there was one object, one metaphor through which I could trace my life, it’s tuna!” I ranted to Jon that night about how our Kildare household had been swimming in tuna fish cans, how tuna had been the protein vunderfood. It made up nearly half my lunches, stinkily falling all over the place (my mother refused to mix it with mayo, just cottage cheese), or secretly appearing inside pasta (Mom, delicious spaghetti—oh wait, what the hell . . .). Stacked tapes of my earliest baby coos were filled with the background calls of my father: “Hey, where’d you put the tuna?” As a teenager, I rebelled and binged on raw tuna at sushi bars; tuna followed me as a rare steak into my African and European travels; canned tuna re-became my staple as a starving artist (not starving for tuna); I then hung out with Jon in Asian tuna markets as my yuppification began. Tuna tuna tuna.

  “You have strong feelings,” Jon had said, which I knew meant: hormones. “Let’s lay off the fish.”

  Later, I’d mentioned the test to my mother. Not because I thought she’d console me (she actually replied, “That’s crazy—when I was pregnant with you, I ate tuna subs all day!”; “Exactly,” I’d wanted to say) but because we’d been connecting so well. She offered to Google mercury poisoning, which was the last thing I wanted her to do, but when I thought of her alone, in her self-bombarded house, using her online connection to do background checks, I hoped it would be a distraction. “Sure,” I’d said. She’s just trying to help.
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  “I printed out seventeen Web pages,” she now added, breathless. “Let me read them to you.” I could feel my cheeks get hot. “Tuna consumption can cause mercury toxicity . . .” I held the phone away from my ear and sighed. I’d told her to do it . . .

  “. . . neural defects . . .”

  But what I really needed was someone to massage my feet, get me dinner . . .

  “. . . kidney tumors in rats . . .”

  . . . be around in case I went into fucking labor . . .

  “. . . and foremost, fetal brain damage.”

  “Great,” I said, sighing. “Thanks.” I stared at my white carpet, my white noise. I’d handed her my vulnerability, asked for help in order to help her, and now I felt even worse. How was I supposed to care for a mom and a child? Who’d care for me?

  I still felt like a kid who needed guidance and reassurance. I checked in with Jon about everyday choices, like whether to do yoga or go swimming or take on a freelance job. As a parent I’d have to make decisions all day. Who’d comfort me when I was confused? Answer my questions? I didn’t have the kind of family that could just pop by in an emergency, or even in a nonemergency. I couldn’t count on Jon for everything. I’d be so alone.

  “Judy, it’s the other line, I’ll call you later.” Mom suddenly hung up.

  I stared at my phone. I was so alone.

  CRACKING CODES

  London 2007

  “Vodka on the rocks.” I ordered my new favorite drink from the bar, actually a few tables pushed together and covered with white crepe paper. I waited for the drink to arrive in its plastic cup and marveled at my surroundings: I was at a singles party at a northwest London synagogue, Purim-themed.

  What had happened to me?

  Drink in hand, twenty-nine years old, I stood quietly for a moment shaking my ice and watched other single twenty – and thirtysomething Jews madly try to impress one another with witty banter, curved postures, pointy toes, and flashy leather purses. All of a sudden my funky fabric bag and red rounded flats seemed tattered and anachronistic. I had not come here on a marital mission—my friend Maya dragged me (I was shocked I’d even agreed)—so I felt strangely calm, an outsider watching the schmooze, expecting nothing.