White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  I tried to think the maturest thoughts possible.

  I never liked wetness either.

  She was teasing me, testing me, because she felt so comfortable.

  This was just a phase.

  I focused on the time the two of us had shared a bed on a trip to London, and she woke up in the middle of the night excited to see me right next to her. “Mama!” she’d exclaimed, scooched over and put her head on my pillow next to me. We fell asleep cheek to cheek. It would happen again.

  Then I crossed the threshold and burst into tears. Other kids adored their mothers, were obsessed with them, overly attached. What if I just wasn’t lovable? Clearly, I had no idea how to do this.

  I ran into the bathroom, shut the door, made sure Zelda could not hear me. My brain whirred: I felt hurt like my mother, I acted like my mother, I nearly reacted like my mother. I knew I could not show Zelda my visceral response. Foul moods made no friends. I wanted to consider Zelda’s feelings first, not scar her by being self-involved or unempathetic.

  But what about me?

  I looked in my minimalist wall mirror. I’d spent years cleaning up my house. Was there room for my emotions?

  I recalled a time when I was six or seven. I was huddled into my mother’s side, on my bed. My bony elbow pressed into her soft stomach, two unlikely puzzle pieces that, in that particular angle, in that moment, fit together. Her torso was warm, propped up against my pillows, nestled in my unmade bed among the factory-second blankets.

  I’d had a particularly uncomfortable hangnail that day, and I rubbed it with my neighboring fingers until I enjoyed the smarting pain. Mom took my hand in her slender, soft fingers. She was hiding in my room, from my father. Dad was sitting in the den, on his chair, seething over their latest altercation while he pretended to read the newspaper.

  “Judy,” she said, “should I get divorced like—?”

  “No!” I screamed before she finished. This was the dreaded topic of any child in the suburban 1980s, the issue at the center of all our paperbacks. Who would I live with? Who would I lose?

  “You’re right,” she said quickly. “I won’t. For you, I won’t. I promise.”

  We were quiet, and after a pause, I thought she might be reconsidering.

  “I hurt myself,” I blurted out. I showed my mother the long edge of skin, hardened yet raw. My bodily abject, dangling between us. “Don’t tell Dad,” I said.

  “I won’t,” she said. “I promise.” Then she added: “Wash it with soap.”

  I imagined the soap on my skin, not sliding off but instead seeping through its different layers, cleaning everything from the surface to its bottom, the side that touched my blood. Mom and I had a special secret, and all that, on my little thumb.

  Later, Mom went to the den.

  “Judy,” Dad hollered, “what the hell happened to your finger?”

  For years, I’d remembered this as a story of betrayal, but suddenly I saw it from a different angle. Now I understood how my pain, my failings, caused Dad so much anxiety and sadness that he couldn’t bear it, and so expressed his feelings as anger, which was easier, less subtle. Perhaps just as Mom had done on those Sundays when I used to walk with Dad, turning her complicated gratitude and guilt that my father had taken over elements of parenting that she couldn’t manage, into rage. But there needed to be space for pain and rejection, for dread and discord—mine, Zelda’s, Jon’s.

  I turned away from the mirror. I just had to figure out how to stop hiding, and where to put it all.

  • • •

  A FEW DAYS later, Zelda showed a new preference. “I don’t like blue anymore,” she said when I asked her why she was stripping her sheets. Up until now, blue had been her chosen hue, a color that had to appear in at least two items of clothing at every outfit change. Blue spoons were prized, blue crayons, exalted. But now, watching Zelda ripping the navy dinosaur linens off her toddler bed after having separated out and then placed all her blue colored pencils on Jon’s desk, I was confused.

  “But I thought it’s your favorite.”

  “Pink!” she shrieked. “I only like pink.”

  “Pink?” I asked. “How do you even know about pink?”

  “I love pink!” she declared, and trotted to her closet where she pulled out the pink ballerina sheets I’d bought a few weeks earlier (because she loved dance, like me)—which she had, until right now, shown no interest in. I didn’t know she knew those sheets were in there. I didn’t even know she could get into the cupboard. “Pink, pink, pink,” she sang as she worked hard at pulling out linens.

  “Why this sudden change? Why pink?”

  “Because girls like pink!”

  “Blue is beautiful,” I said, trying to sound positive. “Some girls like blue, some boys like pink.”

  “No, only pink. Princesses love pink and I’m a princess and I love pink.”

  What had I done to create a princess monster? “But blue is so cool.”

  “Pink!”

  It’s so much more interesting to have unusual tastes, I wanted to say. So much more artistic. Besides, look at me: glasses, sweatpants, my PhD on feminist art and subjectivity and domestic theory, my work as a nebbishy stand-up comic, my flats.

  She pulled out the sheets and fell backward. I went over to help her up. She gracefully gave me her hand, and then got up onto her tippy toes.

  She’d always had girly tendencies, I thought. From an early age she adored wearing my high heels (more than I ever did) and organizing my panties in color-matched piles (I threw them in a drawer). She cared diligently for her stuffed cow Moofie, gently changing his diaper as I changed hers, putting bracelets on his arms and feeding him at every meal. She’d always been dainty, “a little lady” people called her as she ate grapes with two fingers while her friends scarfed up chicken nuggets. Even when she could barely speak, she was insistent about donning matching outfits. She loved makeup, begging me to put tiny drops of Cinderella-branded cosmetics on her face and hands.

  I agreed to tiny drops, more concerned about the fact that I didn’t know how. My own forays into cosmetic education consisted mainly of a trip to the Bobbi Brown counter when I was twenty-seven where the saleslady announced that I had the skin of a forty-year-old who smoked, tanned in bursts, and lived in a pollution corridor. I still felt uneasy with eyeliner, convinced my lines weren’t neat and I looked like a football player.

  I recalled how I’d seen Zelda that day at the synagogue, recognized that she was different from me in so many ways. I felt like my parents never really accepted my differences from them. To meet either of them, I had to slip carefully into their architectures. With my mother and her complex inner worlds—an Escher staircase with levels that never connected, a Magritte landscape with all the wrong shadows—it was like sliding into a soupy, disorienting mess. With my father and his narrow build, rigid and tight, constrained by blinders, not noticing much beyond Yiddish jokes and medical conversation, I had to creep in sideways, hunch my back and hold my breath. He formed a structure for me but it bent me out of shape. I had to try to avoid forcing Zelda into crevices just so she could fit within my limits.

  “Girls love pink, boys love blue. Daddy loves blue. I love pink. Mommy, you’re a lady-girl so you like red-pink.”

  There was that. The truth was that I did like red, and even some pink. I’d loved dolls growing up. I loved getting my nails done (someone else was doing it) and loved doing Zelda’s nails too (up until then, in sparkling blue, a nontoxic children’s brand). I’d always wished for shaving tips, for the lipstick chat. I didn’t want to force my daughter to become the pedicure-partner I’d longed for, but I didn’t want to deny her self-expression either. Why was I resisting giving her what she wanted?

  “I love pink now, only pink,” Zelda reiterated as she stretched across her toddler bed, trying to peel off her old set of linens.
>
  “Well, then, you should enjoy it,” I said. “If that’s what you really like.”

  “Yes, I really, really do.” Sheets were strewn around her. “Mama! Help, please.”

  “Of course.” I was the one who’d bought her the sheets in the first place, I reminded myself. She loved the cartoon about the mouse ballerina, which I also enjoyed. The story lines were good, the characters funny, and the show taught children about dance. Plus, I liked the idea of young characters with creative passions.

  I helped Zelda change her little nest from triceratops to ballerinas, clumsily tucking in corners (bedclothes were Jon’s domain), hoping that I was enabling her to enjoy her taste, allowing her to go through necessary phases, letting her figure out who she was and what she wanted, and mostly, how to be honest with herself.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER, as I put away the morning crafts supplies, I heard torrents of screams from the kitchen. “That’s it,” Jon said, walking to the bedroom. “I can’t take it anymore.”

  I tried, from the two of them, to deduce what had transpired. Something about Zelda wanting Daddy to make her pink strawberry milk but only with a pink spoon in a particular pink cup all while Jon was holding her. Fulfilling the needs of a toddler was a whole different story from a newborn.

  “I need space,” Jon huffed, and ran off.

  I didn’t say anything, made sure Zelda had plenty of room around her so she wouldn’t injure herself if her tantrum got more physical, then knelt down to be at her level. I was there, but not too there. If there was one thing I’d learnt from my upbringing, it was patience with emotional breakdowns. I understood what it was like to live with someone who existed in an exaggerated version of the present, id-driven, frustrated. Only Zelda’s tantrums didn’t try me nearly as much. I didn’t need her to be grown up for me. That wasn’t her job.

  Mom had, inadvertently, taught me a lot about keeping my cool.

  And, about the power of distraction.

  “Zel,” I said, when I saw she was starting to calm down. “I’m going to get you some milk. Why don’t we go to your room and look at pictures of dollhouses and figure out which one we’re going to buy for you?”

  “Yeah!” She suddenly perked up, even though I wasn’t sure she even knew what a dollhouse was.

  And here I was, stuffing one down her throat. A book would have distracted her too, but I was genuinely excited about a dollhouse, recalling the positive elements of my childhood Barbie games, where I ordered my own world, created my domestic narratives. Played goddess.

  Mom, who had bought me those dollhouses, adored dolls, dressing them, creating worlds with them. Bubbie, a seamstress, loved dresses and spent hours on the floor with me acting out imaginary wedding ceremonies with left-over buttons. These games, emerging from and blending with their hoards, had helped endow me with imagination, a love of making up stories, a capacity for escapism that could be useful.

  Raising a strong girl, I decided, was not about what I gave Zelda to play with, but how she saw me live: working, enjoying myself, not having shame about my body or my house, not putting myself down. Following my passions and desires, even if they happened to be feminine.

  • • •

  “MOMMY, YOU’RE SHTINKY, so I don’t love you.”

  This again? “Oh, and Daddy smells great?” I asked, gently but firmly.

  “Yup,” she said, walking over to the other side of the room to play with Massive Bear, her giant stuffed grizzly.

  I crawled over to it, lay down on its paw.

  “No!” she screamed. “Massive Bear is for children, not for people. Buy your own.”

  Again, I felt the urge to crawl away. I also felt the urge to crack up, but I tried to conceal it. Where did she pick up these idioms?

  “All right, I understand you want your own space,” I said, and calmly backed off.

  Then Jon came in. “Daddy can play,” she said. “It’s for children and men boys.”

  Jon, unaware of what had transpired, sat near the bear. “I love you, Daddy,” Zelda said, giving him a massive bear hug.

  “I love you too.” He nuzzled her neck, and she climbed right on top of him, glaring back at me once.

  All right. This was enough. I dealt expertly with Zelda’s tantrums, but for once, I wanted to have my own. I was always promoting household honesty—I got upset when Denise lured Zelda to eat with false promises, I refused to lie to Zelda about Mones’ cancer—but I faked my own feelings.

  “Can I get a hug too?” I asked. “I’d really like one.”

  “No,” Zelda said. “I don’t love you.”

  “Zelda, that really hurts my feelings,” I asserted.

  “Please apologize to Mommy,” Jon joined in, breaking his hug with her. Taking my side. “That was not a nice way to talk to her. Mommy loves you very much.”

  She was silent for a minute as she stepped around Massive Bear’s contour.

  “When you say things like that it makes me feel sad.”

  She looked at me. “Sorry, Mommy,” she said, when she was ready. “I’m really sorry.”

  And that was it.

  “Thank you.” I felt like a lifelong weight had lifted. “I appreciate that.”

  My clean, de-cluttered apartment did have room for feelings, of all kinds. I got up and gave Jon a big kiss.

  “Me too!” Zelda said, running over to join our embrace.

  • • •

  WEEKS LATER, I stared at the clock on my phone as I sprinted, kicking myself (metaphorically and physically). I’d been caught up in my work, and was going to be late. Damn. After several more episodes of having to tell Zelda “You’re hurting my feelings,” I had decided to think about ways that I might have been hurting her feelings, or at least, ways I could have been more present for her. Instead of withdrawing or becoming angry, I was determined to be active, to make special time for the two of us. Sometimes being present was just that—being present. I took her out for frozen yogurt. I took her to free concerts in the park. I enrolled Zelda in a new ballet class and made sure I was the one who accompanied her each week. Now, I dashed down the street, grateful that Denise was already there to get her dressed. I arrived at the dance studio just in time, sweating, and Zelda jumped from her stretch circle.

  “Mommy!” She squeezed my legs, reminding me of the excitement I’d felt back in kindergarten when my mom’s glowing buck-toothed smile appeared in the crowd at assemblies and class Shabbats, the events that, in those early years, she always tried to come to.

  “So sorry I’m late. I’ll sit right here,” I said, perching on the bench, ready to make eye contact, to see her, to smile when she looked at me for approval. Eyes might not be hands, I reminded myself, but they too reassured. I couldn’t pretend to be a master chef or have any knowledge of ironing. All I could do as a parent was just be me, but hopefully, with a bit more self-consciousness and flexibility.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, INSTEAD of rocking to Yiddish songs, I told Zelda stories about Princess Zelda and her best friend, Princess Zoe, who lived in adjoining pink and purple castles and ate pink and purple ice cream and dreamed pink and purple dreams. Zelda was enthralled. “And pink mac and cheese!” she added to the menu.

  It struck me again how my mother’s yarns and dolls left me with a passion for characters and surreal worlds. These were the fictions that Eli and I had relied on for years to communicate, to create bonds. To make fun in our family.

  “Mom,” Zelda asked, sitting up. “Does Princess Zelda have a baby sister?”

  “What?” Had she read my mind?

  “Princess Zoe has baby Anabelle. Can we go to the baby store and buy one?”

  “Babies are really expensive.” But also fun, I thought. And incredible. I could do it again. I could. Yes, I could! Eli and I hadn’t lived in the same country in
nearly two decades and were still in touch almost every day. I wanted Zelda to have a sibling, to experience that fundamental friendship. “We’ll talk about it.”

  “Hug, Mommy!” Zelda now asked, startling me. “And another one.” She grabbed me around the neck and pulled me into her.

  “I love you, Mommy,” Zelda said.

  “Me too. I love you so much.”

  “So much.”

  “Smuch.”

  “Smuch.”

  And even though I wanted to stay in that headlock forever, I pulled away after a minute. “Good night, sweetie,” I said, and kissed her madly on the cheek.

  “Ooh, still too wet,” she said, wiping her face with her hand.

  At least she knew what she liked. I hoped that feisty decisiveness was not just a phase, but a positive segment of the survivor gene that ran in my family.

  • TWENTY-SIX •

  ECTOPIC

  New York City, 2013

  “I’m pregnant,” I whispered to Jon across the speckled diner table as I tried to engage Zelda in place mat activities. I smiled. “I can totally feel it in my uterus.”

  “We started trying two days ago,” Jon said. “Literally.”

  “Just like last time . . .” Now that I knew how this whole impregnation thing worked and how insanely fertile we were, I was convinced. Jon and I had recently—very recently—decided to start trying after several doctors had freaked me out about being thirty-six. If you want another child, I wouldn’t wait even a month, my very reasonable new GP advised a few days earlier, handing me a thirty-page document showing the latest fertility research and the rapidly declining quality of my eggs. I pictured yolks turning gray.

  Here we are again, I thought a few days after the diner when I had implantation spotting. I knew it! Only this time, I was in control. I still hadn’t thought through how I’d manage two children, but I was relieved to have succeeded, excited by my continued fecundity. I started calculating due dates, making appointments, planning a new life.