Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

A few nights before I moved, I had a going-away party and had been directing Jason on how to make the margaritas, where to set up tables, when a young woman, a guest of a friend, came up to me. “I just heard him call you Mom,” she said. “Oh, my God. I thought it was so cool—older woman, younger man, and she orders him around. But he’s your son? Oh, my God, you don’t look old enough!”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “So cool,” she said.

  Jason’s girlfriend was the D.J., and near midnight Jase and I disco-danced to “Stayin’ Alive,” from Saturday Night Fever. (We’d seen the movie five times when I was a senior at college, and Jason and I had memorized all the dances.) But we weren’t in sync. Jason made a V with his fingers and touched under his eyes: “Look in my eyes. Remember? Hold eye contact,” which was exactly what I used to tell him to do back when he was nine. Once our eyes locked, he wound me out and reeled me in without a misstep. People applauded, which made us giggle; but then, when the dance was over, Jason wouldn’t look in my eyes again.

  I must have been determinedly unconscious, because it seems impossible for me not to have made the connection: that Jason was angry at me for leaving. In Orient, I’d finally given him the home he never had. I’d laid down fresh sheets, then placed towels smelling of the outdoors by the beds before he and his friends drove out from the city on Friday nights. When they arrived, we sat down to pastas I’d made with herbs and vegetables I’d harvested from the garden. Mornings I made pancakes with a dash of rye flour to add texture, and sprinkled berries on top. Jason and I and our friends collaborated on fabulous feasts we served on long tables out on the lawn. We read books under trees, played tennis, swam, sat out on the dock.

  When I moved, I took that all away. Jason had called me only once the whole year I’d lived in Santa Monica.

  I thought distance would be a natural and necessary evolution. Jason was twenty-eight, and we’d been a couple most of his life. We’d both conducted a string of monogamies, and I’d been afraid that the reason we couldn’t get close enough to stick with our lovers was because our mother-son connection was too strong. (But was the truth really closer to this: I’d moved away from Jason for the same reason I’d moved away from all my men, because I’d rather be alone with myself, because intimacy scared me?) Whatever my reasons, I was never one to pass up the dramatic gesture, and so had put a whole country between us.

  When I’d called Jason from Los Angeles, conversation was like pulling teeth, so I’d stopped calling. When I hadn’t called for two months and finally phoned on a Sunday early in spring, Jason announced that he’d broken up with his girlfriend—a young woman I’d been fond of, a woman I know Jason loved. Then he said, “I’m in therapy.”

  “Jase, honey, that’s great.” I’d been campaigning for Jason to take another stab at therapy since he’d quit after one session when he was an adolescent, protesting that the therapist had told him he was clay to be molded. “It’ll hurt more before you feel better,” I told my son. “But it’s so worth it. I’m proud of you, Jase. It’s really brave.”

  “I can’t get close,” he said. “I always break up.”

  “I know. I do, too.”

  “As soon as a woman falls in love with me, I get repulsed. . . . It’s because of you.”

  This was what I’d suspected. But then he added, “I can’t trust anybody. I never felt safe with you.”

  A knife in my heart.

  “I didn’t feel safe with myself,” I said after I could breathe.

  “Yeah, well. . . .”

  Our first New York apartment had been in Little Italy in a building where our women neighbors had been born, raised their children, and never left, old ladies who leaned on pillows on their windowsills, watching our comings and goings. It had felt safe to both Jason and me. Three years later, we moved to a larger place, a roach-infested fifth-floor walk-up on the corner of Twelfth Street and Avenue A. It was a dump, but at least we had our own monkish bedrooms, and I could afford the place. I found out soon after we’d moved in, however, that our slum landlord turned the heat off at midnight every evening, and didn’t turn it back on till six the next morning. Jason and I didn’t have enough blankets our first year there, and a few times we had to double up to keep warm.

  On the bright side, there were also two Polish coffee shops, Leshko’s and the Odessa, a few blocks down Avenue A, where Jase and I could eat half a roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and a vegetable for two dollars and fifty cents. St. Mark’s Cinema had double features for three dollars, and my imagined friend the crack-house guard, with a meat cleaver in his belt, had a vested interest in keeping the street safe from rapists and thieves, which meant I could walk home from work or a bar even at two in the morning and still feel safe.

  I used to fancy that that guard looked after Jason and me, but I doubt that was true. In any case, he wouldn’t have been on duty when I came home one Halloween, because it was still daylight. It was 1981, the year I’d turned thirty-one and Jason had turned thirteen. It was our third year in New York, and I’d just slaved eight hours on a rush job at a firm where I usually worked evenings three or four times a week, typing computer code on an ancient word processor as big as a desk. The job only paid six dollars an hour, but I paid myself more by keeping track of my own hours, and often would claim six when I’d worked only three, then spent an hour or two on my own writing—an occasional unfinished short story, or documenting scenes from my real life, writing letters, composing very short poems.

  Jason had called me before I’d left work, when he’d come home from school and tried to turn on the TV. “The electricity’s off. Did you pay the bill?” he asked on the phone, accusingly. Jason used to say, just to check, “We’re more like brother and sister than mother and son, right, Ma?”

  “Right, son,” I’d say.

  He was in a constant fret about money, and whenever I went to a bar, he expected an accounting of how much money I’d blown.

  I told Jason I’d paid the electric bill, then hung up the phone, hoping I wasn’t lying—and that the wiring in our tenement building hadn’t shorted out. My heart sank as I thought that I should get a real job and properly provide for my child—because I couldn’t do it. I wanted to be a writer and I was going to be a writer. I’d never hitchhiked to California, or backpacked through Europe, never seen the sunrise after a night of wanton fun without the sobering weight of knowing my son would wake up soon. I’d sacrificed my youth to motherhood. I would not sacrifice my ambition, too. I nude-modeled for art classes, collected money at Persian-rug auctions, typed, and had the illusion that my days were more or less my own. But I was exhausted all of the time.

  Jason called me back in an hour to say the electricity had been turned on, but the effect of the worrisome news, combined with staring at the old-style bright-green computer screen, with brighter-green letters, for eight hours had put me in a snit.

  When I walked into the door of our apartment it was five in the afternoon and already getting dark. The garbage was knocked over in my path; the television blaring as always from Jason’s room; dirty dishes toppled in the sink; a crusty pan, spills, and a spoon stuck to the stove; and Jason’s schoolbooks had been dumped in the tub (there were no counters, and the bathtub was next to the stove). My heart drummed a war dance in my chest; my breath came in spurts. Jason was paid five dollars a week to do the dishes and take down the garbage. If I had to work debilitating jobs to support us, the least Jason could do was some housework. But all my son wanted to do was slouch in front of the TV—like my parents. And I thought I’d escaped from them. I flipped into a rage.

  “You didn’t take out the garbage?” I screamed, my upper lip curling like a dog’s.

  “I was gonna,” I heard from his room. “I didn’t know you’d be home this early.”

  “Do it now. And the dishes, or we’re not going to the Halloween parade.”

  That got him hopping. I stomped to my bedroom past the bust of Mary and baby Jesus on th
e living-room wall and slammed the door behind me. I lay down on my unmade bed for half an hour, exhausted and not wanting to move. But I’d promised Jason we’d go to the parade. Jason’s voice may have begun to crack, but he was still only a kid, and it was Halloween. Other kids didn’t have to do housework. Other kids had parents in their forties, who socialized with one another and arranged get-togethers with their kids. Other kids were probably putting on costumes and going to parties. I felt heart-sorry for my son, stuck with a mother like me; and there were periods when I tried to act kind and patient, made mashed potatoes and baked chocolate-chip cookies. I even set a time to play chess every night, and tried to stick to it, but it never lasted very long. I was always so tired, and lazy. If I didn’t have to work those mind-dumbing jobs, I’d have more energy to clean the house, and the mess wouldn’t weigh on me like a ten-ton truck. Maybe if I had more solitude, more time to write, more fun . . . But I might as well have been saying: Maybe if I met the man in the moon.

  I washed my face and put on makeup, then pulled on my only winter coat, a raccoon I’d had for ten years, which had begun to break apart like a glacier in spring, and tried to call gingerly, “Come on, turn off the TV. Time to go.”

  Jason was at the door, his hands in his parka, his tongue poking at a tooth at the side of his mouth. He’d had a toothache for a week. Next week I’d have enough for the dentist.

  “You’re not going to wear a hat?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah.” He grabbed his sock cap from a peg on the wall and pulled it down over his ears. He’d recently turned thirteen, and fuzz had begun appearing on his upper lip. His eyes were gray-blue, big, and a little sleepy. He really was a very sweet kid.

  When we rounded First Avenue onto Fourteenth Street, Jason said, “You’re always miserable.”

  “I am not always miserable. . . . Am I?”

  “Yes, you are, and I should know. You’re grouchy for an hour after you come home. I dread you coming home, Ma.”

  “Sorry, Jase,” I said, meaning it, and incapable of changing my behavior at the same time.

  We met up with a few of my friends and huddled together in the bitter windy cold on the curb at Sixth Avenue to watch the parade. Jason’s favorite was the group of twenty or so gay guys all dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Afterwards my friends invited me to a party in somebody’s loft. I wanted to get drunk, laugh, relax, meet people, so I sent Jason home with my locksmith friend Steve, who lived near us and wasn’t going to the party.

  No surprise, I was hungover the next day, and wrote for only one hour. Then after I made Jason and myself some spaghetti, I commanded him to get the dishes done before I got home, and a few minutes later on my way to work, I was stopped dead in my tracks.

  I was about to cross Twenty-third Street, which I’d crossed hundreds of times, only this time for some reason I forgot it was a two-way street. I looked only one way, stepped onto the road, heard the blare of a horn, turned, and was blinded by car lights coming at me from five feet away. I thought, I’m going to be hit by a car—and was hit by a car. Time turned liquid as my hip hit the fender and I floated through the air. My pants ripped, and one shoe tore from my foot, then I landed on the asphalt, horns blaring and cars skidding around me. I lay in a fetal position, and made my body as small as I could as I very calmly thought, “Now, I’m going to be hit by another car and die.”

  I didn’t think of God, my life didn’t flash before my eyes. In my more secular version of shock, the streetlights did a dance in the air above me, the breeze tickled my skin, and the faces that bent over me made me giggle. My foot was already beginning the swelling that wouldn’t end until it resembled a football, but I felt no pain. When the cops came, I apologized. “It’s my fault, it’s my fault. What a moron! I stepped in front of a car.” Then I sang “Another One Bites the Dust” as the buildings receded from the back window of the ambulance; and when the words “no insurance” popped into my head, they popped right back out.

  Then I lay for hours on a gurney in the emergency room, bantering first with the cops, who’d returned to make a report. One of them snapped the elastic on my panties where they showed through the rip in my 1950s pedal pushers, and I didn’t mind. Then I joked with the nurses (“What do you call an idiot who steps in front of a car? . . . . Pancake”); the doctor (“If my foot’s broken do I get drugs? Opium? Do hospitals give opium?”); the X-ray technician (“I’ve been waiting for this all my life: Xerox me”).

  By dawn the adrenaline had worn off and nothing was funny. I was given the good news that my foot was not broken, just a bit ravaged, and then I hopped, literally, into a cab, grateful for the seven dollars in my pocket, and directed the driver to my address on Twelfth Street and Avenue A. I watched the gray city out the window as I remembered, mortified, laughing with a young woman who’d come into the room where I was waiting in the hospital. She and her husband had been in a boating accident; she’d thrown the boat into reverse by mistake, cutting off his leg and severing his balls. Her husband had handed her his leg before he lifted himself into the boat, his testicles cupped in his hand, trying to keep them in place. I didn’t get the sense that the woman had been in love. She was a young, beautiful Puerto Rican woman with rippling black hair and bright coral lipstick, with whom I’d felt simpatico. Her husband was old and owned a furniture store. She’d laughed too and said, “My mother says, ‘At least he still has a tongue.’”

  This was not funny anymore. This was proof of just how cruel the world could be and how mean a person I was. I pressed my shoulder into the door of my building, then sat on the first dirty step, then the next, all the way up the five flights to my apartment, and my foot began to throb like the bass in that song from the early seventies, “D.O.A.” I had a prescription to buy painkillers and instructions to purchase crutches; but I had no health insurance to cover anything, no money—except for the fifty dollars I’d saved to bring my son to the dentist—and no idea how the hell I was going to get back to work to pay the rent and feed Jason and me.

  Jason was asleep in his room when I let myself in and hopped through the tidied kitchen into the living room. My son had been alone all night and didn’t know it. What would have happened to him if I’d died? How would he have even found out? I didn’t carry a pocketbook or wallet, or a picture of him. I hung my keys on a chain around my neck, and carried my money in my pocket, like a kid. I’d been in a thirteen-year-long rebellion against my fate and had never grown up.

  As I lifted my crippled foot onto the futon, my eyes rested on the bust of the Virgin and Child. I’d bought it for twenty dollars at a thrift store when we’d moved in. Twenty dollars had been a fortune at the time, and I hardly noticed the bust was there. Now, as I sat crippled on the sofa and stared at it, a thought appeared in my mind: I wish I could believe. Then it disappeared just as quickly, as I wondered how I could have spent so much money on such a stupid thing. At the time, I’d thought I was simply imitating the aesthetic of my building, where everyone was from Puerto Rico. The same reason I’d painted the rooms the colors of Easter eggs and cut my hair like Louise Brooks or Cleopatra. I was all about style, and I loved kitsch. I was like kitsch: all surface, out of context, trying desperately to stand out, nothing but show. Mary’s image on my wall was a joke, a kitschy reference to an impossibility, an iconic ideal mother I could never be, the type of mother I scoffed at: a passive, sexless, adoring—or weeping, wounded, and suffering—mama.

  Mary was the opposite of me. I was more like Eve, the bad girl fooled by a snake, the fallen innocent who’d disobeyed the Father and let loose a Pandora’s box of woe. So why wasn’t Eve on my wall?

  Somewhere under my bed, stored in a cardboard box, was my other Mary: a little silver relief of her holding Jesus, their faces painted flat inside of a three-dimensional silver casing—with my and my ex-boyfriend Nigel’s faces pasted on top. Nigel had been my first boyfriend in the city and the nadir of my life. He’d taken pictures of me in lacy panties straddling the blade of a
table saw. Then, at an art show at an old S&M bar down on Tenth Avenue, we’d hung that picture next to the disfigured relief of Jesus and Mary. At the opening, someone had written in red lipstick under the diptych, “This Is Insulting to Women.”

  The comment shook me up. I’d thought of myself as a feminist and hadn’t the slightest idea what we’d been trying to say with those pictures. As I hadn’t the slightest idea, really, what I’d been trying to say when I’d hung Mary and her Baby on my wall.

  I looked at her gazing adoringly at her Son as the radiator hissed alive and trucks began to rumble down the avenue; then, as I heard Jason move on his bed, I panicked. What was I going to tell him? He would know right away I couldn’t go to work. He’d be worried about money. I wouldn’t be able to fix his tooth.

  I hobbled into bed, my foot throbbing so hard my head pulsed, and hid under the covers. I’d pretend to be sleeping when Jason left for school. I’d figure something out by the time he came home.

  The young man who’d hit me had insurance, which reimbursed me for my medical expenses as well as the money I’d have made if I’d been able to work. The near-death experience had been a wake-up call; this isn’t the warm-up anymore, this is the ball game, I kept repeating to myself. Holed up in my apartment, I began to write like it would save me. I found a job typing on Wall Street for the same hours but twice the money, and with the writing I’d done while I was recuperating, I applied to the MFA program in writing at Columbia University. I’d have to take out a gigantic loan, but thought it would be worth the gamble—plus, Jason and I would have medical insurance.

  At Columbia I wrote only autobiographical stories that confused even me. One such tidbit: On Valentine’s Day, while her boyfriend, Martin, waits for her with a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket, “Mattie” runs into an old flame on the street, checks into a hotel with him and his wife, and participates in a ménage à trois. In workshop, when my teacher and fellow students asked, “Why would she do that?”, I had no answer. I had no insight, no wisdom, just incident after tragic incident—so many that it was comic. But I wasn’t laughing. There was no understanding my own behavior, and lately, there was no getting out of bed. I went to my job; I went to classes; I forced myself to write sometimes. But the rest of the time I was in bed, picturing hypodermic needles sticking my ass, bricks falling on my head, clubs beating my chest. The world was a cruel place, I was cruel, and I was afraid of myself.