“Are you saying we should let them eat the cupcakes?” asked Karen, looking slightly aghast, both at the idea of refined sugar entering her child’s bloodstream and because doing nothing had never occurred to her.
“Yes,” I said. “Just let it go.” I realized as I said it that “letting it go” might be the best prescription for mothering there was.
With this pronouncement, I felt I had done my duty and wanted to get back, since my own mother would already be worrying that I’d been hit by a car—the all-purpose catastrophe she fears whenever I’m late for anything. I therefore tried to extricate myself from Iris’s grip, but she would not release me, and my heart went out for a moment to the pugnacious Daniel, who had experienced this grip on many occasions.
“But what about the addictive properties of sugar? Don’t you think it’s a slippery slope from sugar to dope to crack cocaine?” asked Karen.
I was trying to frame an answer to this question, but noticed that both women had stopped paying attention to me and were gesticulating over my head at someone. “OK, we can let her go now,” said Karen. Iris let go of my arm and I walked into the lobby.
“Surprise!” everyone yelled.
Yes, it was a surprise party for me. I immediately assumed that my mother was behind it because it combined two things I don’t like: my birthday and any kind of surprise, which tends either to be bad (remember Eleanor’s dictum) or likely to catch me wearing an unflattering outfit. Nonetheless, when you are being feted like this, you have to rise to the occasion or everyone gets annoyed.
“Oh my God!” I therefore said on cue. “I can’t believe it! How did you know?”
It turned out that the idea had actually originated with Pedro, who, for some unknown reason, had access to the birthdays of everyone in the building and who had spoken to the tenants who knew me. My mother had also been commandeered, along with Pauline, to provide the balloons and the cake, which read “Happy Birthday Suzanne from your friends on West 76th Street.” After the hilarity attached to my surprise had died down, Pedro presented me with a locket inscribed with the address of the building, useful in the event that I developed Alzheimer’s and forgot where I lived. Soon everyone was singing “Happy Birthday” with the cheerfulness that comes from being grateful that it is not their birthday being celebrated.
Despite my opposition to such things in principle, I was moved. All these people had made the effort to come downstairs to wish me well. There were Philip and Kurt, the playground mothers, the old Jews (even Mrs. Schwartz with her walker and Brodsky, who was staring at all the women’s boobs), along with some people I’d never seen before but who nonetheless were eager to wish me happy birthday and take a piece of cake.
Stephen, the not-so-wispy math teacher, was there—or at least, happened to be passing through the lobby at the height of the festivities. He seemed distracted, but he nonetheless waited near the front desk to greet me as I negotiated the tide of well-wishers. I had continued to run into him now and then in the elevator and the mailroom, and he had continued to look less and less wispy—indeed, he had not looked wispy at all, though I had tried to think of him this way because this is how I operate, at least according to Dr. Chitturi: I find some negative, often entirely nonexistent characteristic in someone I might like so as to keep said person at arm’s length and thereby deprive myself of achieving the sort of intimacy that I apparently crave but am afraid to experience.
Of course, Stephen’s growing lack of wispiness was also attributable, as I noted before, to his being attached to someone else. I had seen him once in the lobby with the attractive blond, whose role in his life had been confirmed when I sighted him again conversing intensely with her in the Starbucks on Broadway. They were seated at a small table in the corner, their heads close together in the way of people who are hammering out a lifelong relationship. I always assume when I see people leaning close to each other and speaking without interruption for extended periods that they are talking about things like what kind of down payment they can afford on a house and how many children they will have. I can’t think of anything else that would involve such intense concentration. For me, talking to someone at Starbucks progresses by fits and starts, with a lot of staring at the biscotti and trying to decide if I want one, and then trying to figure out what to say while I calculate how many calories I’m going to regret if I order the biscotti with or without macadamia nuts. So when I see people who don’t even glance at the biscotti, I have to imagine that they have jumped to a level of intimacy that I have yet to experience.
If the Starbucks sighting wasn’t enough, I had also seen Stephen hurrying out of the building with the same blond woman a few days later when I came down to check the mail. Pedro, who had become something of a confidante, told me that Stephen Danziger was now often in company with said blond—leaving in the morning and not coming back until the next day. “Let’s hope she lives nearby and he doesn’t have to schlep even further to get to his school in the South Bronx,” noted Pedro, his speech now predictably inflected by the locutions of the old Jews. I didn’t say anything—only registering the fact that I’d lost my chance. The no-longer-wispy Stephen had been snapped up.
On the occasion of my surprise birthday party, however, he lingered near the front desk, and when I finally made my way through the birthday throng to where he was waiting, I noticed that his eyes were a kind of bluish-gray, the color of my father’s, and that his smile was even kinder than I had noticed before. After I greeted him, he took my hand and looked at me a moment with the sort of genuine interest that you rarely see, except from blood relatives who have been conditioned to care about you. “Happy birthday, Suzanne,” he said. The use of my name, I have to say, touched me. In my experience, most people don’t use names with any consideration; they throw them around like arbitrary placeholders. Only occasionally do you find someone who connects the name to the person they’re talking to, which can produce a very novel and personalized effect. Stephen, it appeared, was one of those people.
“I’d like to stay, but I have an appointment and don’t want to be late,” he muttered, which I assumed was code for “I’m deeply involved with a caring but very sexy blond woman, and I don’t want to keep her waiting.” Still, he did hold my hand a fraction longer than was called for—believe me, I’m calibrated to notice these things—which, I assume, was his way of saying “I kind of like you, and if only you’d noticed me earlier—and maybe not pretended to forget my name— who knows what there might have been between us?” Fortunately, I couldn’t concentrate on this missed opportunity and feel as bad about it as I might have since I was preoccupied with having cancer and because Pedro, with the help of my mother, had orchestrated the birthday party currently taking place in the lobby of my building. Thank God for distractions.
“Who’s that?” said my mother, after Stephen had left and she had wended her way to my side. My mother, needless to say, has the eyes of a hawk where men of a certain age are concerned.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Yes, you do. He used your name. I heard him.”
How could my mother have known he used my name when she was across the lobby? Most of the time she is partially deaf, but where she has no business hearing, her hearing is perfect.
Pauline, who had been helping my mother cut the cake, chimed in, “That’s Stephen Danziger. I had him in mind for Suzanne for a while.”
“Really?” said my mother. “Danziger. Maybe he’s related to the kosher foods people. What does he do?”
“He teaches math in a high school in the South Bronx.”
“Hmm,” said my mother doubtfully. “Does he have tenure?”
“I think so.”
“I suppose that’s all right, then. He won’t get rich teaching high school and he might get killed in the South Bronx, but if he has tenure, there’s security. That’s good.”
I said I was relieved that she approved. Now the wedding could proceed unimpeded.
; “Maybe he could transfer to a school in Manhattan,” she noted. “It would be easier for you both.”
“Mom, I don’t even know the man. And he happens to be dating someone else anyway.”
“He’s not married yet, is he?” It was my mother’s philosophy that anyone who hadn’t walked down the aisle was fair game. “Pauline says he would be right for you. Are you saying that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about?”
This is a typical maneuver on my mother’s part: if you don’t agree with her, it means insulting some innocent bystander. In the past, such manipulation would send me into irate sputtering, but this was the kinder and gentler me. I let it go, just as I had suggested that Iris and Karen do with regard to the cupcakes. Instead, I thanked Pedro, put on my Alzheimer’s necklace, and mingled with my well-wishers. It was nice to see how many people I had gotten to know who didn’t actively dislike me, and I had a better time than I would have predicted, though the cake, which was made from whole wheat flour and unrefined sugar, was inedible.
I PAUSE HERE to explain the logistics of my mother’s visit. She had come to “see me through my treatment,” as she put it, and nothing I could say or do would send her back to Santa Fe and her intermediate sculpture classes until she had determined that it was time to go. An obvious problem, however, was where she would stay during the months ahead.
To stay with me was out of the question. Even in my new, more enlightened state, I couldn’t have stood it. I would have killed her. Besides, my apartment, as she herself had always been the first to note, is the size of a shoebox, and her demands in the way of personal amenities are exacting. She requires a great deal of bathroom space, for example, and I have only a small area near the side of the sink with barely enough room for my toothbrush. There is also no floor space where she can lay out the sweaters and hairbrushes that she washes out by hand every night. I don’t have an ironing board or, for that matter, an iron, and I own only two pots.
“What if you want to make a pasta, a sauce, and a vegetable? What do you use?” she asked me.
“First, I would never make three things,” I explained. “And second, everything I make is microwavable, which means I don’t need a pot to begin with.”
In the past, such a statement would have been the prelude to a fight—and my mother might even have run off to Williams-Sonoma and bought me a whole set of kitchenware that I would then have been obliged to donate to the thrift shop on Amsterdam Avenue for the gourmet homeless. But my condition kept her in check, and she contented herself with looking grieved and sighing loudly.
But back to the issue of her lodging. Fortunately for both of us, Eleanor has a very large apartment, with three spacious bathrooms and a well-appointed kitchen, all newly renovated with Ronnie’s ill-gained lucre. Eleanor has known my mother almost as long as I have, but with the salient difference that my mother is not her mother and is therefore a lot more tolerable to her. Eleanor, in fact, kind of likes my mother, or pretends to. It was therefore agreed that she would take her in for the ensuing months. All that stood in the way was the dog.
My mother is one of those people who do not understand the concept of a dog. As she put it: “Why bother? They just eat a lot and make a mess. Then they die and make you feel guilty for not having treated them better.” This, if I took a turn for the worse, could describe her feelings about me, but I didn’t say anything.
Despite her initial resistance, my mother ended up warming to Wordsworth, which was not really surprising. Both my mother and Wordsworth are extremely stubborn, but given that my mother’s IQ is higher, her stubbornness could prevail, which provided her the dual gratification of respecting her antagonist for being like her and reinforcing her superiority by making him bend to her will. If Wordsworth didn’t want to walk, for example, she gave him the sort of look she used to give my father, put him in his crate, and let him stew. Finally, he walked. In other words, Wordsworth was no match for my mother, and very quickly he knew it and did whatever she said. In return, she proclaimed that he was the only dog she had ever known that she could tolerate. She even brushed him so that Eleanor did not have to be yelled at by the groomer on York Avenue. “He has very good hair,” she said, “very soft and manageable, if you take care of it.” I suspected that she thought Wordsworth’s hair was better than my hair.
The little I had of it. My hair had grown sparse over the past several weeks, and it now seemed time for me to buy a wig. Eleanor and I had agreed to go to Wig-a-Little in the Village, for which Eleanor retrieved the discount coupon from the welcome packet that she had filed away in her Kate Spade accordion folder. We trekked downtown and spent a few hours trying on wigs. At one point, Eleanor tried on a black wig in a Prince Valiant style that made her look like Tommy Sadowsky in junior high school. This got us both laughing hysterically, and I think the proprietor of Wig-a-Little would have thrown us out had it not been so clear that I had cancer and therefore had to be indulged, laughter being the best medicine and all that.
After a good deal of raucous giggling, screaming, and passing of wigs back and forth, I finally settled on a straight-haired blondish wig that gave me a sleek if slightly alien look. On several occasions when I wore it, I would catch a glimpse of myself in a store window and not recognize the reflection. The person I saw struck me as quite attractive, someone I might have been envious of in the past.
My mother said the wig looked fine, though she preferred my real hair. This may have been the first time she said she liked something natural about me—an effect blunted by the fact that it was something I no longer had. Leave it to my mother to like my hair when it was gone.
So I was wearing my new wig in the elevator one day when Stephen Danziger happened to get in on the fourth floor. I hadn’t seen him since he had wished me happy birthday during my surprise party in the lobby. As we rode the elevator together, I was again struck by how much better he looked than I had initially thought. It was true that his hairline was receding, which meant that he seemed fated to resort at some point to the depressing comb-over. All men— with the exception of those bushy-haired types who never lose their hair and end up making the women they’re with look balding by comparison—must succumb to the comb-over for an interim period, until they finally arrive at that point where all vanity has been stripped away and they give in to being bald—a moment I could now empathize with, having achieved this state myself. But incipient baldness is not a crime, even if in my younger and greener days I might have viewed it that way—and I couldn’t even say that it was a major detriment to his appearance. He was not a strikingly handsome man, so he didn’t have that much to lose. Nor did he seem inclined to gussy himself up as was the case with Derek, who, I may have neglected to note, was extremely vain and had a large collection of hair- and skin-care products taking up space in his bathroom, not to mention stacks of geometrically patterned sweaters crowding the shelves of his closets. Stephen was also rather thin, even a bit on the bony side, which I prefer to a more muscular physique, which tends to grow paunchy with age. His eyes were a bit bloodshot, which could mean either a taste for drink or a tendency to read in poor light, but given his otherwise wholesome appearance (and his membership in Pauline’s demanding book club), the latter seemed more likely. Once again, I was struck by the color of his eyes, the blue-grey of my father’s, and by the fact that they looked extremely kind.
“Suzanne,” he said as we went down in the elevator on this occasion, “nice to see you again.”
I would have liked to show him that at least I remembered his name, which I had not been able to do at my party, owing to the hubbub. But perhaps as a result of my earlier memory lapse, he quickly beat me to it. “Stephen Danziger,” he announced simply.
“Of course,” I said. “How’s your puppy?” I was pleased to at least have the chance to remember his dog.
“Oh, it wasn’t my dog,” said Stephen. He hesitated as though not sure whether to explain, which I assumed meant that the dog belonged to the b
lond woman with whom he was deeply involved, but he seemed to decide not to say anything, perhaps perceiving that this would be rubbing it in. “What about yours?” he asked with slight amusement. Whether he was recalling my difficulty with Wordsworth or my infatuation with Philip was hard to say. “Have you gotten him under control?”
I told him that the dog wasn’t mine either and was back where he belonged.
“It’s hard work having a dog,” said Stephen pleasantly, “especially when you’re used to living alone.”
This struck me as a cogent remark. I wondered if the blond had asked him to move in, if only to help with the walking of said dog—I’ve heard of relationships built on less.
We had reached the lobby by now, and Pedro signaled to me that he had my dry cleaning, dropped off by my mother on her way to her hair appointment (in one of her typical acts of intervention, she had taken to going through my hamper and bringing my “more delicate clothes” to the dry cleaners). I was hoping to say a few more words to Stephen, but he glanced at his watch and looked rushed. He did shoot a glance at my wig. Men are notoriously clueless about hair, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to say: “I like your hair”— only he didn’t, which led me to believe that he may have discerned something and felt it best to keep his mouth shut.
MY MOTHER WAS now my companion when I went for my chemo treatment. Not that I had a choice in the matter. She decided to come with me, and that was that. This has been the story of my life. Did I mention that my mother was the only parent chaperone at my high-school prom? Not that I would have had a good time with Ian Horowitz, who wasn’t my first choice for a prom date, but it’s the principle of the thing. Having your mother at your prom is as good as signaling that this culminating moment in your high-school career is going to be spoiled right off the bat.
I assumed that she would now spoil chemo for me; that is, if such a thing is possible. But things didn’t turn out as badly as I expected. Maybe the key is to get her in the vicinity of toxic chemicals—the two cancel each other out.
Suzanne Davis gets a life Page 15
