He got up from his chair and followed me. “Lili seems in good spirits,” he said.
I ran the warm water and began washing while he dried. “She is tonight. May it continue.” I crossed my fingers.
He crossed his fingers too. Neil was Lili’s biggest fan. He called her after every meet for a stride-by-stride account of her race.
“How’s Big Al?” I asked. Jenny’s father, Al, was a hulking, broad-shouldered man with a booming voice like hers. He’d entered the final stages of lung cancer and now weighed less than she did.
“Sliding downhill at warp speed. He doesn’t have long.”
“God, that was fast. I’m so sorry.”
“Hard when your only parent gets sick.” He picked up the challah plate and swiped his towel over it.
“I talked to Mom before you came over,” I said.
His jaw tensed. “So you know she canceled her tour.”
“Probably a good thing.”
“Probably.”
Neil and I knew that our mother was not the type to be herded by a chirpy guide or endure countless dinner conversations with widows and divorcees who would be seduced by her stubborn beauty and interest in their lives. Unwilling to divulge anything about herself, she’d steal away to read her historical fiction and biographies of dead presidents, which would only make them vie for her attention more, but we both knew that she hadn’t canceled the trip because she couldn’t handle traveling with a group.
“Neil, she’s not….” I searched for the word. “Herself.”
“I know.”
“She thought you were Norman.” I could barely speak his name. Any mention of my uncle had always been taboo in our house.
“She calls me Norman all the time now.”
“What does she say?” My mother’s secrets still had a power over me.
“Asks me how I’m feeling, obsessively. Tells me she misses me.” He shrugged. My mother was never the gushy type.
“That’s weird.” I told him about her instructing me to cover my head for Mrs. Kessler’s funeral.
He put down a dish and stared at me. “Mrs. Kessler?”
“Long story.”
“Your teacher?”
“Yes, but we can talk about that later.”
“Her test results came back this afternoon,” he said, concentrating on the soap cascading down a blue and yellow ceramic platter Rose had brought us from Madrid.
“Whose test results?” Lili asked. Neither Neil nor I had heard her enter the kitchen. Even with her bum ankle, she moved like a cat and often startled me with her sudden appearances.
Neil turned off the water and looked her in the eye. “Your mom and I were talking about your grandma.”
“Is she okay?” Lili asked as she grabbed two of Jenny’s brownies.
“She’s having some memory issues, sweetie,” Neil said.
“We’re sorting it out,” I added, using the royal “we,” though I hadn’t made a single phone call to her doctor.
Lili’s eyes traveled from Neil to me. She looked as though she was going to ask a follow-up question, but instead she took a bite of brownie. “Man, Aunt Jenny rocks the brownie,” she said, grabbing another one. “For Ethan,” she told us through a mouthful of chocolate, and left the room.
I looked at Neil, my heart racing. “And? What did the results say?”
“The cholesterol medication is not the culprit.”
“Then what is it?”
“Alzheimer’s, dementia maybe. They don’t know for sure yet, but she can’t live alone.”
I scrubbed brisket detritus off the bottom of the Pyrex dish until I was able to ask, “Can’t Greg help her out?”
“She needs more care than a helpful neighbor can provide.” I glanced at Neil and saw my father’s face, the long upper lip and almond-shaped eyes. “I’m going to bring her here. I’m driving up after services tomorrow.”
I felt as if he’d dropped a bookshelf on my chest. By the time Rosh Hashanah ended, my mother and I would be living in the same city for the first time in more than thirty years. I didn’t like to consider that Neil wasn’t just my protector, he was my mother’s too. I was acting like a big baby, but I couldn’t help it. During the early days of our exile from the Schines’ shul, it had been Neil and me against the world, an alliance I counted on.
“Are you going to say something?” His tone was gentle.
“I … time for dessert.” After dinner, I settled Rose and Artie in the guest room and pretended to read. Last month, I’d been enthusiastic about my book club’s pick, the story of a woman who travels through Africa in search of herself. Now her navel-gazing annoyed me.
Sam turned off the light. “Let’s get some shut-eye, honey.”
“Can’t.”
“What’s up?” He held his arm out and I nestled against him.
“Neil is moving my mother here,” I said.
He stroked my back. “We’ll figure it all out.”
“I wish I had your confidence.” We were slipping back into our default pattern, where he consoled and I questioned.
I rolled over, and he stroked my thigh the way I liked. I kissed him, and he moved his hand over my belly and under the elastic of my pajama bottoms. I wiggled out of them and pulled off his boxers. “Come here,” I said.
“Let me touch you.” Sam was a considerate and efficient lover.
“Tonight I just want you close to me,” I said, pulling him on top of me and inside of me, hoping he could travel up through my pelvis, belly, lungs, to caress my heart.
When we were done, he tried again to touch me, but I held his hand in mine until he told me that he loved me and drifted off to sleep.
I lay awake, imagining my mother in her house in Steven’s Point, alone and scared and smoking in one of her silk bathrobes even though she quit years ago. I pictured the crisp white kitchen curtains unwashed and dingy from her cigarette smoke, the Oriental rugs that I now knew to be authentic stained with mud from her gardening boots, and her guest bathroom devoid of the lavender-scented soaps in the shapes of roses and seashells.
The next morning, we piled into Sam’s Suburban and chatted breezily during our short drive to Temple Micah. We rarely went to services beyond the High Holidays. Sam and Lili were too antsy, and I’d never quite gotten over feeling like an outsider here. Nevertheless, we still couldn’t walk two feet without running into a student, parent, client, or friend. Sam led us to our seats as if he were the president walking down the aisle of the congressional chamber on his way to deliver his first State of the Union address.
“He wasn’t voted Deerfield High’s Most Likely to Succeed for nothing,” Rose kvelled audibly as she observed this outpouring of affection for her son. Sam’s brother had never quite launched, and so Sam carried the burden of being Rose and Artie’s golden boy, and in turn the quiet assumption that he would serve that role in every arena of his life. He did not disappoint.
We approached Sheri and her family. Sheri used to joke about Lili marrying one of her two sons, but I couldn’t see her with either of them. Lili had had only one boyfriend, and she liked him because he was “out of the box.” Last year for Valentine’s Day he wrote an acrostic poem using her full name—Lili Rebecca Blumfield—and baked her a red velvet cake.
Sheri kissed everyone and motioned me to sit in the empty aisle seat next to her. “What do you think of the dress?” she whispered.
I examined the dress she’d bought at Anthropologie during one of our shopping trips last July. “Fantastic.”
She patted her stomach. “Looks much better with the Spanx.”
I loved Sheri. She’d given me no choice, with her humor and her persistent generosity and attention to our friendship.
“Hey, Debbie said you didn’t respond to her evite to the break fast.”
“Right, right. I’ll do it later.” For the past ten years, we’d been attending the same Yom Kippur break fast, consisting of friends we’d met through Sheri. We rotated h
osting. I nodded toward my family, settling into their seats a few rows over, and got up to join them. “I better go.”
If Sheri had her way we’d spend the entire service gossiping. Unlike the arrangement at the Schines’ shul, here we sat in plain view of the rabbi, whom I saw every day in the parking lot, and I felt self-conscious if I didn’t pay attention.
I walked down the aisle and slid into my open seat, with Lili between Sam and me. She’d had a bat mitzvah, so she knew to turn the pages at all the right places and inch toward the aisle when the cantor approached us so she could kiss the Torah with her prayer book. During the rabbi’s sermon, she sidled up against me. The hypnotic sensation I’d felt during Mrs. Kessler’s tahara returned, ferrying me back to the women’s section of the Schines’ sanctuary, where my mother would put her pearls against my cheek and bring them to her lips the way the men kissed the Torah with the stringy fringes of their prayer shawls.
I draped my hand over Lili’s wrist, and her pulse beat against the tips of my fingers as I tried not to think about what made me uncomfortable about Temple Micah: women wearing sleeveless blouses to services, the ark designed by an elite New York artist, and the cantor’s operatic treatment of the melodies. Today I succumbed to my longing for the wailing cantors and familiar melodies of the Schines’ shul.
Our handsome, clean-shaven rabbi invited congregants to Doctor’s Park to join him for Tashlich, the ritual of casting bread symbolic of our sins into the water. Rabbi Schine used to take us to Atwater Beach, where the odd sunbather would stare at his black hat and payis, the forelocks he curled up and bobby-pinned to his temples. “We throw our sins into a body of water containing fish. A net can catch a fish as unexpectedly as a sin can catch you,” he told me before I knew what a real sin looked like.
Just before Lili pulled away from me, Mr. Rosen blew the shofar, the rich cry from the ram’s horn that reverberated through our bodies with such force and wholeness that I wondered if my mother, miles away, felt it too.
8
My mother arrived in town a few days before Lili’s surgery. The plan was that she would stay with Neil and Jenny until a bed opened up at Lakeline Assisted Living, a facility located only a few miles from both of our houses. This arrangement could last for days or months.
Neil phoned to check in while Lili was in surgery. I told him that I was a wreck about her undergoing anesthesia. Sam had lost feeling in his legs for three days after a routine hernia operation.
“Please distract me. How’s Mom?” I thought of the old joke about getting rid of a stomachache by having someone clock you on the head.
“Disoriented from the move. And….” He was hiding something from me. “What?” I asked anxiously.
“Big Al is in hospice.” He sounded overwhelmed.
“How’s Jenny?”
“Not good.”
In the short silence that hung between us, I could practically hear him trying to form the question that neither one of us wanted him to ask.
“I’ll wait until Lili is home from the hospital, but then I want you to take Mom while Jenny and I say goodbye to her father.” Without seeing him, I knew he was thrusting his tongue into his cheek, as he did when he was nervous.
“You’re kidding, right?” My voice was shrill. I felt as though I was trying to get to the finish line of a marathon and he was asking me for a piggyback ride.
“No, I’m not.”
“Neil, I kind of have my hands full over here. Lili is in surgery this very second.”
“Guess what, Barbara. So do I,” he snapped. We hadn’t fought like this since we were kids.
“Okay, Neil. Okay.”
“The world doesn’t revolve around your drama with Mom.”
His words were an openhanded slap across my face. Neil had always understood how my mother’s antics affected me, and his admonishment made me feel like I’d been a big whiner all along.
“Sorry, that was shitty,” he said.
“Shitty, but true.” These days, my relationships with pretty much everyone felt off, and I couldn’t afford to be at odds with Neil of all people.
“I better let you go. Give Lili a hug.”
“Okay,” I mumbled as I pondered the possibility of taking on my mother’s care. I’d been an excellent nurse to Rose, and I certainly had experience with fixing my mother scrambled eggs and toast on trays and checking on her when it got too quiet so I could put out her cigarette in case she’d dozed off mid-puff. Once she almost burned the house down. But I was a little older than Lili when I’d last taken care of her, and neither Neil nor the rebbetzin had the right to expect this of me, particularly now. Or maybe Neil did. He’d carried the bulk of my mother’s care for years. I couldn’t think straight.
“What was that all about?” Sam asked.
I rubbed my forehead and sighed. “I’ll tell you later. Let’s see what Felix has to say.”
Felix was walking toward us in his scrubs, smiling. I teared up when he told me that everything had gone well and that Lili had handled the anesthesia like a champ. We followed him to the recovery room, where we found Lili with her hands folded neatly over her lap, her ankle wrapped in layers of gauze and bandages. She gave us a woozy smile.
“Hi, Mommy,” she said, slurring her words.
“Hi, baby. You did great.” I tapped her good knee a little too hard.
“Ouch.” She flinched. She wasn’t paralyzed, thank God.
Sam and I sat on the chairs next to her bed.
Lili patted her stomach. “I’m starving.”
“No solids for a while. Do you want me to get you some juice?” Sam asked.
Sam had talked Felix into keeping her overnight so she could be monitored for any ill effects from the anesthesia. Usually he talked me out of my fears, but given his experience, he’d felt cautious, too. Lili was assigned to a private room, and we all watched Mama Mia! on TV. I tried to concentrate on Meryl Streep’s love triangle, but my conversation with Neil gnawed at me, and I couldn’t get comfortable in the room, in my chair, in my skin. The letter from the rebbetzin had unearthed my relentless desire for my mother to show up, to comfort me in the aftermath of Mrs. Kessler’s death, and now to arrive in this hospital room and tell me that Lili would return to her old self in no time.
Longing for my mother was a dangerous business. The last time I’d fully submitted to it, I was in the midst of delivering Lili, losing pints of blood and then my womb. I called out my mother’s name, from instinct and memory. She came.
She took the bus from Steven’s Point and arrived at the hospital with a pale yellow baby blanket she’d knitted. My head was fuzzy from the Percocet, and I almost pinched her to make sure she was real. When she asked Sam if he’d like to go home and clean up and get some clothes, he looked at me tentatively, and I nodded that it was okay. Enough time had passed. Abracadabra, she morphed into the mother who’d once known to bring me a lozenge before I told her that my throat hurt and who’d called the principal after she heard that the playground bully had shoved sand up my nose.
She held a straw to my lips while I took small sips of water. I drifted in and out of a hazy slumber, periodically flinging open my eyes to see if she was still there. She swaddled Lili in the yellow blanket, and my baby girl curled into her grandmother’s boyish torso as if it were a bassinet custom made for her. “She looks just like you did, Sweet B,” my mother murmured. For a second, I was her Sweet B, warm and safe in her slender arms.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, and she responded by kissing me on the forehead. She still bathed in lavender but no longer smelled of cigarettes.
My mother slipped out while I dozed off. That night I started hemorrhaging and asked Sam to call her. She promised him she’d be there in a few minutes.
She never showed.
The next morning Neil visited me, but he couldn’t look at me as he told me that he’d just dropped our mother off at the Badger Bus depot, that she feared she was catching a bug and didn’t w
ant to get the baby sick. She’d call me later, he promised, fussing with the zipper on his windbreaker. She didn’t call. I was finally done. Well, almost. I called her the first time Lili spiked a fever but hung up after a few rings. And maybe a few times after that, too.
A month later, I joined a Mommy and Me group, and in the musty basement of a church, over banana bread and bottled water, we shared war stories about our birthing experiences. I didn’t mention the blood transfusions or my ruptured uterus; instead, I told the story of my mother standing me up in the hospital. I told it slow and cold.
My tale prompted other women to tell far worse tales of their mothers’ transgressions. The raw anger and sadness in their voices stirred me, and the ultimate war story about my mother bubbled up from a place deep inside, to my tongue and lips. I opened my mouth but stopped short when I noticed that our babies were suckling, drinking in breast milk tainted with bitterness. I didn’t want that for Lili.
I unlatched my baby from my nipple, held her close, and promised that I wouldn’t deny her a relationship with her grandmother, no matter what. I’d always desperately wanted a grandmother. I also vowed never to tell my war stories. I’d been using them to shield myself from the temptation of letting my mother back inside. My shield was losing its armor. Now here I stood on the lip of the mikveh, my hatless mother slipping, slipping, and me both wanting her to steady me and wanting to follow her into the waters.
“Look, Mom, it’s your favorite part,” Lili said, returning me to the present.
Meryl Streep was singing about time slipping through her fingers as she combed Amanda Seyfried’s hair, as my mother had combed mine, as I had combed Lili’s. Crap. Tears gushed from my eyes.
Sam looked over at Lili, and they both laughed at my sappiness.
“I’ve got a few years until I flee the island, Mom,” Lili said as Sam handed me a tissue.
Out of solidarity, we ate bad hospital food with Lili. From the way Sam was fondling his Blackberry, I could tell he was itchy to tend to a client who had been hectoring him all day. I waited for Lili to fall asleep, and then I grabbed my purse and pulled him out into the hall to talk.
Washing the Dead Page 11
