by A M Homes
Norman calls asking if I’ve “got any big plans.” He says he is sending something; he has spoken with Ellen about what would be a good gift and he’s putting it in the mail—insured, overnight express, to be sure it gets there in time.
I spend the official day in hiding. I turn off the phone, I don’t answer the buzzer.
Later I go downstairs and find that people have left me flowers and gifts, similar to the way strangers leave offerings at scenes of tragic accidents. My friends have created a veritable altar to the birthday girl: an FTD Pick Me Up bouquet, a get-well card, and so on.
Norman sent a small heart-shaped gold locket, the kind that snaps open and you put two pictures in, the kind that you’d give a little girl. It is such a strange gift for a thirty-two-year-old. Is this jewelry? It is more like pre-jewelry, like a training bra. (For Christmas he will send me a thin cashmere sweater—which will make me wonder, is this the kind of “cashmere sweater” Ellen was referring to?)
Ellen sends a birthday card meant for a small child—shaped like a teddy bear, signed, “Love, Mommy Ellen.” She sends a kiddie card, a silky nightgown negligee like something Mrs. Robinson would wear, and a box of homemade candy from her favorite Atlantic City candy store. The chocolate is thick, heavy, rolled, filled—it looks like it could bend your mind. I can’t keep the things she sends me and I can’t throw them out either. I give the chocolate away. That evening I make each of my friends take a piece, like communion wafers, bits of the mother. “Here,” I say pushing the box forward, refusing to try one myself. “Take one,” and I watch to see how it goes down.
Christmas Eve—it’s a year since this started unfolding. I’m on the train to Washington—it’s packed, the mood is festive, the luggage racks are bursting with ornately wrapped packages. I’m bringing presents even though my mother has told me we don’t celebrate Christmas. The fact is we don’t celebrate Hanukkah either.
We handle the holidays by pretending they aren’t happening, by ignoring them. We hold our breath—it’ll pass. An invisible cloud hangs over the house, a depressed charcoal gray, like the set for a Eugene O’Neill play.
Some part of me thinks it’s not hard to have a decent holiday; you choose what holiday you like and you celebrate. Every year I become all the more determined that I will do it for myself, I will make my own holiday.
The winter I turned nine, I was fixated on having a Christmas tree. It made no sense to me that all up and down the block every house except ours had a tree.
“We’re Jewish,” my mother said. “Jews don’t have trees.”
“We weren’t always Jewish, were we?” Until then we’d always celebrated Christmas, a treeless Christmas, but Christmas nonetheless. I remembered leaving a plate of cookies for Santa, waking to find it empty, replaced by a long red stocking hanging from the fireplace, an orange bulging in the toe, walnuts spilling out the top, presents on the hearth. It wasn’t my imagination. Until then we’d been like everyone else, and then suddenly we were different.
“I was wrong,” my mother said. “It was my error. Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, we have Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.”
“But the Solomons next door are Jewish too, and they have a tree.”
“That’s their problem,” she said.
It wasn’t as though we were especially religious. On Yom Kippur, the highest of the holy days, the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting, we paused only momentarily for God to count us in and then ate a late breakfast. But now, without warning, Christmas had changed its name to Hanukkah. It came early and lasted for eight days, like a plague.
We gathered around a menorah and lit the candles—no one knew the prayer; instead we said thanks. And thanks a lot. And is it returnable?
After the fourth night my brother refused to participate. “I’ve had more than enough,” he said, refusing to leave his room.
From my bedroom window I could see the neighbors’ tree twinkling with glass icicles, miniature white lights, colored balls, tinsel.
On the day after Christmas, my mother took me to the library. Next to the library was a Christmas tree lot. I sneaked over and talked to the guy. It took a surprising effort to convince him—on the day after Christmas—to take pity on a nine-year-old who lived in a house without a tree, but he finally gave me a puny Christmas tree. I dragged it to the car, stuffed it in the backseat, met my mother back in the library. I was bursting with excitement at my ingenious sneakery, beside myself with joy. Back at the house, I slipped out and was dragging the tree from the car, into the house, when my mother started yelling, “What are you doing? You can’t bring that in here, it’s a tree.”
“Why not, why not? It’s just a tree.”
“Not in the living room, you’re not going to put that in the living room.”
“Why can’t we be like everyone else?”
“Because we’re Jewish,” my mother said.
And so the tree went in my room. I knew nothing about trees, about tree stands; I put it in a Maxwell House coffee can. The tree listed to one side. I propped it against the wall. It was a pathetic tree, scrawny, a tree no one wanted. But it was my tree, my Charlie Brown tree. I loved my tree, I watered it, decorated it with construction-paper loop chains and popcorn on a thread. Despite my good care, the tree died; it went from green to brown and brittle. As I dragged the tree out of the house, the needles, once soft and supple, now sharp like thorns, fell everywhere. I dragged the tree out of the house, across the yard, down around back, and hurled it down the hill. Back inside, my mother already had the Electrolux out and was working the long wand, the power brush, up and down the hall.
And now, again, it is Christmas. Waking up in the twin bed of my childhood, I do not jump up and hurry into the living room to see what Santa has brought me. I lie there thinking, it is only one day, there is no reason that today has to be so awful, so different from any other day. I take a breath and tell myself I will make it good.
The telephone rings. I hear my mother in the kitchen, answering it. She calls my name.
“How are you? I just wanted to wish you a wonderful Christmas. What are you up to today?” Norman asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
I don’t think he believes me.
“I’m just getting ready to go to church with the family. Just on my way out but I wanted to say hello. Ho ho ho.”
There is a pause.
“Have you heard from the Dragon Lady?”
“She’s with friends in Atlantic City; they’re going to a show at one of the casinos, Wayne Newton or something.”
“Fine thing,” he says.
“Isn’t it?” I say.
“Listen, I don’t know how long you’re in town…I’m not going to be able to get together today, but maybe later in the week, if you’re still around, we can meet.”
“I’m not sure,” I say, thinking that at any minute I’ll spontaneously combust and leave a smoldering heap of ashes on the floor for my mother to suck up with her Electrolux wand.
“Well, listen, you have a nice day and we’ll talk soon.”
“Yeah, you too. Merry Christmas.” I hang up. Norman the good Christian is off to church, leaving his “other” daughter trapped like some Cinderella in the house without holidays.
I go into the kitchen. “Are you all right?” my mother asks.
“Fine,” I say, slamming the refrigerator. “I’m perfectly fine.”
“Do you want a bagel?”
I am picturing roasted turkeys, hams, a large luxurious dinner—too much pie.
“What does ham taste like?”
“It’s good,” my mother says.
“Why don’t we ever have ham?”
“Your father doesn’t really like meat—he thinks he’s a vegetarian.”
Despite my thinking I will make it a decent day, I cave in. Norman is going to church with his family and then having Christmas dinner, and they have a fucking Christmas tree. I know because late last night I drove by the house, an
d I saw the driveway filled with cars, a wreath on the door, a thousand lights inside.
In the afternoon, my mother does the winter equivalent of spring cleaning—she is on a stepladder in the closet. “Does any of this mean anything to you?” She shows me an old frying pan, a cookie tin, a chipped plate.
“No.”
“I’m thinking of going to a movie,” I say.
“Do you think you’ll get in?” my mother asks.
My father is in the living room reading. “What are you thinking of seeing?
“Schindler’s List.”
“I read a review that was negative,” my father says.
“Bye. Have fun,” my mother says.
“It’s not supposed to be fun. That’s why I’m going.”
I grew up convinced that every family was better than mine. I grew up watching other families in awe, hardly able to bear the sensations, the nearly pornographic pleasure of witnessing such small intimacies. I would hover on the edge, knowing that however much they include you—invite you to dinner, take you on family trips—you are never official, you are always the “friend,” the first one left behind.
The movie theater is crowded with families, with couples, young and old. I find a single seat in the middle of a row—everyone rises to let me pass. I’m sitting in the theater by myself, distinctly aware that I do not want to spend the rest of my life alone, frightened that I will never be able to make a life, that I am too fractured to connect with another person.
The film, taken from a novel by Thomas Keneally, is based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman, a Nazi, a womanizer, who ultimately turned around and saved the lives of eleven hundred Jews. I watch thinking of Norman, Norman as Schindler—German, Catholic, charismatic, charming, struggling with right versus wrong. I watch prison camp commandant Goeth, who shoots Jews for target practice, thinking of the randomness, the unpredictability, of history. Even those who seem decent or even perhaps heroic aren’t; instead they are human, deeply flawed. It is about the degradation of the soul, struggling to maintain some small sense of self amid so much loss, struggling to maintain oneself in a death camp, to remain human, alive, even in death. It is the Christians versus the Jews, the dividing of families, oddly relevant.
If Norman were truly the big guy, the good Christian he pretends to be, he would accept responsibility. He would tell his children that there had been a lapse in the marriage, but that something good had come of it—me.
On all sides of me people are weeping, and yet I am finding the film uplifting—it is equal to what I am feeling.
I drive home. The lights are on; I am in front of the house, the only house we ever lived in, in front of my family. I pull into the carport. I am so angry, so sad, hating everyone for who they are and for everything they are not. It is the rising of emotion, as everything I can’t articulate begins whirling inside me. I gun the engine. I imagine driving the car into the house, crashing through, desperate to get past what is blocking me. I am gunning the engine, wishing I’d take my foot off the brake; the car is straining under my foot. The car, a brainless machine, wants to go forward, to hurl itself blindly through the wall and into the kitchen. I picture the cabinets emptying out, dishes breaking, the engine punching through the back of the refrigerator, a headlight coming through the crisper door. I hope the dog isn’t in the kitchen, that no one has gone in for a snack. I sit with my foot on the gas, wanting to do it, and then thinking about my mother and my mother’s dishes, how much she loves her dishes, how much I love my mother, how I wouldn’t want to break the dishes and how it wouldn’t be quite the same if I went into the house first and emptied all the shelves and then came back out again and went crashing through.
I pull up outside the house and I don’t want to go home. There is no home, there is no relief, no sense of having simply survived.
Christmas is almost over. I do not want this to be the most depressing story ever told. I turn off the engine. I wait.
In January 1994, just after the new year, Ellen calls and asks, “When will you see me?”
I say, “Saturday.”
She is shocked. So am I. I’m not sure why I say Saturday; but in some way it feels inevitable. How much longer can it go on: When will you see me? Why won’t you see me? We need to meet in an agreed-upon way—and not in a kamikaze attack like the scene in the bookstore. There is no good time, no right time. I am repelled and I am also curious.
I say Saturday and immediately regret it.
She gets too excited. “Where will we meet? What will we do?” Ellen envisions the meeting as a fun-filled-day-in-New-York package—horse-drawn carriages, ice cream sodas, going to a show (by this she means a musical).
I’m thinking an hour, maybe two. I’m thinking a little bit will go a long way.
“Let’s meet at the Plaza,” she says. “At the Oyster Bar.”
The Plaza is a part of the fantasy—home of Eloise, four o’clock tea, a tourist attraction. The last time I was there, Zsa Zsa Gabor was in the lobby talking the man at the candy store into giving her free chocolates.
“Will you let her kiss you hello?” a friend asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say and then feel bad. “If she wants to kiss my hand, she can.”
All of the books on adoption and reunion say to arrange for someone to meet you after the reunion for a kind of deprogramming session, to pick up the pieces. I call a friend, a woman with children and grandchildren of her own, and arrange for her to meet me in the Oak Bar at 6 P.M. I tell her that if I’m not there, she’s supposed to come into the Oyster Bar and get me. This is in case the mother tries to somehow detain me, to put me under her spell, in case I lose my free will and have to be plucked from my mother’s clutches.
“Can I meet your mother?” the friend asks.
“Sure, I guess,” I say. It seems odd that the friend is more excited, more interested in meeting my mother than I am. It seems strange, but at the moment everything seems strange.
“No,” she says. “I guess that wouldn’t be right. You’ll tell me about her. And maybe take a picture.”
I would like to go as myself, not my best self or average self, but my worst self. In the end, I dress up. I am once again compelled to try to make a good impression. In some fantasy of my own, I want her to see how well I turned out, want her to be proud of me.
In the hallway outside the Oyster Bar she is wearing a fluffy white fur jacket, a printed silk blouse, and slacks, her hair piled high on her head in a post-beehive bun. She looks like someone from another decade—a woman who believes in glamour, who listens to Burt Bacharach and Dinah Shore to cheer herself up. I suspect this is the way she must have dressed when she used to meet my father—probably also in hotels—but now she’s fifty-five years old and a lot has been lost to time.
“Is that you?” she asks, breathless.
“I can’t believe it,” she says, her voice escalating beyond giddy and into a husky sort of mania—on the verge. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you.”
She takes my hand and kisses it.
Before anything else happens I want to run to a pay phone and call my friend. “Remember when you asked me if I was going to kiss her…well, she kissed my hand. Did she know we had that conversation? Is my phone tapped? Is this the difference between what one is born as and what one becomes, hardware versus software, nature versus nurture?”
She kisses my hand and I want to run.
I follow her into the restaurant. She orders a Harveys Bristol Cream, I order a Coke. I have never seen someone drink Harveys Bristol Cream. I only remember it from ads; suave couples in front of a fireplace, drinking Harveys.
I feel suddenly defensive; under her gaze, I sense I am not measuring up. She is sitting there in her old rabbit jacket and I am across from her in my best clothes. She never graduated high school and I have multiple master’s degrees. She is the one who for months begged to meet me and I am the one who avoided her. I tell myself it is not ab
out surfaces. I tell myself everything will be all right.
“I’m having lobster,” she says.
“And what will you have?” the waiter asks.
“Nothing, I will have nothing.” I have nothing, I am nothing. Nothing suits me fine.
“Have lobster,” she says.
I am allergic to lobster. “Nothing is good,” I tell the waiter.
She talks about Atlantic City. She says that she has left her job—I don’t know if that means quit or was fired—and is going to open a beauty parlor with a couple of “wonderful operators.” She talks, about anything, everything, without the awareness that the person sitting across from her is both her only child and a complete stranger.
Her lobster arrives, she pulls meat from the claw, dips it into a silver pot of butter, and pops it into her mouth. She brings the claw to her eye, looking to see if there is more. Nothing is enough. I stare, wondering how she can eat. I can barely breathe.
“Did your father send you something for your birthday? He was going to send you something very nice.”
I can’t help but remember the gold-plated locket that’s appropriate for an eight-year-old. The gift, apparently, was her idea—they discussed it beforehand.
I am a thirty-two-year-old woman sitting across from my mother and she is blind. Invisibility is the thing I live in fear of. I implode, folding like origami. I try to speak but have no words. My response is primitive, before language, before cognition—the memory of the body.
Her lobster finished, she removes her plastic bib and orders another drink.
“I have to go soon,” I say.
She takes out a cigarette case and extracts a long, thin cigarette.
I check my watch.
“Will you ever forgive me?”
“For what?”
“Giving you away.”
“I forgive you. You absolutely did the right thing,” I say, never having meant it more. “Really.” I get up.
“I have to go,” I say. I flee, leaving the woman in the rabbit coat alone with her Harveys Bristol Cream.
