Why I'm Like This

by Cynthia Kaplan

  What is this process of letting go of things? It’s really too painful to observe. A year or so before we moved her to the nursing home she began disengaging from her possessions. I don’t mean as in “One day this cachepot will be yours.” She wanted to give or even throw almost everything away. Now. Paintings, books, dishes. “What do I need it for?” became her mantra. If we’d emptied her apartment of everything but the teapot and her Estée Lauder bath powder she would have been thrilled. I’m not proud of this, but I actually became nervous she would promise things that I wanted one day, namely the piano, to whatever relatives happened to making their biannual pilgrimage to her door. In my head I was preparing speeches. “I’m sorry, I know she said you could have everything she owns, but you can’t.” I’m a big anticipator of confrontations that will probably never happen and this one repeated itself over and over in my head for months. I was attached to her things, well, some of her things, as I was attached to her, and I just didn’t want anyone getting any funny ideas. One day my brother casually said, “Barbara and I are thinking we’ll take the piano.” “Think again,” I said.

  What was my grandmother going to do all day without The Pocketbook? It had provided her with any number of activities. She took things out, she put them in. If her glasses were missing or she hadn’t brought along enough tissues, there was the task of going back to the room to retrieve the glasses or to the nurses’ station to restock the tissues. Sometimes she carried around the small amount of jewelry we sent with her to the home. And there might be a comb, or some safety pins. How come all of a sudden these things were no longer essential to her? All right, so she lost The Pocketbook, but with it went the glasses for playing the piano and the pins for pinning whatever needed pinning. I became even more obsessed with what would occupy my grandmother’s time and attention between our visits than I had been before.

  Then, one day, I found her in the activity room, parked in her wheelchair among fifteen or so other residents in their wheelchairs, the big-screen television blaring in front of them—it was like a wheelchair parking lot, or a drive-in, really—and her head was bent and her hands were in her lap. I thought she might be asleep. But as I got closer I saw that she was fiddling with a piece of fabric. On another visit, as we sat in the winter garden, a large sunny room, she was stretching a corner of her skirt between her hands. On another visit still she continually smoothed a tissue on her lap. I finally realized what she was doing. My grandmother had been a dressmaker by trade and now she was fingering what little bit of fabric she could get ahold of as though she were examining it for a sewing project. She was planning where to put the pockets, how many inches to make the hem. After she stopped working she continued to make many of her own clothes and I used to bring her mine to alter. She had a black Singer sewing machine that flipped up out of its own maple table. Actually, it weighed a ton and had to be schlepped out with some effort. I would stand in her little den, turning slowly, one step at a time, as she knelt on the floor, measuring and pinning. I would sit with her while she basted, and then I would try the thing on again. All this before she even plugged the machine in. When she shopped for clothes at B. Altman’s or Lord & Taylor, she stood in the store and turned out the sleeves of a jacket or examined the waistband of a skirt, determining the quality of the workmanship. One day, not long after B. Altman’s had closed, my grandmother went to play bridge in her navy blue Altman’s coat, and when her friends complimented the coat, without a word she opened it to reveal the Altman’s label in the lining. “Aaah,” sighed the women. Until the day we cleared my grandmother out of her apartment, those beautifully made suits and dresses hung in her closet, along with that navy coat, testaments to her glory days.

  I was obsessed, as well, not just with what my grandmother was doing all day but with what she was thinking. Was she thinking “Make a skirt, make a skirt”? I hope so. That she may have been thinking “Where’s Jack, where’s Jack?” or Sam, her dead husband, or her mother or me or anyone, pained us all terribly. Or perhaps, by this time, her consciousness was devoid of the details; the body still knows how to do what it has done for three-quarters of a century, and the eyes see what they have seen a million times before. Sort of the phantom-limb theory. Before the Alzheimer’s, when she was still just a wobbly old lady, my grandmother was afraid to hold her grandchildren in her arms. But later, some ancient maternal intuition reasserted itself and after John was born she reached for him. Even though she was hard pressed to remember that she herself had a son, her body knew what it knew. And “I know you, I know you,” is exactly what she would say to the baby, each time she held him. It was one of the few coherent phrases she had left. Sometimes I thought that as she lost language and John gained it, there would be a meeting place, and they would be able to communicate only with each other.

  But I need to say this: She never didn’t know me. Never.

  I think about the person my grandmother once was, or rather, how I will want to remember her, one day, some days from now. She was brave and resourceful. She practically raised her sisters and once she painted her living room in Long Beach in a single morning. She loved her family fiercely. She was not daunted by her inability to play bridge well. She was not boastful about her gifts as a classical pianist. She never flinched from life’s burdensome tasks. She never stopped trying to better herself; who else would slog through Thomas Pynchon at ninety years old? She volunteered for ORT and Hadassah. She was a pioneer, really. She was fourteen years old when she arrived in New York with her mother and two of her three sisters. They had worked their way across the continent to earn their passage, from Odessa to a port in Morocco, maybe Tangier or Casablanca. Of her childhood in Russia, I knew only that her father, from whom she had been inseparable, had died young and poor; that the pogroms had begun; and that one day she stood in her school uniform with hundreds of other children to watch the Red Army march through the streets of Odessa.

  In Grafton, Vermont, not far from where my husband’s family has a vacation house, there is a cemetery. Unless you know it is there it is easy to miss. It is at the very edge of the town center, through a rusty turnstile and up a steep path. In the summer small bees hum drunkenly over rampant wild thyme, and in the winter it is foot deep in snow, sheltered from the wind by towering, white-tipped pines and naked gleaming birches. There are two aisles, one directly up the center and the other transecting it about three-quarters of the way, and when you stand in the back of the Grafton Cemetery you know exactly where you are: in Church. (I know, I’m a Jew, but just go with me.) Most of the gravestones face forward up the nave in neat rows and the rest, the most prominent, face back at them across the front aisle. It is as though they are where they have always been, where they belonged, before anything bad ever happened, before illness and war and lumber accidents. It also goes to show you that when you take the big plane ride to eternity, your seat assignment doesn’t change, which seems both a comfort and an outrage. Still, this is an awesome, soul-piercing place, inhabited by two centuries of New Englanders past, their epitaphs fading stoically from their stony faces.

  There is one that I will always remember: GONE HOME.

  Maybe The Pocketbook has done that. Maybe it has gone back to the apartment, looking for a familiar face—the den chair, the kitchen table, the piano. Or back even farther, to Brooklyn or Philadelphia or Odessa, as my grandmother does when she asks for her mother and sisters and husband as if they were all still alive. Maybe The Pocketbook didn’t recognize my grandmother anymore and went in search of a youthful-looking senior playing bridge at the Ninety-second Street Y or shopping in Altman’s for Ferragamos. Maybe it couldn’t get used to her gradual decline, as I have, and can’t shake the memory of her old self, as I usually can. I have said over and over to people, as if trying to reassure them, or myself, that I don’t really remember my grandmother before the big slide began, that it has come over us both gradually and in a way that has continually displaced the past with its own overpowering prese
nt. But now, writing this, I remember her helping me turn my old jeans into a skirt on the sewing machine she gave me for my thirteenth birthday. I remember the day she came to see me in a play wearing two different blue shoes, and how we laughed. I remember eating potato chips with her in the hospital cafeteria while my grandfather was dying upstairs.

  All my life she never seemed to age. I grew up and she just sort of hung around, as is. But now, suddenly, she is blasting forward and I feel stuck. I am the adult and she is the child and she has lost her pocketbook and doesn’t care, doesn’t see what it means, that things have ramifications. But, of course, they don’t. Not for her. Only for me. Some day, I will have an actual conversation like that with my child. I will say: “Don’t lose the things you need.” He will answer quite logically: “I don’t need them anymore.”

  the good swimmer or how I lost him

  LIKE a swimmer approaching Dover from Calais, my husband is slowly looming into view. I can see his capped head, bobbing up and down in the distance, rising and falling between the frothy white ridges, disappearing, reappearing; yes, he’s coming. I can see him now with the naked eye.

  When my son emerged from his watery nest in my belly last year, my husband, conversely, submerged. He dissolved with a celebratory fizz followed by silence, like the flattening of champagne, like a bromide, into the murky depths of fatherhood, which is nothing akin to husbandhood. It was not at all his fault, but my own. I cast him off. That I did so unwittingly is not much of an excuse. But I did not know that my son would displace him so thoroughly nor that my episiotomy would hurt for almost a year. So I agreed that when the year was up we would go to the wedding of a friend in the Bahamas without the baby. I agreed to this many months in advance, under the delusion that by the time the wedding rolled around it would be good to have some time alone with my husband, some adult time. What this meant, I could only vaguely recall. They don’t tell you until you’re too deep into it, but breast-feeding really kills the libido. You know, I hate that word, libido. It’s so ugly. It would be better backward—odibil. Breast-feeding, and exhaustion, and fierce, all-consuming mother love, are no friend to odibil. And yet my attraction to my son, who has staked out the territory between my collarbone and my belly as his own, and who has, as well, mastered the art of French kissing, is terrifying. It is the love that dare not speak its name. Well, not really, that’s something else. But the kid sure can kiss.

  Still, when you have to go to the Bahamas, you have to go to the Bahamas.

  Okay, we had a decent time, so sue me. It was nice to sleep late and read a whole book (on the beach!) and eat a meal in more than five minutes and have painful sex without the Baby of Damocles hanging over our heads. It was fun to have twenty-four-hour butler service, although try as we might, we couldn’t come up with anything that needed but-ling. And we were only a fifteen-minute walk down the beach from the Atlantis Resort, a thirty-trillion-guest-room colossus intended to conjure the mythic sunken city. It didn’t. I’m no authority on the subject of mythology, but I don’t recall that the denizens of that great underwater metropolis at any time engaged in poolside aerobic and spinning classes. Nevertheless, the Atlantis Resort did have a spectacular network of water slides, and we and other wedding guests frolicked like seals on crack. When we’d had enough of the fleshy, sunstroked throng, we returned to our gracious little hotel for lunch.

  Throughout the weekend friends and acquaintances inquired after John, and if by day two my response was “John who?” it was definitely meant as a joke.

  Because on the way home all David and I could talk about was seeing the kid. The excitement was enormous. I foresaw a joyful homecoming with smiles and hugs and a lot of filthy, disgusting, Oedipal behavior. When we walked in the door there was a mad dash for him, but I elbowed David in the kidneys and got there first. I held John for a long time. I didn’t notice that he was not holding me back. Not in that way he has; usually he clings like a monkey. He seemed alternately bemused and insouciant, which was understandable, although some trick for a baby to pull off. Suddenly his parents show up after a three-day absence, just when he’d gotten used to his grandparents being his new parents; what the fuck? But I was so happy to be with him I just didn’t notice. I was naive.

  The next day the baby avoided me entirely. He wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Aloof is putting it kindly. He turned all his attention to David, as if David hadn’t gone away, too. As if David hadn’t disappeared for four days on some idiotic boondoggle just a month earlier. Or gone to China for eight days in the spring. Although John had only been walking for a few weeks, he navigated around me with surprising finesse. He started toward me and then, psych, turned away. Toward David. Toward anything. Suddenly the Word was Da-dee. “We’re not British, you know,” I said to him, but he even ignored the insult.

  And what I immediately realized was this: I blew it. I blew the best, most important relationship I have ever had, with the only person who has ever loved me completely, fanatically, and certainly unconditionally. I waited until he was just old enough to be cognizant of my whereabouts and then I jetted off to parts unknown without a word of warning. As far as he was concerned, we were through.

  It’s not like I didn’t expect some sort of reaction. But he’d had such a good time with my parents, or so they said. He’d been no trouble at all and hadn’t been disturbed in the least when he woke up in the morning to find that despite all efforts to the contrary, his mother really had turned into her mother, after all. What I had thought would happen was the following: he would cry often, because I was not with him, but he would persevere, and then, when I came home, he would be ecstatically relieved and cleave to me like a deer tick. But that is not what happened at all. Instead he bided his time, scheming and plotting, so when I finally showed up he could exact his cruel punishment.

  Over the next two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I did everything I could to win him back. I dressed him in his favorite clothes and made him his favorite foods. We played with his favorite toys and sang his favorite songs. I figured out the guitar chords to “John Jacob Jinglehiemer Schmidt.” I showered him with praise. He remained indifferent. He suffered me. He adored David. I hated David. How many children spend their lives trying to please fathers who come home at seven o’clock each night and play golf all weekend? Fathers who somehow manage to arrive on the scene when all the barfing is done. Actually, David is a much better father than this, he has to be or I’d divorce him, but still, fuckity fuck fuck, I gave that baby life, the ingrate.

  I was never popular. I wasn’t exactly unpopular, I mean I wasn’t beneath the radar; I was somewhere in between. In high school I had a group of close friends and we sort of rummaged around on the outskirts of the popular crowd. We were welcome at parties but not essential to anyone else’s good time. I was part of a gang in college, I guess, but I never got the impression that when I wasn’t there someone said, “Hey, where the hell’s Kaplan?” I still dream sometimes that my college friends are planning something fun and don’t include me. Sometime around my twenty-seventh year, I was really, really popular for a week.

  Here’s what it is: I was extremely popular with John. I was at the apex of my popularity potential. I was the in crowd as far as he was concerned, the prettiest girl in class, the highest scorer on the team. When I wasn’t around this kid was definitely thinking, “Hey, where the hell’s Mommy?” Wherever I was was the cool place to be. This concept is at the very heart of popularity. A cool kid could stand in a pile of shit and people would say, “Hey, Bob’s in shit, let’s go!” Of course, you could say that it was really John who was popular with me. He often did stand in shit and I was right there by his side every time. But in fact it was our mutual regard that made us what we were, that makes all great friendships what they are. One popular person is a magnet, two are a fortress. People came along with John and me, not we with them.

  And one of those people was David. Because where John and I were the most popular was in
our apartment.

  You see, it doesn’t matter if you are popular in a city of one million or a class of 150 or an apartment of three. As a matter of fact, I’ve been in threesomes (not that kind) before, and there has always come a moment when the odd man, i.e. me, is out. Well, not this time, friends. Not this time.

  But then I blew it.

  I opened the door and let that annoying hanger-on, David, in. He’d been there, swimming around the island, treading water, blowing bubbles, whatever. And somehow I thought that he was waiting for me. For me to come around. To loosen up the tea party. To make room for him. For sex. Instead, though, because I’d left John alone on the beach like a baby turtle, so to speak, and only for a second, I tell you, David swam up to shore, opened his big fat yapper, and took the kid whole.

  horse kills owner or how I got him back

  THE day after Thanksgiving, David, John, and I drove to Vermont, hoping to do a little skiing in the preseason lull, but by the time we got to the ski house John had a fever, and we canceled our reservation at the mountain’s day-care center for the next day. In the morning, I sent David skiing and I stayed with John, coaxing him to eat a few Cheerios and sip water. I fed him drops of Motrin and when the fever dipped we sat on the orange shag carpet and put the colored balls into the translucent tube and then took them out again. David came back early and I went to the mountain and skied for an hour. When I got home John was slumped on David’s shoulder, which is where he spent the rest of the day. That night, he woke up crying, very hot, and we took him into our bed, where he slept curled against my body, ripples of heat rising from his skin, bending the air.