The Year My Mother Came Back

by Alice Eve Cohen

  Whoa, whoa, whoa! Where is this coming from? I was terrified when my mother appeared at my kitchen table the other day. Now I want to talk to her? I don’t think so. I send thoughts in her general direction, somewhere in the stratosphere, trying to strike the right tone for addressing my mother’s ghost—a balance of superstition and ironic detachment: Stay where you are. I repeat. Stay. Where. You. Are. Please, please, please don’t show up again. Tuh, tuh, tuh! (I toss salt over my left shoulder for good measure.)

  FIVE

  Julia is home from an inspiring high school theater workshop at the Stratford Festival in Canada, where she was thrilled to perform Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy—a peak experience for a kid who’s been enamored of Shakespeare since she was six years old, when I first took her to Shakespeare in the Park (a production of Henry VIII; hardly the Bard’s most kid-friendly play, but Julia was spellbound.)

  Radiant, confident, and relaxed, she’s in full vacation mode, wearing a gauzy sundress, flip-flops and sunglasses, her waist-length thick brown hair sun-streaked with blonde, like it is every summer. She drops her suitcase and backpack in the living room. “It’s good to be home.” She reaches down and I reach up for a hug.

  Next week is Julia’s eighteenth birthday. She leaves for Princeton the week after that. These are our last days as a family of four living together under one roof. Julia didn’t rebel in high school in that cataclysmic way you expect from adolescents. She’s always been preternaturally good-natured and easy-going. But as soon as she got back from Canada, something must have kicked in. Her subconscious registered, “Oh, shit, I forgot to have my teenage rebellion! This is my last chance before I go to college.” Consequently, she and I lock horns at least once a day. She’s embarrassed by things I do (oh, for example, breathing). She lowers her eyelids in that way only a teenaged girl can do—that special, glowering look reserved for mothers—which makes me grumpy, so I try to glower back, but she’s by far the superior glowerer. At six feet tall, she has the advantage of looking down at me when she glowers.

  Julia can’t wait to go to college. Another month at home and we’ll both implode. I commit the cardinal sin of offering unsolicited suggestions. “Are you sure you should be drinking so much coffee?” I ask her, in our little kitchen. She ignores me, while brewing another pot for herself and Emily, her best friend since second grade. “Oh, never mind, your caffeine habit is excellent preparation for college life. Just promise me you won’t join an eating club. Those elitist clubs are the last bastion of Princeton’s old-boy privilege.”

  “Mom,” she says with a teasing grin, putting her hands on my shoulders and looking me straight in the eye, “I am planning to join an eating club. It’s one of the things I’m looking forward to about Princeton.”

  “No, no, not the eating clubs! When I was in college, I joined a vegetarian cooking group and loved it.”

  “Really, Mom? That might have been cool when you were in college—in the seventies.”

  “I’d like to join a vegetarian cooking group,” says Emily, reassuringly.

  “Thank you, Emily.”

  Julia laughs. “Emily is a vegetarian and she goes to Hampshire College, so that doesn’t count.”

  “I guess this is not your mother’s Princeton,” I sigh. The girls laugh.

  A FEW DAYS after she gets back, Julia wakes at noon and asks if we can talk. We have the apartment to ourselves. Julia sits cross-legged on the sofa in the plaid boxer shorts and forest green tank top she wears as pajamas—her hair over one shoulder in a tousled, slept-in braid. I join her on the sofa, and she tells me, for the first time ever:

  “Mom, I’m interested in finding my birth mother.”

  “Wow!”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I say. And I mean it. I was at Julia’s birth, and I fell in love with her birth mother, who was twenty at the time. Zoe didn’t want to have any contact after the birth, but I always intuited that Julia would one day want to find her.

  “This summer, for the first time in my life, I suddenly found myself wondering about Zoe, wanting to meet her. Being adopted didn’t seem like a big deal for me growing up. I mean, this is my family. I always felt totally loved by you. And because you and I look so similar, people never assumed I was adopted, so that wasn’t an issue.”

  Except for our height differences—she’s six feet, I’m five feet three inches—Julia and I look uncannily like mother and daughter. We both have long, straight, brown hair, dark lashes and eyebrows, similar almond-shaped faces. Ever since she was a little girl, people have frequently said, “Julia, you look just like your mother,” to which she politely agrees. If they ask, “Is your father tall?” she says, “Yes, he is.” In fact, Julia’s biological father is six feet seven inches. Ironically, I look more like my adopted daughter than my biological daughter. Eliana looks more like Michael.

  “I’d love to help you with your search, Julia.”

  “Thanks, Mom. That means a lot to me.”

  It’s something I’ve looked forward to since Julia was born. My memories of Zoe, and the family folklore we’ve shared with Julia about her, have been entirely positive. Julia wrote her college essay about her birth mother—about the gift Zoe gave her by choosing artists to be her adoptive parents, and what a huge influence the arts have had on her life. I want Julia to meet Zoe. Of course I do!

  But today I hear her say “my birth mother” as if it’s an entirely new concept. Birth mother is the thing I am not, was not, will never be for Julia. For the first time, the term birth mother makes me feel inadequate; a poor substitute, lacking in genetic credentials.

  “Your timing is perfect, sweetheart. When you turn eighteen on Saturday, you can put your name in the National Adoption Registry, which helps reunite adoptees and birth parents. They might help you with your search—that is, if Zoe also chooses to register; a big if, but worth a try.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I’ll do that eventually, but no rush.”

  “Understood.” (That’s a relief.)

  “Right now I’m totally focused on college.”

  “Sure, Honey, that makes sense.”

  CLINGING TO OUR fleeting time as an intact family of four, I hastily organize a four-day weekend trip to Martha’s Vineyard. I haven’t been back to the Vineyard since my blissful summer job there, as arts director of the Chilmark Community Center, before my senior year in college. I have great memories of family vacations on the Vineyard as a kid. I want to share the island with my family.

  Our minivacation is a total bust. Michael and I get stomach flu. We lie uselessly on our hotel bed and ask Julia to entertain her little sister. Julia is impatient to get home, see her friends, pack for college. Only Eliana is happy, hanging out with her awesome big sister, jumping in the waves, collecting shells, rescuing baby jellyfish that have washed ashore, making seaweed sculptures.

  “I love it here! Can we come back to exactly the same place next summer?”

  Michael groans. Julia rolls her eyes. I respond weakly from under the covers, “Sure, Sweetiepie, you and I will come back.”

  Monday morning, we catch the first ferry to the mainland. We’re back home in New York City by mid-afternoon, Michael and I still wobbly.

  I have surgery tomorrow.

  And the play I’ve been working on is due the day after tomorrow. Repatriated to my desk in the living room after my feeble attempt at a beach escape, I turn on the computer. An e-mail from the producer reminds me, “Email script by Wednesday. I want to consider Oklahoma Samovar for our season.”

  I’m anxious about surgery. I’m anxious about Julia leaving for college. I’m anxious about the play. This never-ending play.

  Oklahoma Samovar is a two-act, loosely based on the lives of my ancestors. My Latvian great-grandparents were the only Jews in the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. It’s a big play: two continents, a hundred years, three generations, commingling the past and present, the living and the dead; a cast of six actors playing
two dozen roles.

  I wrote the first draft of Oklahoma Samovar twenty years ago. I flew to Tulsa to interview my ancient Great Aunt Sylvia about the family history. Sylvia’s big sister was Rose, my mother’s mother. I never met Rose and had never even heard of Sylvia. I didn’t know a thing about my Oklahoma roots, until my uncle filled me in, a few years after my mother’s death.

  My mother kept Oklahoma a secret.

  Diminutive Aunt Sylvia had a photo on her dresser, in a mother-of-pearl frame: a little girl in a white dress and a straw hat, standing by a peach tree.

  “Ever seen this picture of your mama?” Sylvia asked in her high-pitched Oklahoma twang.

  “No.”

  “Then it’s yours, honey. Louise never told you ’bout us?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have no idea.” I turned on my tape recorder. “Tell me everything, Sylvia.”

  “Oh, well, there’s a lot to talk about, isn’t there,” she chuckled. “Where should I begin? My parents, Jake and Hattie—your great-grandparents—sailed to America from Latvia in 1887 when they were just seventeen years old. Jake came first, and Hattie followed. Jake drove a streetcar in New York City for a while, but he didn’t like it one bit. When he found he could get a free plot of land in Kansas in exchange for plantin’ three trees to show good intent to cultivate the land, why that’s just what he did. Ya see, my daddy always had a mystical feelin’ ’bout nature and workin’ the land.

  “When Hattie got off the boat, she thought Jake was still livin’ in New York City, so she traipsed around the country, looking for Jake all over creation, carrying a feather bed and a samovar. It was her bridal trousseau. I still have that samovar, I’ll show it to ya.

  “Hattie finally caught up with Jake in Garden City, Kansas. Lord knows how she ever found him. ’Course there weren’t any rabbis in Kansas at that time, so my parents were married by the banker, who was also the justice of the peace. They lived in a dirt dugout for two years. You see, there were no trees in the plains. Mama desperately wanted a wooden house and she wanted to cook on wood—she was plumb tired of cookin’ on ‘cow chips.’

  “In 1889, they opened up the Oklahoma Territory. In order to get their hundred an’ sixty acres of free land in Oklahoma, homesteaders had to cut down three trees, to show good intent to cultivate the land. Mama figured there’d be plenty wood in Oklahoma, so they left Kansas for the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889.

  “Papa was missin’ a thumb. He always told us it got blown off by a sooner—that’s what they called the poachers at the Oklahoma Land Run, that crossed the startin’ line sooner ’n they were s’posed to. Papa was the only Jew in the Land Run and the first peach farmer in Oklahoma Territory. The original homestead’s still standin’. Your mother never told you ’bout the homestead?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can’t figure why not. Louise loved it here. She and I would go campin’ together in a little cabin in the woods. She and I used to go huntin’.”

  “My mother hunted?”

  “Yep. We’d shoot possum. Louise was good at it, too. Heh-heh. You sure she never told you about us?”

  “Very sure.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “So do I.”

  Aunt Sylvia flew from Tulsa to see the premiere of Oklahoma Samovar two years later. She was so old, tiny, and frail that when I walked with her to the theater in the East Village, I feared the fierce November wind would carry her away. When the house lights faded and the performance began, Sylvia turned around to the man sitting behind her and proudly proclaimed, “That’s me they’re talkin’ about! They’re talkin’ about me!”

  IN THE PLAY’S first incarnation, I hadn’t yet figured out the story I wanted to tell. Each reading launched a new set of rewrites. A year ago, my friend Eric directed a workshop production of the play, which illuminated some questions and raised new ones. My mother is now a character in the play, a fictionalized version of her as an eight-year-old in 1929. I wonder if the play needs to be more about my mother or less about her. Now that she’s been showing up at my kitchen table, maybe I should ask her—ha!

  How can I possibly finish this rewrite in two days?

  As I read through the script, scribbling notes, the phone rings. It’s my ex-husband, calling from his home in L.A.

  “Hi, Brad.”

  “Alice, are you sitting down?”

  “Yes.”

  “I found Zoe!”

  “What?”

  “I looked her up on the Internet, and she has a website, so I—”

  “Wait. WHAT? You. Go back. You found Zoe?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean found? How did you—”

  “I just got off the phone with her a minute ago! She has—”

  “You called her?”

  “Her phone number is on her website. She wants to see Julia. She has two baby girls, she’s married—”

  “But what about Zoe’s—”

  “Her husband knows all about the adoption. Zoe wants to see Julia! I’d like to tell Julia myself.”

  “Sure. Um. Would you mind waiting till tomorrow to tell her?”

  “Okay. Absolutely. Isn’t this great news?”

  “Yes . . . wow. She wants to see . . . That’s . . . that’s fantastic news.”

  So why am I so angry?

  After Brad hangs up, I slam down the receiver, put my face in my hands and groan. In my roiling tumult and turmoil about mothers and birth mothers—about Julia looking for her birth mother, about Brad preemptively finding Zoe, about mothers lost and found—I want to find my mother. Where’s the National Registry that will facilitate my search? Sign me up. Heck, I’ll just Google her. Maybe she has a website with her phone number on it. Ha!

  With my face in my hands, I say her name out loud—Mom . . . Mommy . . . Louise.

  “Why are you so angry, Alice,” she asks, inside my head. (This time, it’s just my mother’s voice. Not a visitation. That’s okay.)

  “Because, in one move, Brad has (1) usurped Julia’s quest to find her birth mother; (2) violated Zoe’s privacy. Zoe wanted anonymity. We weren’t even supposed to know her last name. And, oh, for example, what if Zoe had not told her husband, and what if she did not want him to know she’d given up a baby for adoption eighteen years ago? And (3) he left me out of the process. I wanted to help Julia with her search.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “And now—Anyway, it’s done.”

  “True. Brad can’t un-find Zoe.”

  “I know that this is great news. I’m being petulant and petty. And that’s the worst thing, Mom. I’m ashamed. I want to be a better mother than that.”

  “Your feelings are completely understandable, especially in context.”

  “What context?”

  “Julia leaving home on Saturday.”

  “Ouch, don’t remind me.”

  “And your surgery is tomorrow.”

  “Right. Ugh. I’m really scared, Mom. Mommy, I am. I’m really, really scared.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why’d you say I’d be fine?”

  “That’s what we mothers say.”

  “Whether or not it’s true?”

  “We comfort our children. It’s part of the job. Anyway, your surgery isn’t such a big deal.”

  “Not like yours, you mean?”

  “Good luck tomorrow, Alice—tuh, tuh, tuh! Be sure to throw salt over your left shoulder.”

  SIX

  Michael is there when I awaken from the anesthesia, my left breast smaller by a peach-sized lump of flesh than it was when I woke up that morning. I insist on walking the fifteen blocks home, even though I stumble out of the hospital in a groggy daze. Michael puts his arm around my shoulder and helps me to navigate the sidewalks and traffic lights on the steamy day. I zigzag drunkenly, hugging an ice pack under my shirt to reduce the sw
elling. I’m sore from the procedure, but I no longer have shooting pains. I’m infinitely grateful that the metal marker was removed, as promised. I desperately want coffee. Michael ushers me into a Starbucks, buys me a monumental cup of dark brew, and walks me home.

  I look at myself in the bedroom mirror. The asymmetry of my breasts gives the pair a cock-eyed look. It amuses me.

  I remember my mother’s body, when it was beautiful. At three years old, I would play on the floor in the warm, steamy bathroom while Mom took a shower, her curvy silhouette visible through the translucent vinyl shower curtain. She turns off the water, opens the shower curtain, and reaches for the white towel. I look up to admire her large, round breasts as she leans over me, eclipsing the ceiling lamp, steam emanating from her body like a halo of light. She dries herself, wraps the towel around her chest. She’s so young, much younger than I am now, lovely and sexy. My breasts are the same size and shape as hers were. Except that my left one is now a little smaller.

  I WAKE UP early the next day to make eleventh-hour revisions to Oklahoma Samovar, typing slowly with one hand, holding an ice pack in the other. It hurts, but I skip the pain meds, because they make me sleepy.

  As five p.m. approaches, I type FINAL DRAFT on the cover page. Have I actually finished it?

  My finger hovers over the keyboard for an inordinately long time.

  I hit send. I sit with the finality of it.

  I wait for a sense of euphoria.

  Fulfillment? I’d settle for contentment.

  Instead, I feel deeply unsettled. Why? Don’t I want the play to be finished? I’ve been working on it for such a long time. Could it be that I’m not ready to end my relationship with it? Maybe writing this fictionalized story of Mom’s family is my way of searching for my mother. Working on it all these years kept her with me, and hitting send is sending her away.

  I’m troubled by a vestigial belief that I’m not allowed to complete it, that I’ve betrayed my mother’s tradition of working on a book forever and never finishing.

  Is that it? Are you mad at me, Mom? Envious that I finished my play, even though it took me twenty years?