The Year My Mother Came Back

by Alice Eve Cohen

  “It doesn’t feel like home without Julia.”

  “I know.”

  She looks at her plate and pushes the eggs around with her fork.

  “You okay, Sweetheart?”

  She starts to cry. I kneel beside her chair and she lets me hug her. She doesn’t like anyone to see her cry, so she hides her face in my chest till my shirt is damp. She wipes her nose on a striped pajama sleeve and looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes.

  “Mom, when do I have surgery?”

  “Next month. About six weeks.”

  “That’s so soon!”

  “I know.”

  Her mouth quivers, tears brimming again. She glances at the clock and shifts into high gear. “I can’t be late for school!”

  She bolts into her room, slams the door, emerges moments later in T-shirt and jeans, speed-braids her voluminous hair, tosses her homework and lunch bag in her backpack, and we’re off.

  I FALL INTO a daily routine, taking Eliana to school, walking through the labyrinthine paths of the Central Park Ramble, lying motionless on the radiation table. Those once excruciating sessions fly by, now that I’ve begun time-traveling with my mother. When Jamal says, in his beguiling Barbados accent, “Please lie perfectly still for ten minutes,” it opens a portal through which I summon her. These telescoping minutes might last for days, or for just a few fleeting moments. We revisit events from our past together. Sometimes we just talk. Always, my mother is there and she is not there.

  IN MY PERIPHERAL vision I see Mom leaning on the end of the radiation bed, ankles crossed, reading the People magazine I picked up in the waiting room. She’s wearing a loose-fitting dress in an Indian paisley print, and she looks relaxed. It’s comforting to have her in the room, watching over me.

  “It’s chilly in here. Are you cold, Sweetheart?” she asks.

  “A little.” The side of my face is pressed on the mattress. She pulls the sheet up and smooths it over my shoulders. “Thanks.”

  She goes back to reading the magazine. I listen to the pages flipping, and the customary electronic beeps and whirring of the machine.

  “Mom, can I talk to you about something?”

  “Of course.”

  “You never told me about your childhood.”

  “That’s true.” She puts the magazine down on the end of the bed.

  “I learned about your Oklahoma roots years after you died. I always hated your secrets, and this was one more secret.”

  “I didn’t intend for it to be a secret.”

  “Really? Well, it was, and it made me mad. You never told me a thing about your childhood or about Oklahoma! I talked to your brother, he told me to talk to your aunt, and I had to invent the rest. Makes me angry now, all over again. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “You never asked.”

  “Okay. Sorry. I’m asking you now.”

  “Then I shall tell you now.” She pushes her reading glasses up on top of her head and sits on the step stool next to my bed.

  “I grew up in an unhappy home, in a big, dark house, in the orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn. My family was affluent, relatively speaking. My father—your Grandpa Ben—was a well-respected doctor. His office was in the house, and we had to be very quiet when he was seeing patients. Our home was brimming with polished antique furniture, bookshelves laden with books and medical tomes and ivory bookends. Persian rugs, oil paintings, bronze figurines of Greek gods and goddesses, Tiffany lamps, silver tea sets, velvet drapes, and very little light.”

  As she talks, I picture her, simultaneously, as my fifty-seven-year-old mother and as a little girl in her dark house in Brooklyn.

  “I lived with my mother, Rose, my father, Ben, my big brother, Edwin, and my horribly mean old Russian grandmother. Grandma spoke only Yiddish and hated my mother—her Oklahoma-born-and-bred, assimilated country hick of a Jewish daughter-in-law. I think my father loved Rose, but he was incapable of or unwilling to stand up to his toxic mother on his wife’s behalf. My mother died in 1943, when I was twenty-two.”

  “That’s how old I was when you died.”

  “Is that right? Yes, that’s quite a coincidence. I used to visit Mother in the hospital after my classes at Columbia. She had diabetes. She died from too much insulin and too little happiness.”

  “Please do not breathe so deeply, Ms. Cohen,” says Jamal, over the speaker.

  “Do you want me to continue?”

  “Please.”

  “My father Ben grew up in Odessa. He studied to be a rabbi, before abandoning that career path to become a Marxist and a doctor. He spoke five languages, had a photographic memory, and liked to show off at every opportunity, by extemporaneously reciting entire pages of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Gershwin, Puccini, and Tolstoy. When he quoted from Anna Karenina, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ I was sure he was talking about us. Father didn’t tolerate intellectual mediocrity, especially in his progeny. He disparaged my brother Edwin for his lack of ambition and set his sights on me, his high-achieving wunderkind daughter. He raised me with big words, great expectations, and enormous fear of his judgment.

  “Every summer, my mother and my brother and I fled our claustrophobic home in Brooklyn for the wide expanses of Oklahoma. Our annual pilgrimage started with a two-day train-ride to Tulsa—and then on to the family homestead. We relished those summers on the peach farm with Grandpa Jake and Grandma Hattie. We hated having to go home. It was the only place my mother was truly happy. She was a farmer’s daughter at heart. She was so alive there.”

  “Why’d you keep Oklahoma a secret, if it was so important to you?”

  “I wanted to preserve the kernel of happiness Oklahoma represented, and feared it would be lost if I spoke about it out loud. Talking about it would be like opening Pandora’s box. All hell breaks loose, and the potential for future happiness flies out. In social science terms, talking about Oklahoma was taboo. You see, what is considered taboo varies from culture to culture, depending on what commodity is in short supply: in a sexually repressed society, talking about sex is taboo; in a culture experiencing famine, it’s taboo to talk about food—saying the word yam is the equivalent of telling a dirty joke, met with ribald laughter.”

  “So for you, happiness was the commodity in short supply. Thus, Oklahoma—representing happiness—was taboo.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Mom, you and I both lost our mothers twice: first to depression and then to death. Was it too painful for you to remember losing Rose? Is that why you exiled her from your memories?”

  “Probably. Isn’t that why you exiled me from yours?”

  SCHOOL IS CLOSED for Yom Kippur. Madeline stays home with Eliana. I’ve rescheduled my radiation session for the afternoon so I can go to synagogue in the morning.

  “On Rosh Hashanah it is written. On Yom Kippur it is sealed.” We repeat this prayer throughout the day, chanting it in Hebrew and in English. On Rosh Hashanah, God inscribes the fate of every human being into the Book of Life—“Who will live and who will die? Who shall be happy and who unhappy?”—but God’s judgment is not finalized until the book is closed, ten days later, on Yom Kippur.

  Who gets happiness?

  Was Aunt Phyllis able to love radiation because of her innate state of happiness? Does that explain her capacity to transform an “Oh Shit” moment into an “Aha!” moment? I think so. Her default barometer is set on feel-good. Even huge obstacles—and she’s had some—don’t derail her. They are simply temporary detours from her general state of contentment.

  Is her propensity for happiness inherited? Learned? Willed?

  Who gets to experience it all the time?

  Who gets to experience it once in a while?

  Who never gets it?

  Where can I get some?

  Is happiness a function of chemistry? Genetics? God?

  If God, is it determined by God’s mood, as God thumbs through the Book of Life, be
tween Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, deciding who shall live and who shall die? Does he also decide who shall be happy and who shall be sad or depressed or screwed up?

  What is God thinking about, while marking up the Book of Life with editorial comments and directives in the margins? “Live, die. Let’s see . . . this one will break a toe; that one will get into her first-choice college; he will be hit by a bus and lose a leg; she will have one shorter leg.

  “You will get cancer and live happily for four more decades,” like my mother’s father, Ben.

  “You will die depressed and sick at age forty-five,” like my mother’s mother, Rose.

  “You will live happily to age a hundred and three,” like Rose’s little sister, Sylvia.

  “You will be diagnosed with brain cancer at seventy-five and given only six months to live, but will survive another ten years,” like my congenitally cheerful Uncle Edwin.

  Edwin was more resilient than my mother was. The jovial, self-proclaimed absent-minded professor, renowned for his Brooklyn College courses on Moral Development, Ed’s contentment was irrepressible and infectious. Whatever my mother’s mood, she would always brighten up in her brother’s presence. When we visited Uncle Ed, the moment we walked through the door he would launch into song—an operatic recitative about whatever happened to be on his mind—improvised in loosely rhymed verses:

  Welcome, my darling sister, Louise!

  Take off your coat. Have a drink. Sit down, please.

  Come in, come right in, my three lovely nieces!

  May I interest you girls in some nice, stinky cheeses?

  Then Mom would sing with him. Just because. It was silly and entertaining, and we understood that she only did this with her brother:

  It’s a pleasure, dear Ed, to drink sherry with you,

  But first, I’ve a question, or maybe a few.

  What books are you reading? What conceptual forces

  Are driving your Moral Development courses?

  Uncle Ed would pull a book from his vast bookshelves, open to a page, and paraphrase—in song:

  (To the tune of “The Hallelujah Chorus”)

  Mar-tin Buber!

  Mar-tin Buber!

  “I and Thou!”—Not

  “I and It!”—That’s

  —his Phi-lo-so-phy!

  Then, Uncle Edwin would pick up his violin and play some scratchy melodies, while my Aunt Abby served the sherry and stinky cheeses.

  When Edwin was diagnosed with brain cancer, his right jaw and skull were surgically carved away, bit by bit, year after year, until he looked like he was wearing an expressionistic mask, his mouth a diagonal line on the far right side of his decimated face. Even so, he woke up every morning beside his beloved wife of sixty years, happy to be on earth another day, joking, “What do you know, Abby-girl? I’m still alive!”

  “You, Alice, will be the brooding sister.”

  “You, Julia, will inherit your birth mother’s lightness of spirit.”

  “You, Eliana, will inherit your mother’s propensity for brooding.”

  Are the infinite varieties of the human condition randomly assigned? God’s capricious whims? Or a meditative, thoughtful, and painful endeavor? Like making art. Is God plotting the beats in our collective lives with parental compassion? Or is it a creative act? Is she writing fiction, inventing characters for an epic novel? Is he the head writer for an ongoing soap opera called Life on Earth?

  I try to achieve an Aunt Phyllis – like state of euphoria during treatments. There are times when I approach it, lying nearly motionless on the radiation table, when my shallow breathing slows, and the itch on my nose that’s been driving me crazy fades from consciousness.

  At those moments, like right now, lying facedown in a room as sterile as a space capsule, I enter a Zen state of equilibrium, akin to happiness. But unlike Aunt Phyllis, I have to consciously will it, and must work hard to maintain it.

  I carefully set my compass on a course headed toward joy, fretfully checking to see that I haven’t veered off course, that I’m not sailing straight back to the black hole of sadness where I’ve already spent too much time. Like my mother did, and her mother, too.

  THREE

  “We were close, weren’t we, Mom? Before your cancer?”

  “Yes. That was a dreadful turning point. It wasn’t the end, but that was our great divide. There was a before and an after.”

  “The after was when all hell broke loose.”

  “For both of us.”

  I was twelve. Tomorrow, I would start eighth grade. I looked at myself in the mirror, previewed my back-to-school outfit—red miniskirt, black turtleneck, black fishnet tights. I stuck my skinny chest out, trying to look like an eighth grader, but I still looked like a little girl.

  On the last day of seventh grade, Dad took Mom to the hospital. He didn’t tell us why. When she was away for three days, I was sure she had died.

  Then Mom’s best friend Shirley called.

  “Hello, Alice, dear. I’m so sorry about your mom. Tell me, darling, did she have one breast removed or two?”

  I didn’t understand Shirley’s question. I couldn’t imagine why breasts would be removed.

  “. . . Alice? Are you there? One or both?”

  “Um. Um. One. I think just one.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, isn’t it? At least it was only one.”

  I was wrong.

  Once Mom came back from the hospital she was changed. No longer the mother I knew. No longer the mother who smiled and laughed and grew flowers and napped on the hammock so the birds would land on her. No longer the mother who once loved me so much, the mother who hugged me, called me Sweetheart and Honeylamb and Sweetiepie, who said she loved me to pieces, who praised my drawings, who did “X Marks the Spot” on my back, over and over, as many times as I asked. This other mother barely noticed us. She was an imposter. Like the Mean Mother from the bad dream I used to have. My mom didn’t actually die, but she was gone.

  Dad didn’t talk to us very much all summer. He came home from work and played piano for hours. Chopin. Beethoven. Mozart. Brahms. Gershwin. Bach. Sometimes he and I played clarinet-piano duets together. I was getting good at clarinet. We were practicing the Brahms sonatas.

  I looked in the mirror again. I was the youngest in my grade and I was completely flat. This was going to be so embarrassing. I’d be the last girl still wearing an undershirt. Maybe, maybe, maybe Mom would take me shopping for a training bra, like all the other mothers of every girl I knew. I hoped she would.

  No. This wasn’t the time to ask my mother to take me bra shopping.

  In the schoolyard, some of the fourth graders are flirting with each other. Their juvenile attempts are bumbling, graceless, and adorable. The boys intentionally bump into the girls. The girls push the boys and run away laughing. And so it begins. Eliana isn’t yet interested in boys in that way, which is fine with me. The only boy she considers a close friend is James, her best friend since they were three years old.

  I was fourteen. It was August 1969, two years after Mom’s surgery. I was home from a month at music camp, where I played in an orchestra for the first time; where I got drunk for the first time; where, unbeknownst to me, another camper slipped acid into my hive medicine and I unwittingly tripped for the first time (and last time—what a nightmare!); and where I suddenly, unintentionally, flamboyantly, extravagantly, conspicuously reached puberty. My breasts grew so fast, you could watch their size increase with every passing day; for the boys, it was a spectator sport.

  I came home with my brand-new breasts, and there was Mom with none at all.

  “Falsies” is an embarrassing word.

  Everything is embarrassing when you’re fourteen.

  Nothing is more embarrassing than your mother’s falsies.

  Mom wore a crude prosthetic, a padded bra, which slid around, telegraphing to the world that she had “falsies.”

  It was like she hated that I was suddenly sexual, and
she was suddenly not.

  At music camp, my new figure made me a catch to the predatory boys. Squirrel to their falcon. A minute ago, I was a little girl, and—Boom!—now I was a sexpot. Ogled, pursued, invited to join illicit midnight skinny-dippings in the pool. It was dangerous, fun, titillating. And it was too much, it was overwhelming, confusing.

  I was having a secret romance with David, the eighteen-year-old counselor who taught woodwinds and conducted the chamber music ensemble. The first week, we took secret walks in the woods, holding hands. One afternoon, he pulled away from me, stared at me with a crazed look, and abruptly unzipped his jeans and ripped them off.

  I was thinking, “Oh my God, oh my God, this is it! David is overcome with sexual desire. He’s taking his pants off. What’s going to happen next? Am I ready for this?”

  There was a praying mantis crawling up David’s thigh. A six-inch twig with legs. He flicked it off, and I laughed my head off. He laughed, too, then pulled his jeans back on.

  That night in my cabin, according to plan, I tied a long piece of string around my wrist, and threaded it through the knothole in the wall beside my top bunk. David tugged on the string to wake me at midnight—very Romeo and Juliet—and I quietly climbed down from my bunk, tiptoed past Sheila the counselor, and out of the cabin. We ran into the pine forest and snuck into an abandoned cabin David had the key to. We took our clothes off. I learned about male anatomy, a new subject for me. There was lots of touching and stroking and fondling, no more than that, but it was a lot. I still felt like a little kid, wearing the strangely persuasive costume of a young woman.

  We were busted in the middle of the night, naked in the cabin in the woods. Flashlights on us. David was fired. The camp director called my parents.

  Mom was furious.

  With camp? With David? With me?

  Yes and yes and yes.

  When I went home at the end of the summer, buxom and fattened up from camp food so bad that all the kids filled up instead on white bread slathered with butter and sugar, my mother looked at me like she didn’t recognize me.