The Year My Mother Came Back

by Alice Eve Cohen

  She looked at me with . . . what is it? Disgust? Envy? Fury? Loss?

  Yes and yes and yes and yes.

  Mom forbade me from ever seeing David again.

  “He’s too old for you, Alice. You’re in tenth grade. What is a college freshman doing with a fourteen-year-old?”

  “Almost fifteen!”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “You haven’t met him!”

  “I don’t want to meet him.”

  I ran to the living room where Dad was at the piano, playing Chopin.

  Mom followed me, arms crossed, lips pursed.

  Dad finished playing, then turned to face me.

  “What’s wrong, Alice?”

  “Please let me see David. We’re in love!”

  Jennifer, my goofy-looking little sister, looked up from her book, eyes wide, her crooked teeth facing every which way.

  “You know me,” said Dad, chuckling, turning it into a joke, “I don’t know a damn thing about relationships. All I understand is music, and since David is a classically trained musician, in my book, he’s—”

  “Ira!” snapped Mom.

  “Uh . . . Listen to your mother, Alice.”

  “Daddy, please!”

  “Your mother says no. So that’s that.”

  “This is so unfair!” I ran upstairs to my room and threw myself on the bed, sobbing, Juliet separated from her Romeo. Amanda the Cat jumped on my bed, licked my face and purred. She always did that when I cried. I wanted to believe it was affection, but I think she just liked the salt. I took out my stash of love letters from David—he wrote me long, flowery, idolatrous letters every day—and I cried some more.

  MY SISTER MADELINE was going back to college. We drove up to Boston and helped her move into her new dorm room at Brandeis. Gone, just when we needed her the most. Madeline didn’t live with us anymore. Jennifer and I were sad that she wasn’t home. Why did she have to leave now? Madeline always saw the bright side of things. With Mom angry all the time, we could have used Madeline’s calming infuence.

  Mom was always glaring at me. Sometimes she stood behind me and insulted me, while I was looking in the mirror. She had never insulted me before. Never said stuff like this to me, never before this summer. She was acting crazy. I got the feeling she couldn’t say this stuff to my face because she knew it was wrong.

  “You’re getting fat,” she told my reflection.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Your legs look like stuffed sausages.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  “Your breasts are enormous.”

  I started to cry. “Stop it!” I put my hands over my ears.

  “You eat too much. Have a yogurt for dinner, or a bowl of soup.”

  “Shut! Up!”

  “Not both. I’m concerned about your health. You used to be—”

  “Don’t!”

  “—so slender and pretty, and—”

  “Please leave me alone!”

  “Now look at you!”

  “Get out of my room, Mom!”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “GET OUT!”

  DAVID WENT TO college in Boston. He wrote me long love letters and took the train every weekend to see me. We would meet up secretly at the home of his friend Ralph, a senior at my high school, who had also met David at music camp. David recently had a falling out with his parents, and they locked him out of their New York City apartment where David grew up, so David would crash at Ralph’s on the weekends. But now, even Ralph’s laid-back parents were tiring of David, who had a habit of getting kicked out of places. The two guys cooked up elaborate schemes for our clandestine meetings, which once entailed my climbing into Ralph’s second-floor bedroom window via the maple tree in his backyard.

  Sometimes, David brazenly knocked on my front door. If Mom was out and Dad was home, I would let him in, and they’d talk about music. He successfully wooed my father with his musical passions: they had the same favorite conductor (Bernstein), same favorite orchestra (Philadelphia), same favorite composer (Beethoven). He made my dad positively ecstatic by playing duets with him.

  But as soon as my mother came home, the music stopped.

  “Get out of my house.”

  “With all due respect, Mrs. Cohen—”

  “Shut up!”

  It was sort of a relief when David and Mom fought over me. I was momentarily out of the spotlight. Dad ignored them and played piano, providing the soundtrack to their arguments. Jennifer and I sat on the sofa, observing Mom and David’s back and forth debate, as if we were watching a tennis match. Jennifer worshipped me and my teenaged friends. In Jennifer’s eyes, I could do no wrong.

  David sometimes went to outrageous lengths to try to win over my mom.

  “Mrs. Cohen, I noticed that your floors needed mopping and waxing, so while you were out, I took it upon myself to . . .”

  The floor shone under its slippery coat of wax. My mother was momentarily speechless, stupefied by the deafening clash of gratitude and rage.

  “It was very nice of you to mop the floor, David. Thank you, but it doesn’t change my opinion. Now leave.”

  “Mrs. Cohen, with all due respect, I know you don’t trust me—”

  “You’re right, I don’t.”

  “But I want you to know that Alice and I are not having sex.”

  “I should hope not!”

  Technically speaking, David and I were not having sex. We did other things, but we’d never had intercourse. Mom probably assumed we had, but I was so mad at her, I wouldn’t admit to her that I was a virgin.

  “Alice,” Mom scowled at me in the mirror, “I looked through your sketchbook—”

  “Don’t look at my sketchbook!”

  “—and I saw your drawings of naked couples having sex.”

  “That’s private!”

  “Are you having sex?

  “They’re just drawings! Stay out of my stuff.”

  She sighed, stared at me for a full minute, with who knows what thoughts going through her mind, then said, “You’re drawings . . . are excellent.”

  DAD AND I didn’t talk much. It wasn’t his style. Cheerful detachment was his style. He avoided emotional confrontation by keeping himself busy: doing calisthenics every morning when he woke up, working in his office all day, playing piano every night, sailing every weekend. My parents argued about sailing. Mom thought he should spend less time sailing and more time with his family. He was stubborn about doing what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it. I wasn’t good at sailing. Neither was Mom or my sisters, so Dad was off limits on weekends when he raced with his expert crew.

  The way to reach Dad was through music. He took me to my clarinet lesson every Thursday evening. We played clarinet-piano sonatas together. It made us both happy. It was the only way I knew how to feel close to him, to get his attention. My playing impressed Grandpa Ben, who proclaimed in his thick Russian accent that I was destined for a world-class concert career (though his considerable hearing loss cast doubt on his assessment of my talent.) The only one in the family who didn’t like my clarinet playing was Amanda. As soon as I started playing, she flattened her ears, ran to the door, scratched on the screen, and meowed pitifully, begging to be let out.

  Music was a reliable way to escape my mother’s weird anger at me. She didn’t yell at me or insult me when I was practicing, so I practiced a lot.

  When I was a little girl, I once threw a block at Sally and chipped her tooth for saying my mom was crazy, but now I wondered whether it was true. My mom was so different from other moms. Over the summer, while I was at camp, Mom gave up stockings. She gave up high heels. She gave up lipstick. She gave up shaving her legs. She gave up dyeing her hair. She gave up acting like other middle-aged suburban moms. She didn’t look or behave like any of the other moms I knew.

  She was a mad woman. Not a madwoman. She was a woman who was mad all the time. She was mostly mad at the trappings of being a suburban wife, so s
he had jettisoned them, one by one. What would she give up next? From the way she was looking at me, I thought she wanted to give up being my mother.

  At the end of tenth grade, I broke up with David. It was my decision. “I can’t stand having my mother angry with me all the time,” I told him after that awful year. “It makes me miserable. And I’m not in love with you anymore.”

  But even with David out of the picture, Mom still seemed to be angry with me.

  When I pick up Eliana from school, she and her classmate Thomas are intentionally bumping into each other, shoulder to shoulder, in that fourth-grade way that could be aggression or flirtation, or an amalgam of both. I picture Eliana a few years from now, as a fourteen-year-old. Oh, my God, I would hate it if either of my daughters at age fourteen had a love affair with a college student. I would forbid it. I’d be furious. What was I thinking? Of course David was too old for me. Of course my mother was right.

  Pelting rain. The motor was idling. The windshield wipers swished back and forth, to no purpose. I sat in the passenger seat next to Mom, my face in my hands, hoping none of my classmates would see me through the wall of water. Students huddled under umbrellas and ponchos near the high-school entrance. The bell rang, and they shoved through the glass doors.

  “Mom. Please don’t go into school like that.”

  “Why not?” she snapped.

  “Because you’re wearing a nightgown!”

  “I have a raincoat over it. Nobody will notice.”

  “Yes they will! Everyone will notice.”

  “Who cares what I’m wearing?”

  “I do!”

  “Well, I don’t. I’m angry, and I need to have a word with the principal. If I phone he’ll ignore me. I can get his attention if I go into school now.”

  “Yeah, you’ll get his attention alright!”

  She turned off the engine. “Are you coming?”

  “Don’t go into school like that.”

  “Are you coming or not, Alice?”

  “No,” I groaned. “I’ll wait till you’re inside.”

  “Fine!” she seethed. She turned off the engine, got out of the car, and slammed the door behind her. I watched her run through the pouring rain in her slippers, her long white nightgown dragging in the puddles.

  My mother was usually angry at me. But today she was angry for me, which was even worse. She periodically marched into the high school office in her nightgown to complain about some meaningless bullshit—my intense homework load, or my heavy backpack, or some other idiotic notion that she had blown way out of proportion. I was mortified by her public displays.

  The late bell rang. I waited in the car till she was out of sight before slinking soggily into school. Later, through the open door of my first-period Spanish class, I saw the assistant principal escort my mother out of his office and into the hall, where he jutted his chin out and called her an “irate parent” in his gruff, retired-army-sergeant voice, before letting go of her elbow. There was giggling in the classroom. My cheeks burned. I stared hard at my notebook and scribbled hieroglyphics in the margins. Some of my classmates were staring at my mother, the lady in the nightgown and trench coat. Some were staring at me.

  “¡Atención, clase! Escúchame, y repita lo que digo,” said Señora Delgado, tactfully and mercifully closing the door.

  Every morning, after walking Eliana to school, I take a different path through Central Park. This is my favorite part of the day. Purple morning glories line the fence around Sheep’s Meadow. Turtles line up on the boulders bordering the lake. Bright yellow leaves carpet the trails near the Boathouse. Jugglers and musicians practice at the Bethesda Fountain. In a hidden pond, I see orange carp, pond skimmers, emerald dragonflies. There’s an aerial party around the birdfeeders, a cacophonous symphony of birdsong. I walk on soft grass and dirt paths, and scramble to the top of boulders, pretending that I’m on the Appalachian Trail, rather than in the middle of Manhattan.

  Signs at trailheads designate the Ramble FOREVER WILD—albeit a loose definition of wild. Central Park is a carefully landscaped illusion of nature, designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmstead, maintained these days by the Central Park Conservancy. The purported “wild” parts are fenced in. Obedient tourists and locals stay on the paved paths. A man-made waterfall flows into the man-made lake. I’m sure the multi-ton boulders were deposited here by retreating glaciers in the last Ice Age, but what about that huge gray slab of stone, artfully silhouetted against the lake? Was that the work of Mother Nature or Mr. Olmstead?

  I’m amused by the trompe l’oeil effect. I like being tricked into thinking I’m in nature, when this park is as carefully contrived as Disneyland. Anyway, the trees don’t give a damn that they were planted by a landscape designer. The ducks don’t care that the lake is a ruse, fed by an underground plumbing system. To the thousands of migratory birds that land in Central Park each spring and fall, Central Park is an oasis of forest and ponds, not an elaborate stage set. They have no argument with the human landscaping, or with humans for that matter. I figure, if birds are tricked by Central Park, there’s no shame in being tricked myself.

  It was 1971, and I was sixteen. Eleventh grade.

  One day, Mom abandoned the falsies and went natural. Very Women’s Lib, except that the all-natural, braless attitude was more of an under-thirty thing, and braless feminists generally had breasts. But this was very Mom. Breastless and restless. She was already the only woman in our constrictive suburban ecosystem to not mow the lawn to precisely match the tacitly approved crew cut of the neighbors’ lawns. She was the only woman in our neighborhood who went to antiwar protests, who held two master’s degrees from Columbia University (Sociology, and Public Law and Government), who had contributed as a researcher to two books developed by renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, and who was working on a monumental, ever-growing, ever-unfinished, PhD dissertation.

  Mom had attained an enlightened state of antivanity. I admired her nonconformity, I really did. I was grateful that we went on family trips to antiwar marches on Washington. That was cool. I was glad she was a feminist. I should have been proud of her, but she embarrassed me. Her tirades at my school had made her the brunt of jokes. “Alice’s mother is weird, she’s crazy,” my classmates whispered. I wanted to punch them in the face, but I just walked past them, my cheeks burning.

  MEANWHILE, MOM STILL acted like she hated me.

  “I don’t want to be called Mommy ever again.”

  “Should I call you Mom?

  “That’s just as bad.”

  “Okay, you want me to call you Louise?”

  “That’s better.”

  She used to love me. What did I do? Grow up? Reach puberty? Nothing I could do about it. She never used to say mean things to me. I wanted to cry, but I was sixteen, so what could I do except be angry back at her? I was so angry I ate a whole box of Fig Newtons. That would show her. Ha!

  Some days I hated her. I never used to. It was because of her stupid breast cancer. It ruined everything.

  But I didn’t really hate her. I missed her. She probably didn’t really hate me, either. She liked my good grades and my artwork. I won an art contest in Seventeen magazine, and she showed everyone the issue with my prize-winning collage published in it! She probably missed me. She probably missed herself. Why did she have to get breast cancer? I hated, hated, hated cancer.

  She hated my boyfriend, Paul—more than was logically possible. I thought she also liked him, but she wouldn’t admit it. How could she not have liked him? He was fantastic. I was totally in love with him. We met at All-County Choir. Paul was in a band, and he played guitar and sang exactly like James Taylor. He was a year older than me and he lived two towns over. We biked six miles to visit each other. He was super smart and super nice, tall and lanky, gorgeous, sexy, and oh my God, what an amazing kisser. We only made out, which was fine with me—lovely, actually. We were crazy about each other. I was so happy we were together. Paul had drawn a scarily l
ow number in the draft lottery, but he got into Cornell, so he’d be safe for the next four years. His mother, Beverly, said if he was drafted they’d move to Canada. Beverly was cool. She liked me a lot, which was nice but kind of surreal, in light of my mother’s low regard for her son. She was a teacher, really smart and interesting, very liberal. In fact, she reminded me a lot of my mother before she became angry all the time.

  The more Mom hated Paul, the more I loved him. She unwittingly regulated our mother – daughter emotional thermostat. The more she dialed up the heat on her anger, the more my passion for Paul increased, till I was on fire. Dial it on up, Mom! She was probably jealous.

  Mom and Dad barely ever touched. Did that mean they never had sex? (I didn’t want to think about that.)

  Then Paul went to Cornell. We continued our romance long-distance, until he started dating Caroline. The morning Mom figured it out (my bloodshot eyes gave me away), she launched into a ferocious monologue at the breakfast table, while brutally slicing a loaf of bread.

  “Paul is despicable, unfaithful, false-hearted . . .”

  I begged her to stop. I was still in love with Paul and I couldn’t stand hearing her rail against him, but she was unstoppable. She continued to assault the bread, while spewing a thesaurus-worthy litany of invective.

  “He’s deceitful, duplicitous, perfidious, hateful . . .”

  “Shut up!” I yelled, covering my ears, but Mom was just revving up.

  Jennifer ate her frosted flakes, silent and attentive, her silver braces gleaming.

  “. . . fickle, treacherous, cheating . . .”

  Her anger was way out of proportion. I was the one who should be angry, not her. But now I couldn’t be angry at Paul, because Mom had stolen my anger.

  “. . . underhanded, lying . . .”

  I had to defend Paul’s honor, even though he’d just broken up with me. I wanted to kill Mom, Mommy, Mother, Louise, whatever the fuck she wanted me to call her today. I wanted to stab her with the bread knife. I actually wanted to do that. I pictured myself grabbing the knife and stabbing her in the chest.