by Sigrid Nunez
But she was not without pity for humans. Once, she went into the city to do back-to-school shopping and gave all her money to an old woman begging outside A & S.
She never forgot the hunger of the war years. “Aren’t you going to finish your ice cream? You’ll regret it. When the war comes, there won’t be any ice cream.” (I worried a lot about the coming war and had my doubts whether hiding my head in the crook of my arm as we did in school shelter drills was going to save me. At any rate, when the bombs fell I wanted to be home. I knew in case of attack we were supposed to go down to the cellar, but my mother said she would never do that. She remembered raids in which people had drowned in cellars where the pipes had burst. “I rather die any way but that—drowning with the rats!” I agreed, and for a time my bad dreams composed themselves out of these elements: sirens, rats, and the water reaching to my chest, to my chin …) At the time of the Cuban missile crisis she went back and forth to the supermarket until the cupboards were jammed. For Easter our school held a contest in which pairs of children played catch with raw eggs. (“Only in this country do they teach children to throw food around.”) They say a European housewife could feed her family on what an American housewife throws away. Suppers from my childhood: boiled eggs and spinach, knockwurst, scrambled pancakes with applesauce. My mother’s love of sweets would eventually cost her every tooth in her head. Sometimes we made a whole meal out of a pie or a cake. We ate Hershey bars between slices of white bread for lunch. In our house you did not get up from the table until you had cleaned your plate. A common punishment: to be sent to bed without any supper.
I don’t think I ever saw her truly relaxed. Some part of her was always going—head, hand, foot. Even when she was sitting still her breath came a little fast. I suspected that she had high blood pressure. No way to know for sure, since she never had it checked. She wanted nothing to do with doctors. Though she suffered from headaches aspirin couldn’t touch, she would not go to a doctor for a stronger prescription. When small growths like blisters appeared on the whites of her eyes, she removed them herself with a sewing needle. “But you’ll get an infection!” “Ach, don’t be silly. I sterilized the needle.” Who needs doctors?
She had good hands, and she wanted always to be using them. At Christmas she baked and decorated dozens of cookies, storing them in tins with slices of apple to keep them fresh. She copied scenes from children’s books onto our T-shirts using Magic Marker, and covered her bedroom walls with a motif of abstract flowers made with crumpled paper dipped in paint. She learned to sew first of all for economy, but then an obsession took hold of her. Day after day we would come home from school to find the beds unmade, dishes in the sink, and my mother at her Singer. After a long day of sewing she would spend her evenings knitting. She made everything from bathing suits to winter coats. She was like a maiden in a fairy tale, spinning, spinning. Soon the closets bulged. All that work ruined those beautiful hands. The scissors raised a great welt on the knuckle of the third finger of her right hand, and crushed her thumbnail. Instead of being proud of her work, she would rather have had others believe the clothes were storebought. I was proud, and bragged to my friends that she had made my new red corduroy coat. Liar, they sneered, when they saw the label she had sewn in the lining.
She had a green thumb. Neighbors brought her plants that seemed in danger of dying. And she saved from dying too a score of sick and injured animals—squirrels, birds, a cat that had been trapped in a burning house. I remember as blessed those times when she was engrossed in nursing some creature back to health. It was good to see all her gentleness brought out. For those hands that could make plants bloom and heal a broken wing could also destroy and cause pain. They tore things and smashed things. They pinched, slapped, and shoved.
I sit on her bed watching her get ready to go out. The process of putting on her face takes a long time and is always the same, but I never tire of it. Those tempting little pots and tubes with names like desserts: Iced Mocha, Plum Passion, Peaches ‘n’ Cream. The magic mascara wand. Abracadabra: blond lashes are black. She says it helps if you keep your mouth open when putting on eye makeup. She is in her slip and stockings, the bumps of her garters standing out on her thighs. When she crosses her legs, there is the hiss of nylon against nylon. She says that European women are better at using cosmetics than American women. “American women look so cheap.” She always puts her lipstick on last, but first she rubs a dry toothbrush lightly across her lips to smooth them. I pick up the tissue she uses to blot her mouth and fit my own mouth to the imprint. The next part of her toilette I don’t like. Before pulling on her dress, to protect it from stains, she ties a scarf over her face. Standing there in her nylons and slip with the scarf over her face she is a disconcerting sight.
People said, “Your mother is so pretty.” But she didn’t see herself like that. I could tell by the way she spoke of other women that she did not count herself among the pretty ones. She was not flirtatious. She was never charming in a strictly feminine way. She had no use for feminine wiles, and she hated being ogled by men. She would not wear clothing that drew attention to her figure. Her daughters were another story: “When you are young you can get away with anything.” Not all agreed. The dean of boys stopped me in the hall. “Does your mother know you’re walking around like that?” “She made this for me.” “Well, tell her this is a high school, not a skating rink.” I was chagrined, but my mother laughed. “It’s his own guilty conscience that’s bothering him.”
She didn’t like to go to parties where she might be asked to dance. “I don’t want a strange man putting his arms around me.”
She never complained about getting older. She looked much younger than she was. Once, on her way to the store, she crossed in front of a police car and the patrolman called out through his bullhorn: “Young lady, shouldn’t you be in school?” “I gave him a dirty look and kept walking.” I knew that look. I’d seen her shoot it at a lot of men. In time her coldness toward men would seem to me a miscalculation: Hadn’t she ever considered the possibility that being nice to men could get a woman things she might not otherwise have?
Though she would always color her hair she gave up trying to stay slim. As she put on weight, her jaunty walk became more of a waddle. You would not have thought she had once been good at gymnastics. But she could still bend from the waist with straight knees and touch her palms to the floor.
She might not enjoy going to parties, but she threw herself wholeheartedly into helping me get ready for one. She made my dress. She did my hair. She got into a competitive spirit: “You’ll be the prettiest one there.” By the time I was in high school her moods in general tended to be brighter. I think it had to do with her children growing up. I was the only one still at home. Young enough to be still under her thumb but old enough not to be a burden. I did well in school, I made her proud. (But if someone complimented me in my presence she would shake her head. “Please. She thinks highly enough of herself as it is.”) She was curious about all aspects of my life and took pleasure in those adolescent triumphs: making cheerleaders, being asked to the prom. The carefree, promising youth she herself had not known.
(I spent the summer of my twentieth year in California. One day my friends and I took acid and went to the beach. At sundown, driving home in our jeep, we were still high. On acid, every passing thought can strike like an epiphany, and this one seemed to fill my head with light: My mother had never known this. To be driving with your friends in an open car, laughing; to be twenty and happy and free with the wind in your hair and your life ahead of you—she had missed all that.)
My friends liked her. She was different from other mothers; prettier, livelier, more fun. She enjoyed making people laugh. She would have you on the floor, doing toothless Rufus who ran the corner store, and his half-wit wife. Her dislike of men never extended to the boyfriends her daughters brought home. She was often at her best when one of them was around. She cooked special dinners and knitted sweaters fo
r them too. I had boyfriends who, years after I’d stopped seeing them and moved away, would still call her from time to time to say hello. She took it hard sometimes when I announced that she wouldn’t be seeing a certain boy at the house again. I suppose she too could have wanted a son.
She was no liberal, but something about the sixties appealed to her. The antics of the Yippies, bra-burnings, the way the hippies got themselves up—she got a kick out of all that. She liked to see a bit of spunk now and then. You could light up a joint right in front of her. “Now just a minute,” she’d protest, but she was only playing her part. My friends thought she was cool. She was pleased and excited that I went to Woodstock.
I found her everywhere in my reading. Children are said to see images of their own mothers in the stepmothers and witches of fairy tales, but I always saw mine in the innocent blond girl, often the prisoner of the witch, forced to labor at her sweeping or spinning. Later, I would identify her with any damsel in distress, with romantic heroines like Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Scarlett O’Hara.
I placed her under the sign of beauty, suffering, and loss.
Sitting on her lap as she pages through a magazine. One ad after another showing beautiful women in beautiful dress. “You should wear this, Mommy.” “You would look nice in that.” Her response is gruff. “And where would I wear such a thing—to the laundry room?”
The hours and hours she spent beading the gown I would wear to the country club dance.
She swiftly disabused us of certain notions acquired at school. America is the land of equal opportunity. All men are brothers. The best things in life are free.
Home for lunch, I eat my sandwich while she sits at the kitchen table, pasting S & H Green Stamps into a book.
The hum of her sewing machine. The funny munching sound of her pinking shears. “‘My Lili of the lamplight …’”
Sometimes I would catch her looking at me with a gently stricken expression. In a sad voice she would say, “You are a good kid, you really are.”
Her favorite English poet was Tennyson.
She said, “Give women power and they’ll turn out to be worse than men.” (She always expected the worst of people. She thought humankind was irredeemable. Her punishments were always given more in anger than in sorrow.)
She had strong opinions about everything. Opinions should be strong, otherwise they are not worth having (Goethe).
Her people, the Swabians: known for their bluntness and for their love of order.
She was different. She did not belong.
“How in God’s name did I get here?” she would ask, her head in her hands, truly bewildered; as if she had blown here like a feather.
When I was in grade school I remember she used to write poems based on themes from mythology. She made the costumes for some of our school plays. Always a supply of pink and blue yarn (in our neighborhood someone was always having a baby).
No one I ever knew had such smart hands.
At her lowest she would say, “I feel like a bug crushed under someone’s heel.”
I believe that, in spite of all her railing against her lot, she never really expected anything different.
You made your own bed, now you have to lie in it.
I don’t believe my mother made her own bed.
Often, when I said that my mother was German, people wanted to know: “How German?”
Her accent: described by one friend of mine as “so German it makes your skin crawl.” The accent of the mad doctor. “Und now, zee injection.” The accent of the murderer, the torturer. “Vee haf vays of making you talk.”
After her mother died, in the early seventies, my mother went to Germany and brought back some mementos, including a box of photographs. Most of the people in these photos were strangers to me. A chubby, smiling boy of about ten: Albrecht, 1918. A cousin of my mother’s mother. “He grew up to be so handsome, you never saw anything like it. How can I describe him? You know Hitler’s master race? Well, he was the ideal: blond, blue-eyed—and in his SS uniform he was a god. He rose very high in the SS. Ach, don’t look at me like that. He was in the Waffen-SS, he had nothing to do with the camps. He was a good, decent man. What? Who knows. After the war we never heard from him again. Not even his wife knew where he escaped to. South America, probably.”
When I was growing up, whenever I threw a tantrum she would say, “Who do you think you are, a little Hitler?”
I must have been about seven or eight when Mr. Blum first came to the house. Mr. Blum was from Berlin. He had escaped to America in the thirties, when he was in his teens. Now he worked for the welfare department. He and my mother met in our building one day when she was downstairs getting the mail. (“He took one look at me and started speaking in German.”) After that he dropped by sometimes when his work brought him to the projects, though I gathered such visits were against regulations.
He wore a black patch over one eye, like Godfather Drosselmeyer. He had a large head with damp-looking wavy gray hair, and large hands with fingers so long and thin and pale they made me think of candles. He looked ancient to me (it was more that patch than the gray hair.) In fact, he was probably about ten years older than my mother.
The morning they met at the mailboxes was a Saturday and I was home. My mother had been gone so long I started to worry and went downstairs to look for her. When he saw me Mr. Blum turned to my mother and said, “You married a Japanese?”
The next time I saw him was in our living room. “What happened to your eye?” “The cat ate it.” “I don’t believe you.” “You are right, my dear, I am lying. I tell you what really happened. One day, you see, this eye got very tired. I took it out to give it a rest. I put it in my pocket for safekeeping, and when I went to get it again, it was gone!”
I liked Mr. Blum. I liked his peculiar tweedling voice. His voice was a rocking horse, rocking, rocking. My mother pretended to be merely putting up with him—“I thought he would never leave!”—but that’s not how it seemed. They had so much to talk about. They talked for hours at a time, half in English, half in German, fortifying themselves with two pots of coffee and a dozen pastries between them. They talked about people in the projects, including Mr. Blum’s cases, and we children were warned not to repeat what we heard. Of course, even when it was in English much of that talk was cryptic to me. (“And it turns out the father of the baby is the father of the mother.”) Sometimes they talked about the war. (Mr. Blum had fought in France.) They talked about before the war, and I noticed that often—usually—instead of saying Germany they said Europe. For example, speaking of any number of things you could get “in Europe” and could not get here: good bread, good butter, a decent education.
I knew that Mr. Blum lived about a half-hour’s drive from us, and that he too had a family, including a son at NYU—“a real beatnik, that one.” That we were never invited to his house and never met any of his family did not seem to me odd; Mr. Blum never met my father either.
Now I can’t recall whether they always argued, or whether this was something that developed only after a time; I do seem to remember many visits ending in a quarrel. Mr. Blum was a terrible tease. He would say to my mother when she opened the door, “I come to see your half-Aryan Kinder!” He hardly ever called her Christa, but rather Greta, Gretel, Gretchen, Heidi, Ilse, and so on, in his teasing way. He baffled me. “Why do you call my mother Greta?” “For Greta Garbo, of course. Because Garbo’s face is the ideal to which your mother’s face aspires.” He made me cry one day when he said, “You are nothing but a little monkeyface compared to your mother.” He said also, “Deine Mutter ist meshuggah.” And once, when he was talking about a house he had been to, I thought I heard him say, “In every naked granny was some little trotsky.”
I remember how my mother’s eyes blazed when he said that violence ran in every German’s veins. But then immediately he added, “I am teasing, Heidi. You know how I love to see you get mad.” But sometimes, hours after he’d gone, she would
still be fuming. “Why does he come here? He just wants to insult me. Next time, I throw him out. Bastard. I don’t know why I even let him in.”
Once, she did not let him in. She knew that he was in the neighborhood, because she’d seen his car parked in the lot behind our building. She sat on the couch with her arms crossed high on her chest when he came to the door. Seeing the look of satisfaction deepening on her face as he knocked and knocked, as if he knew we were there, I felt as great a fear of my mother as I have ever known.
And then came the big fight, the one that ended with her demanding that he leave and not come back. Though it was in German, and though I was in my room and missed most of it, I could have told you what it was all about. It would have begun with one of Mr. Blum’s jabs, wounding my mother in her Deutschtum. She would have tried at first to hide her feelings, not wanting to let on how much he had gotten to her. He would have persisted, probing at the chink in her armor. In the explosion that followed, Negroes, Indians, and Hiroshima would probably all have been dragged in. My mother would have accused somebody—or everybody—of being a hypocrite and holier-than-thoo.
