A smart person knows what he can’t do, but a smart aleck thinks he can do everything.
“I’m not telling you what to do,” Ettie said, “but you should go to college. Today everybody needs to go. In college is where you get smart and after you get smart, you get rich. And in college is where you’ll find a husband.
“Go to Boston. They have schools there for doctors and lawyers. Go look for one.”
So I left my life on Madison Avenue and I started a new life as a college freshman in Boston.
Ettie, Mr. Goldberg, the store, and my “situation,” as Ettie would say, disappeared before the train even got to Back Bay.
Ettie was in her seventies by the time I left for Boston. She had never lied about her age.
“A spring chicken I’m not,” she often said, “but I remember what it’s like to be young.
“When you’re young, you think you’ll always be young. You can’t imagine that the day will come when you’ll be happy just to have a nice hot glass of tea with lemon, a good bowel movement, a glass to put your teeth in, and praise God because you slept through the night and woke up in the morning without a pain.”
When Ettie was in her nineties, she lay dying on the green couch in the living room. I saw Mr. Goldberg kneel down next to her and take her hand. With tears in his eyes, he said, “You know, Mrs. Goldberg, I could have done a lot worse.”
Let me tell you something, if you’re lucky, you’ll get old.
EPILOGUE
ETTIE’S DEATH WASN’T a great loss to the world, but it was to me. Many years had passed since I had lived at 743 Madison Avenue. I was busy with children of my own. Often I found myself saying to them the same words Ettie had said to me. More time passed and I had grandchildren. I remember Ettie saying there were things I wouldn’t understand until I became a grandmother.
How right she was.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2011 by Ilene Beckerman. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-117-3
As part of our celebration of Mother's Day, we hope you enjoy this special preview of our latest anthology,
WHAT MY MOTHER GAVE ME,
edited by Elizabeth Benedict.
AVAILABLE WHEREVER
BOOKS ARE SOLD
Introduction
It is said that all books begin with an obsession, and this one is no exception.
In this case, it’s a beautiful winter scarf my mother gave me toward the end of her life, probably the last gift I got from her. After she died in 2004, I became more attached to it. The times I thought I’d lost it, I went into full-blown panics. It was only partly that I didn’t know where to find a replacement for this embroidered wool scarf whose label said MADE IN INDIA. Mostly, it was feeling that I’d lost my connection to my mother—a connection that was restored as soon as I found it.
The intensity of my feelings about the scarf surprised me, because I had felt so distant from my mother for most of my life. But because she was kind, loving, and needy, my feelings for her were layered with guilt, and the guilt so thick it sometimes felt like torment. After she died, I just felt sad and intensely aware of the scarf, which I wear around the collar of my coat all winter long, every year.
I lived silently with this welter of feelings year after year. I didn’t know whom to talk to about it, or what to say; the scarf was attached to a free-floating, inchoate grief. Or was it something other than grief? For years, the feelings were beyond any words that I could summon. In 2011, my brooding gave way to curiosity, and I began to wonder about the experience of other women. If this one gift meant so much to me, if it unlocked the door to so much history and such complicated feelings, might other women have such a gift themselves?
What My Mother Gave Me is the affirmative answer to that question. Each of the contributors describes a gift from her mother—three-dimensional, experiential, a work habit, a habit of being, a way of seeing the world—that magically, movingly reveals the story of her mother and of their relationship. The pieces run from short and sweet to long and wrenching, from hilarious to mournful, from heartwarming to heartbreaking. And the treasured gifts shimmer in their variety and uniqueness: an etiquette book, a plant, a necklace, a horse, a passport, a trip on the Circle Line boat around Manhattan. One woman received from her writer mother the habits of writing a thousand words a day plus one charming note. Another got the gift of taking the impossible in stride. And one was given a few bottles of nail polish that changed her life.
Singly, each piece is a gem to me: a gathering in of memory, affection, and gratitude, however tormented the relationships once were. Taken together, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; simple joy and devastating grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage; the anguish of suffering mothers and daughters powerless to help them—and the spoken and unspoken weight of missing all the mothers who are gone.
Having had an unhappy mother, I found myself astonished—feeling a mixture of envy and disbelief—by the stories of happy mothers and daughters. At first, I thought it was the younger writers whose mothers were happy, those whose mothers had more control over their lives and their finances than women of my mother’s generation. But as essays arrived over a period of months, I saw I was wrong: there are happy mothers from all generations in this collection. Such mothers—it’s clear from these pages—raise more lighthearted offspring than unhappy ones; or do I mean only that the absence of torment is palpable in their pages?
As essay after essay reveals, a single gift can easily tell the story of an entire life. Yet for all the richness here, it’s striking how modest almost all of these gifts are. A used cake pan, a homemade quilt, a wok, a Mexican blouse, a family photograph. It just might be, after all, that it’s the thought that counts—and the packaging, too. I don’t mean the paper and the ribbons, but the emotional wrapping, the occasion for the gift, the spirit in which it was given, and everything that happened before and after. This is another way of saying that, as gift givers and recipients—whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends—we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter most.
Ilene Beckerman’s beloved and bestselling book has been adapted for the stage by Nora and Delia Ephron. The star-studded Off-Broadway show is receiving rave reviews, as did the book:
ISBN 978-1-56512-475-2
“Illuminates the experience of an entire generation of women . . . This small gem of a book is worthy of a Tiffany box.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Never has the love of beautiful clothes seemed less frivolous.”
—The New Yorker
Inspired by a school reunion, Beckerman addresses what really matters in life.
ISBN 978-1-56512-374-8
“[An] eloquent blend of memoir and down-to-earth advice . . . makes these lessons not only worth learning, but irresistible as well.”
—The Common Reader
“Cuts to the heart of the female experience.”
—Chicago Tribune
The highs and lows of a relationship with an adult daughter are revealed in this poignant and candid story.
ISBN 978-1-56512-476-9
“Pithy wit and cute drawings sketch the happy tears, bittersweet memories and flares of anxiety that a daughter’s wedding elicits.”—The Dallas Morning News
“This is no mere humor book. Amid the drolleries are the poignant reflections of a mother.”—Beliefnet.com
Looking for love is never easy, and it’s never what you expect. This eloquent book is a reminder of how true that is.
ISBN 978-1-56512-180-5
“This savory little truffle turns out to be surprisingly poignant, laced with the bitter, the rueful, and the sweet.”
—Good Housekeeping
“Few contemporary authors capture the poignancy of romantic feeling in the spare, subtle way Ilene Beckerman does.”
—USA Today
The Smartest Woman I Know Page 4
