Habit
Page 10
—Your mother can go with him, she tells me. You can go back to Irene in her office and get her paperwork.
And the manager disappears.
—I have to find a bathroom NOW, says Ma. She is jumping up and down, and it looks like she is getting ready to hitch up her skirt and do something unseemly.
—Where is the bathroom? I ask the tech.
He blinks at us and looks distractedly down at his clipboard.
—I can’t do an x-ray without paperwork, he says.
—SHIT, says Ma.
A few years ago, my mother announced she had a confession to make. I had no inkling of the guilt she’d apparently been wrestling with for quite some time.
It seems there were plenty of tap classes to be had near our home when I was a kid. She knew her little girl would have died and gone to heaven for a tap class; everything down to my toes needed to tap, tap, tap! But Ma had her own ideas, and sent me to ballet class instead.
Tap dancing was not for our kind of people. Tap dancing was vulgar. Ballet would be much more appropriate.
—SHIT, says Ma. She wiggles her hips and hops.
The x-ray tech can’t begin to appreciate the profundity of this moment. My well-bred mother has unexpectedly been transformed into a potty mouth and appears to be fixing to shuffle off to Buffalo, and there’s nobody but me and this stranger to admire the significance of her amazing breakthrough.
Guess I’m not adopted after all.
He points to a bathroom door and Ma makes a dash for it. I had no idea she could move like that. She leaps in and slams the door.
The tech is trying to sidle around the corner.
—Oh, no you DON’T! I call out.
He backs away further and I charge around to block his escape, brandishing my Sudoku book. I point my pen menacingly at his chest.
—Where are YOU going? She doesn’t know where to go when she comes out. I’ll get the goddam paperwork, but you have to stay with her till she gets this x-ray done!
In the car going home, x-ray in the bag, so to speak, we are warriors galloping back to camp with scalps and prisoners flung across our horses’ necks. We holler like the winning team on the bus back to school. If Ma knew how to high-five or bump my chest, and what it meant, she would do it right now. If I had a bottle of champagne, I would pour it over her head.
For a long time afterward, Ma keeps telling friends and family about how I blasted those buggers without skipping a beat in Sudoku. I myself will never get over Ma’s climactic jig in the hallway, and especially the S-bomb.
Weeks ago, I gave the hospital’s archive room a copy of the Power of Attorney to put in the computer so I can pick up test results without Ma’s signature on the release. The archive people seem to lose everything, too, but I have made a friend there, Iris, who recognizes me now. She knows very well that she will have to look in three or four places to find that POA. She never tells me I’m wrong—we both know it’s in there somewhere. I’m just now putting this together with the recent thingy problem, and a pattern is emerging. Next day, I go to the counter to pick up the CD and reports of the tests, and I’m glad to see Iris is on duty.
—What is it with your computers here? Nobody seems to be able to find anything and they all act as if it’s this big mystery and it only happens to us.
—Don’t you let them tell you that, says Iris. They took away the good computers to save money when we went private. Now nobody can’t find nothing around here.
I wonder how long they’ll keep someone like Iris around. She’s a little too smart for her own good.
10.
Proof of Life
GRAFFITI ON A DESKTOP in the Anthropology 101 classroom freshman year:
God is dead.
—Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead.
—God
Lately, I’ve been fretting about transportation.
When they canceled Ma’s driver’s license after the car impoundment debacle last summer, I committed to help her figure out how to get wherever she needs to go. Her friends and I do most of her transportation, and there are a couple of useful local people who can be hired. Still there have been times when we’ve found ourselves in a bind.
There’s a city service you can sign up for called CCT Connect. They have small vans that transport senior citizens door-to-door for a pittance. They can even take you if you’re in a wheelchair. All you do is fill out a short application and send it in with a copy of your driver’s license, birth certificate, or passport.
—Don’t take the passport. I might need it.
(I’m at Ma’s apartment getting ready to root around for one of the things on CCT’s list of options.)
—Why? Are you going somewhere? You still haven’t had your surgery.
Ma’s been stalling about the surgery. She says she’ll make up her mind by the end of the summer. I don’t think she has a trip set up, but I’m always a little suspicious. Colette and I wring our hands a lot over Ma’s travel bug, so she has learned to keep her plans to herself—she finds our remonstrations about travelers’ insurance and her lack of overseas health coverage to be just so much negative thinking. Whenever she can get her hands on some money of her own, she’s off, usually somewhere religiously oriented. She’s been to Yugoslavia (the site of some apparitions of the Virgin Mary), Russia (to see their icons when she joined that first local Orthodox church), and the Holy Land (baptized in the Jordan). Her present spiritually themed dream destination is Greece, because that seems to be where her current crop of priests and monks are more closely aligned. She thinks I don’t know this, but it’s obvious—she’s trying to learn Greek, and she has a new, gigantic National Geographic atlas of the Greek islands displayed prominently in the living room.
—Of course I’m not going anywhere now. I keep the passport in my purse for identification because they took away my license.
—Right, well, it looks like it has expired, so good luck with that. Where do you keep your birth certificate? Is there a file?
Most people know how to find their vital documents when they need them. I have my own special file in my office where I stash any number of things: marriage certificate, baptism records, proof of immunizations, passports. There’s even a card with Eliza’s tiny three-year-old fingerprints, made by a group that visited her pre-school to simplify identification in case something unspeakable happened.
Ma has beautiful files, at first glance. She hired someone to come in and organize her life several years ago. Everything is alphabetical, and not hand-labeled like mine. Whoever did the work had a gadget that typed the headings on the little cards. They even slipped them in the slots on the files in a perfect descending pattern, like music scales. It’s impressive, until you go looking for something and find yourself in a netherworld of complete and utter chaos.
There are nine drawers. Each one holds items that are meant to be compatible. In the accounts drawer, there are three different places she can file her bank statements: under CHECKING or BANK or NATIONAL PENN (depending on her mood I guess, because there is certainly no system I can identify). INSURANCE has a couple of obsolete car insurance policies (not the most recent one) as well as some Explanations of Benefits from her HMO. The rest of the HMO stuff is filed under HEALTH PLAN, but it takes up a lot of space because mixed in with it is a five-page history of the state of Pennsylvania.
Daddy was very organized; I’m sure he could have told me where their birth certificates and things were at all times. He used to spend hours in his study, sitting behind the desk he inherited from his father, the Chief Justice, working his way through a vodka bottle in the bottom right-hand drawer and poring meticulously over figures. Daddy also had a sense of humor: For years, he kept a paperweight on the bureau, with a giant clip holding a check carefully filled out by Ma:
Date: $106.40
Amount: Marjorie von Moschzisker
Pay to the Order of: March 5, 1969
Signed: The Mills Hardware Company
After he died and we kids formed Operation Ma, I didn’t inherit the desk, but I did get the job. The way Ma kept her accounts made me tear my hair out. My picky-eater friend Margaret would speak up for Ma when she could. Her husband, George, is an artist, too, and according to Margaret, their brains don’t do orderly financial management. And that’s quite an understatement.
If Ma’s organizational talents equaled her artistic gifts, she would be like a top-of-the line Macintosh with all the latest software updates. She had a lot of solid training abroad and in Philadelphia before she raised us. (Painting, drawing, and sculpting—it’s funny to think of a young debutante doing all those nudes. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why she’s so immodest.) As far as I’m concerned, Ma is the real deal. She was always working on something or other while we were growing up. My earliest childhood memory is downright Proustian: sneaking into her mysterious studio upstairs at age two to smell the turpentine, stretching up on tiptoe to peer over the edge of the table at a stained palette’s shiny blobs of rich colors, and finally, unable to resist, popping the lid of a paint tube into my mouth. I can still taste the grit. Ma and I practically lived at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on weekends, and I vowed never to do that to our kids. As a result, they haven’t learned much about art from me.
Ma’s creative pace picked up a lot when the house was finally empty, during The Separation. Daddy had Ma on a strict allowance and, needing to supplement, she managed to launch a significant career as a portrait painter. People would wait their turn for years. Some of the last ones she did were of our children:
Eliza, Ben, Sam
There’s been some rumbling among my siblings about the extensive collection of Ma’s artwork in our house, but I say tough luck. She needed the money badly after Daddy died, and we were willing to pay for the stuff. It’s lucky that David really does like her work. I try not to insist on displaying everything. We’ve got a bunch of gifted friends and family whose work we really love, but Ma’s art is pretty much all over the place. David says it’s not just the quality; it’s the scope, the journey of her work that he admires. He’s only uneasy when my dealings with Ma are particularly fraught. He says it’s hard for him to see me worn down while surrounded by all these potent reminders of my mother, no matter how wonderful they are.
But for me, it doesn’t seem to matter how upset I am with Ma, my feelings never transfer to her art. I can be screening her calls except to occasionally scream at her and hang up, waking from nightmares about her almost every night, but my relationship with Ma’s pictures and sculptures is on a separate plane. I’m in awe, and I love living among them.
There’s probably something in psychology textbooks about this, but, whatever. It doesn’t feel unhealthy to me. I even admit to a degree of gloating over certain particular treasures, like these two little bronzes I have:
That’s Colette, age two, strangling Pussle, the cat. (Pussle really had nine lives—she survived swallowing a needle and thread when she was a kitten, and being dropped repeatedly from the second floor balcony by eight-year-old Felix. She was found once, after an unusually long absence, under a sewage grate in the street. We had to get the fire department to extract her.) The bull is special because Ma’s favorite childhood home was in the country. She’s so subtle with these gems; they’re like sketches almost but you can tell how much she delights in the subjects. I’ve always felt miffed that Ma stopped sculpting before she could do one of me, but at least I have these two beauties.
Ma keeps trying to give us a portrait she did of me during college, but it’s enormous and I don’t really like it—I don’t think it’s her best work and besides, she did nothing to hide the fact that I was bored out of my mind. She has it in her bedroom:
If this piece had a title, it would be Young Woman on Stairs with Cats, Holding in Her Stomach and Wishing She Had a Cigarette. Ma let me read that book near my elbow when I got desperate, but mostly I passed the time trying to make her laugh, mimicking her concentrated expression while she painted: head tilted back, eyes squinting, mouth hanging open. She would snort when she turned from the canvas back to me.
Ma at work, 1980s
I wish she could have put me in this oil below—a Christmas present. She based it on a photograph I took of David and the kids at our club in Penllyn. I had no idea Ma was working on it, and it may be my favorite. That’s Sam with his back to us in the too-long swim trunks he insisted on wearing that summer. His bony shoulder blades are poking through his towel, which depicts a Central American village scene, a gift from a babysitter from El Salvador who helped us through the aftermath of the earthquake. Ben looks almost manly. Eliza’s there with her elegant neck and her bag of chips, smiling for the camera, and David is David, keeping a quiet eye on the brood. That’s the polo field in the background, with all its history from my own childhood, of egg-and-spoon races on the Fourth of July, Sunday afternoon teas on the lawn, and riding ponies along the far tree line with Colette. This is my world, and Ma’s, too—she saw her father land his plane on that field. Sometimes he would take her there at four a.m. to look for mushrooms in the dew. She watched from the roof of her grandmother’s house when the club’s barn burned down one night and the era of polo came to an end.
I have my own personal relationship with that leafy branch in the foreground; in fact, every single stroke of this simple but remarkably accurate sketch is part of my DNA. It’s my special people enjoying my special place, and it was made specifically for me by the one person who clearly knows how important that is.
I can’t remember if it’s Colette or Felix who once said when you really feel at the end of your rope with Ma, remember the art.
Here’s one we have that I’m in. It’s a Where’s Waldo. This is the backyard of the first house David and I bought in Los Angeles, just up the hill from Universal Studios. If you look carefully, you’ll spot me (actually only my legs) working on a wannabee starlet suntan by the pool. David designed that wall and the gate, and I tended the roses. The house came with a pre-installed mean old white cat with a crooked tail named Missy, who shunned us. She lived mostly in that rose garden (when David wasn’t chasing her around the house in a rage, bleeding from their turf battles). Missy’s buried there now. We still wish we’d kept this house . . . and it’s so typical of Ma to bravely let that blue striped umbrella take up a quarter of the canvas. I imagine a therapist might have questions about that—what exactly are we hiding and whom are we hiding it from?
Ma gave me a fascinating pencil sketch of Daddy. She dashed it off on the day after they were married, during a train ride on the way to report for his height-finder school at the beginning of World War II. Neither one of them had any idea what they were doing; they were not emotionally equipped for marriage and hardly even knew each other. They hadn’t really had a honeymoon at all, but look at how she did his lips in this picture:
So we’ve got something from just about every one of Ma’s different phases. We drew the line at the abstracts she tried in the late 1960s to early 1970s: paintings of stripes done in masking tape, caged in primary colors. Ma has recently realized that her cages were a subliminal way of expressing how she felt back then: trapped. She would be the first to agree the stuff was not worth keeping, but I think she should get credit for experimenting.
Looking at the portraits, it really is fascinating how someone can be such a nuisance and also have this superb gift for expressing the soul without words. Maybe it’s because they’re of our children, but those three portraits can bring me to tears. Ma identifies with Mary Cassatt, who often painted her own family. She believes portraits are most effective when the subjects are linked to the artist by blood. She’s also figured out that all the faces she worked on over the years were actually getting her ready for her great passion: Byzantine icons.
Since Ma began to make icons, it’s been hard to get her to paint anything else. (Icons are made, not painted. The artist never signs an icon. It’s something about humili
ty. Ma flatly refuses to sell them to non-Orthodox people. It would be blasphemy or something.) Icons are always of the saints, the angels, and the holy family. She says the whole point is to help the viewer to feel close to those unseen heavenly beings, like having a comforting photograph of a loved one that is far away. Here’s a Mother and Child she gave me:
What I found intriguing when she started is that there’s a whole series of prayers and meditations to do during each of the stages of making an icon. It’s very hard to get it right, and therefore most people, Ma included, can’t just paint alone at home. They have to go to a master iconographer for workshops, which are seven-day exhausting marathons. At first, if she didn’t get the prayers right, Ma found that the layers of clay, gesso, egg tempera, etc. wouldn’t set: The gold leaf would peel off the board or something, even if her materials were perfectly prepared. Maybe there’s some more concrete explanation, but it sure is interesting if it’s the kind of spiritual phenomenon she implies. There’s something so profound about the eyes in Ma’s icons. I don’t dare tell her that or she’ll assume I’m ripe for conversion.
As with many things, Ma doesn’t really know when enough is enough. Icons must be shared with the Whole World, and she has decided that this colossal task is completely up to her. For about fifteen years, she has been determined to make a video about icons that will once and for all convert everyone on this earth and save our souls, amen. (I have a sneaking feeling that besides the trip to Greece, the world’s need for this video is what is motivating her to go through with the cancer treatment instead of just moving into Father Nicholas’s attic to let nature take its course. I’ll take it, if that’s what it is. Far be it from me to quibble about what Ma wants to live for.)