Up For Renewal

by Cathy Alter

  I thought about what he said for a while.

  “It’s not that my mother doesn’t know me as a person,” I said finally. “She knows who I am. She just doesn’t know what to do with me.”

  “Yah, okay,” agreed Dr. Oskar, “that’s another way of saying it.”

  “So what do I do when I’m home with her?”

  “You need to figure out a way to be vulnerable with each other.”

  All weekend, I watched my parents’ faces to see if they were trying to swallow their big secret. But I saw no big smiles, no meaningful eye shifting. If they knew, they gave nothing away. But I still couldn’t stand keeping quiet, even if they could.

  “Why don’t you go watch some television with my father while I shower?” I said to Karl one morning.

  “Because he’s watching golf,” he responded.

  “Well, now’s your chance to learn a little about the sport,” I suggested brightly. Karl looked at me like I was sending him off to the SATs.

  When I wasn’t trying to orchestrate “the talk,” I was taking a stab at creating a mother/daughter bond. Early Thanksgiving morning, while Karl and my father lugged a dozen extra folding chairs from our basement (ample time for a talk!), my mother opened her boutique to me for some private shopping.

  “What do you need?” she asked, using what sounded to me like forced chipperness.

  No matter how much time had elapsed between shopping trips, I always dreaded the way my mother followed me around her store like an overzealous publicist.

  “Maybe some jeans?” I weakly suggested, pulling out a pair with heavily embroidered legs.

  I saw her visibly exhale, happy that I was at least feigning interest. It always took me a while to warm up to the fact that she was eager to give me whatever I wanted.

  “What size are you now?” she asked.

  This was a test. My mother constantly accused me of losing weight. Except for the months directly preceding my divorce, when stress and grief had taken off pounds like an illness, I had remained at the exact same weight since college.

  “I’m still a size six.”

  Just to make her point, she added in the size four. When I emerged from the dressing room in the size six, which fit perfectly, she looked at me very seriously and said, “Your legs look like sticks.”

  I said nothing.

  “Are you eating?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look unhealthy.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Dr. Oskar had urged me to have an authentic, genuine exchange with my mother while I was home. Obviously, this was not it. But why was the thought of having a meaningful conversation with my mother so hard for me to digest? I knew that this was her way of expressing concern, however misguided. Why couldn’t I grasp the meaning and embrace the messenger?

  We drove back to the house in silence, walled off further by my new pair of size 6 jeans. In the hours leading up to Thanksgiving dinner, I sat quietly in the guest bedroom, psyching myself up for the party. The fact that I began the month playing the hostess and ended it being a guest did not escape me.

  As relatives started to arrive, I watched my mother go into high gear. Surrounded by our family, she was in her element fixing drinks, hanging coats, manning the stereo. She was barefoot, and the whisk-whisk sounds of her soles across the floor sounded like rustling silk taffeta. I looked at her and thought, my mother is the most beautiful woman in the world.

  I felt like I had come to the Thanksgiving table with a whole new appreciation for my mother and her skills as a true entertainer. Unlike me, she loved to be in the limelight and often directed the conversation to some escapade in which she had the starring role. Her storytelling reminded me of Glamour’s final tip for being irresistible at parties.

  12. PUT YOUR SOUL OUT THERE.

  Go ahead and risk self-exposure with that story about your run-in with your boss. Confess embarrassment. Tell a joke you love even if you’re really bad at it. Because off-the-charts charm comes from letting them know the real you.

  Usually, her stories involved dating the star quarterback of her high school, Richard (she called him Dick) Romanos, who more recently had a bit part on The Sopranos. Or the time in the 1970s when she grew marijuana in little flowerpots that she kept on the windowsill of our dining room. With their mischievous theme and slightly delinquent subject matter, her stories were usually crowd pleasers.

  Tonight, however, after a few glasses of champagne, my mother began to regale the crowd, which consisted of, in part, my father’s sister Gladys, her hard-of-hearing husband Bill, and a young couple invited by my brother and his wife, with a version of number 12 gone horribly awry.

  “Elliott [my father] and I once made a home movie with our friends,” she began teasingly. “Our scene was closed set only.” When no one bit, she added, “I agreed to go topless.”

  Another story began with her sewing her own maternity minidress (“Hey! This was the sixties!”) and ended with her taking it off and going skinny-dipping. “With the neighbors!”

  Whether she was trying to feel relevant, reminding the younger people at the table that once she too was a hottie, or just had one too many glasses of champagne and felt like boasting (which, again, I guess, is a sadder way of being relevant), I was completely unnerved by her ribald tales. They embarrassed and scared me.

  Later, I asked Karl if he’d noticed anything odd about the topic of my mother’s dinner conversation. By then, I was referring to it as the “And Then I Was Naked” story collection by Time-Life.

  “I didn’t hear her saying anything weird.” He looked at me with concern. Neither of us said anything for a while.

  “I guess I never noticed it before,” I said finally. “But so many of my mother’s stories are about herself. I don’t know how to connect with her.”

  Karl gave me one of his default replies, the one he used when he had no immediate plans of dealing with (cue ominous music): A Conversation.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said. When he saw that his (typical male) response had no effect, that I was still standing in front of him awaiting better marching orders, he added, “Don’t worry. I love your mother. She’s awesome. I love your whole family.”

  At least he knew what he was getting into.

  Still searching for a way to make my time with my mother more meaningful before we left for D.C., I asked her if she’d file my nails. When my grandmother was still alive, though barely, my mother would file and polish her nails as my grandmother lay in her hospital bed. Like she was getting her ready for a cocktail party. Whenever I’d visit my grandmother, I was always so touched to see the bottle of Revlon’s Love That Red on her nightstand. It was the same color my mother wore.

  Was I subconsciously trying to create the same caretaker bond that my mother and her mother shared? My mother definitely was the better manicurist. But more than that, allowing her to take charge of my ten fingers reinforced the silent contract we had with each other. I would always need her help.

  “You always did file your nails into funny little points.” She laughed, taking my hand into hers. I remembered that line from the movie Beaches; when Barbara Hershey’s little girl holds her plump hand next to her dying mother’s, she says, “Look, we have the same hands.” No matter how many times I see that movie, and it’s been a lot, that scene always makes me bawl.

  I also had my mother’s hands; small palms, long piano player’s fingers, thin wrists that wore watchbands on the last hole. But hers were always hot, and mine were always cold.

  She started with my thumb, and as she went along, my nail filings formed tiny mountains of white powder on my jeans. She worked quickly, using the previous finger’s handiwork as a visual guide before beginning on the next. “You have to make the shape of your nail match the shape of your cuticle,” she explained, starting on my index finger. This was perfectly acceptable conversation, of course. But sitting there, hand in hand, I had the familiar pang of wanting another kind of conn
ection, one that was easy and honest and where we could both be ourselves. I wanted to say something, anything, everything. But I was still mute as she started on my left hand.

  It was time to pull out the serious guns. I remembered an article from Real Simple called “Getting to Know You,” a four-page list of Barbara Walters–esque questions intended to help readers begin meaningful conversations with relatives and friends, preferably after a few eggnogs. The questions were divvied up into categories, such as “Childhood” and “Love and Family.” Reading it, I had been particularly moved by the questions under the “You and Me” heading, especially, “Is there anything you wish had been different between us?” That one was too painful to imagine asking my mother. Even writer Erik Jackson admitted, “such topics can seem scary (or face it, best avoided).”

  I started with a few softballs from under “The Kind of Life You’ve Lived.” For some reason, I felt like a pimply-faced boy about to ask the most popular girl in school to dance.

  “Mommy,” I said, half expecting my voice to crack, “what do you like best about yourself?”

  My question broke her filing rhythm. “I don’t know.” Her tone of voice was surprised, amused, and a bit flirtatious. I could tell she was flattered to be asked. And so I asked her again.

  “I’m funny and loving and caring,” she ticked off. I used the journalistic trick of staying quiet and nodding my head in encouragement. She continued. “And I rarely get angry.”

  It seemed more like she was writing her own personals ad. I had dealt with tough interview subjects before—I just had never considered my mother to be one, but I had never exactly sat down with her before in this capacity.

  I kept on her. “Do you have any other positive traits?” I asked.

  “I’m very generous,” she said, suddenly more firm in her answers. “And I’m protective of the people I love.”

  “How are you protective? Can you say more?”

  It didn’t take any further probing. She finally got what I was after.

  “If anyone was ever mean to you,” she said, squeezing my hand for emphasis, “I would make sure that it didn’t happen again.”

  It was interesting that she was talking about future cruelties as opposed to all the nastiness I had endured, motherless, in the past.

  “Is there something about yourself you’d like to change?” I asked gently.

  “I’m happy with myself.” The quickness of her response sent a red flag to my reporter’s ear.

  “Come on,” I prodded, suddenly more assured. “There must be something. Everyone has something.”

  “I’m too impulsive.”

  “How?”

  “I open my big yap too much.”

  And there it was, and it was everything. For so long, I had wondered if my mother possessed even a smidgen of self-awareness—and if she did, would she be willing to reveal the dirtier parts to herself? Finally, she had seen for herself what had long been hanging off the clothesline for me.

  “You’re not so bad,” I said. She held both of my hands in hers and examined her neat artistry. “Neither are you,” she said, turning from my hands to my face. For the first time since sitting down, I looked directly at my mother and saw that her eyes were wet and shiny.

  And I realized that all along, I knew exactly how to get more out of her; I had just never asked.

  As my father drove us to the airport, I wondered if Karl had done any asking of his own.

  DECEMBER

  Gift Wracked

  ever since returning from Thanksgiving, I had a newfound obsession with engagement rings. The impendence of a significant birthday, coupled with a half-baked belief that Karl would use this milestone to propose, was turning me into a total caricature of a woman in desperate need of a diamond.

  All of a sudden, I found myself ripping out ring ads from InStyle and scrutinizing them like I was studying for the bar. Most designs operated under the more-is-more aesthetic, but that didn’t stop me from debating the merits of each maker. Most dramatic was the ring by Scott Kay, which rose from the page like Venus on the half shell and had diamonds bursting out in every direction, like the ring had vomited mini engagement rings all over itself. Then there was the ring offered by Simon G, a headlight-size solitaire surrounded by an octagon of pink diamonds on a three-rowed band of white diamonds. It looked like something Willy Wonka might have masterminded, had he operated a jewelry store instead of a candy factory. A trilogy ring by Diavante (which I had initially misread as Deviant) was my least favorite, mostly because it combined both yellow gold and platinum, which only highlighted the diamond’s poor taste in neighbors.

  An equally new and regrettable development was my selective hearing. Every time Karl began a sentence with, “Will you…,” my heart raced. And every time that sentence ended with, “get me a glass of water, hand me a towel, wash my brown pants,” I felt simultaneously ashamed and enraged at myself. I had fallen prey to the worst these magazines had to offer, becoming a living, breathing Cosmo article.

  Actually, I was even worse. In October’s “10 Ways Not to Get Him to Propose,” I was Cosmo Commandment Number 2. In a watch list that included “Gain 35 pounds to show him how sexy you’ll look pregnant,” and “Oh so casually request ‘Babe, can you scratch my ring finger? It’s kind of itchy’” was this big don’t: “Freak out whenever he utters ‘Will you…,’ then act all depressed when the words ‘…marry me’ don’t follow. Practice on these: ‘Will you…pass the remote?’ or ‘Will you…stop staring at me like that?’”

  I knew women like this. I just never fancied I’d become one. I thought about a college friend who believed her boyfriend would propose over Christmas break. When she came back to school in January, she was absolutely livid after she unwrapped a blue box from Tiffany’s to find a pair of what she described bitterly as “mother-fucking pearl earrings.”

  I wondered if I’d exhibit the same grand disappointment and foiled sense of entitlement if my birthday came and went with no knee dropping, no quavering speech, and no velvet box. Would my heart end up crushed under all my foot stamping? To make matters worse, Hanukkah began the evening after my birthday, which provided eight more opportunities for letdown.

  I needed to do some damage control. Pronto. In the days leading up to my birthday, I had to emotionally prepare in the event of a nonevent. This month, every one of the magazines offered plenty of nifty ideas for what to get your boss, your sister, your globetrotting friend. But what about an article that dealt with the gifting aftermath? The fact of the matter was I needed an article that addressed what to do if I didn’t receive my heart’s desire, an article complete with scripted dialogue and a photo showing how to appear gracious that I could take with me to the bathroom and practice striking in the mirror.

  The makings of a colossal disappointment were already there. For instance, while on an overnight getaway to New York City, Karl and I were shopping along Madison Avenue, pretending we were rich and pointing at the astronomical things we’d get for each other. “Just wait here,” I instructed outside Prada, “I want to pop in and buy you the whole store.”

  We wandered into a shop with beautiful leather coats from Canada, and Karl wanted to buy me a knee-length trench that was the color of a dull nickel. It was slim and fitted to my body like it was custom made for me, and it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen. It was also on sale for $700, which, had he got it for me, would have been a pretty amazing souvenir from our trip. It also would have been the first real gift Karl had ever bought for me.

  But, and here comes the crazy, I was nervous about Karl spending that much money on me. Not because he couldn’t afford it or that we had already spent too much money on our train fare to New York. So I asked myself, what was really going on here? What did this jacket really represent to me? Why, when what I really wanted to say was “Yes, please buy me this jacket,” what I said instead was “No, I already have plenty of jackets”? The answer that came was this: if Karl was spen
ding $700 on a coat, then that was $700 he wasn’t going to be spending on a ring. Looking at my reflection in the store’s mirror, I continued to make more troubling if/then statements. If he bought me the coat, then he wouldn’t be buying me a ring. Which also meant if he was prepared to buy me the coat, then he hadn’t already bought me a ring.

  “You are turning into such a girl,” teased Steph, my first cousin and the person I felt closest to in my family. She and her husband Drew ran a porn website out of their farmhouse in Maine. They were also in town, having flown into Manhattan to meet with one of their site’s contributors, a gay hard-core star from the 1980s.

  Over dinner, while Karl and Drew chatted about deer meat, Steph and I sat with our shoulders touching, and I relayed some of the side effects I was suffering from my now-seven-month immersion into women’s magazines.

  “Who cares about a ring?” Steph asked in all seriousness. She held out her hand to show me hers. I remembered when she picked it out, under duress from her mother, my aunt Hava and my mother’s sister. It was white gold with a dull, dark stone that was set flush with the plain band. “I hate things that sparkle,” she explained. “I’d take it off right now if it wasn’t stuck on my finger.”

  “Sometimes I feel like Cosmo’s Bedside Astrologer has taken over my brain,” I said, switching the topic to something she was more familiar with. Even though she was almost nine years younger than me, it was Steph who had first told me about the birds and the bees.

  “If you were a magazine article,” she posed, her cheeks bright from too much wine, “which one would you be?” She began to lampoon my reading material by offering me some helpful title suggestions.

  “How about ‘I Love Me Now,’” she said, draining the rest of her wine. “Or, ‘12 Ways to Fuck Yourself and Other Things I Learned from Reading Magazines.’” By the time she came up with my personal favorite, “Our Parts Fit: A Love Story,” we both had tears streaming down our cheeks.