Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

by Bess Kalb

  Never. Buy. Fake. Anything.

  TWO DAYS DEAD

  When I die you’ll have two days to kill before you have to get to Martha’s Vineyard for the burial. You still won’t be good at crying in front of Charlie—he’s a WASP, they don’t do histrionics. That will be your assumption anyway. He would’ve loved for you to let him see you hurt. You were trying to protect him, trying to make your pain invisible. Without a witness. It’s just noises into a pillow.

  You’ll do something very strange the day after you get the call. You’ll get out of the house and go to Koreatown to the women-only spa. You’d gone there twice before, once with your friend the lawyer and once by yourself after a bad day at work. You’ll get in the car and drive yourself (terrible!) and pay the woman twenty dollars. She’ll ask if you have an appointment, and you’ll say, “No, I don’t have an appointment.” It will be the first full sentence you spoke that day. You’ll make an appointment for a manicure. A manicure! You’ll think, “I shouldn’t have chipped nails for the funeral.” My granddaughter. It wouldn’t have mattered.

  You’ll change into the thin cotton robe in a shade of green that will make you look very peaked. You’ll take your towel to the showers in a trance. You’ll make yourself very clean, you’ll get shampoo in your eye, and the tears will start again. You’ll sit in the tub naked and, like a child in a bath, you’ll watch your arms float, in disbelief at how pleasant it all is. You’ll look around at the bodies in the room, a parade of black ink tattoos running together—animal faces, geometric shapes. You’ll regret not having one, a permanent mark. You’ll think, “Something to identify the body.”

  A woman will shriek out your name, and you’ll dry yourself and follow her to the nail room, poorly ventilated and bright. You’ll pick a sensible neutral. She’ll ask how your day was. You’ll smile and say, “Fine.” You’ll swallow a full sword.

  You won’t leave for five hours. Until it’s dark. You’ll fall asleep in a pink sauna lined with glowing bricks of a pink salt, small and silent with an aroma like bread. The ceiling will seem to pulse, and you’ll close your eyes. You’ll shower again and sit in the steam room, breathing in the thick, wet air. Filling your lungs with the heat. Exhaling through your mouth.

  You’ll schedule a scrub.

  That’s where you’ll cry outright. The scrub will happen on a flat metal table. An older woman in black underwear will point to the slab without ceremony. You’ll lay your body facedown, and she’ll immediately douse you with scalding water. You’ll wince, and she’ll laugh. She’ll coat your body in a rough soap and begin to sand off your legs, your stomach, your breasts, your arms. She’ll flip you over like a hamburger patty and start again. When she rinses you off, gentler than before, you’ll feel your skin wash down the table, your unnecessary cells. She’ll touch your face, and you’ll lean into her very slightly. You’ll cry again. She’ll say, “Too rough?” And you’ll tell her, “It’s fine.”

  When you come home, Charlie will greet you at the door. He’ll be so worried—your phone was off. You’ll fall headfirst into his chest and he’ll catch you. You won’t say a word, and when you look up at him, he’ll be crying, too.

  { part two }

  YOUR MOTHER

  PINK MILK

  YOUR MOTHER AND I barely had a conversation from the time she was a very young child to when she announced she intended to leave the house at sixteen years old. We had very little in common and neither of us had much of an interest in forcing anything. I read on the couch and she read in her room, and she ate in the sunroom with the housekeeper at six while her brothers were at sports and I smoked in the kitchen waiting for your grandfather to come home. It was fine that way. It was quiet. Ships passing.

  You have to consider, Bessie. I had three children by the time I was thirty-two. I had gone from this scrappy Brooklyn girl in this madcap love affair with your grandfather to being locked away alone in a big house in the suburbs while these three kids ran around and howled like hyenas. My world became very small very quickly. My sons could take care of themselves, but your mother was different. She needed me desperately. And she resented me when she sensed my distance. I’d look at her with her big brown eyes and she was this living, breathing reminder that there was something I could not give. I didn’t have the perfect motherly instinct, because I was mourning the loss of a life I never had a chance to live. I’m not excusing myself. And I’m not saying I’m sorry. I’m just saying how it was.

  It all went to hell the night before your mother started kindergarten. I’ll never forget. I walked into her room—she must have been reading in bed with the housekeeper—and I set out her clothes on her rocking chair while they watched. I took out her patent leather Mary Janes from her closet, a powder-blue dress with mother-of-pearl buttons, a white cotton turtleneck, and little white bobby socks with ruffles at the cuffs. Perfect. She glared at me the whole time.

  “Robbie, sit up so I can brush your hair.”

  She didn’t know she had a choice then—those were the days. So she sat up on the edge of the bed and the housekeeper ran off, and I retrieved the Mason Pearson hairbrush from her dresser and got to work.

  Her hair was thick and black and curly, and the only way to tame it was to brush it a hundred times. An enormous amount of hair on such a tiny girl. So I got to work and she moaned and she pretended to cry, and I held her shoulder and she wriggled away.

  “Enough theatrics. If you tangle it, I’ll have to start all over.”

  The first time she said “I hate you” was when I was brushing her hair. “I hate you.” She couldn’t have been older than seven.

  She became very attached to the housekeepers as the years went on. There was a woman from Ireland who scrubbed a copper serving platter and it oxidized. An enormous Swedish woman who had a brain aneurism at the grocery store and died in front of half the town. A woman from the Caribbean who backed the car into a telephone pole and got out and ran down the street. An excommunicated nun who I think was an illiterate, but she made the most wonderful soufflé. Your mother charmed them all—and she turned them against me. She’d mock me with a singsong “Yes, Mrs. Barbara” if I asked her to do anything. None of the housekeepers lasted longer than a year.

  They would look after her when your grandfather and I would leave for Europe for a month or two. I’d worry about your mother, building her case against me. Rifling through my purses for dollar bills and change. Throwing my cigarettes at the geese in the backyard.

  I’d bring her back dolls from every country. A Spanish dancer holding miniature brass castanets. A Marie Antoinette from France with a porcelain face and rouge circles drawn on. A Hungarian soldier with a real mink hat. A couple of Dutch milkmaids in hand-painted clogs. She had a collection of fifteen or twenty by the time she was twelve, and she lined them up on the bookshelf across from her bed, staring at them as she fell asleep at night.

  There was a woman we hired whom she loved in particular, Mrs. Garnier. Mrs. Garnier was from Montreal and her son was killed in a bar fight. She doted on your mother. She taught her to bake tarte tatin. When your mother practiced piano, Mrs. Garnier made up songs and sang along. One day while your mother was at school, Mrs. Garnier and I had a terrible fight—I forget about what—and she quit. She walked out of the house. That night your mother got her first headache.

  They were not just headaches, they were crippling headaches—she’d wake up shrieking. She had ringing in her ears and pain she said felt like an electric jolt. Her vision would blur and she’d have to sit in the dark, rocking back and forth, until the headache stopped. They happened once a week, then twice. She came to me ranting and raving: “I can’t go on like this. I’m dying.” She collapsed on the floor. So I put her in the car and took her to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

  She was seen by the top neurologist in New York. He did a full exam: vision tests, a scan of her he
ad, something with electric pads. Nothing was the matter. Your mother wept in the car the whole ride back. “You can’t make me live like this.”

  So I took her to the pediatrician in town, a lovely woman who’d seen all my kids since they were in diapers. She read through the report from Columbia and did some tests of her own. She said there wasn’t anything to do. So I begged her. Robin needed help. I looked the doctor right in the eye and said, “You need to give her something.” The doctor thought about it and suggested that perhaps your mother was suffering from some sort of seizure problem. It made sense to me. And so she wrote her a prescription for phenobarbital. It was only later I learned it’s a version of the same drug they use to execute criminals.

  Your mother was ten years old.

  She started her regimen the next morning. It was a bright red syrup—cherry flavored—and I’d mix one big teaspoon in a glass of milk and she’d drink it with her breakfast. Pink milk. She did that for three years.

  They were the greatest three years of anyone’s life. She was calm and made all kinds of friends and did beautifully in school—she rose to the top of her class. At the end of each year they’d give out superlatives, and your mother was always awarded “smartest.” She’d shake the principal’s hand up there and everyone would cheer and she’d beam into the lights. We didn’t get along any better, but we didn’t fight, and that was enough. And everything was fine.

  When she was eleven I sent her off to sleepaway camp with two bottles. In those days there was hardly any supervision. She started getting the doses wrong. She used a soupspoon to measure. So she’d make the milk too strong on some days and her tongue would turn red.

  That’s when she started to sleepwalk. She’d wake up in the middle of the night in the shower cabin, and on some mornings she’d have leaves in her hair. She’d apparently tried to break into the mess hall and fell asleep at the front door, which wasn’t even locked.

  One morning, when they played the bugle and all the girls woke up and made their beds and stood for inspection, your mother wasn’t there. They searched the whole camp. They called a sheriff from the town in New Hampshire. They couldn’t find her. They started searching the lake.

  That afternoon, a man in a pickup truck was driving down the dirt road about three miles from the camp, and he saw what he thought was a garbage bag in a ditch. Your mother was sitting there in her nightgown, soaking wet in mud, shivering. When he dropped her off at the town hospital, the doctor asked if she’d been taking any medication, and she glared at him and said, “Ask my mother.”

  Oh, how I berated her when I got the call. I was worried, of course, but I knew she was fine. The doctor sent her back to camp with a measuring spoon.

  Just after her thirteenth birthday, I drove your mother to the pediatrician to get the prescription refilled. Her bat mitzvah was the week before and it was perfect, if you must know—we had a luncheon at the house and she agreed to have her hair set and she wore a pale yellow skirt suit and cream pumps with one-inch heels. A miracle. (But, Bessie, you should never wear yellow with your coloring—you’ll look dead.)

  So I got to the pediatrician’s office and the door was locked. I had somewhere to be, so I banged and I yelled, and your mother was rolling her eyes and giving me grief for getting the day wrong. Eventually we could hear someone starting to unlock the door from the inside. It took a full minute.

  And standing there was the pediatrician, stark naked except for a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck, her breasts pointed right at us. Her eyes were wild and her hair was sticking out at all angles. I shut the door. Your mother and I didn’t say a word, and we got back in the station wagon. I drove her to school, and that was the end of the phenobarbital.

  Years later, when your mother was at Columbia medical school, the doctor who initially examined her there passed away. He’d been the head of the neurology department for thirty-five years. There was a big ceremony and his picture was everywhere around the campus, and your mother recognized him. So she went to his office at his practice and she gave her name and requested her twenty-year-old records from his secretary, who was crying. She handed your mother a file folder: “Robin E. Bell, May 12, 1964.”

  And there was the diagnosis written in black ink: hyperosmia. Abnormally acute sense of smell.

  PHONE CALL, DECEMBER 2011

  GRANDMOTHER: Bessie?

  GRANDDAUGHTER: Grandma?

  Bess! Ha! Thank God in heaven I got you. You haven’t left for Yosemite Park?

  No, we’re packing. We’re about to get in the car. What’s up?

  You’re going to be freezing! It’s freezing there!

  I know. I’ve packed a lot of warm layers and I’ll be inside—

  No, you won’t. You’ll be outside. Your mother says you’re cross-country skiing.

  Yes…Charlie’s family really likes to cross-country ski.

  I don’t understand it. It’s a ridiculous thing to do. It’s not skiing, it’s shuffling.

  It’s fun—it’s being outdoors and it’s not that hard. We practiced in Maine on a golf course.

  But you’re not going to be on a golf course. One fall and you snap your leg and you’re lying there in the middle of the wilderness and you can’t get up.

  Surrounded by Charlie’s family!

  And how’s that going to look? They take you outside for one second and you’re belly up in a ditch.

  Charlie led outdoor adventure trips for kids at a camp for five summers. I couldn’t be with anyone more prepared for disaster.

  You’re not some ten-year-old boy he can throw in his backpack at a moment’s notice. You’re not exactly small.

  [ASIDE]

  Charlie, will you tell my grandma I’m not going to die in Yosemite.

  CHARLIE: I’m not getting involved in this.

  Charlie says everything’s going to be fine and he’s very prepared. I thought you were worried about me being cold.

  Can’t I be worried about more than one thing? Why don’t they take you someplace normal? Even normal skiing—somewhere with a hotel you can sit in.

  They like roughing it, being in nature.

  Because they didn’t come from suffering. They never chased mice around the attic with a broomstick and survived on forty dollars a week.

  I thought it was forty-five a week.

  It was just enough to starve.

  Please just—

  You know what’s roughing it? Lying on a straw bed with meningitis, and the only medication we can afford is cod liver oil from the Italian neighbor whose son got his hand caught in a meat grinder.

  [SILENCE]

  Grandma, I think it’s going to be fine.

  Does your jacket have a lining?

  My jacket has a lining.

  Bring a hat.

  VOICE MAIL, ONE DAY LATER

  Bessie, your grandfather says there are brown bears in Yosemite, and they’ve become domesticated because tourists are giving them food. But if they come up to you and you don’t have any food, guess who they’re going to eat? But they’re not the worst of your problems. Grizzly bears are the real threat. If you even see a grizzly bear, it’s already too late. I’m being serious, Bessie. You must be careful.

  PHONE CALL, TWO DAYS LATER

  GRANDDAUGHTER: Grandma, I got your voice mail. I barely have reception—I’m standing in a field.

  GRANDMOTHER: Bessie, thank God.

  I talked to Charlie and all the bears are hibernating.

  That’s a myth. They wake up and they eat.

  The chances of me being attacked by a bear are extremely small. Speaking of animals, tomorrow we’re riding horses! Horses are vegetarians.

  Oh, Bessie. Oh my.

  What did I say?

  H
ave I told you about your mother’s friend Lisa Belski?

  Yes. The woman who didn’t wear a helmet—

  She was on her honeymoon in the South of France. And she and her new husband thought it would be a good idea to take a romantic ride on horseback through some vineyard or other. And they were riding along and your mother’s friend Lisa’s horse got spooked—who knows why? Maybe there was a bee! And the horse tossed her off and she landed on her head and she was paralyzed immediately. And then do you know what happened?

  What happened?

  Her husband abandoned her for a stewardess.

  LEAVING IT ALL BEHIND

  When your grandfather made his first money, we left Brooklyn for good. We had been living in the attic and then with Leo and Lily, and I had two children, your uncle Larry and your mother, who was just a baby. She had colic and the whole house would be up at night.

  Your grandfather wanted to get as far from Brooklyn as possible, but I insisted we be along the train line to New York City, so we bought the house in Ardsley. It was a long and winding ranch house done in a contemporary style for the time, and I filled every inch of it with art. The dining room was enormous, and I had my mother’s table extended with leaves and hung a chintzy bamboo chandelier with monkeys resting on the arms. It was very fashionable then. I thought it was fun. Bessie, when you come into an enormous amount of money very quickly, you have to do everything you can to make it seem like you’ve had it for ten generations.

  I had the couches upholstered in a thick floral damask just like I’d seen in a photograph of a drawing room of a manor in the English countryside. There were real geodes from Brazil and masks from Africa that scared the living daylights out of your mother. I filled the walls with paintings from the Ashcan school, brooding men in hats crouched together in the cold; they reminded me of my father. They weren’t pretty, but they were very fine works. I had a collector’s eye.