by Bess Kalb
So that summer I threw her the most perfect wedding money could buy. It was under a white tent in the backyard, and all the waiters were in matching red vests and red fezzes, like at one of the grand hotels in Morocco. I wore a stunning orange-and-pink Pucci dress, which at the time was very avant-garde. You can buy as many clothes as you like, Bessie, but you can’t buy style. There was a champagne tower and a live jazz band, and everyone danced until there wasn’t any alcohol left. Nobody ever said I couldn’t throw a party.
The marriage went sour fast. Your mother would call me from the pay phone on the street and I’d hear cars honking and ask, “Why aren’t you calling from the apartment?” And she never had a decent answer. One morning I drove by the apartment to drop off some wedding presents that had been sent to Ardsley, and she was wearing dark sunglasses and turned me away, which I thought was odd. She had specifically asked for the chairs! One night during one of her pay phone calls, I swear to God I heard her sniffling. In all her life she had never called me crying. I asked her what the matter was and she said, “Nothing.” And then she said, “I don’t know. I think I’m just difficult.” And I closed my eyes and felt the ground drop beneath me.
I knew that tone of voice. I knew it from Estelle.
You know that story about your grandfather paying him off. But I don’t think you have any idea what I did. Your grandfather isn’t the only hero of this particular story. He was the muscle.
One afternoon your mother called me up from her apartment, cheery and bright as can be, and she told me, “I think I’d like to go see Marian, but James is taking the car this afternoon.” Marian was her closest friend from Brown. She lived in Halifax. She had flown in for the wedding and stayed at our house. And I said, very nonchalantly, “Oh, for how long will you see Marian?” And she said, “Maybe until dinner.” And I said, “Doesn’t Marian live in Canada?” And your mother said, “Certainly. Yes. Yes, that’s right.” And the line went quiet. And her tone of voice was very odd when she repeated, “But I’ll be back in time to have dinner with James.”
Something was very off. So I said, “Stay exactly where you are.”
I was in front of her at the curb in about forty-five minutes with a suitcase full of my underwear and socks and sweaters and a winter coat. I drove her straight to Kennedy Airport. She boarded a seven p.m. flight to Halifax and went off to stay with Marian. She didn’t say thank you; she just walked to the ticket counter with my suitcase in her hand.
Then I dealt with James.
He never particularly cared for me, and he resented the checks I occasionally sent your mother. But I knew he was terrified of your grandfather. He respected him—he was a department chair at Columbia, after all. I went home, and that same night, I sent your grandfather right back to Riverdale with a blank check. It must have been two in the morning when he got there. He opened their apartment door—we had the key. He took that guy by the collar of his shirt and said, “How much for you to walk away?” James looked your grandfather straight in the eye and he said, “Twenty thousand dollars.” Your grandfather took out his pen and the checkbook he carried in his jacket pocket and said, “I’ll make it an even five.” And that was that.
Everyone has a price.
PHONE CALL, NOVEMBER 2012
GRANDDAUGHTER: Hi, Grandma.
GRANDMOTHER: Bess! What’s wrong? What’s the matter?
Nothing’s the matter! I’m just calling you back. I’m just getting out of work.
It’s seven at night your time!
The show tapes at six and I stayed to watch it. I had a bit on! With kids—it’s cute. I’ll send you the link.
You’re working yourself too hard. You and Charlie should enjoy being engaged.
I’m enjoying being engaged by living my life and doing my job.
You’re like your mother. You sound very anxious. This whole thing is killing you. You know what you should do? You should become a teacher.
Grandma.
You like working with kids so much. And you can be a teacher anywhere. You can be a teacher in New York.
I can think of two reasons why I should not become a teacher: I need a master’s degree and I have no interest in becoming a teacher.
I have three reasons why you should.
Try me.
June, July, and August.
PHONE CALL, JANUARY 2013
GRANDDAUGHTER: Grandma. Great news. I found my wedding dress.
GRANDMOTHER: I thought you already bought your wedding dress!
I’m selling the long one and I’m getting a short one—tea length.
[SILENCE]
Grandma?
I’m here.
You’re upset.
Why would I be upset? It’s your wedding.
I just didn’t feel like myself in the one from New York. I felt like a cupcake.
All right.
And it was really heavy. I wouldn’t have been able to dance.
All right.
My mom wore a tea-length dress.
It was her second wedding, Bessie.
It was beautiful. I’d wear it, but I can’t wear a drop waist because of—
Because you have my hips! Thank you, Grandma!
Thank you, Grandma.
Just tell me it’s white.
It’s white. It’s all in a delicate lace with a fitted strapless bodice and tulle under the skirt. It feels like a ballerina’s dress.
Fine.
I really love it.
You’ll need to wear a strapless bra.
It actually doesn’t even need a bra because of the structure of the bodice.
Wear a bra. You’ll thank me.
I always thank you.
That’s right.
Anyway, what are you going to wear?
I was thinking I’ll wear yellow. I saw a yellow Armani jacket in bouclé that will be perfect for June.
It sounds very elegant.
Well, I’m very upset I can’t wear the skirt. My legs have these horrible veins!
So wear pants! It’s cold in June anyway! You’ll look great in pants.
Fine.
[BEAT]
Bessie?
Yes, Grandma?
You’re going to look stunning.
VOICE MAIL, TWENTY MINUTES LATER
Bessie, oh, your cell phone is probably on silent. What am I going to do with you? Have I ever told you about my wedding dress? My brother Leo’s wife, Lily, sewed it herself on a dress form. But it was very ornate—big sleeves and a high lace collar and a full ball-gown skirt. I wasn’t sentimental about it. When your mother was a little girl, I’d give it to her and she’d play dress-up with it with her friends. They’d run around the backyard in it doing plays. It was torn to shreds. I never cared. What do I care? It was the same backyard where your mother got married. Twice.
The first time she wore an elaborate dress. She hated it. I insisted on it.
When your mother married your father, she was doing her medical internship, she was exhausted. Two times I met her for lunch and she had a patient’s blood in her hair. So it was time to buy a dress and we went to Saks, and whatever they had is what she got. Off the rack. It was an afternoon dress. Not even formal.
The older you get, the more you remind me of her.
TWO VERSIONS OF THE SAME STORY
1
Your mother would kill me for saying this, but you weren’t exactly “planned.”
She had just passed her medical boards—it was the second year of her medical residency—and she went out drinking. Gin and tonics all night. Enough to give her quinine poisoning. You’d think she was trying to cure malaria. A few days later she was still throwing up
. She felt awful. She thought she was dying. So she went into the emergency room and the doctor took one look at her. “When was your last menstruation?” She thought for a minute, then she threw up on his shoes. There’s your answer. And you wonder why you love gin.
So nine months later you still weren’t born. She was in terrible pain. Every time I checked in on her it was one complaint after another: “My back is killing me—I can’t walk. I can’t sleep. I think they’re wrong about the baby. I think it’s twins.” She was working up until the end, her belly stretching out her hospital scrubs—a reminder of what happens when you let a woman in the program (there were only two other women in the psychiatry rotation at Columbia). She’d joke about it when patients brought it up. “I had a big lunch.”
At forty-one weeks she refused to go in and get induced. She wouldn’t even talk about a cesarean section. I’d tell her to get it over with and she’d hang up. You two were already playing chicken.
It was thirteen days past her due date and she was waiting for her omelet at Popover Café on Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam when her water broke all over the leather booth. She said “shit” loud enough that a busboy ran over. She left ten dollars cash on the table and marched out the door and hailed a cab and was at New York Hospital by eight a.m.
Someone paged your father, who was doing his critical care rotation at Mount Sinai, and he ran into the room at 8:20. It was just him and a nurse and your mother—their doctor was on his way from Westchester, but there wasn’t any rush, they thought, because the labor had barely started. The nurses changed shifts at nine a.m.—everyone in the north tower and south tower walked across the skybridge and switched places. You shot out at 9:02 into a bewildered doctor’s hands. He was paged to the next delivery, and he looked at your father and said, “You’re a physician, right?” Your father nodded and the doctor handed you to him. Then he left and it was just your mother and your father and all of you blinking at each other in disbelief. The covering doctors heard a baby cry and ran in all hysterical. They cut the cord and checked all your functions (perfect), cleaned you off, and put you on your mother’s chest.
You both got very quiet, and then you looked away from her and fell asleep.
When I came into the room an hour later, she said, “Mom, what am I supposed to do?”
2
Your mother was thirty-two when she decided it was time to have you.
She had just finished the first year of her medical residency and had decided to go into psychiatry. She had finally found what she loved: unlocking people’s minds, reassembling their sanity, healing the anguish in their heads with her wits and instinct. She’d written her admissions essay about the pink milk I’d given her when she was a girl and how she wanted to fight that kind of misdiagnosis. Blame me.
She had also found something else she loved: your father. Your father was her champion. Nothing like James. He was four years younger than she was, but she was a year behind him in medical school because she’d taken so much time off to nearly die in Paris and accidentally marry a schmuck. Your father was the top student in his class—a brilliant scientist, an intuitive physician. A healer. When they met, he invited her up to his dorm room at Columbia medical school and said, “Would you like a panini?” She had no idea what he was talking about, but she said, “Sure.” He took out fresh bread and aged cheddar and whole grain mustard from a dresser drawer, plugged in an electric contraption, and made your mother the greatest cheese sandwich she’d had in her life. The way he watched her eat it made her know he’d put her delight above anything else so long as he drew breath. She wasn’t wrong. Four years later, they were married.
And two years after that, your father took her to St. Barth’s to celebrate before she took her board exam. They stayed at a ramshackle bed-and-breakfast in the middle of the jungle. It was owned by a young bohemian couple who had come to the island on vacation and never left. Can you imagine? There were goats and chickens and a garden where they grew all the vegetables they ate. They had two little twin boys with long blond hair running around the place barefoot and they all lived this very charmed life.
By the end of the trip, the boys had taught your mother how to break a coconut and climb a tamarind tree to pick the fruit. She was relaxed and tan and happy. On the last night, she leaned over to your father at the big communal dinner table and said, “Let’s have a kid.” He could have died of happiness right then and there.
As you grew inside her, she’d walk by the children’s clothing stores on the Upper West Side and marvel at the dresses. Little blue-checked pinafores and lace booties. Hats printed with tiny ducks. Pink this, pink that—all this stuff she’d never buy for herself. She stockpiled it all.
At work, her patients would touch her belly when she examined them. “Is it a boy or a girl?” they’d ask, and she’d grin and say, “Girl,” as if she’d won the lottery. She’d feel you kick at night and wake up, then sing you back to sleep: “Youuu can dance, youuu can ji-ive, having the time of your li-ife…”
You were two weeks late. It was freezing on January 29, but she insisted on going for a walk that morning anyway. She made it two blocks to Popover Café on Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam and was just sitting down in a booth when her water broke. She shouted, “Thank God!” loud enough that a busboy ran over. She threw ten dollars on the table and marched outside and hailed a cab.
“New York Hospital! I’m having a baby!”
When you were born, the nurses were changing shifts and it was just you and your mother and your father in the room. The three of you, all alone for a full minute. She looked from your father to you and she closed her eyes and sank into the pillow. “Bess. Her name is Bess.”
YAHRZEIT
I’ve been dead a year.
It’s getting harder for you to hear my voice in your head, and you won’t listen to the voice mails you saved.
You collected them for years, which is both sentimental and morose.
Listen to them. I’ll wait.
You won’t do it. You’re afraid you’ll cry or that they’ll be very banal. Here. I’ll say them for you.
Hi, sweetheart. It’s Grandma. Call me back.
Hi, honey. It’s Grandma. I was wondering if you and Charlie had any plans for New Year’s. We’re going to the club down here. Anyway, call me back.
Bessie, it’s Grandma. I just got the new J.Crew catalog in the mail and I am calling to tell you to buy a peacoat. You won’t look good in the camel color. Buy it in black. Anyway, call me.
Bessie, you must call your mother. She’s worried about you hosting all those people in Block Island. They’re adults. They can take care of themselves. Your stomach can’t handle all the stress.
Yeah, hi. Grandma. Call me back.
Bessie, your mailbox was full. Do you need a new dress for that girl’s wedding in Thailand? You know it’s very hot there. Call me back.
Bessie, I just saw the most mediocre film. It was the Steve Jobs biopic. Don’t watch it. Very plodding and all over the place thematically. Your grandfather loved it.
Bessie, I can’t tell you how upset I am. Frances died. Oh, Bessie. Oh my. She was only eighty-five. It was a stroke. Oh, Bessie. I’ll try you back.
Bess. The New York Times is saying they put formaldehyde in the hair-straightening treatment you do. You must stop. I’ll mail you the article. Just get blowouts a couple times a week like everyone else on the planet.
Bessie.
Bessie, it’s me. Grandma. I’m just around.
Yeah—hello. Bessie, it’s me. I’ll give you another ring.
Bessie, hello.
Bessie, I’m just calling.
Bess.
It’s me.
It’s Grandma.
Just listen to them. Hear my voice. I’m right there, in your phon
e, in your bag. I’ll wait. Listen to them. I’m slipping from you. Fading. It’s terrible to fade. I could be very close. In your ear, clear as a bell, asking you to call me back.
{ part three }
OUR LIFE TOGETHER
I’VE NEVER TOLD YOU about the first time I held you in my arms.
It was the day you were born. You were two weeks late, so I was already camped out in a hotel room in New York.
You already know the story of the water breaking and the nurses changing shifts. How your grandfather and I were there within the hour.
I put on a yellow smock and a hairnet and walked into the delivery room. Your mother was asleep in her hospital bed and your father was tending to her, stroking her hair. I walked straight to you in your bassinet.
You had these little bow lips, round rosy cheeks. You were fair, like me, with milky gray eyes, like me, and reddish hair. Nothing like your mother right from the start. You opened your eyes, bleary and wet and narrow. I wiped some schmutz off your chin. I touched your forehead with the back of my hand. You made a squawk and I squawked back. I scooped you very carefully out of the bin, and I pressed you to my chest and breathed in your head. I’d never done anything like that before. And I held you about a foot away from my face and you had your little eyes open, fixed on my face. You didn’t have a name yet, so I gave you one. “Hello, angel. Hello, my angel.”
There you were, staring at me out of my own eyes. Perfect. Just perfect.
PHONE CALL, FEBRUARY 2013
GRANDMOTHER: Hi, honey, how’s everything going?
GRANDDAUGHTER: Everything’s fine.
Just fine?
I’m just making dinner. It was a long day.
