Becca in a Brownie troop. Do you remember the pledge? “To help other people every day, especially those at home.” And now I am one of those people, but I have such a clear memory of you in your little brown dress holding up two fingers crossed by your thumb, that beanie off to one side, your book bag there on the kitchen counter, red Formica, the linden tree out the window.
Your father keeps pointing out what I don’t remember, and I keep saying, “But here, look at all I do remember.” He wonders where my memory has gone, and I keep saying it’s not that it has gone but simply that I have run out of space. I have filled every nook and cranny with things I wish I could now box up and store elsewhere, to make room for the new. Like I remember making Popsicles out of Kool-Aid, filling the little plastic holders I got at a Tupperware party. And I can remember the Christmas one of you got a Vac-U-Form and one of you got Incredible Edibles, and the whole house smelled of sweet, burning plastic for days, and you both had scars on your arms from hitting those hot plates. I think those toys came with a warning and maybe got recalled, but you loved them while they worked. I remember Crazy Foam, and Fuzzy Wuzzy soaps, which grew fur and had a prize in the center, and those pretty jewel-toned bath oil beads that I think you two gave me every birthday or Christmas for several years, the fragrance Cachet and then Charlie.
I remember smells that way (a whole section of my brain seems to house them), and I love the memories, but I do need the space these days. I can’t recall that your father has an appointment, but I can recall vividly the year we got a Christmas tree that was flocked in pale pink. I remember those temporary tattoos, skulls and crossbones and hearts and flowers, your tired, dirty bodies covered in them after long play days in the summer; I remember hosing you down on the back sidewalk and then filling a warm, soapy tub, Jeff surrounded by plastic boats, and you, Becca, with that bad-looking naked Tiny Tears doll that you took everywhere for years. I drew hopscotch boards for you, the big circular one like a snail, hopping round and round to the center, where we put a big H for “Home.” And then you came home later and later, Becca, in your low-hanging bell-bottoms, which you spent a summer embroidering. I taught you French knots, remember? My mother taught me French knots and the running stitch, and then I taught you just as she’d taught me (hold tight to the needle and wrap, wrap, wrap), and you wore Indian moccasins and a beaded headband and a poncho like what is back in the stores now. You were no longer consulting your Magic 8 Ball by then; you weren’t consulting me either.
I remember your father saying to Jeff, “Son, the only thing you should ever drink like water is water,” and, Jeff, you were leaning against the refrigerator looking at us with one eye closed, I suspect to get us in focus. You were only 15 and reeking of marijuana and liquor. There are smells I’d rather not keep in my memories, but good luck with that.
Your father smelled like lemons that time I grew suspicious—lemons—and I knew it was something you had once had in the bathroom, Becca, and so I went down to Rexall and sniffed around. Love’s Fresh Lemon—that was it. They also had Love’s Baby Soft. You had both of those products when you went away to college. I unscrewed the cap and breathed it in, and I knew. I just knew without really knowing, if that makes sense. I wish now that I could delete it all from my mind, like that old electric typewriter we had for years, where you could put in a cartridge and retype all the words that you did not want, and they were magically lifted from the page.
I remember Rudolf and how there was a big smudge, like a shadow, where his body had pressed against our bedroom wall. Even after he died, I still thought I saw him from the corner of my eye. Even now, I think I see him sometimes, large graceful movements as he tiptoes down the hall, then rests in first position, naturally graceful.
More and more, I am always there in Boston when I write to you. And not even your Boston, but mine, the one of my childhood. I’m always there on the platform, waiting for the train; I put Christmas lights in the trees, and I hear laughter from people passing. I smell the river and the warm wool of my scarf, dampened by my breath. I think my mind takes me to that place where I still have things to work on. It is possible that there can be one thing in your life that you never stop working on. My wish is that you both are in lives that provide loving and trustworthy souls who can hear your story; I hope you are able to articulate with great passion all the things I did wrong in life and have great plans for how you will go forward and do it all better. Then I will know I did a good job. I love you more than the air I breathe. Always have. These days my air comes bottled, and they charge me for it.
June 2, 2015
We have been here a week, both of us exhausted from the move and the unpacking, still trying to adjust to the heat and the different light. We both needed a break, and so today we went to find the house where Frank had lived as a boy. He insisted I take that damn oxygen tank with us, but I won the battle, at least for today. I just wanted to roll down the window and breathe on my own, and I did fine. Down to only one cigarette a day, sometimes two. Frank said things looked so different to him, and he circled the block several times before stopping in front of the house; it clearly has not been loved, with paint peeling and some shingles missing; an old Honda Civic (like we’d once had in our drive), bikes in a messy garage (we’d had that, too), and a circle worn into the dirt like a bike path. I waited in the car while he went to the door.
The young woman who answered said it wasn’t a good day, so then we drove and parked along Highway 211 and stood at the edge of the railroad tracks. He said he wanted to walk down to the site, but he didn’t do it that day. It was hot, and the sun so bright, broken bottles shattered and sparkling along the roadside. He told me how he used to put pennies on the rails, something I had heard him tell many times; one of the flattened pieces of copper was on his dresser, in the little jar where he put pins and paper clips. I can only imagine he was thinking of his father.
It’s odd, isn’t it, what we never outgrow. I think that those who forget being children have likely lost their souls; it’s just that simple. Please don’t forget. I hope these notes to you will help.
May 3, 1985
Newton
My father would have been 86 today, and I wish I could call him. TW3-3642. He almost always answered on the third ring and then called my name—“Lil!”—as if a complete surprise and delight to hear from me. There’s so much I probably haven’t told you about him.
He loved beef tongue, which I hated to see in the refrigerator, and he always wore a hat (many men did at the time). He once saw Houdini (I think he told you about that), loved crossword puzzles, and aspired to play chess after the ’72 Olympics. He liked that there was a sport where you remained seated and more or less solitary, and he admired the way that each move reduced all the chances up ahead; he made little notations when he looked at the games in the newspaper, and I still have some of those notes that he kept squirreled away in a book called “How to Play Chess in Ten Easy Lessons.” He had written “impossible” under the title with a big exclamation mark, but still he made his notes, and they are there in the book, just as he left them, things that make no sense to me: Nc3 f5 e4 fxe4 Nxe4 Nf6 Nxf6+ gxf6 Qh5#.
He once said he was sure he could be a better player if such concentration didn’t make him want to drink and smoke so much. You wouldn’t know all of that by those later years, the way he sat in his chair with so little to say, focused on whatever was on the television, a lot of silly shows like “The Gong Show,” which he would never have watched back when he was teaching himself to play chess, and he certainly wouldn’t have laughed. And yet there he was, laughing along with whatever silly thing Chuck Barris did. I checked on him daily for a long stretch of time (the rest of his life, I should say), the distance between us seeming longer and longer with each passing day, and especially in the winter. A broken hip that winter took him to the hospital and was the beginning of the end.
I never learned how to play chess, maybe because I associated it with those year
s right after my mother died, when it seemed that my father was looking for ways to fill his time, neighbors and friends at work encouraging him to have an interest or a hobby. Perhaps I also don’t have the brain for it! I wasn’t very good at bridge either. I was in a club briefly, but it became obvious that no one liked being paired with me; there was one woman, Naomi Brennan, who remembered every card thrown and talked the entire time, a Benson & Hedges cigarette always pinched there between her coral lips.
If I concentrated on the cards, I missed the conversation, and if I concentrated on the conversation, I made a million mistakes with the cards. Whenever we met at our house, you children were like mice, getting into my butter mints and mixed nuts and the little Cokes. I even had skirts to put on the bottles (a gift from Naomi) and cloth napkins embroidered with the different card suits. My favorite part of being in that club was eating butter mints and smoking. I had smoked Salems for a long time, but then I switched to Virginia Slims, because I loved the commercials. I liked to think I had indeed “come a long way, baby.”
Frank always asked if I really enjoyed that time with bridge group, and then he commented that it sounded like a henhouse brothel for the mentally impaired with talk of “tricks” and “rubbers” and “dummies.” It seems such a joke would get old, but it didn’t, or hasn’t; it still makes me laugh, even though I gave up bridge to volunteer, and that made me feel better about myself. I think Frank then thought I was spending too much time in sad situations (the burn unit, where I read to children, the grief support groups, where I served coffee). And maybe I did get too close sometimes. Maybe I didn’t have cheerful and uplifting things to tell when I came home. Maybe that’s the difference between a game and reality.
My two cents: Go to the dentist twice a year. Floss. Get your physicals. Be honest. Be kind. Wear good, comfortable shoes. Let people know what they mean to you. Bring your children to see their grandparents. Always have extra Halloween candy. Drink lots of water. Make sure your children have pets and lots of free time. It’s so important that they know how to be alone.
And thank goodness for you and your children that the days of laxatives are over! I saved several of my mother’s magazines, just as they were by her bed, and over the years, I have enjoyed going back and reading what she was reading at the time, but I have been shocked by all the ads and columns about dosing your children with castor oil for anything that was wrong with them. It didn’t happen to me, perhaps because my mother was not there, but it explains a lot of other people I know if that one psychology course I took in the extended-education program holds true!
What I love about looking at the magazines that were there by my mother’s bed is to see what she had marked with a dog-eared page or a scrap of paper: the recipes and bits of news in Life magazine, like an article called “Men Lose Their Pants to Slack-Crazy Women.” She also marked an ad about getting a canary and how it would lift your spirits and make you sing.
Sometimes, I take smoke deep into my lungs and I hold it there before I safely douse my cigarette in a pail of sand I keep by the back door, the same one that was by the door of my studio, the same one you children used at the beach and in your sandbox, Mother Goose barely visible on the rusted tin.
December 21, 1967
I am sitting on the floor in the studio at the end of the day, already dark at five as I survey my domain. I am so proud of the world I have built here, the little bodies in leotards and the great excitement when fitting them for their first toe shoes or picking out costumes for the spring recital. We all have fun with the recitals; the whole family pitches in with the props and the staging. I love to sit here in the dark, in the silence, the streetlight shining outside the window.
The kids want a puppy, and I think it is time. Margot is getting old, and aren’t we all. I will turn 35 soon, older than my mother, and I’m both relieved and sad when I think of that. To be so happy! She would love knowing that I am, and who would have ever thought I could be? The tree at home is up and all decorated, and I have a tiny one here, as well. The shopping is almost done: G.I. Joe, Twister, Easy-Bake Oven, and that strange rubbery thing with his horse, Gumby. Frank and I are giving each other a Zenith stereo console. It will fill a whole wall, but Frank swears the sound is worth it.
My mother’s cheese soufflé:
½ cup butter, ½ cup flour, 2 tsp salt, ½ tsp paprika, dash Tabasco, 2 cups milk, ½ lb American cheese (cut up), 8 eggs grade B (separated). Melt butter, add flour, and season. Stir until smooth. Add cheese and keep stirring. Beat whites stiff. Beat yolks and pour into cheese, fold over the whites, and put in casserole. 475F for 10 min, reduce to 400°F for 25 min or bake slow at 350F for hr.
She made a note that this should cost 63¢ and is supposed to feed 6, but that they are talking about people who don’t have a good appetite, that our family of 3 licked the bowl clean. She wrote: Fast way is better! But don’t leave the kitchen!
Spring cleaning 1978
Here is a review my mother had torn from the paper, “The Deer That Grew Up,” about the movie “Bambi,” which she had promised we would go see. Of course we didn’t get there, and then it was years before I saw it. I took you two when it came through town in the late ’60s. “Bambi,” “Dumbo,” “Cinderella,” “Snow White.” So many lost mothers! And as soon as Bambi’s mother got shot, I started crying. Of course, I never would have made you two leave, and so we sat with our Milk Duds and popcorn, a grape Charms sucker for Jeff, you two fixed on the screen and me studying that huge chandelier and hoping it was securely supported. I studied that and the lovely red drapes at the front of the theater, and imagined how nice that would be at the small elementary school stage we borrowed each year for my recital. For a long time after, we quoted Thumper: “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all”; certainly I have failed staying true to that one too many times to count. But I have never eaten venison.
I also found the ad for the Darling Pet Monkey! $18.95, and I am attaching it here. “Almost human,” “likes lollipops,” “FREE cage” and “FREE leather collar & leash,” it says, but, children, it does not say what it will cost to clean all the rugs it will shit on or the drapes will shred with those claws and teeth. Jeff named him Zorro, but Demon was more like it. You were both terrified, and so was I. Do you remember? Becca, you were crying hysterically, and poor Margot was barking and whining and torn between wanting to hide under the bed or kill it. I sent you both outdoors, for fear of getting attacked while I finally trapped him in the small downstairs bathroom. I called your father, but his office phone rang and rang and rang, so I called the police, who came immediately but asked me what were they supposed to do with it, and I said we didn’t care—just take it.
I did write to the Animal Farm in Miami Beach and try to get my money back, but they never responded. The good news? We got Rudolf, and though Margot wasn’t thrilled, he grew into a graceful prince. If Nureyev had been changed into a dog, he would have looked just like our Rudolf. I’m pretty sure that our Darling Pet Monkey did not end up scaling the branches of the Franklin Park Zoo, but that’s what we told you two. In fact, we said there were several Darling Pet Monkeys who’d welcomed him in.
February 2, 2012
Something I have never told you:
I called your young colleague on the phone several times to see what I might hear in the background. Once, I held my nose and tried to sound like Lily Tomlin on “Laugh-In.”
“Hello?” I said. “Is Franklin there?”
Pause.
“I said, ‘Is Franklin there?’”
“No one by that name lives here,” she said, the words clipped and quick.
So the next time, I said, “Tell Franklin it’s time.” And I knew in the pause that she wanted to ask a question. She wanted to say “Time for what?” But I hung up.
And then I appeared at her door on a Thursday morning in early November. Her apartment reminded me of Becca’s right out of college, only Becca has always had a way o
f pulling a home together, even with things like particleboard and cinder blocks, and this young woman did not; this one had no homey touches to speak of, and it reeked of patchouli, a little cone of incense burned to ash there on the table beside where she finally offered me a seat on a cot, covered in one of those cloths from India they used to sell at World Bazaar. Hers was covered in cat hair and some kind of crumbs.
She plopped down in a purple beanbag chair, and just the sight of it, just the imagined thought of you seated there, long legs out in front of you on that awful carpet people had to rake, made me pull my coat closer to my body. There is no telling what lived down in the deep pile of that rug, and yet I imagined you sprawled there, talking about this or that excavation and what had been unearthed, shards of china and peach pits in so-and-so’s ancient shit house. The apartment was near a T stop, and I imagined you at her window, drawn to the clicks and clacks of passing trains.
I’m not sure what it was I thought I would find. Actually, I was disappointed for you. Such a foolish thought while there with this young woman glaring at me, hands crossed protectively over her chest.
“What is it you want?” she asked, a smirk on her young, lineless face.
“Oh, I think you know,” I said. “So why don’t you tell me what it is you want.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” she said, and pretended to care about those dried-up dead ferns she had hanging. She looked like she had just come in from a logging camp, flannel shirt opened over tight thermal underwear, jeans cuffed with those Wallabees the kids both wore. I hated those shoes, and I’m not sure why, but something about the shape and her wearing them made me hate them even more.
Her hair was all wild and tangled, like she’d stuck her finger in a socket. I felt drab and old, and had to rally myself to hang in there, to continue to think about what a ridiculous situation it was to begin with.
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