1979
PHYLLIS WENT BACK to her department too. They elected her chair because they thought she was the only one who could keep the string professors from strangling one another with catgut, the woodwind professors from soaking one another’s reeds in strychnine. She did bring about something of a truce before we went off on sabbatical—to San Diego, where we’d be near Granma and Grampa Irwin. She’d write a music fundamentals text, and I’d expand my lesbian history articles into a book I’d call Surpassing the Love of Men.
If I’d been an academic historian, I would have known how difficult it would be to trace love between women from the Renaissance to the present—over two continents and five countries. But I didn’t know it. Maybe the editors at Random House and William Morrow didn’t know it either, because they both bid on the book as soon as they saw my outline. “I’m going to be published by a New York publisher!” I shouted to my mother over the phone. “Two big publishers love my book!”
“Oh, Lilly,” my mother cried, “I’m so proud of you.” But then we said no more about it. What could my mother understand about “Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present” or about New York publishers?
I laughed at myself when I hung up. My ecstatic squeal echoed still in my ears. “Two big publishers love my book!” It had been me, a ten-year-old kid, shouting to Mommy: “RKO and MGM both wanna give me a contract!”
Avrom and Lillian: Avrom reading, age three and a half
Phyllis and Avrom
Chanukah
Christmas
Phyllis, Avrom, and Lillian
At the end of that sabbatical year, my mother came to San Diego by bus, a last visit. Driving her home to Los Angeles we stopped at Knott’s Berry Farm, where she and I had gone a few times with Rae and Mr. Bergman when I was a child. Knott’s Berry Farm had been a corny tourist attraction made up mostly of two-dimensional or papier-mâché imitation Hollywood sets—cowboy saloons and gold miners’ cabins and hoosegows in which you could have your picture taken as a jailbird. FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY, the billboards between San Diego and L.A. announced, and in recent years Knott’s had installed elaborate rides for the kids in order to compete with Disneyland, down the road.
My mother sat on a long bench with four or five other grandparents and exhausted parents, and Phyllis and I stood at a mesh gate, watching our son go round and round a phony lake on a big plastic swan. For no reason at all I glanced back at my mother. The brilliant Southern California sunshine seemed to illuminate just her and none of the others on the bench; she seemed inches taller than all of them. Her eyes were half-closed. She was basking in the warmth and watching her grandson. I’d never seen her like that, so calm, so self-possessed and content, so queenly. Where had the coat of her craziness gone? the old veil of her tragedy that almost always covered her face? I gazed and gazed. This picture of her, just this, is what I want to hold on to forever.
She called a few days later, when we were back in Fresno, but the majestic figure in the sunlight had vanished. “The doctor found a big lump,” the old hysterical voice screeched into the phone. “A big lump, Lilly! What do you think it is?”
How could it be, when I’d just seen her looking happier than she ever had? “You’ll be okay, Mommy. Don’t worry now.” It was the voice of a ten-year-old—a child trying to sound calm and controlled in front an adult who wasn’t. “I’m coming, right away.”
When I arrived, my mother was pacing up and down Curson Avenue, the familiar look back on her face, the familiar dishevelment back in her hair and clothes. This time, though, it wasn’t my mortality that she was worried about but her own. “What do you think it is, Lilly?” she cried again, though I knew she didn’t want to hear the terrible word.
My son is four years old. Is this all she’ll get to see of him? The thought comes with despair, rage, then a warp in time: I’m the one who’s four years old; my mother is abandoning me. “I’ll make us a cup of coffee,” I told my mother lightly. I went to her kitchen and stuck my head deep into the cupboard where she kept the Instant Folgers so she wouldn’t see my face screwed up in a four-year-old’s panic.
At the hospital we sat together in an office, and the doctor, dressed in a natty light-colored suit and a dark shirt, gave my mother a form to sign. “You need to read it first,” he said brusquely, and busied himself looking for something in a drawer. I stood at her side and read the words to myself as she held the paper. “What does it mean?” she asked me in Yiddish, her eyes blinking, out of control, as though the fine print on the official-looking paper signified doom.
I couldn’t say the words because I wanted to protect her from them. “It just says they’ll put you to sleep for a little while,” I answered in English, “and then they’ll do a test.”
“That’s only part of what it says.” The doctor threw me a disdainful look. He grabbed the paper from my mother’s hand and with a finger inexorable as death pointed to the clause he wanted her to see. “Look, here. It says that if I find a malignancy when we’re doing the biopsy, you’ve given your consent for a mastectomy.”
“What does he mean?” she asked again in Yiddish, and now I had to say it.
We’d gone to have Thanksgiving dinner with friends in Three Rivers, and I could hear the phone ringing into the dark when we pulled up to our garage. “Lee-lee, the ambulance came for your mother. She’s in the hospital very sick, very very sick,” Albert yelled into the phone. It was pneumonia, he said. She’d had three months of chemotherapy.
“We’ll come with you,” Phyllis cried.
“No. Please. I need to be alone with her,” I said. “Stay here and take care of our boy.”
My mother is hooked up everywhere to complicated yards of tubes and wires. She tries to tell me something, her hands waving indecipherable messages, her lips moving around the clear tube in her mouth that reaches down to her lungs. “What, Mom? What?” I can’t understand. “Tell me later, when they take the tube out of your mouth.” But she won’t stop. Now she points to her lips, pulls my chin to her, pulls me close to her face. It frightens me. What does she want from me? “I don’t understand,” I cry, frustrated. It had always been so hard for me to understand her. But she won’t rest. She points to my lips now, pulls my chin to her. “My face?” I’m desperate. “What about my face?”
Then I get it. So simple. “You want me to kiss you?” I hear my aunt, who’s standing behind me, make a muffled sound. My mother nods and sighs deeply, and her body seems to relax for the first time. I kiss her face over and over and call her “my darling.” When I leave the room for a minute, Rae runs behind me. “Wash your mouth good with soap,” she whispers loudly. “Pneumonia is catching.”
I go into the bathroom and scrub my lips as Rae directed, but then I’m sorry I did it, and my lips hurt from the disinfectant soap. All that day I kiss my mother over and over and call her “my darling.” I won’t scrub my lips anymore. I stand by her side and hold her hand. What can I tell her? “I sent my editor Part One of my manuscript, and she says it’s going to be a very important book.” “Avrom’s kindergarten teacher says he’s reading at a third-grade level.”
She squeezes my hand, and her lips seem to smile around the tube before we lapse into silence, then I kiss her again. There isn’t any more to say. But there doesn’t need to be.
As a child I had little to say to my mother that I thought she could understand, yet I had a million kisses for her. When I grew up I was usually too angry to give her kisses. I couldn’t bear to witness her pain anymore, I couldn’t bear that she’d been always a victim. Why hadn’t she known how to make a decent life for herself? But it comforts me now, it comforts her too, I can see, when I kiss her again and again as I used to.
Have I really told her everything I need to? “It’ll be all right, Mommy,” I say now. Not you’ll be all right. I can’t lie to her.
“It’ll be all right,” I say again after a few minutes, and she nods her head yes.