During the last week of school a student showed up wearing a dress I’d bought in college at a Limited Express. The kind of thing the nineties churned out in large batches—long and floral, demure but dramatic. For that girl it was just another piece of vintage clothing, one that she might have paid a laughably high amount for, considering that it had been mass-produced and essentially spun out of plastic. Several women my age, I’d discovered over the years, had owned it too, including Rose, and they all spoke of it with the bewildered, fervid fondness you might reserve for that one dress you gamble your limited summer funds on in the hopes that it’ll lead you by the hand into your most cherished visions of the future. Rose had bought hers with money she’d earned working as a cashier at a Waldbaum’s, and we’d purchased it the same summer—1993. Hers from the Smith Haven Mall, mine from the one in Cherry Hill, Rose’s beige and flowered, mine navy and flowered. By the time we met, Rose didn’t have hers anymore. Hungover and bored one morning her junior year, she cut off the bottom half of the skirt to show off a tan, and then accidentally left the dress on a Greek island that August. I still had mine. The dresses in my closet were the closest thing I had to a photo album, and this one had moved with me over twenty-two years and four Brooklyn apartments.
I could have taken this as a sign to call Rose, but I didn’t. I was not yet truly sorry for saying what I’d said, and I was leaving in August to take a last-minute job that had opened up at a girls’ school in San Francisco. Each day that passed without my writing or Rose calling confirmed that neither of us was willing to say what needed to be said in order to see our friendship through the next few decades, and to choose not to contact the other person despite need or regret meant that we were making a decision to become strangers. When I noticed I felt more excitement at the prospect of leaving rather than guilt over not calling her, I knew that the bones had set and I could start moving about.
Sibling rivalry, said my mother, when I told her about Rose. I’d left out the parts about the married men and made it all about real estate. That was bound to happen.
You’re kidding me, said my father, genuinely surprised, and genuinely troubled, when I told him.
I nursed a small but powerful fear that my father would die from a heart attack while I was out there. Something needed to punish me for trying to run away from my problems. Mostly I was thrilled not to have to panic anymore about where I was going to live. The school owned an apartment that they rented out to faculty coming from far away, and I could stay there for one year. An alumni endowment subsidized a part of the rent so that it would not be much more than what I was paying in New York, with a dishwasher and laundry in the unit besides, and lucking into that scenario might have really been what I thought I needed punishing for. Why should I have everything?
My mother took me to lunch several times that summer—I think it was her way of acknowledging that she wanted to get a good look at my face before she lost regular access to it—and in various diners, she told me stories I’d never heard before. My mother, with her split pea soup and saltines and iced tea. I always used to think it was old people’s food, she said, every time she ordered the soup. Depression food. It was strange to eat with my mother in a restaurant. We went to the movies together, the supermarket together, Target, Home Depot, but we never ate out together, the two of us alone, had never really faced each other as people with thoughts and opinions to exchange over two plates and two glasses in a restaurant. So maybe she told those stories because she felt she was on unfamiliar territory, too, and wanted a shield. Maybe she felt free to say some things now that I would be three thousand miles away.
Stories like the one where my grandmother left my mother alone in the car whenever she went to visit her oldest sister in Ancora—the state-run mental hospital whose name everyone used as a punch line when I was a kid—and one time, said my mother, a woman in a blue chenille bathrobe, periwinkle, my mother said she later realized the color was, while going through a brand-new box of Crayolas, a patient, unsupervised, out wandering about, came up to the car window, wearing a platinum wig and too much makeup, my mother could not stop staring at the pink circles of blush, she looked like a doll, you think I’m making this up, said my mother, look at your face, knocked at the car window, and when my mother curled herself into a ball in the floor of the back seat to have someplace to hide, the woman started singing, my mother couldn’t remember what song, but it was a song that was popular at the time, and the woman sang to my mother with her face pressed up against the window until an attendant ran up to the car and pulled her away.
Everyone used to say Aunt Leola had a heart problem, said my mother, who was too young, maybe about four, to know what kind of hospital she was being left in the parking lot of. A heart problem, my mother said, shaking her head and reaching for another packet of sugar. As if to say Can you believe the bullshit people perpetrate and accept? It wasn’t until years later, when she overheard one of her aunts say to her mother that she’d be damned if the change was going to put her in Ancora the way it did Leola that she understood what had really happened, but still my mother was too young to feel that Leola in Ancora had anything to do with Peggy in Audubon, the quote unquote change being so far off in the future, said my mother, that it was like they were talking about polio in the past. They had an ice cream parlor at Ancora, and my grandmother always brought my mother a sundae in a paper cup as a reward for waiting in the car. They had cows there, a little dairy farm for the residents to help with, as a kind of therapy, said my mother, who didn’t know where she’d heard that, maybe in the paper.
Did she ever tell my grandmother about what happened with the woman in the parking lot?
You didn’t tell my mother stuff like that, she said. She’d think you were making it up.
Stories about my father’s mother, who hated my mother because she made my father happy in a way my grandmother never could, because my grandmother had been too busy favoring my schizophrenic uncle who had been smart enough to try to be a priest but ended up in Ancora, too, after he punched the bathroom mirror because he thought he saw an enemy in it. My grandmother had jealousy like rabies, my other grandmother used to say. She was jealous of her sister-in-law, jealous of my mother, of my mother’s mother. She fought with my grandfather if he talked too long to another woman at a company picnic, if he smiled too wide at a neighbor after Mass, if he complimented another neighbor on her roses. Fought so loud the neighbors once came over to make sure my father and his brother were okay, my father, six, answering the door, the neighbor woman picking him up and standing in the living room holding him and shouting that she was going to call the cops if they didn’t stop. My mother wasn’t sure, but she thought the fighting started after my grandfather came home from the war, from Japan, because my grandmother couldn’t bear to lose him and the thought of being left alone with two kids again made her go crazy.
She was very proud of you, my mother said. On that we could agree.
When exactly did my grandmother become an alcoholic?
During menopause, said my mother. After my grandfather passed away. My father once caught her sitting out on their back porch drinking Listerine out of a shot glass. Caught his brother doing it, too, once, straight out of the bottle, when they lived together for a little while after high school, and tried it himself but it made him feel like an idiot to do a thing like that alone by himself in the house if he didn’t really have a death wish.
You should be writing this down, said my mother, as she ripped open a packet of sugar. Some of this pain needs to be made useful.
It doesn’t work like that, I said. A phrase I hated, but there it was, slipping out of my mouth, and my mother, who loved to say It is what it is, another phrase I hated, wouldn’t judge. I took a pen from my bag and slid the place mat out from under my plate. I’d almost gotten that pen out earlier, but didn’t want to look like a vulture swooping down on the steaming pile of bodies that lay in the middle of the road. I wrote and thought about Rose, running back to rental cars and locking herself in bathrooms to capture scenes and conversations that never would have transpired in front of her if her notebook and pen had been visible. Or at least, it doesn’t always work like that.
Then what’s the point?
I laughed. There may be none at all! I’m still trying to figure that out.
You still don’t know?
I’ve been told it’s a marathon, not a sprint, I said, and started to write.
My mother shook her head. Well God bless you, she said. You’re forty-two. I hope you find out what the point is soon.
What was the point of having me? I said, still writing.
Oh, stop it, she said. You and your smart mouth.
Another diner, another afternoon: And then I thought I really was going to end up like Leola in Ancora. After I had you. My mother’s—well, she said, they didn’t call it postpartum depression back then, they called it the baby blues, and it was the reason we lived with my grandparents for the first few years of my life. It was why there was only one of me, my mother said, and why she didn’t drive alone for years, because in the months after she had me she used to fantasize about driving off the side of the road and crashing herself into a tree or a house or another car—but, she reasoned, if there was someone in her car, of course she wouldn’t do it. They put her on a drug, my mother wasn’t sure which one, and when I threw out the names of the ones I thought might have been prescribed in the early seventies, she asked how I knew all that, and didn’t sound pleased, whether because it meant her daughter was smarter than she was or morbidly intimate with instruments of pharmacological torture, or both, I couldn’t tell.
All I remember, said my mother, was that it made me feel like crap. But I took it. Your grandfather made me. I told myself that I would never let myself feel that way again.
Did you? I asked her.
Yes, but it was nowhere near as bad. I kept myself busy. Too busy, sometimes, your father thought.
In the car home, my mother asked me if I’d ever felt that way.
No, I said.
You better not be lying, she said, as I pulled into the driveway and she unbuckled her seat belt.
I’m not, I said. I’m not that proud.
My mother laughed. Is that so, she said, and climbed out of the passenger seat.