By Seth Shapiro
Three months before my thirteenth birthday, I persuaded my father to sue my mother for custody of me. This was in late August, near the end of a two-week visit with my father. I wrote my mother a letter informing her of my decision. I told her I knew she might be disappointed, but I wasn’t rejecting her; I only wanted to spend more time with my father, to know and love him as well as I knew her. I also told her not to call me. We could discuss this when I returned home, if she wanted to.
She phoned the second the letter came. Phyllis, my father’s wife, answered the phone. “Hold on, Sandra,” she said, and held the phone out to me, her palm covering the receiver. I shook my head. Phyllis gave me an exasperated look and told my mother I was busy. She called three more times in the next hour. I had known this was going to happen, but I was not even thirteen, and I wanted to forget how well I knew my mother. Phyllis agreed to relay her messages to me: How long should she preheat the oven for my lemon chicken recipe? Should she run hot or cold water when scrubbing the sink with Comet? What should she do if the washing machine stopped in midcycle? I had typed out three pages of instructions before I left, but the calls kept coming right through dinner. Could she use ammonia on Formica surfaces? Should she use tap or distilled water in the iron? Finally, Phyllis exclaimed, “Jesus, Sandra, we’re eating. He’ll be home in two days.” Then I watched her face darken and imagined the blast my mother was delivering. Don’t you tell me when I can talk to my own son. I’m his mother, and when I tell you to get him, you jump—understand?! Phyllis hung up the phone and sat back down at the table, her lips drawn across her face like a thin white scar. Ten seconds later the phone rang again. My father and Phyllis looked at each other. I felt like Jonah hiding in the bowels of the ship, knowing the storm above was all his fault. No one moved. “Mommy, the phone is ringing,” said Leah, my little stepsister. “Maybe you should answer the phone, Alan,” my father said. I stood up from the table very slowly, giving myself every chance that the phone might stop ringing before I reached it.
“What’s the problem, Mom? I wrote everything down.”
“You little bastard! Don’t bother coming home. If I never see you again I’ll die happy!”
My father wasn’t enthusiastic when I asked him to sue. “Lawyers? Court? Not again.” My parents had divorced when I was five, and the episode still bothered him. He had wanted to work things out quietly, but my mother staged a grand opera. She asked for an exorbitant amount of alimony and minimal visitation rights for my father. She accused him of being an adulterer and wife beater. My father was a rabbi in a small town on the New Jersey shore and brought in many members of his congregation as character witnesses. My mother had no witnesses on her behalf. She lost every point she argued for.
“But, Dad,” I implored, “she’s driving me crazy!”
He and I usually didn’t have much to say to each other, but I expected the word crazy to explain everything, as if I were revealing to him that we shared the same inherited trouble, like gum disease or premature balding. I pitched my case to him, describing how she complained about her haywire menstrual cycle when I was eating, how she slept on the couch every night, sometimes with a cigarette still burning in her hand.
“Do you know how dangerous that is, Dad?”
He pressed his palms up his cheeks, a gesture that always led me to imagine he was trying to stretch his beard over his forehead. I envisioned him doing the same thing the day he met my mother. When I had asked her, the year before, how they came together—a far more mysterious question to me than where I had come from—she answered, “In the shower.” Both were on an archaeological dig in Israel. My father, recently ordained, was covered with soap in the primitive communal shower when my mother walked in, nineteen, naked, enthusiastic about everything. Several months later they were married, but my mother was bored by the life of a rabbi’s wife. She had no interest in charity work or Sisterhood meetings. She saw an analyst five times a week and signed up for classes on Sanskrit and criminology. Once she planned a lecture at the synagogue on Gurdjieff’s centers of consciousness. Three people came.
I told my father I was fed up with cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing.
“I thought you liked doing housework,” he said.
“Not all the time. I want to have a normal life, Dad.”
He touched his beard lightly, thoughtfully. I had found the right word.
“Sometimes her boyfriends sleep over. I see them on the sofa bed when I get up in the morning.”
“All right. All right.”
“Dad, I’m telling you this is an open-and-shut case. I’m old enough to live with whomever I want. That’s the law.”
I knew about the law from my mother. She sued everyone. Landlords, universities, car dealers, plumbers, my father. She stayed up all night researching her cases and planning her strategies. In the mornings I would see her asleep on the couch, openmouthed, beneath a blanket of law books and the sheets of paper on which she outlined her complex and futile arguments. Years later, after I graduated from law school and returned to New Jersey to practice law, many of the older lawyers around the courthouse told me my mother had a reputation as a compulsive but knowledgeable and creative litigant. “I always thought the law was a metaphysical exercise for her,” one of them said to me. “I can sue you: Therefore I exist.”
I also learned the art of exaggeration from my mother, the art of how to invent something when the truth is boring or makes you anxious. I had seen her on the sofa bed with a man only once. The year before, she had come into my bedroom very early one morning to tell me that Sidney, her sometime boyfriend, had spent the night. “You don’t mind that he’s here?” she asked, sitting on the side of my bed. Her weight was comforting, as were her warm, heavy sleepy odors. I told her I didn’t mind. “I slept in the other room,” she said anxiously. “But I’m going to lie down next to Sidney for a couple of minutes.”
“All right,” I said, and went back to sleep. I knew she liked Sidney. She had told me that he had always wanted a boy to raise, and that he was personal friends with Joe Namath. He bought me books, bats, tickets to ball games. In two years he would go to jail for fraud and income tax evasion, but that morning my mother and I both believed in him. When I went into the living room he was asleep on his side. My mother was awake, pressed up against his back with an arm around his chest. She smiled at me as if Sidney was some wonderful secret between us.
My mother’s explosion of telephone calls came on Thursday night; late Sunday afternoon I took the bus from my father’s town to the Port Authority bus station in New York. My mother usually met me inside the terminal, but I didn’t see her anywhere. I called home six times in the next hour, counting twenty-three rings on the last attempt. The next local bus across the river didn’t leave for two hours. I found a bench at the far end of the terminal, and, sitting with my suitcase between my knees, watched everyone going home, everyone except for the panhandlers, the proselytizers, the old men sleeping against walls, teenagers who had run away.
My mother wasn’t in when I arrived home. She hadn’t left a note, and by ten o’clock I still hadn’t heard from her. I knew what she was doing. She was letting me know how it felt to be abandoned. I knew she would return the next day, but I was still in tears by the time I was ready for bed. My room felt like the loneliest place in the world that night, so I pulled out the sofa bed. I had never slept in the living room before, and I couldn’t orient myself, couldn’t gauge the black space around me.
Gradually the darkness lightened into a dull grayness. When I could see everything in the room clearly, I began preparing for the first day of school. I kept thinking, Now he’s brushing his teeth, now he’s deciding which shirt to wear, now he’s pouring milk over his cereal. . . . as if, without my mother in the house, I were inhabiting someone else’s life. I was all ready by six thirty. I lay back down on the couch and watched the clock for the next hour and forty-five minutes.
At eleven thirty, during biology, the school secretary came to the classroom to tell me that my mother had phoned. She told me that I was to go right home because of an emergency. The year before, I’d been called out of class about once a month because of an “emergency” at home. Usually my mother had fought with a patient, or a married man she was seeing had stopped answering her calls, or her father had sent her another sanctimonious letter, or some judge had treated her in a cavalier manner.
I declined the secretary’s offer of a ride and walked home. When I let myself into the apartment, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She held the letter I had written to her in one hand and was burning holes in it with her cigarette. She looked like a curious child torturing a small animal.
“I thought you saw a patient now,” I finally said.
She was a psychologist but had only four regular patients. She used her bedroom as an office, though she longed to have one in town. “Someplace beautiful,” she would say. “Someplace where I can really be myself.”
“I canceled,” she said, burning a chain of holes through my name.
“Canceled! What for? That’s thirty-five dollars!”
She looked at me for the first time. “Would you please explain this, Alan?”
“I explained everything in the letter.”
“Everything? Really? I can think of any number of things you didn’t explain. Why you’re leaving me, for instance. Can you explain that? Am I really that bad of a mother?”
“I told you I wasn’t rejecting you.”
“Look, Alan. Let’s agree on one thing. Let’s agree you’re not going to treat me like I’m stupid.” She said this slowly and rhythmically, as if I was the stupid one.
“Mom, I just don’t want to live here anymore. That’s all.”
“That’s all? You think it’s that simple?”
“I explained. I want to live with my father.”
“Tell me the last time he called.”
“Maybe he doesn’t call because he’s afraid you’ll sue if he says something you don’t like over the phone.”
“Oh, I see. Now it’s my fault. I’m to blame because your father has no interest in you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what are you saying? That I’m a failure as a mother?”
“No, Mom. You’re not a failure. All right?”
“Then why? Why are you doing this to me?”
“Jesus, Mom. I just want to have a normal life.”
“Normal!” she cried. “What’s not normal about the way we live?” “Everything! The cooking, the cleaning, the shouting. Everything!”
“Who shouts?”
“You do. You’re shouting now.”
“Of course I’m shouting. My son tells me he doesn’t want to live with me anymore. Can’t I shout about that? Isn’t that normal?”
“Mom, this conversation is retarded. I’m going back to school.”
“And who asked you to cook and clean?” she shouted after me. “Not me. You love to cook. Or is that another thing to blame me for?”
“Good-bye, Mom,” I said, walking out the door.
“Don’t come back, you lousy child! Just see how well you can get along without me!”
Before I began cooking and cleaning, my clothes always came out of the wash shrunk and discolored, sending me into fits most mornings because I was embarrassed to wear wrinkled shirts to school and my mother refused to iron them.
“You iron them,” she would say. “They’re your shirts.”
“But I don’t know how!”
“Neither do I.”
“Yes, you do! You’re supposed to know!”
“I am? Where is it written that I’m supposed to know? Tell me? Where?”
For supper she usually boiled pouches of frozen food, and even that gave her problems. “Oh, puke!” I’d say, pursing my face and coughing up a mouthful of half-frozen meatloaf.
Once, on her birthday, I bought her a cookbook and pleaded with her to learn some recipes.
“Oh, honey, I can’t deal with recipes.”
“But why?”
“Because nothing ever turns out the way it’s supposed to for me.”
I began with simple dishes—baked chicken, broiled lamb chops and rice. Then I moved on to lasagna, curried shrimp, veal scallops with prosciutto, Grand Marnier souffés, and poached peaches with raspberry puree. I prepared some of my most inspired meals when my mother entertained Sidney.
“I don’t know how you do it,” she would say, anointing herself with perfume as she watched me work in the kitchen.
“It’s easy, Mom. All you have to do is follow the directions.”
“Directions,” she replied, “bore me.”
When my first day of school ended, I returned home as usual to begin dinner. Mrs. Gutman, my mother’s four thirty patient and close friend, was sitting on the couch. She was a stout Romanian woman with a collapsing beehive of rust-colored hair held vaguely together with hundreds of bobby pins. “Hello, darlink,” she greeted me, her accent falling with a thud on the “darlink.” I could tell by the sad cast of her eyes that she knew all about my letter.
Mrs. Gutman had been seeing my mother longer than any other patient. Her fifty-minute sessions sometimes lasted for two hours and she would call at three and four in the morning when her nightmares frightened her awake. The ringing phone always exploded in my ears. I would sit up in bed, my heart beating violently, as if it were connected to the phone with jumper cables. I couldn’t hear my mother’s words very clearly, but I would lie awake for hours listening to the dim, low murmur of her voice, a sound as comforting as the patter of rain after an electrical storm.
Mrs. Gutman was the last scheduled patient of the day because her sessions went on so long. Usually I would be preparing dinner when they finished, and Mrs. Gutman would crowd into the tiny kitchen to sample and advise. Pressing her bosom against my rib cage, she stirred, tasted, lifted covers off pots, and inhaled deeply. “No, darlink, you must do like dis one,” she’d say, sprinkling paprika into a stew that I had delicately seasoned and simmered for hours. “Great! Now you’ve ruined it,” I’d say, hurling the wooden spoon into the sink.
“No, darlink, was too bland. Taste now.”
“Don’t call me that. I’ve told you my name is Alan.”
“Yes, Alan, darlink.”
Later, after Mrs. Gutman had left, my mother would say, “Why do you have to be so mean to her? Because she’s my friend? Is that why?”
“I’ve told you not to analyze me. I’m not your patient.”
“You can’t give me credit for my successes, can you? You know how important I am to Mrs. Gutman, but you won’t give me credit for it.”
“Mom, she’s your patient. She shouldn’t be wandering into the kitchen. It’s unprofessional.”
“Mrs. Gutman is one of my dearest friends.”
“Well, she shouldn’t be. You’re her therapist. You’re not supposed to be her best friend too.”
“Where is it written that I can’t be both? Tell me! If Mrs. Gutman values my friendship, who are you to tell me I’m wrong?”
That afternoon, Mrs. Gutman stayed only for her scheduled time. When my mother came into the kitchen, I was already eating my dinner, poached turbot. She joined me at the table with peanut butter on stale white bread.
“That smells delicious,” she said.
“It is.”
“Can I have a taste?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m seeing how well I can get along without you.”
“Oh, really? Who paid for that?”
I pushed my plate over to her.
“Look, honey, I’m sorry I said that. The truth is I can’t get along without you either.”
“Mom, I just want a change.”
“But you don’t have to leave. I can change. I’ll change. You want me to cook? I’ll learn to cook. I’ll be the best cook in the world. You don’t want me sleeping on the couch? I won’t sleep on the couch. I’ll rent an office in town. How’s that? You’ll never have to see any of my patients again. Just tell me what you don’t like.”
I was staring down at the table. Without looking up, I replied, “Mom, I’ve decided.”
She yanked me by the elbow. “You really think some judge is going to send you to live with your father because you say you want a change?”
“Do you think there are any judges who don’t know about you?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean all the lawyers you’ve spent the night with.”
She slapped me across the face. She had never hit me before, and she began to cry, holding her hand as if she had burned it on something. “You’re just like everyone else,” she cried. “You’re all the same.” I had hoped my mother would just boot me out, hurling suitcases and insults at me, and when she thought to call me back, to apologize and argue some more, I would already be ensconced at my father’s house, too far away to hear a thing. But after my father sued, I barely heard her voice. At dinner, she would occasionally glance up from her plate and look at me oddly, as if I were a stranger she had just found sitting at her table. If I attempted conversation, she’d either ignore me or say, “Ask your father.” I felt sure her silence was purely strategic; I felt certain that if I told her I was changing my mind, tears would well up in her eyes, all would be forgiven, and she’d vow to change. Some nights, though, after I was in bed and she called up Mrs. Gutman, her voice sounded extremely faint, more so than usual. I kept changing the position of my head on the pillow, but I couldn’t tune her in, and after a time she faded out like a voice on the radio during a long drive in the middle of the night.
At the end of September, my mother and I visited her father in Florida. He was a dentist and we saw him twice a year to have our teeth fixed and to be reminded of things we were not supposed to do. I was not supposed to eat sweets because my teeth were low in calcium. My mother was not supposed to “use” cigarettes in public or tell anyone she was divorced. For some reason, he thought it was less embarrassing to introduce her as a widow.
“Your grandfather doesn’t know about our problems,” she said to me on the plane, “and I don’t plan on telling him.”
We always went to Florida at the wrong time—either in May or late September, when the air in New Jersey was most delicious, when the perspiration on your face was cooling as a breeze. Usually we stayed only for two or three days, sunning by the pool of his condominium or accompanying him on the golf course for his daily 6:00 a.m. game. My mother didn’t play, but he was adamant she come with us, as if she might get into trouble if she was left alone. By the thirteenth hole she was desperate for a cigarette. She’d quickly light one up as my grandfather was bent over the ball. He’d catch a scent of it and stop his stroke. “Sandra, how many times have I asked you to refrain from doing that in public?” Once the cigarette was lit, she would become calmer, drawing deeper into herself with each drag. “Sandra!” She’d let a long, elegant ash drop to the green.
“Sorry, Daddy,” she’d say in a bored voice, as she grasped my shoulder for support and twisted the cigarette out against the bottom of her shoe.
On this visit, we went straight from the airport to his office because a tooth had been bothering her for weeks. My grandfather ushered her into the chair and instructed her to remove her lipstick. She pressed her lips against a tissue, leaving a red O-shaped print, and then she gave it to my grandfather as though she were handing over her mouth. “Sandra,” he said, over the whine of the drill, “have you heard from the Yoskowitzes’ son?” Both his hands were in her mouth and she moved her head from side to side. I sat in the dental assistant’s chair (my grandfather thought he might inspire me to become a dentist), where I had a direct view of the bloody saliva swirling around underneath my mother’s tongue. “No? Maybe he’ll call you when you get back. I gave your number to Jack and Bea to give to him. He lives in Jersey City and sells hospital equipment. They showed me a copy of his tax returns, so I know for certain that he earned $81,000 last year. He thinks you’re a widow so don’t say anything to disappoint him.” Her eyes widened with hurt. I wanted to do something. Unclasp the towel from around her neck, give her back her mouth and tell her, Run, I’ll meet you at the airport. “Let’s just hope,” he continued, “he doesn’t mind that your teeth are so stained with nicotine.”
She raised her hand for him to stop. “Daddy, I really don’t want to hear this today. My life has been really shitty lately, and I just don’t want to hear this.”
My grandfather held the drill in the air and looked up, like someone about to begin conducting an orchestra. “Some days,” he sighed, “I’m almost relieved that Rose is gone.” I watched my mother’s eyes brimming with tears. When my grandfather noticed, he reached for a needle and asked her if she needed more novocaine.
A month before the hearing and two weeks before my bar mitzvah, I went to see a court-appointed psychologist. Florence Fein’s office, in a red Victorian house, was a large room crowded with old furniture, Oriental rugs, stained glass, and antique lamps. She served me lemonade and asked me what I would like to talk about. I told her I couldn’t think of anything.
“Why do you think you’re here?” she asked.
“Because I have an appointment?”
“Perhaps you can tell me why you don’t want to be here.”
“Because there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“You don’t have to have something wrong with you to go to a psychologist, Alan. Most people come here just to figure things out.”
“I don’t have anything to figure out. I know I want to live with my father.”
“No one is keeping you here. You’re free to leave.”
“Then you’ll tell the judge I have to live with my mother.”
“Alan, my job isn’t to penalize you for anything you say. If you really don’t have anything you’d like to discuss with me, I’ll just write in my report that I couldn’t draw any conclusions.”
I was uncomfortable with Florence Fein because I could never say a bad word about my mother to a stranger.
“If I go right now, is my mother still going to have to pay for the time?”
“Yes. How do you feel about that?”
“Bad. She’s spending a lot of money for nothing.”
“Do you always feel bad about your mother’s actions?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you think that’s going to change if you live with your father?”
“I don’t know. . . . Don’t you think people can change?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t be in this business if I didn’t think so.”
I understood then why Florence Fein had a more successful practice than my mother. Florence Fein really did believe people could change. The word didn’t hold the same meaning for my mother. When I thought of her pleading, “I can change! I’ll change!” the words sounded to me like “I’m in pain! I’m in pain!”
“Alan, you probably know that your parents’ divorce was very bitter.”
“Yes. So?”
“Do you think your father has put any subtle pressure on you to come live with him?”
“Did my mother say that?”
“Not at all. As a matter of fact, she argued that your father wasn’t all that interested in having you live with him and that you might be deeply hurt once that became a reality for you.”
“What else did she say?”
“She said she’s failed at everything she’s ever tried and doesn’t want to fail as a parent.”
The day before my bar mitzvah, my mother informed me that she planned on coming. I acted surprised, but deep down I had expected it.
“You’re not religious,” I argued.
She was driving me to the Port Authority to catch the bus to my father’s town.
“You know this isn’t about religion. You just don’t want me to come. Admit it.”
“But you’re always saying my father’s friends are against you. You’ll have to face all of them if you come.”
“And so why should they be at my son’s bar mitzvah and not me?”
“Mom, that’s not a reason to go.”
“Oh, and are your reasons any better? You just want all your father’s friends to think you’re more your father’s son. You want them to think, ‘My, hasn’t he turned out so nice and polite despite his mother.’”
“I’ve told you not to analyze me. I’m not your goddamned patient!”
We entered the Lincoln Tunnel, and I was truly afraid she would order me out. We hadn’t talked that way in months. But she didn’t say anything until we pulled up to the terminal. “Talk to your father that way sometime,” she said, “and see how long he lets you live with him.”
That evening Phyllis fixed a traditional Sabbath meal. My father invited six couples from his synagogue to join us. They were too interested and too familiar with me, as if I were a disfigured child and they were pretending not to notice. Before we had finished the soup and melon, they asked me which subject I liked the most in school (social studies), whether I was a Yankees or a Mets fan (neither—the Dodgers), whether I, too, planned on becoming a rabbi (no—either a lawyer or a chef). Everyone gave me a pained smile. I was thinking of the last elaborate meal I’d prepared for my mother and Sidney, and how I loved standing in the kitchen with her, minutes before he came to the door. My mother and the pots rattled with expectancy: Would this be the man to stay with her, to adjust our haphazard course? The kitchen smelled rich with promise, as if the scent of her perfume and the odors of my cooking held the power to transform our lives, to transport us from our crowded, chaotic apartment into a large house where we all had our own rooms, where my mother would be calm, secure, loved.
After we returned from services that evening, I told my father and Phyllis that my mother would be showing up the next morning. They looked at each other.
“Oh, Alan,” my father sighed. “Couldn’t you have done something?”
“No, Dad, she wants to come.”
“Doesn’t she know how uncomfortable this is going to be?” Phyllis added.
“Mommy, who’s coming?” Leah asked.
“Nobody, dear. Nobody.”
The next morning I stepped up to the Torah and saw my mother sitting in a row of empty seats. She waved at me like someone in a lifeboat attempting to fag a distant ship. Everyone’s eyes moved from her to me. I brought my tallis to my lips and began chanting in a language I didn’t understand. After the service, she rushed over to the receiving line and reclaimed me with a long embrace. She had not held me or kissed me for months. Several people waiting to congratulate me formed an uncomfortable semicircle around us. She tightened her hold, as if I were a charm to ward off bad spirits. People began to file away and then we were standing alone, like two people who had wandered into the wrong celebration. Then Phyllis came over to tell me that the photographer was set up for a family portrait. My mother squeezed my elbow.
“You stay right here, Alan.”
“We’ll only be five minutes,” Phyllis said impatiently. “Come, Alan.”
She reached for me and my mother slapped her hand away. Phyllis looked at her hand as if it didn’t belong to her.
“I’m his family,” my mother declared. “If the photographer wants a portrait, he can come over here.”
“Crazy woman,” Phyllis murmured, and turned away.
My mother caught Phyllis on the side of her head with her purse. Phyllis whirled around, crying, “Oh! Oh!” more in disbelief than in pain. My mother lunged. Each woman grabbed at the other’s hair and face. They teetered back and forth in their high heels. I could hear nylons whispering against nylons. My father rushed over, his hand raised and his black robes billowing. I ran out.
I kept running until I reached the beach, breathless. Each gulp of the November air stung my lungs. I wrapped my tallis around my neck and walked rapidly through the sand. Then I heard my mother shout my name. I turned around. She was perhaps a hundred yards behind me, her shoes in her hands. She crossed them over her head, signaling me to stop. I walked down to the shoreline.
I recalled how she and I used to come to this same beach on winter afternoons when my parents were still married. She liked the remoteness of the beach in winter. Once we came with a helium balloon she had bought me at a nearby amusement park. At the shoreline she had bent down beside me and we placed our fingertips all over its shiny red surface. “We’re sending a message,” she said, “to your Nana Rose.” I let go of the balloon and watched it sail up into the brilliant blue air and disappear high over the ocean. She explained that when the balloon reached heaven, Nana Rose would recognize our fingerprints. Perhaps I looked at her quizzically, because she then said, “Trust me, sweetie. We’re already on the moon.”
I watched the waves explode and dash toward me, watched the froth top my shoes, and at almost the same moment felt my socks turn to ice.
“Alan, dear, why are you standing in the water?”
She was right behind me. I didn’t turn around or answer.
“Honey, doll, you’ll ruin your shoes.”
“Good.”
“You’ll catch pneumonia.”
“Even better.”
“Won’t you at least step out of the water?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Maybe I want to go for a swim.”
I really didn’t want to swim. I just wanted to lie down in the surf and close my eyes and drift, like a toy boat or a bottle, to the other side of the ocean, washing up on the shore of a country where nobody knew me.
“Darling, it’s too cold to swim. Wait until the summer. Then you can go in the water.”
“Don’t talk to me like that!”
“Like what, sweetie?”
“Like I’m crazy. Like I’m about to jump out a window. You’re the one who’s crazy, not me.”
“Oh, Alan, don’t criticize. Not now. Not after what I’ve been through. Don’t be like all the others.”
I turned around, ready to shout, “Why can’t you be like all the others?!” Then I saw how bad she looked. One eye was half closed and her nostrils were rimmed with blood. Angry red welts laced her windpipe. She dropped to her knees and began crying, her tears falling into the sand.
I was only thirteen that day, but I knew my mother would never change. She would never have a beautiful office like Florence Fein’s. She would never have more than three or four patients, people like Mrs. Gutman, who were as chaotic and pained as she was. I knew she would always feel like a stranger on the planet.
Two weeks later a judge sent me to live with my father. The fight with Phyllis and the depositions provided by nearly everyone in my father’s congregation weighed heavily against my mother. I was sullen with the judge, though he was kind to me. Perhaps I could have said something nice about my mother, but I was only thirteen and didn’t know that love can be as obdurate as the changes you long for. Perhaps I could have told him that after I turned around and saw her bruised face, I lifted my mother to her feet. I pressed my tallis against her bloody nose. Then I rolled it up into a tight little ball, and we trekked back up the beach together.