At first I thought my mother had kept the folder of Gary Wilensky out of some maternal guilt—a scrapbook of her own oversight, a reminder of what could have been. She has always been an involved, concerned parent—the organizer of teen programs, the supervisor of field trips, the point person for other mothers deciding on their own daughters’ curfews or allowances. This one oversight, I thought, might have haunted her as it has haunted me. That would make this story somewhat neater.
“No,” she says, “how could I have known? Everyone went to him. He taught at the other girls’ school. Our friends from Fire Island had him over for the Jewish holidays!”
She is a woman who worries whether she made the right decision to install track lighting in the renovated kitchen, even though, she says, track lighting is considered dated. But she does not often question her own parenting decisions. She did what she thought was right at the time, and I admire her for this as much as I disagree with some of her decisions. I am the opposite. I put my own instincts on trial.
“Did you predict I would ask about him years later? Is that why you kept the folder?”
“No, I kept the folder because I keep everything that has to do with you girls. He was an important figure in your life at the time, and it was all over the news,” she says. “I keep our history. That is my job.”
“That’s true,” I say. “You are the family archivist.”
“You know, my mother was the opposite,” she says. “She didn’t save anything that had to do with me. She preferred to ignore me. My whole life as a kid—it was like I wasn’t there. I remember asking her a question in the backseat of the car and she acted as if I hadn’t said anything. She never even bought me a birthday present. Can you imagine that? It’s not like I hate her for it, but this stuff, it stays with you.”
This is why she was so involved with me, she explains. Why she retained every report card, every note I ever wrote, everything that ever happened or didn’t happen to me. This is why she kept the folder on Gary Wilensky. This is why she always wanted to fix me.
“You were always so sad,” she says. “I didn’t know how to help you.”
“Mom?” I ask her during another one of our late-night phone sessions. “Why am I still fixated on Gary?”
She is endlessly patient, endlessly cooperative and sensitive to this particular obsession. She still wants to help.
“Well, you were always interested in the macabre,” she says, but I reject this explanation as oversimplistic. There must be a more psychologically illuminating reason behind it all.
She is thinking now, as if she had been me at fourteen, imagining what it was about him that impacted me so hard when he was still alive, before we knew what we knew.
“He came at a time in your life when you needed him,” she explains. “He praised your talents. He was good for your ego. He explained to you who you were on another level. He saw you as something different from other people. He saw a side of you that was quite strong and special and gifted. The girls in your class didn’t see this side of you.”
She pauses for a moment.
“With Gary you were the chosen,” she continues.
“But I wasn’t,” I say, though she doesn’t hear me.
“Playing with him represented change, growth, and you wanted change.” She pauses again, slipping further back in her memory. “I used to lie awake in bed at night as a teenage girl just thinking—” She grows quiet.
“Thinking about what?”
“Oh, about what else was out there, outside of my house in Queens. I could feel there was so much more I was missing, and I wanted to know what it was. A fourteen-year-old has a very limited exposure. School is the same every day. It was for me, and more so for you, in the same school for all those years with the same girls.”
She moves so easily between the two of us, overlapping our two girlhoods to thread us together.
“But you had something separate from those girls,” she says. “You had Gary.”
“But, Mom—”
She is still talking, still polishing the silver of one memory or another. “It’s funny, because you never acted like you needed anybody,” she says. “You always used to slam your door shut and say, ‘Leave me alone, Mommy,’ and I never knew what I did to make you so upset.”
“I thought you thought I was a monster.”
“Never,” she says. “I never, ever thought of you that way. That’s how you thought of yourself.”
There is such a thing as an inherited self-image. You can see it not in the mirror that faces you, but in the one behind you, with its infinite reflection. The way I saw myself at fourteen was a warped reflection of my mother’s self-perception as a child, which was a dented reflection of her mother’s childhood reflection, and so on—each burden passed down from mother to daughter. And in the era of your life, when your identity as an individual is struggling to break through the surface, it’s this history that holds it down.
My mother’s mother was a great beauty. There are stories of how she stopped traffic when she crossed the street, how strangers would propose to her, how wherever she went, she was always the most beautiful woman in the room.
Before these stories were passed down to me, they were passed to my mother, who slept with her hair wrapped around soup cans and starved herself until she looked longer than her five-foot frame.
My grandmother didn’t understand why my mother’s hair didn’t fall smoothly over her face, like her own, or why, as a teenager, my mother begged to have her nose refined to mirror her mother’s delicate features.
“My mother never once helped me look pretty,” my mother said once as she dug a bobby pin into my scalp to fasten a curler. “I had to do it all myself.”
My mother was a substitute for her dead brother, who was found cold and blue in his crib at age two. When she was born, she was supposed to make it all better.
Still, my grandmother blamed herself for her child’s death, for allowing the doctor to use forceps to deliver him, for not checking on him in his crib sooner. To cope, she avoided painful reminders of her lost child—my mother being the most vivid of all. My mother skipped kindergarten because my grandmother didn’t care to walk her to the bus stop. She bought her own birthday presents because my grandmother didn’t shop for her. And each summer at camp, she’d be disappointed when my grandmother failed to show up on parents’ weekend.
There are few pictures of my mother as a child, and none of her as a young teenager.
“She was trouble,” my grandmother would say, lounging on the crack between two twin-sized beds pushed together, the lone photo of my mother, sullen at age seven, hanging on the wall beside her.
My grandmother was twelve when she came to America from Poland. On a ship bound for New York, she slept on the bottom bunk with her little brother, who died of an illness during their voyage. Her mother slept on top with someone who wasn’t her father, but that was a secret. She watched the sagging shape of two bodies on a mattress above her, and listened for their moans. At eighty-three, my grandmother told my mother this story for the first time. “Eighty-three,” said my mother, a second time.
Beauty came easily to my grandmother, but survival was a struggle. She saw in my mother a spoiled child who didn’t appreciate her relatively easy suburban upbringing. My mother saw in her own reflection a girl who didn’t engender her mother’s love. So she taught herself to appropriate her mother’s beauty, and vowed to herself that she’d be different with her children. To her, rolling hot curlers in my hair was an act of love. To me, it was a punishment.
When I was fifteen, my mother took me to a plastic surgeon who shaved the bone of my nose while I slept. For a week, my eyes were rimmed in blue bruises and my nose leaked stale blood. When we removed the cast, I studied myself in the mirror. I was a new person I didn’t recognize, smoother than the old one, full of a newly discovered shame. A new secret to keep. Even now, when I look in the mirror, I’m surprised by my own face. I try to memorize it, but when I walk away, the memory always fades.
“I don’t know what I look like,” I tell my mother when we argue about this part of our past. “I was only trying to help you,” she said. “I thought I was helping.”
When my mother was defiant, my grandmother would put a curse on her.
“I wish daughters on you,” she would say, and now my mother understands what she meant.
In Florida, I lay on my grandmother’s bed and listened to the voices in the kitchen.
“Nonsense,” said my grandmother, dressed in the yellow housecoat my mother gave her. “I loved you and your brother just the same.”
My mother told me to pack, and we moved to a hotel. When we came back the next season, my mother brought my grandmother a new housecoat. When we came back again, my grandmother was in the same housecoat in a new apartment in a bed with protective rails. My mother rubbed Vaseline on her lips. “I love you,” my grandmother mouthed. “I know,” said my mother.
This is the line of women that has led to me. Each one with her own struggles and resentment, which she tried to correct with the next generation. Each time creating new struggles and resentment.
“I love you,” says my mother before we hang up the phone, which means be careful and good night and I’m sorry.
“I love you, too,” I say, which means I know.