“Put your keppele down on the pillow,” my grandmother would say when she put me to sleep. She’d stroke my head gently. “What beautiful curls,” she’d say. I nestled into the big puffy feather pillow in its fresh case. It was like sleeping on a cloud. A cloud far away from home where I was used to hard, foam rubber pillows and scratchy wool blankets. I’d dreamily fade off in the big bed in her royal apartment that was right across the street from the Grand Concourse. In the morning there was sweet-smelling Palmolive soap in the bathroom. My grandmother told me stories about my father getting poison ivy, and how she had to scrub him down in the bathtub with some other kind of harsh soap that smelled bad, and how they couldn’t switch back to the sweet soap for a whole week. I loved listening to the way she took care of my father when he was a little boy.
When I was only seven my parents let me go by myself to visit my grandmother in the Bronx. My father buckled me into my seat in the airplane at Logan Airport. And my grandmother was waiting to meet me when I walked down the ramp and onto the runway at Idlewild. There she was, dressed in her gray tweed suit, with the carved jade brooch pinned on the lapel, smiling to see me, just like always. After we dropped my suitcase at her apartment, we went right out again to Addie Vallins’ soda fountain for a malted milkshake, the kind you could only get in the Bronx.
My hand in my grandmother’s, she took me all around Manhattan that week. Way out onto the arm of the Statue of Liberty, to the top of the Empire State Building and on the Circle Line so we could see the whole city from a ferry boat. At Radio City, after the Rockettes, my grandmother got a little worried that the movie Gigi Goes to Paris might not be suitable. But on the huge screen of the miraculous theatre, Gigi was magnificent. Afterwards we went to Schrafft’s, where the perfectly round scoops of chocolate ice cream were served in silver bowls.
My mother wasn’t soft like my grandmother. She was brusque and efficient. When we got sick, it seemed like she was a little scared she might catch what we had. Not that she was ever irresponsible. She’d dutifully take our temperatures, give us baby aspirin and make sure that we drank plenty of liquids. Sometimes she’d even smash up the pink aspirin in a bowl of applesauce to get us to swallow it. She’d shake the thermometer really hard with a certain twist of her wrist to get the mercury to go all the way to the bottom, so the reading would be accurate. And when the thermometer read 98.6 for a full twenty-four hours, she sent us back to school the next day.
It seemed like being a mother might have been a difficult job for her, not that she ever said that out loud. It was as if she had to keep moving so she wouldn’t have to think too much about what she was doing. At home with us she was always busy with cleaning the house, keeping it well-supplied as economically as possible, cooking praiseworthy and nutritious meals, and making sure that we were three well-functioning children—that we were healthy, went to school, did our homework, played our musical instruments, and that our teachers and friends and friends’ parents all liked us.
“Teddy already knows how to read!” she told her friend Ellie on the phone. “Marcia Zelliger told me he was sitting on her front step with his book about the rabbit. He turned the page at the right place every time, and he could recite exactly which words were under each picture.” Not only did my mother say that Teddy was smart, but the neighbor confirmed it. She talked about me on the phone, too, even if it wasn’t about how smart I was. “I’m looking into art classes for Anne in downtown Old Marblehead,” I might hear her say. “The teacher chose her and one other girl to make the mural on the classroom wall, and now I’m thinking that maybe she should take art lessons. Joel can take her on Saturdays.” She made it sound like we were model children she was proud of. Sometimes she’d give out recipes for her pastries—frosted brownies and apricot bars, and once in a while even her special recipe for rugelach, which people said was the best they’d ever tasted. Her friends all admired how good she was at taking care of us and at keeping the house in great shape.
I believed in her competent image, too. I was especially impressed by the way she could get into long conversations on the phone with people she didn’t even know. It could be someone new in town who didn’t know that the fish was freshest on Thursdays, or how to get a parking sticker for the beach. Or she’d have a long talk with the kosher butcher about prices and cuts of meat when she placed her order each week.
She could appear to be a mother anyone would want. She’d laugh and smile and her body looked inviting, like I’d want her to hug me. And sometimes when she did, she was warm, and it seemed like she meant it. It was that feeling that always kept me coming back for more, that made me think I could find true comfort in my mother. But then just as surely as the soft form of my mother had been there, it would disappear with no notice at all. It was as though there were a goal bigger than being our mother that took her attention away. Things like buffing the kitchen floor once the wax had dried, or making sure that she hadn’t missed a coupon for something she needed at the store that week, could sometimes seem more important than anything. The very fact that I wanted more of her could somehow be turned around into a negative trait. My very first word, she reminded me more than once, was “more.” “It makes sense,” she said. “You can never get enough!” Not only did I seem to have a character flaw, in my mother’s opinion, but worse than that, “more” was confirmed to be unobtainable.
Deep down, I thought, my mother wasn’t completely happy with being a mother. It was as if she wanted more, too, or at least something different. Maybe, I hoped, she’d change and be happier. And maybe someday she’d tell me about what it was like when she was a little girl. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something about the way she avoided talking about her mother and father that made me feel like she was always holding something in reserve for later. I knew that growing up her whole extended family lived in a brownstone on East 89th Street, her aunts, uncles, and grandparents on one floor and she, her brothers, sister, and parents on the floor above. I knew what the place looked like and felt like because my great-grandmother lived there until she was ninety, and usually we’d stop by for a visit when we came to New York. It was dark and dusty and old, with heavy red drapes and a big, solid, dark wood table. That’s where we always sat, my great-grandmother shrunken and tiny, always wearing a turban on her head, covering what I’d heard was very long gray hair, all wrapped up inside. And there was a tiny garden in the back, with lots of old vines and weeds, and no flowers that I can remember. My grandmother Anna and grandfather Abe were shadowy. I never even knew what they looked like until Cecile had the old photographs copied and distributed to the family members when I was about eighteen. There were a few stories about how Nate got lost on the beach and how Cecile found him, or how Joe threw the package of Mallomar cookies out the window when he discovered they were made with gelatin and weren’t kosher. But it was hard to imagine what their lives were really like.
Repeatedly, I’d ask my mother about how her parents died. But there wasn’t much information on that either. “Cancer,” she’d say quickly for my grandmother, and “heart attack” for my grandfather. One word for each. It didn’t possibly seem like that could be the whole story.
When I was pretty young, maybe six or seven, my mother would tell me, “I never want to be a burden to my children when I get old.” I used to wonder why she’d say that. It was as though she was taking me into her confidence, but also I thought there might be a tinge of blame in her words, something to do with our being a burden to her. When I think about it now, working as a Hebrew school principal might have come more naturally to my mother than taking care of us. Trapped with us at home, she didn’t have the advantage of fully showing her exterior self. At the Hebrew school, she grew in stature from teacher to principal to very important principal. In the end, she was respected when she retired, just as she wanted. Even when she died, she appeared to be in perfect health, seemingly without a cause, and no one ever did have to take care of her. That was probably lucky because it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have to take care of my mother.
The fact was that my mother was almost always healthy. I remember her having the flu two or three times, and the occasional very bad cold, but she always seemed to recover fast. There was one time, though, when she got in a bad car accident when we lived in Connecticut. She’d gone through a yellow light and another car crashed into her, and her head hit the windshield. She was certain that the light had still been yellow. The police had to bring her home in a police car. They escorted her right up to the front door, and waited until she got inside before they left. There were black stitches on her lip. You could see the threads. For the whole next week she had to drink all of her meals through a straw because her lip was so swollen. Not just beverages, but soups, too. Everything had to be in liquid form. We thought of all the possible flavors of Carnation instant milkshakes she could have, and argued about who would get to shake the can for her. But she didn’t see the fun of it. She refused to laugh, maybe because her lip hurt too much. Sometimes my mother would actually cry. And when that happened, it was upsetting. Her face would contort into an unattractive form, her features slowly shifting until they finally registered into full-blown sobs. The way she’d look when she cried never made you want to console her. Usually the reason was because no one helped her with the house cleaning. She’d be in the living room surrounded by the old Electrolux vacuum cleaner that she swore by, and the carpet sweeper, which was lighter to handle and you didn’t have to plug it in. My mother had a system for which surfaces required vacuuming and which ones got the carpet sweeper. In truth, I helped a lot with the carpet sweeping. It was fun to roll it around, and to clean out the clumps of dust wound up with the threads and other odds and ends that got stuck in the bristles.
Once when my mother was in one of her cleaning frenzies, she sponged down everything in sight on Danny’s desk, which he’d arranged so carefully. She even wiped the tips of the wooden matchsticks that Danny had decorated, each with a different letter written on it, and the cork tops of the bottles he had filled, each in a different shade of water tinted with food coloring. She used that same stinky sponge on everything—furniture and delicate items alike, sometimes leaving little green crumbs of sponge on the surfaces. Danny was upset that the tips of the matches now smelled like sour sponge and that some of the letters had been wiped off. I felt bad, too, knowing how Danny must have felt. When she wiped everything clean like that, it was like she was making you invisible.
Danny wouldn’t stay angry long, though. That wasn’t his nature. That’s why it was hard to stay mad at him, even though he could be infuriatingly impulsive. Like the time when he painted a portrait of Woody Allen right on top of the canvas I’d made a couple of years before, a picture of a tree with twisted branches. It was part of the oil paint kit I’d received as a birthday present when I was ten. At first I was furious, but when I looked at the portrait, which he had hung over his desk, I had to laugh, particularly because the resemblance to Woody Allen was really good for a kid Danny’s age.
When my mother did cry, it would usually take place just around the time when my father returned from work. That way she could solicit his sympathy. “I never get any help around here,” she’d say in between sobs. “I just can’t take it when they don’t even clean their rooms. It’s impossible to even open the doors with all of their clothes in balls on the floor.” We didn’t see how it could possibly be such a big deal, but then her whole body would start quivering and sobbing, and it seemed like we must have done something really horrible. Like we were to blame for making the world my mother had tried so hard to maintain completely fall apart. In the end we’d always promise to try harder to help with the cleaning.
The Sunday newspapers are spread over the dining room table. The kids are occupied, and Roy’s making another pot of coffee. I’ve just cleared off all of the pancakes from the plates, and am thinking about pouring a fresh cup. We’re trying to have a normal weekend morning. As I sit back down at the table, my father is spouting out the headlines of The New York Times, but I don’t bother to respond and neither does Roy. I’m used to my father expressing his indignation about the world. I just grit my teeth and try not to say that he should just read to the newspaper himself so we can all have some peace.
My father has taken to visiting us regularly, every couple of weeks now that my mother has died. I know I should be more tolerant. He’s hungry for company, I tell myself. During his first visits, he was mostly silent. Even though I know that his daily world must be completely turned around since my mother’s life ended so abruptly, I’m still taken aback at just how completely deflated and pained he is. I’d never really thought of my parents as belonging together. My father seemed too wide-eyed and independent-minded for my mother, who was always slightly annoyed by his obliviousness to her version of reality, his shakiness as a breadwinner, and his hair-brained approach to his responsibilities of keeping the cars from breaking down and the lawnmower running. He’d often spend Saturday afternoons patching things together with glue, not ordinary household products like Krazy Glue or Ducco cement, but batches of epoxy he’d make in the basement. Even though my father was a chemist, my mother, ever efficient, seemed skeptical of his practical abilities.
When Danny died, my father could barely function and couldn’t stop breaking into tears at the mention of his name, while my mother kept forging ahead, not talking about it. My father, Ted, and I would do our best to drop Danny’s name into a conversation—a story about his life, how much we missed him, anything we could come up with to help keep him alive. But my mother would never bring up Danny. That was when I was almost certain that my father would break away from my mother, that he wouldn’t be able to stand her unrelenting momentum any longer.
When I was young and kids’ parents started getting divorced, I began to think for sure that my parents were not married to the right people. If they would each just marry someone else I thought our lives could be better, and we wouldn’t have to keep hearing the same grating tone of my mother’s voice when she always seemed unhappy with my father’s behavior. But my parents never seemed to be quite like other parents. Habit or duty or something seemed to hold them together, even after what seemed like too big of a divide after Danny’s death. Now when I witness my father’s loss, I feel guilty about judging my parents’ marriage the way I did. There must have been an ongoing dynamic that I just couldn’t see, something that must have at least resembled love to make my father so broken without my mother.
Maybe it’s a good sign that my father’s again reeling out his commentary on the world news. What Ted and I refer to as his “selective hearing” seems to be back, too. For years now, it’s been hard to know if he might really be turning deaf, or if he’d just prefer not to acknowledge something that didn’t interest him. His obliviousness to the routine of our lives bothers me again just like it always has, like when he doesn’t notice that everyone else takes their shoes off when they come into the apartment, except for him.
“Dad, please take off your shoes when you come inside, like everyone else,” I tell him. “This is New York City, the streets are dirty.”
“I’m more comfortable with them on,” he says back, undaunted.
It’s hard not to get annoyed. And now without my mother around to badger him, the nagging sound of my own voice seems louder than before.
Eli has had enough of his toy castle, and comes back to the table. “Papa Joel, tell me how Grandma Lois died. Did you see it happen?” He’s right up close to my father, trying to look him in the eye. When he doesn’t answer, I’m embarrassed of my harshness with my father. If he can hear, I’m thankful that he hasn’t chosen to give Eli the details of what he saw.
Fantastically, my father appears not to notice my intolerance. In fact, what he seems to see is exactly the opposite. “You’re always so supportive,” he tells me when it’s time for him to leave to go back home. “You’re such a good daughter.”
I know the water will be chilly, but I have to make myself get into the pool again. I haven’t been swimming once for the past month since my mother died. Finally, ID in hand, I walk over to the Columbia gym. I head straight for the locker room, change into my bathing suit, don’t bother to take a shower first, and walk right up to the edge of the pool, which I know will be cold. In the first couple of laps, I find myself sputtering, but it’s just the power of suggestion. Soon I’m swimming effortlessly.
To my complete surprise, I can feel my mother’s presence with me in the turquoise walls of the pool. It startles me a little, because swimming has always been my private world. Even when my lane is crowded, and I need to gauge my speed against the other swimmers splashing past me in the lane, I’m there on my own. But now that I think about it, it was my mother who first took me to the water. Even though she wasn’t much of a swimmer, she loved the ocean as much as I did. In those years when we lived in Marblehead, just as long as there was a little sun and the temperature hit seventy degrees, we’d head for the beach. I’d play in the waves or run further down the beach, while my mother kept an eye out. Maybe it makes sense that she’s here with me now.
“Just wait two minutes while I get these apples chopped,” I yell at Eli, who’s grabbing his ball back from Eva.
“My ball, my ball.” Eva starts crying.
The water for the eggs is boiling. I set the timer for eight minutes before picking up Eva to console her. I can’t stand my voice, screaming at the kids as I try to prepare for our small Seder. My mother’s tenseness rings in my head, as I attempt to recreate a small version of the Passover I grew up with, the holiday I always remembered with great anticipation. I must have helped my mother get ready for twenty or more Seders in my life, but it’s been a long time since then and I’m no longer sure of the details. I found a children’s Hagaddah coloring book around the corner at the bookstore, and there’s a picture of what goes on the Seder plate. Roy doesn’t like rituals, but he’s agreed to go along with it, he says, as long as I don’t take it too seriously. It’s only the four of us, nothing demanding. I just want the kids to know a little bit about the story of Passover, I tell him.
Growing up I loved Passover. Every year we’d read from the same wine-stained Maxwell House Hagaddahs, everyone singing off key and no one caring because everyone was tone deaf. I can still taste the chalky yolks of the hardboiled eggs that would finally be passed around the table. We’d bathe them in the bowl of salt water along with the parsley, and slide them around on our plates and into our mouths. I didn’t know how I’d possibly last another half hour until we got to eat the charoset and maror sandwiches made with broken pieces of matzoh. The whole extended family wouldn’t be there like at Thanksgiving, but usually my aunt Cecile’s family came, and sometimes Nate. Once, my great-grandmother even made the trip up from New York. Shy as I was in those days, when it was my turn to read from the Haggadah, I’d recite my lines in a strong voice. Sometimes my cousins and I took turns pretending to be Elijah, making objects move mysteriously or opening the door in spooky ways. One year Danny dressed up as Elijah’s ghost.
My mother always constructed two delicious Passover meals, the first night turkey, the second night pot roast. She’d carefully shape the matzoh balls and drop them into the soup. It was a big operation to set the table. We had to bring out both of the extra leaves, and unroll the foam pads specially cut for the larger table shape before laying out the big tablecloth that was actually a striped Indian bedspread. I’d set the table with the special Passover plates and the tarnished silverware that we hauled out of the basement each year for the holiday. My mother was even more anxious than usual. I could feel her nervously watching to make sure I was using the right silverware, not mixing the meat with the milk. And there was always some worry about the matzoh balls being too heavy. One year she’d try adding club soda, and the next year it might be extra chicken fat. But she always managed to pull through right up to the sponge cake that she made with ground nuts.
One year, I discovered a reason why my mother might have been in a bad mood on Passover. My aunt Cecile told me that their mother died when she was seventeen and my mother was nineteen, and it happened the night before Passover began. Their rabbi invited the whole family—my mother, Cecile, Joe, and Nate, and of course their father, to his family Seder because their mother had just died. “I was so proud having the Seder with the rabbi that year,” was what my mother told me when I asked her about it. But Cecile had said it was miserable, maybe the worst night of her life. And later Nate told me how scared he was that Passover night when he was only seven. Cecile also told me that when their mother was dying of breast cancer, she sat by her side during those final months, changing her messy bandages, while my mother was nowhere to be found. My mother did not like being around death.
Six years ago when I was visiting my parents on Passover, unbelievably my great-grandmother died the day before the holiday began. At 104, she was the oldest living member of our family, a true relic especially by our family’s standards. She had outlived her own daughter by more than sixty years, but still she managed to die on the same day before Passover. “Isn’t it peculiar that both your mother and grandmother died on the very same day of the calendar?” I pointed out to my mother. But she just gave me a blank look.
My great-grandmother had to be buried very fast in keeping with Jewish law. She was living in Crown Heights with Great-Aunt Gussie and her family, who had become Hasidic many years before. “It has to be before sundown,” was what Gussie’s husband Joseph had said. “We have to get her in the ground before Pesach begins.”
My mother never made it to the funeral. She said it would be impossible to get back in time for our Seder. Cecile, Joe, and Nate all got to the burial in time, Cecile already being in New York, but Nate and Joe flew in from Washington. “They just threw her in the grave,” was how Joe described it. That year, by chance, my mother had planned to have only family friends at the Seder, no relatives, so as it turned out everyone came, and Passover went on as planned.
With the help of the coloring book Haggadah, I tell Eli and Eva the story of the pyramids and Pharaoh and the slaves, and the parting of the Red Sea. And Roy chimes in with a verse of Dayenu.
After I’ve already kissed Eli goodnight, he calls me back into his room for one more last thing. “Why do we celebrate Passover for seven days?” he asks. I explain to him that the Jews spent seven days wandering in the desert before they could get out of Egypt. “So tell me, Mom,” he says. “Moses was the good guy and Pharaoh was the bad guy, right?” By his standards he’s exactly right, and I nod, happy to have accomplished something new this Passover.
My nerves are still frayed, and I keep on getting angry at the kids even though Passover has come and gone.
“My mommy, my mommy,” they clamor and fight with each other every night as I make dinner. I try hard not to let my exasperation show.
“Mom, what makes you cry?” Eli asks me one morning on the way to school.
“When I’m very sad or hurt I sometimes cry,” I tell him. “But not often—only some of the times when I’m sad or hurt.”
“Do you ever get angry when you’re sad?” he asks.
Eli’s wisdom seems impossible for his four years. At forty-three, I’m only now starting to grasp that my mother’s anger might have come from a deeper place, a place that might have more to do with sadness. I wish I’d known how to sympathize with my mother. Maybe then I’d know how to mourn for her. Sometimes I just want the kids to get out of the way, and Roy, too, so that I can go on with this act of grieving. But then in trying to remove the human obstacles from my path, I’m being like my mother, and I want to get rid of that, too. And how can I possibly grieve for my mother when I want to get rid of her?
After dropping Eli off at pre-school, it’s only 8:30 a.m. and I see that Eva has fallen asleep in her stroller. With the whole morning still ahead of me, I wheel the stroller into Starbucks to buy an overpriced cup of mediocre coffee. I set myself up at a table and unload my backpack that’s always filled with book proposals waiting to be read. The first one, as luck would have it, turns out to be a synopsis for a healthy Kosher cookbook. Coincidentally there’s some kind of Middle Eastern music playing in the background, and I find myself weeping uncontrollably as my mother’s presence suddenly and completely overwhelms me. All I need is time to remember her and be sad, I reason, so I won’t be angry.
Roy wants to be supportive. I tell him we really have to take a trip to the Caribbean, the one we didn’t get to take when my mother died, but he says he can’t spare the time from work. It infuriates me that he’s not being understanding. “How about we go to Cape Cod for a week this summer?” Roy suggests. He doesn’t get it. The summer is still months away, and I need something immediate—the calm of clear lapping waves and fine white sand.
Then he says he’ll take the kids to New Jersey this weekend to visit his parents, so I can have a day to myself, and he has it exactly right. When Saturday arrives, I pack the bag of snacks and toys for their car ride, and they leave.
I start out by opening the mail that’s been mounting up on the chest of drawers in my bedroom. Right there in the envelope on the top of the pile is the rebate check from Club Med. I can’t believe our good fortune. Now we really can turn around and use the check for a new vacation. I dial 1-800-Club Med, and book us for five days in the Bahamas later this month. I can easily envision the gentle Caribbean water.
But the Club Med reservation isn’t really going to work out. I already know that. Roy’s already said he can’t take the time off from work now. And besides, when I check the flight possibilities, everything that’s available is indirect, and changing planes with the kids would only be an ordeal, not relaxing at all. Still, I put the receiver back in its cradle and let the reservation sit for a few hours, enough time to really cry and feel sorry for myself. My mother is like a beach I can’t get to. Now more than ever, she is nowhere to be found.