29
The birthday card that expressed my true feelings for Mother did not exist, because my feelings were wolfish. I glanced at the cards on the rack at Centerville Pharmacy, to torment myself with the nagging doggerel. A Mother is someone we keep very near, In our hearts and our thoughts each day of the year probably contained a grain of truth, but the next idiot couplet ran, Because we cherish her, Because she’s so dear. “Cherish” was a verb that repelled me. Another card, bound with pink ribbon, had the pretensions of a cocktail menu, listing Mother’s assets: A smile when you’re sad, A hand when you’re down, A word when you’re blue, and ten more, ending with, A friend like no other, Thanks for being that kind of Mother.
A woman near me jerked her jowly face at my sudden hacking cough of dissent.
The message I wanted was
Mother, in your twisted will,
Greedy for attention still,
Bitter woman, incomplete,
Who taught me how to lie and cheat . . .
When I quoted that to Hubby, he choked in a convulsion of genuine mirth. Then, with unconvincing piety, he said, “Give Ma a break, Jay. She’s going to be ninety. Statute of limitations for being a witch ran out.”
“Happy birthday, Mother, you maimed me from the start. I carry from your womb a fanatic heart,” I said. “Apologies to W. B. Yeats.”
“I’m squealing on you!” he said, giggling and scratching his hairy forearm in excitement. I’m squeelun!
“All the cards have the word ‘cherish’ in them. I’d replace that word with ‘fear.’”
“Poor old Ma.”
“Healthier than you, Hubby.” But I was also thinking: birthday cards were not messages, they were merely token gestures—phatic, so to speak.
“Fuck you, homo.”
“Eat me.”
“She’s a living fossil!”
But Mother did not seem any older than when, on the morning of my return from Mona’s abandoning the child, she had sat stony-faced at the kitchen table and rapped her skinny hand on the surface and said, “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
She seemed old then, but no older now. And I had not aged at all.
I had been proud of myself in helping to see Mona through the crisis. But I sat sorrowing for the months of struggle, and for the day I had parted from lonely Mona, who had never stopped grieving for the child.
I was then a child myself, an angry, humiliated child, and Mother was a fierce, unsatisfied woman. The worst of it was that in the family time had stopped. I was still that boy, and she was still that scolding woman.
Franny called, about Mother’s ninetieth. I tried one of my satirical poems on her. She said, “I know how you feel,” which was a lie. The calls were constant because of the approaching day. A seemingly impossible event was being planned: a birthday lunch that was supposed to include all of us, including Fred, who was usually in China; Gilbert, who might be in Bahrain; the two working daughters, who’d have to take the day off—it was a weekday; all the spouses, who never felt welcome; and, hardest of all, Floyd, who hated me.
The last time we’d all been together as a family was seven years earlier, around Father’s deathbed, and then at his funeral.
We think it’s best to take him off his ventilator.
But he’ll die without it!
We should respect her wishes.
To test Mother, I went to see her and said that I might be traveling on her birthday. “Work-related travel,” I said. She sat leaning slightly forward, her bird-woman profile backlit by the last of the daylight that emphasized her smallness and her ferocity.
“Oh?”
I said, “I need to raise some money for a book I want to write.”
The mention of money always made her pause, like a bird stiffening at the snap of a twig.
She said, “I remember when I was a lot younger, having to work my fingers to the bone to make ends meet.”
I had half expected her to offer me a pittance, but not even that.
“I always managed to set a little time aside for my parents, though,” she said. “In spite of everything.”
“I’m kind of strapped for cash.”
I was describing how hard up I was, and how busy, as a way of dramatizing the sacrifice I would be making by attending her birthday party. I was trying to see if she cared. She was not moved by my mention of my dilemma. With a half-smile of serenity that could also have been sadism, she watched me teetering.
“But I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all I expect.” She folded her arms and in this compact posture seemed like one of her own little carvings.
“There’s a lot of animosity going around, though,” I said. “Bad feelings.”
She tightened her features, pointing her beaky face at me, losing the faint traces of her color, and I thought how a plucked bird can look rep-tilian.
She said, “What do you mean by that?”
“Your children.”
“My children?” This uprush of indignation was pure theater.
“Some of them hate each other.”
Using her shoulders to convey shock, she said, “That’s not true. You know damn well that’s not true. Are you trying to upset me?”
“Floyd hates me.”
“No one hates you.” She regarded me with contempt, her nose lengthening and lizard-like. “Do you really think you’re so damned important?”
That “damned” meant she was genuinely angry, and that she was in the wrong. Just as she was about to speak, the phone rang. She picked up the receiver, exaggerating its heaviness with the gesture. The thing squawked.
“Hello . . . Oh, fine . . . Yes, of course I am.” She sounded unconvincing and wounded. “I’ll have to call you back later.”
When she hung up I stared at the phone in puzzlement.
“Franny,” Mother said. She rolled her eyes. “She thinks I’m an invalid.”
She had not told Franny I was there. But I had known for many years how she kept her children separate. And this dig at Franny meant that when she spoke to Franny she would disparage me.
“And Fred hates Floyd,” I said, picking up the thread of the conversation.
“Fred is a kind and generous boy,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me in sympathy. “Poor kid, he’s always working. He hardly gets a wink of sleep. All that traveling.”
“I travel.”
“To China?” She smiled, playing this trump card. “And he has school-age children.”
I left Mother that afternoon, as so many times before, feeling defeated, undercut, belittled, doubted. And I knew from the way she had answered the phone that all she’d remember of my visit was that I had upset her, not the news that I had canceled my plans to be at her birthday party.
The call came that night from Rose, harsh, hectoring, not to be interrupted.
“What the fuck is your problem? It’s Ma’s birthday in two weeks and you go all the way over there to upset her. You are such an asshole.”
I allowed a pause. I said, “She told you that?”
“She told Franny, who told Fred.”
“I thought you were on the outs with Fred.”
“We’re supposed to be planning a family party, you dork.”
“Whisper, whisper.”
“We’re lucky that Ma is still with us.”
“You’re lucky she gave you a house. I helped pay for that house. And your ass and your husband’s ass are parked in it.”
But the drone on the line told me that Rose had hung up.
Hubby called too, and left a message on my answering machine.
“Ass-hat.”
“I don’t think you realize how sensitive Ma is,” Gilbert told me, on a crackling line from Qatar. “She was really hurt by what you said.”
“What did I say?”
“You accused her of being an inattentive mother,” he said, as I listened, astonished at the woman’s mendacity. “And you know how hard she tries.”
In this outpouring of good feeling for Mother as her birthday approached, I was the only holdout, it seemed. I loved her less than anyone. I perhaps did not love her at all. I saw her as cruel and selfish—and how was it possible that I was the only one of her children who felt this way? In this sprawling family I was the single skeptic. I wondered why, yet I did not doubt my feelings. I suspected the motives of the others, the ones whom Mother corrupted with her gifts and compromised with her gossip. I had no allies.
Or perhaps I had one.
It was one of the perversities of the family to see an occasion such as this, a birthday, a wedding, any celebration, as a chance to settle old scores. Because it was superficially benign and included everyone, a family gathering was an opportunity to inflict pain, to get even with the maximum number of people at one time. A family meal, everyone with his guard down, I remembered as raised voices, vicious words, unforgiving whispers, kicks under the table, sudden departures, floods of tears, and slammed doors.
“I’m not angry!” someone would scream.
In the endless, inward, contained war, the family like a bag of ferrets, a birthday or a wedding was a separate pitched battle. I dreaded the skirmish to come.
Fred invited me to his house in Barnstable for a drink. This sort of hospitality I saw as hostile.
He poured me a small glass of clear viscous liquor and said, “This is Chinese gin. Baijiu. I hand-carried it back from Shanghai. Go on, chug it.”
“Razor blades,” I said.
“Best quality—Maotai,” he said, clinking his glass. “Ganbei!” and he drank. “Listen, I want you to come to the party.”
This gratuitous prologue meant one thing, and we both knew it: he didn’t want me to come to the party. An italicized but loomed.
“But Ma said you were traveling, that you had some kind of assignment. So, I’m just saying—and look, I really want you to be there—that you don’t have to be there. We understand.”
He looked fussed, he took another drink, he hated holding this conversation. He wanted me to say that I had other plans so he would be off the hook.
I said, “I want to be there.”
He tried to conceal his look of disappointment with another drink, wincing as the liquor went down.
“It’s just a lunch at the Happy Clam. Not really a party. An hour at most. No one’ll be missed. My kids have soccer. If you had plans, you could take Ma out another day. She’d love that.”
“Fred, you sound like you don’t want me to go.”
“Did I say that?” He sighed. He made a business of pouring another drink and slowly screwing the cap on the bottle so that he could turn his back on me. “I said I want you to come to the party.”
“I don’t have other plans. Turning ninety is a big deal for Ma. I’m going.”
Fred smiled at me, a version of the pitying smile that Mother had perfected—and talking to Fred, I often had the feeling I was talking to Mother.
“Floyd’s going to be there,” he said with moistened lips.
“So?”
“I’m just saying. Floyd’s signed on.”
Floyd’s name was a weapon in the family, and for years this weapon had been used against me, waved in my face, flourished, glinting in the sun like a hammered blade.
“Ma said she wanted everyone there.”
“Right, right,” and now Fred looked alarmed. “That’s why Floyd’s going.”
“And that’s why I’m going.”
Now Fred began to smile, and I knew worse was to come. “He can be difficult.” He went on smiling. “He’s crazy, you know.”
“You can handle him,” I said, smiling back.
But his smile was meant to threaten me. Fred said, “He can be violent. What if he freaks?”
I realized that I enjoyed confounding Fred, seeing him squirm, and now I knew that he feared trouble—Floyd ranting at me, my hollering back at him, Mother covering her eyes (“You’re killing me!”), the girls sobbing, “Mumma! Mumma!” Unfinished meals, untasted drinks, bruised shins, hurt feelings, slammed doors.
“I’m going,” I said.
Fred’s face shone with insincerity, a feeble expression of fear as he clucked and wrung his hands. “Like I said, I want you to be there. And Ma wants everyone to be there. It’s a big day.”