“Oh, by the way, Mom,” I said, holding up her new gold drapes as she inserted pins into the pleats before hanging them, “Katy and I think it would be fun to get an apartment together. She’s finishing her last year at Northwestern and needs a roommate so she can afford a decent place.”
Pinching out the T-shaped pins from between her lips, Mom stepped down from the ladder and faced me, her face a bitter scowl. “You mean to tell me you’re not going to live here and pay me rent? Don’t you think you owe me that after a whole year living in Europe?”
I knew this was coming and tried to sound casual, matter-of-fact. But her guilt-inducing, accusatory tone churned my gut. I took a deep inner sigh and stood my ground. “Mom, I’m twenty-one years old. I spent all year living independently. Besides, Katy needs a roommate to share rent. I’ll still be close to home.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!” She jabbed at me with her index finger. “After all I had to contend with last year—the fire in the six-flat! Running back and forth to the West Side! When I finished high school, I gave my parents seventy-five percent of my salary when I got my first job. Aren’t you being just a little selfish here?”
“Mom, that was the Depression! Your parents couldn’t find work. Besides, it’s time I was on my own.”
“We’re barely squeaking by with those buildings. There’s always extra expenses and one headache after another.”
I tried to keep my voice calm and even, but a pleading tone had crept in. “Mom, I’ve promised Katy. I’ll be able to help you when you need it.”
I didn’t mention that I had no intention of tolerating the curfews Mom would surely impose on me, or her furious harangues if I ever stayed overnight at Bill’s new apartment. “You young people are all mixed up,” Mom ranted. “It’s the Communists—I know it! Undermining America by morally corrupting our youth! Khrushchev said he’d bury us—well, this is how he’s doing it!”
The heady days of buying our “little mansion” (as Mom proudly called the house on North Keeler); the sense of camaraderie effervescing from our family’s teamwork, which had turned the fixer-upper into a beautiful home; the vitality and energy of riotous youth that had infused the house—that era had passed, and along with it, the extra helping hands had disappeared.
Smitten with his office crowd, Dad wanted an escape from Mom’s relentless criticism. Gone were the days when he had written her love poems, told her how much he appreciated her holding down the fort, and encouraged her “not to do anything unnecessary.” He had withdrawn emotionally and now seemed not to understand (or care about) Mom’s roles as homemaker and business manager. “What do you do all day?” he queried resentfully when she wanted to purchase a dishwasher (“a three-hundred-dollar storage cabinet,” he groused).
Mom was nursing long-held grudges and new realities. She stewed about Dad’s lack of appreciation. “He saddled me with that rooming house when he was gone six months of the year,” she sputtered in exasperation. She also claimed he’d never been “openly friendly enough” to Grandma K, choosing to ignore Dad’s patient tolerance and management of Grandma’s psychotic and threatening outbursts in their home for fifteen years.
Now Paul was gone (and the “ingrate” didn’t write or call), and I was moving out. She began demanding recognition. “I’m an executive,” she shouted at us, “doing dirty work! No one knows what the housewife does. It’s all taken for granted.” A housewife, okay, but to call herself an “executive?” We all found this statement ridiculous hyperbole. Yet that’s exactly what she was—managing the finances and logistics of the three West Side buildings and our twelve-room house with a barn, an attic, and a basement, all of which Dad was filling with his junk at an alarming rate.
It’s not surprising to me now that Mom began drinking.
Having a couple highballs at the occasional gathering of her friends and at her monthly club meetings—or waking with a hangover on New Year’s Day—had been the worst of her indulgences. When ironing, she sipped from a can of Budweiser set on the end of her ironing board as she watched TV. I never saw her drunk.
Now she was downing mixed drinks or sipping Four Roses whiskey for a couple of hours nightly while she sat at the kitchen table, puffing cigarettes, stewing about the injustices that had been foisted upon her. It was bad enough that she had to put up with her manipulative, judgmental mother-in-law and an insensitive husband, who didn’t treat her with “kindness and consideration,” but now, her lousy, selfish daughter was moving into her own place instead of paying Mom rent!
While still living with my parents, I came home from my weekly Saturday night date with Bill. Walking from the front door through the darkened foyer, I saw a puddle of light leaking into the dining room from the kitchen. My heart pounded. I dreaded seeing Mom inebriated but went into the kitchen anyway to say hello.
She sat at the Formica kitchen table in her usual late-night mode, chair positioned slightly askew so she could extend and cross her legs at the ankles on another chair. In her left hand, she held a tumbler of amber liquid; a filtered menthol Salem, smoke twisting toward the ceiling, drooped between her right middle and index fingers. Next to the half-empty Four Roses whiskey bottle, a butt-brimming ashtray overflowed onto the table. I entered into a miasma of stale smoke. “Hi, Mom,” I said, trying to sound pleasant, but inwardly shrinking—as if I made myself small enough, I could disappear.
“Oh, hello,” she replied in a bitter tone, her eyes droopy and unfocused. Dragging deeply on the Salem, then blowing the smoke over her shoulder, she set her mouth into a grim, tight-lipped, ironic smile. On the floor lay her girdle, removed so she could drink and brood in comfort. Night after night, her thoughts looped, forever circling to the same playlist: how much she’d suffered; how her despicable mother-in-law had duped her with a purported “gift” of a six-flat in a now-riot-riven ghetto; her horrible children, who’d abandoned her.
“Are you okay?” I asked. She waved the cigarette hand as if dismissing me. I knew a conversation was out of the question. “Well, I think I’m going right to sleep,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”
I turned to go upstairs.
“That’s right. Just go to bed. I know you’re far too busy and important to talk to me.”
“Mom, that’s not fair. I’m just tired.”
I headed up the back steps to the second floor, washed my face, fell into bed, and pulled the covers up to my chin. As I nodded into a half sleep, I heard Mom’s heavy footfalls on the back stairs, her unsteady tread entering my room, where a desk lamp cast a soft, low light. Opening my eyes in tiny slits, I saw her in the shadowy glow, hovering over my bed, swaying a little; her face sagged, her nose crinkled, and her mouth turned down as if she were looking at an object of disgust.
Ptew. Ptew. She’d spit on me!
I lay silent, stunned—more embarrassed for my mother than furious at her vulgarity. One part of me wanted to leap up, grab the front of her blouse in my two fists, shake her, and scream, “How dare you!” But another part cringed at the humiliation she’d feel if I confronted her—if she had to face how low she’d sunk in her desperation to blame someone else for the emotional wasteland of her life.
I pretended to sleep. She spit on me again, muttering, “Whore. After all I’ve sacrificed for you.”
Heart thumping in my throat and chest, eyes still shut, my breath came shallow and fast until she wobbled out of the room. Sleep was elusive; anger, sadness, and helplessness all washed over me. What was wrong with her?
Perhaps the years of living with Grandma K’s madness, her mental illness encased in a chrysalis of silence, had inured me to not thinking of a solution. Avoidance of the subject had left me bereft of an emotional larder from which I could draw nourishing words and empathy to help my mother. The only way I could respond to Mom’s emotions was to steer clear of her.
The next day, Mom said nothing about the incident. Had she been too drunk to remember, or was she too embarrassed to own up to her horrid behavior? Whatever the case, I chose not to bring it up. She was already such a mess, so angry with Dad (for exactly what I didn’t understand at the time), and now my drive for independence was sending her into even deeper crisis. She repeatedly circled back to her role in supporting her parents. It was the creed and faith of her personal religion: you sacrifice your own happiness, and your family’s, to do the very best for your parents. I was an apostate.
I recognize now the damage Mom’s single-minded devotion to Grandma K had wreaked on her marriage; that Mom had been flailing her whole life in a river of guilt. She was trying to tug me into the same current that engulfed her. I had to resist the pull, or drown. But there was no point in forcing her head deeper into the torrent, so I just let the spitting incident pass—and planned my escape.