“Before you were born, I had an important job at City Hall,” my mother says.
I sit at the kitchen table eating Oreos with milk and watch her iron my white middy blouse with its blue tie for tomorrow’s school assembly. I have heard this tale before, but I enjoy listening.
“I worked in the mayor’s office,” she continues, “for the President of the City Council. I ran the speaker’s bureau for the mayor’s last campaign.
I already know how her boss, as acting Mayor, married my parents. They all waited at City Hall for the phone call to confirm that the Mayor was in Yonkers, and the City Council president was able to perform the ceremony. There is a certain cachet to being married by the Mayor of New York City, even if he was only Mayor for a day.
“When the war was over, I was offered an important government job in Paris, coordinating refugees, but I had to turn it down because I was pregnant with you.”
That part of the story always makes me feel guilty. I’d cost my mother her chance to go to Paris. I’d have gone anyway, even if I’d been pregnant. At ten, I know I can do it all.
My mother’s life seems like a monotonous routine. Our cluttered, one-bedroom apartment smells pleasantly of Lysol and lemon oil. At lunch, I come home from school, and she serves me hot Campbell’s soup and a sandwich. I feel lucky to live a block from school, so I don’t have to eat cafeteria food.
My mother is not an inspired cook. Dinner is always something broiled with cooked frozen vegetables. Once, she bakes a cake but the packaged frosting tastes like candle wax, and my brother and I deposit her efforts in the incinerator. She never tries again. It is my father who is the chef in the family.
Every week we go to the public library on Fordham Road. We walk there and take the bus back, my mother’s shopping bag loaded with books she reads voraciously. There are two small, stuffed bookcases in our living room. Mother always borrows, never buys. I visit friends whose parents have no books, and their houses seem incomplete. Soon I acquire her habit.
My mother shops at Alexander’s. She loves to go when they are having a sale and brings home bags of bargain dresses for us to try on. Most of them don’t fit, and she returns them the next day, but there is always the occasional great find. I hate Alexander’s with its tables of disorganized merchandise and the crowds of women pushing one another, so I am happy to let her shop for me. I have no particular taste in clothes.
On Saturdays, my parents sit in the living room and listen to Milton Cross and the Metropolitan Opera. Before they had children, they used to go and see it live. I think opera is incredibly boring, all those people screeching in German or Italian. In the summer, we go to a bungalow colony in the Catskills my great aunt and uncle own. My mother sits and reads under the trees while the other women play mahjong. Two bam, three cracks. I hear the tiles click on the table. The men come on Friday nights on the bus for the weekends.
“I wish your grandmother had lived to see you,” my mother says. I am in her lap sitting on the lawn in the shade. “She would have just adored you.”
“Where did she go when she died?” I inquire.
“Mother looks up. “She’s in heaven.”
I stare at the sky and concentrate but I can’t see her, and I get bored and go off to play.
High school comes and I no longer come home for lunch. My mother takes a part-time job, working for a friend who runs a headhunting agency. She is always there when I come home.
“What happened at school today, darling?”
“Nothing.”
I return her hug and retreat to my desk to start my homework. She comes in after a while with tea and cookies for me, kissing the top of my head as she places them out of range of my school papers.
“Were you bored, staying home with us?” I inquire.
She smiles beatifically. “Watching you two grow up was the most fascinating thing I ever did,” she assures me. I don’t believe her. I ask her to help me review my French vocabulary.
I have become a perfectionist. Every index card must be gone over until I can get them all right, every time. She types my school papers for me on our ancient Remington. Her typing is flawless and faster than mine will ever be. Most of the papers come back with A’s. I must do well in school, make something of myself, and be self-supporting. I have no intention of replicating my mother’s life.
“You should be a teacher when you grow up,” she suggests, “that way, you can always be home when your children get back from school.”
I shrug off her suggestion. Who knows if I will even have children? What if no one ever wants to marry me?
I am not an easy teenager. My father and I yell and scream at one another regularly. I am strong-willed and stubborn and I want it my way. He, of course, wants it his way. In retrospect, I have difficulty remembering what “it” was. Mother, always calm and reasonable, negotiates a settlement between us, calling on her skills as a legal secretary as if mediating between two hostile business partners.
As I enter college Mother’s ambition for me increases. Perhaps I might consider law school. Had she been able to attend college, she would have loved to be a lawyer. She has the temperament for it, always reading documents with meticulous care and putting notes in the margins. Her passion for detail irritates me. I have no patience for reading between the lines. I prefer the purity of science to the ambiguity of law.
As I start graduate school, I fulfill my mother’s fondest fantasy and marry a nice Jewish man.
“Don’t wait as long as I did to have children,” she advises. She was thirty when she married, forty when she had me, and forty-two when she produced my brother. “Your father and I didn’t want to bring children into a world ruled by Hitler,” she explains, “so we waited until the war was almost over.”
I have already planned the rest of my life. I will write my dissertation and become a professor at a good college with old, ivy-covered buildings. We will live in a large city with good jobs for both of us. As soon as I prove myself and get tenure, I will consider the possibility of babies.
The year I finish my thesis, there is a shortage of positions in ivy-covered colleges, especially for persons of my gender. The departments are filled with professors with too much testosterone who ask me questions about my reproductive agenda, more detailed than even my mother would dare. I am filled with rage. This is the first time sheer brainpower and hard work have not gotten me what I deserve. I join the Women’s Movement and go back to the drawing board. I need a profession where I can be my own boss.
My mother has a stroke during my final year in medical school, and I fly back to care for her. She cries when I walk into her hospital room, but cannot speak. I rock her in my arms and try to reassure her. “Things will get better once the swelling goes down.”
When did she get so old and so frail? I review the CAT scan with her neurologist, my fledgling knowledge of neuroanatomy recognizing the destruction of her speech centers, my mother, whose speech and letters were so literate.
I guide her to the bathroom, help her to undress, and bathe her, seeing her old woman’s body for the first time in years. I shampoo her hair and wrap her in a large terry towel. When did the parent become the child?
With therapy, her speech improves. She can get out simple sentences of two or three words. The input channels seem intact, and her reading choices from the library are the same. I begin my residency, flying out to visit as often as possible.
The four of us are at dinner when she breaks into the conversation, forcing each word out as if giving birth.
“Have a baby,” she tells us in no uncertain terms.
My father tries to mollify her.
“I understand why they don’t want to have children. It’s not a nice world to bring children into. The Republicans are in power.”
I dissolve into giggles, but I do have a plan. I will finish my residency, start my practice, make sure it is well established, and then I will get pregnant. After all, there is plenty of time. My mother didn’t have me until she was forty. I don’t share this plan with her. I am afraid to raise her hopes or give her a reason to nag. Even with aphasia, my mother’s skills in that arena are unparalleled.
On schedule, my practice takes off, and I begin to consider motherhood. I stop using birth control and discover that becoming pregnant is not as easy as getting an A on an exam. It takes a while and I lose a few, but I am like a pit bull. I will accomplish this, whatever it takes.
Six months before I succeed, my mother has her final stroke. It fells her as she walks from the bedroom to the kitchen and kills her instantly. I arrive by the next plane to find her lying on the living room floor, her head on a pillow, covered with a quilt. She looks as if she is taking a nap except that she is cold, and her skin has begun to turn blue. I arrange the funeral and sob as she is laid in the ground, but I have been grieving for her for ten years. The mother I remember disappeared with the first stroke. We take my father home, and he asks me to go through her things. He will give away whatever I don’t want.
Her clothes and shoes are all too small for me. As we got older, she shrank, and I got larger. Her taste in clothes ran to brightly patterned polyester. I pack her jewelry and purses. My father turns down my suggestion that he come live with us. He can’t breathe in the Los Angeles smog.
My daughter is born a year later, and I name her after my mother. My passion for my child astonishes me. At forty, I have an epiphany. This is how my mother felt about me. I always took her love for granted, like having a warm blanket or an unending supply of peanut butter sandwiches. I find myself singing her lullabies and mouthing her homilies. I realize what a wise woman she was, and wish I could tell her.
At four, my daughter demands a purse. She and her friends are putting on a play and she wants a prop. I rummage through my closet and find my mother’s old straw bag. Before handing it over, I check the pockets. Hidden in a zippered compartment is a poem, cut out years ago, from a newspaper. Its title is “To My Granddaughter.” I begin to cry at this sudden message from the dead.
That night, I hold my daughter in my arms and tell her about her grandparents. “I wish my mother had lived to see you,” I tell her. “She would have just adored you.”