Excerpts

Excerpt I     Excerpt II

Dear Faye,

Sorry I haven’t called lately, but I’ve been recovering from the parental visit. It’s cute how Mom asks if she can drink the water from the sink; no, we don’t use those purification pills in the concrete jungle. However, the way she triple wrapped all her stuff in plastic bags is not endearing, particularly when she methodically wrapped, unwrapped and rewrapped them at seven every morning. I’ll admit that I’ve opened up a travel bag or two only to find shampoo or hand cream oozed all over and I don’t have a single plastic bag in which to wrap the leaking bottle, but she takes it to the extreme. I think she travels with a toothbrush, one change of clothes and five hundred plastic bags.

We did go to Ellis Island which was fun, but getting there is practically like immigrating. Everyone is pushing and shoving in line to get on the boat, we’re all crammed in and everybody has to stand because there’s not enough room. It’s freezing, babies are crying, people are complaining...it was all very real. Except for the refreshment stand with pretzels and hot cocoa, I’d say it was an identical experience.

In the evening I took her to a poetry reading which didn’t go over too well. How was I supposed to know it was an African-American lesbian event? I knew we were in trouble when they started out with the cock poem. Mom didn’t even take her coat off the whole time. It’s not my fault there was nothing else happening on a Monday night; I had ruled out the sitar recital and the reading at Barnes and Noble on “The Clitoral Truth.”

Afterwards, I took her to a seafood restaurant so she could get a “nice piece of fish.” Unfortunately there were some not-so-nice non-kosher lobsters greeting us when we walked in. All night she was eyeing the waiters like they were carting around human heads. “Back and forth with the lobster, how can I enjoy my food here? Feh, it’s disgusting what people eat.”

Last night she called Dad to make sure he had not wasted away from malnourishment in 24 hours. This was the conversation I overheard from my bedroom: “Did you defrost the salmon patties I left you? No, they are not tuna. I gave the tuna to my mother. Yes I’m sure. I marked the salmon with an “S” and the tuna with a “T” so they couldn’t have gotten mixed up. Remember I showed you the defrost button on the microwave? It’s on the upper left…it says ‘Defrost’…well, check to make sure you plugged it in…” Faye, please don’t ever let me marry a man-child.

So anyway, I tried to remove everything remotely sexual from my apartment before Mom arrived. I said a tearful goodbye to Mr. November and threw out my one copy of Playgirl. Regardless of my efforts, I’m positive that Mom will still walk out of the apartment with a condom wrapper stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

I find it hard to believe that she’s quite so innocent though given that sex book she kept in her night table. I found it once when I was rifling through the drawer looking for kleenex; I assumed she had put it there for me to read about the carnal activities that at twelve I could only dream about, so I’d quickly stuff it under my shirt and sneak down the hall to my room. The book was brand new when I first found it, and I didn’t want to break the binding, so I’d crack it open just half an inch, reading only the words along the outer edge of the page. By the next week I was folding the paperback in half, eating greasy chips and powdery doughnuts while mulling over oral sex techniques and pawing at the pages with my sticky hands.

Reading that book became a regular after school activity. Now, it was all of a five second walk from their bedroom down the hallway, past the bathroom, your room and Gordon’s to get to mine, but it felt like the length of a football field. And it never failed that halfway down the corridor, Mom would holler my name, demanding my presence downstairs that very moment to wash a bowl or pick up a pair or errant socks—clearly impossible as the book would surely fly out of my shirt, the pages spontaneously fluttering around her feet. I had only a split second to decide if I should run and replace it back in her room or make a mad dash into mine as the hallway suddenly transformed into Indiana Jones’ rope bridge, fraught with danger on each end. And since we had two staircases, I frantically tried to analyze the location of the bellow to see which set of steps she was closest to, though knowing Mom, she would magically appear at both.

Of course, there was also the fear of returning the book when I was done. This first required a trip to Mom’s room to make sure she wasn’t in her bedroom or bathroom, or hiding in the closet or under the bed. Then I had to go back and stuff the book under my shirt and traverse the rope bridge which gave her plenty of time to whisk quietly up the carpeted stairs and catch me. Plus I was faced with the daunting task of putting it back exactly as I had found it. Was it horizontal or vertical? Was the front cover or back showing? A fraction of an inch in the wrong direction and I’d be discovered. And even after replacing the book, there was the pervasive paranoia that I had, in fact, not actually returned it and in some crazed and frenzied moment of my fervent sexual awakening, left it lying open on top of the dinner table next to the pot roast. It’s truly amazing that except for the fact that I can only enjoy sex on a rope bridge, I don’t have any real sexual hangups.

I figured Dad couldn’t possibly have anything incriminating as I rummaged through his closet one day for a tennis racket. That’s when I stumbled on the box of four-legged underwear…good for an additional ten years of therapy. Most kids only find the random Playboy and try to come to terms with the fact that their parents actually have sex; I have to deal with the image of ours prancing around their bedroom in perverse lingerie. Perhaps the underwear had some spiritual significance. Maybe on the first night of Passover, they don their unigarment and Dad chases Mom around the room as if she is escaping from Egypt; he calls her his love slave while playfully smacking her rear with a stiff piece of matzoh and she begs him to “let my panties go.” I try to soothe myself with that thought.

I took Mom to meet Tony and told her that I've been spending a lot of time with him—leaving out the fact that it’s in bed, though I’m not sure the fleeting break from loneliness is worth the ensuing emptiness with him. Sometimes when we lay there welded together, I am lured into believing that this feels right. But then he looks at me longingly and asks what I’m thinking and I realize I’m debating if I should buy a sander tomorrow or just go ahead and varnish my desk. I want to want to spend a night with a guy, to wake up together in the morning and hear him fart with abandon as I burn us some breakfast.

Mom will never understand or approve of any of my relationships with men. If I'm deeply involved she’s worried I’m too serious and not seeing other people; if I'm not dating, she thinks I'm a man-hating feminist out to take over the universe. I am a feminist out to conquer the world…who happens to like a nice piece of ass once in a while.
Mom is so focused on the externals, the appearances of my life that she can relate to her friends as evidence of her success as a mother. She always feels compelled to tell me what my grammar school colleagues are up to, and really, I’m thrilled that Cheryl Levy is doing group theater in Akron. And Moshe Shmial, the kid who used to pull his arms in close to his chest and flap his hands like a baby bird whenever he got overexcited, he’s now a world-famous brain surgeon and cordon bleu chef on the side with his third little genius on the way, oy he gives his mother such nachas.

Since I don’t boast the large office, big paycheck or fancy title, I think Mom’s given up on me and is now fixated on making sure I marry someone who does. I wonder if I would have her approval to date a Jewish woman. For that matter, I suspect if I was having an intimate relationship with a farm animal she wouldn’t mind as long as it was kosher.

The whole time Mom was here I wanted to call my therapist’s answering machine. Just to hear the voice of this woman who cuts a clearing in the woods. Not a path, just an opening. She lets in some light. But what is wrong with me on top of what is wrong with me? I should be sleeping or screwing rather than swooning at the sound of the tone. When I add up the actual time we’ve spent together, it’s mere hours, yet I feel like Carol has known me all my life.

I can’t understand how therapists truly empathize with people and then just pack up and store them away in a briefcase at the end of the hour. On the other hand, how could they ever enjoy a concert or a good meal if they took people’s troubles along? I asked Carol about this, and what she told me took my breath away. She said I was inside her. That I was in her bones. Made me wonder if I’ve settled there, like marrow. When we speak, I can sense each thought enter her; it’s like my words seep into the cellar of her soul. There’s the closeness that happens unclothed in the dark, but I think the real kind works its magic without music or moonlight, on Tuesdays at five o’clock with only two chairs and a dead plant to set the mood.

She took my hand the other day. Sat next to me and grasped my hand in hers. She didn’t say a word, but I could hear her tenderness hanging in the air and I felt something flutter open in my chest. She looks at me like I matter, not just to her, but to the world…to God. Somehow she tells me that my presence, my mere existence, is important. I’ll never know how she gets all that into one cosmic glance. I’ve never seen it before and fear I won’t again. Some things change you forever, but I thought they were big things—an illness, the death of a child. But her hands changed me. They murmured and whispered, and said she knew. And not just for those fifty minutes, but all the time

When I look back on our childhood I don’t think we expressed much affection in our family. There were a lot of locker room type pats that served to convey everything from “good job setting the table” to “gee, sorry you lost your leg in that thresher.” We didn’t exchange many hugs, and those that we did share retained that same kind of patting action, like we were simultaneously burping each other.

Carol reminds me of Jane, my seventh grade teacher whom I adored. I used to sit next to her after school while she graded papers, pretending to be engrossed in my homework when I was completely absorbed in her. One day she suddenly reached out and stroked my hand, and I grabbed on to it for dear life. That brief moment was an awakening, like a first kiss. In fact, I think I recall it more vividly. I tried to memorize the details of everything around me, memorialize each crack in the wall as part of that moment so that I could cherish it forever, even though it was already slipping away. Looking back on it now, I think of the two people who jumped from the World Trade Center holding hands. In my twelve-year-old mind, every bad haircut and new pimple was cataclysmic, and when she reached out for me, it was like this beacon of light and hope in the midst of my despair. A reminder that even in the worst moments two people can come together, joining hands and hearts, to face the abyss. You found my hand and love rushed in, Anne Sexton wrote. Perhaps, for an instant, it happened to me.