Читать книгу Don't Go Crazy Without Me - Deborah A. Lott - Страница 13

As my father predicted, Roy’s was only my first death, and I didn’t have to wait long for the next. A sweltering night a few weeks before the first day of kindergarten. I already dreaded it, having watched Paul go off to school most mornings pale and trembling. He regarded the spanking new Monte Vista Elementary a prison to which my mother heartlessly committed him every morning and which he could never count on surviving till 3:15 p.m.

Our family in the backyard, drinking lemonade at 9:00 p.m. We were congregated outside because my father had deemed it stuffy indoors, stuffiness a phenomenon as much existential as atmospheric. Ira could condemn an environment as stuffy for any variety of causes: an irritant or vapor in the air, mold, mildew, my Uncle Nathan’s lingering cigarette smoke in a carpet or drape, stale popcorn in a movie theater lobby, any house in which old, sick people resided or—God forbid—had died.

The stagnant air of a summer night in La Crescenta definitely qualified. While my father could splash Lysol and Clorox on any surface he deemed germ-ridden, which had resulted in our toilet seat’s being bleached colorless, stuffiness was not so easily defeated.

“I can’t breathe in here,” my father had said, grasping at his throat and prompting the entire family’s exodus. Stuffiness prevailed despite the two four-foot tall gray metal fans, which I regarded as two kindly robots that whirred all summer long in the living room and across the hall from the bedrooms in an attempt to cool us off. They required we shout to be heard over them, which wasn’t a problem since shouting was our usual form of communication.

In the backyard, the atmosphere had just begun to cool, the smog to lift, and the crickets to chirp when my mother heard the phone ring. All three phones lived in the office, with their long cords coiled and tangled around my father’s ancient desk, into which my brothers and I had relentlessly carved doodles.

An ominous feeling came into my stomach. When the phone rang that late, it could only mean something bad had happened: car wreck, home robbery, pipes burst in a bathroom, fire in a kitchen, roof blown off in the wind. We were in the bad-things-happening business. His anxiety made my father the perfect salesman for insurance. He could conjure up all manner of bad things happening.

The ringing stopped. My parents went into the house and my father limped out alone.

“Long distance,” he proclaimed stentoriously. Long distance meant Detroit. My mother spoke to her family once a week on Sunday mornings, the calls stilted, my mother never forgiven for marrying Ira. Her family waited for that germ of a catastrophe he carried within him to eventually take us down.

My father went back inside and then returned immediately. He proclaimed the news. “Your grandmother Gertrude has passed away. Her heart.” That ominous feeling inhabited me. The air felt sullen and I could smell acrid metallic remnants of ozone. The crickets’ chirping suddenly sounded off-key. My stomach turned over and over. Did I feel bad because I already knew this was going to happen, or had my bad feeling made it happen, or had I only felt bad after I heard what had happened? It was so easy to become mixed up about cause and effect, before and after, the connection between thinking and dreaming, willing and acting, between what was inside my own head and what was in my father’s.

God was punishing us; my grandmother Rebecca had taught me that God stood poised to punish Jews for every minor failure to perform His commandments. It had to be my fault; what had I done this time? The “bad habit.”

A weekday afternoon earlier that week. I crawled into bed while my parents worked in the office. Jeannie, one of the sexy women from the Jewish Center whose office help my father demanded, in addition to my mother’s, had come over. I could hear her screeching and laughing at my father’s jokes, his potching her on the tuchas as she walked by him in her bright red capris. I would take a nap; yes, that’s what I was doing. My mother always encouraged me to be like the other normal children in the neighborhood and take a daily nap. But as soon as the smooth cool satin edge of my yellow wool blanket touched my cheek, the sensation transferred immediately to that other part of me between my legs.

I put the satin edge inside my legs, turned over onto my stomach, and gripped the blanket tight against me. I tried to hide what I was doing by pulling the rest of the blanket over me, to shut my eyes and not move, so that no one could see the pleasure inhabiting me. If I shut the bedroom door, it would look suspicious; no one in my family ever shut a door. My mother could come into the bedroom to check on me at any minute. I tried to move as little as possible, but my body overrode me.

With the blanket’s edge between my legs, I beat my legs together, faster and faster, more and more furiously, pulling more and more of the scratchy wool part of the blanket against me. Lost in the sensation, carried by the movement of my legs, I forgot to worry about how I looked, about whether my mother would be fooled into believing this was a nap. Waves of pleasure washed through the center of me. What could be so bad about this? Could it hurt me somehow? There were so many things that my father said could hurt me. If I didn’t pee as soon as I felt the urge, he said my bladder would burst, and this felt like having to pee; could it burst my bladder too?

My mother came into the room and knew immediately that I was not taking a nap. She walked over to the bed, stood over me, and pulled my hands away from under me. My body called out to my hands; all I wanted was to keep touching myself, to keep making those waves of pleasure inhabit me.

“Get up,” she said. “You need to stop doing this. This is a very bad habit.” I went back to my carrot seed record, to my toys, but I could smell myself on my hands, I could feel the yellow wool fibers on my fingers. The space between my legs called out to my hands more persistently, I rubbed my legs together without using my hands, I leaned in and rubbed against the corner of my table, the corner of my bed. But nothing felt as good as my yellow blanket. It wanted to be between my legs as much as I wanted it there.

There was something bad about my body; there was something bad about what I did with my body. My mother’s body must not have been anything like mine or she would have understood.

And now doing the bad habit had brought on us the wrath of God and killed my grandmother. A grandmother I had only met once when my mother’s family came on the train to visit. I had sat on her lap and pressed my body against the shelf of breast that extended from her neck to her waist. I’d followed the thick braid that wrapped round and round the top of her head with my eyes, amazed that I could not locate the beginning or ending of that one seemingly infinite loop.

We all went back into the house then; I needed to see my mother. The news on the phone had blanched the color from her face. I followed her into the bedroom, though she did not acknowledge my presence. Loss had rendered me invisible to her. I watched as Death threw her down on the bed, curled her up in a fetal position, convulsed her body in sobs. It was going to dissolve her and me along with her.

“Mommy,” I said. “What’s wrong?” I knew, of course, I knew, but I just needed to hear the reassurance of her voice.

“How can you ask that?” she said. “My momma . . .” Unable to complete the sentence, she sobbed deep, impenetrable sobs that felt as if they could break her in two, break me in two.

“Just leave me alone,” she said, her voice a sharp blade breaking through a watery surface, confirming my culpability.

My mother remained curled up on the bed, in the dark, from that night until the next afternoon. Until that moment, death in people had been confined to Roy whose image I felt responsible for rehearsing lest he be lost forever to me. Now I understood that even mothers could die. Mother-loss was a disease that spread through my mother’s body, blighted her from the inside out. Filled her with some foreign material. From my grandmother’s sick heart in Detroit to my mother’s grieving heart to mine, mother-loss was contagious. Death could make mothers disappear.

And I understood instantly that my love for my own mother, which I’d believed to be singular, special, charmed, was not. I loved my mother, my mother loved her mother, and that mother had died.

My mother emerged from the bedroom the next day wearing a somber gray sheath dress. Circles of rouge congealed in blotches over the unnatural pallor of her cheeks. I can still see her leaning over the low broiler shelf in our kitchen, smoke in her face, fanning the flames off three T-bone steaks, gray and shriveling, shrinking within their rim of fat. With a large fork, she turned the steaks over as they spat and kicked grease into her face. Uncle Nathan had gone to pick up Rebecca, who would move in to take care of us. Rebecca kept kosher and would not cook traif meat for our dinner. So my mother’s parting act was to feed us.

“Be good for Grandma,” she said, producing a dry kiss. “You know she doesn’t put up with any trouble.” Her body felt stiffer than ever, as if she’d steeled herself from the inside out against her own grief. Then she was gone to get on a plane to Detroit for the funeral.

When I got out of bed the next morning, something besides my mother was missing. It was me, the reflection of me in the large square mirror over my mother’s dresser. The mirror in which I used to look at myself next to her had been blacked out with a cloth. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and there, the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet was also covered. I flew from mirror to mirror then—the mirror behind the door of the hall closet, even the small pane of mirrored glass on the front of my mother’s upright piano—all covered.

My grandmother watched me bounce from one covered surface to the next.

“What! You’re so vain you need to look at yourself all the time?” Rebecca spewed the words, digressed into Yiddish, and then surfaced in English again. “You don’t need to admire yourself when your grandmother has just died,” she said. I could only imagine what Rebecca would do if she discovered me doing the bad habit.

I found my father in the office, puzzling over one of his own notes from the day before. My mother usually stood over his shoulder and translated his writing for him.

“Jeannie’s coming over to help me,” he said. He sounded worked up. My father said that my mother was regal with her long neck and broad, square shoulders. But Jeannie was one of the sexy women my father favored. They wore pedal pushers and bright coral lipstick, and screamed at his jokes, and ate with their fingers. They had honeyed East Coast accents and showed off their painted toes in golden sandals. Their breasts looked like ice cream cones planted upside down on their chests.

Eva wore what she called “tailored” dresses and never left the house without stockings on. She only owned one tube of lipstick. She had no patience for women who indulged in frivolous activities like card games and shopping and gossip. She hated the women who giggled and flirted with my father but lacked the power to banish them from our house.

“Grandma scared me,” I said to my father.

“What, did she hit you?” Before her visit was over, Rebecca would slap me across the face, chase me into bed, and put me across her lap and give me an enema when I couldn’t get hard stool out of my rectum. For the latter act, I would be grateful. As of that moment, she had only harangued me in Yiddish.

“The mirrors,” I said. “Why did she do that to the mirrors?”

“It’s part of Shiva. When someone dies, you cover up the mirrors, and take off your shoes, sit on a low bench, and wear black. A man doesn’t shave. A minyan of thirteen men gathers to say Kaddish.”

“Why can’t I look in the mirror?” I said.

“When someone dies, you turn away from your outward appearance, and turn your attention inward.”

“I don’t like it,” I said. “It scares me.”

In preparation for my mother’s return and the week’s Shiva, my father took me with him to the market, where we bought silver foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses.

“These are what people brought over after my zayde passed away,” he said. “I remember so vividly the afternoon he died, hovering outside the room in our house where people from the shul sat with him. I kept staring at the crack under the door, thinking that if I just kept watching, I’d see the Malech-Hamovess, the Angel of Death, slip out under the door and carry away his soul.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Nothing. Not so much as a shadow. I wanted some sign so I could keep on believing. I was so angry at God. Then people brought us Hershey’s chocolates. You have to understand, Rebecca would never bring candy into the house. She caught me gorging myself on the chocolate. ‘How can you enjoy yourself?’ she said. ‘Chocolate! Feh!’ She made me feel guilty because if my grandfather hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have gotten the chocolate, and I loved the chocolate so that must mean I was happy he had died. ‘If you’d really loved him as much as you say, you wouldn’t be able to indulge yourself; you wouldn’t even want to eat chocolate; you wouldn’t even want to look at chocolate,’ she said. I felt terrible. She took away the only small consolation I had.” I patted my father on the arm. He continued. “Rebecca was wrong. It’s only human to crave a sweet taste in your mouth when you’re sad. It’s okay to feel two things at the same time. You never have to feel bad just for being human.”

I understand my grandmother’s ritual with the mirrors differently now. The Malech-Hamovess that my father failed to see lurked all around us. It had destabilized the energy fields, opened the portals between the living and the dead. We had to cover the mirrors; otherwise my grandmother’s death could take advantage of our vain desires and pull in others after her, through the permeable membranes of our own reflections.

While Rebecca readied the house for my mother to sit Shiva, Paul and I spent a lot of time outdoors. For my birthday that year, my mother had given me a play oven that I kept on the concrete wall in the lower portion of our yard. “Try to guess what it is,” my mother had said, when she presented me with the square package. “I’ll give you a hint: it has buttons.”

“Is it a dress?” I asked. “A sweater? A coat? A blouse?”

“No,” she said, “it’s not clothing, but it has buttons.” The only objects I knew of with buttons were clothes. I’d asked for a stove, but I knew it couldn’t be a stove because stoves had knobs, not buttons. The stove I wanted could not have fit in that little box. It was nearly life size and pink, like the one I’d seen in the toy section of the Sears catalog. A stove that looked like the one Miss Frances cooked in on television. I opened the package.

“See,” she said, “buttons,” pointing to green, yellow, and red buttons that pushed in and out without effect. I felt duped. This was so much less than I’d asked for. Another of my mother’s disappointing gifts: scratchy blouses and sweaters in neutral colors, textures utilitarian and serviceable. I preferred the fluffy, shiny dresses with oversized bows that my father gave me. And the bounty of stuffies he brought home on my slightest prompting: poodles, tigers, teddy bears, lions, zebras. He was still trying to make it up to me for Jo Jo, the stuffed monkey that I took with me everywhere until I made the mistake one day of letting him fall from the car seat into the gutter.

“There’s pigeon dreck there,” my father shouted, instructing Ben to remove Jo Jo from my sight as I screamed. He put him in the trunk. Later that night, my mother held him up for a moment so I could say goodbye, and then he disappeared from my life. Afterward, I kept trying to remember his face. I keep trying still.

The other animals were small solace but I loved them nevertheless and never took them out of the house where they might meet Jo Jo’s fate.

My mother’s oven was too small to put real pots and pans in. But in her absence, the toy stove was all I wanted to play with.

I made mud pies—the mud was chocolate; the sprinkle of sand on top was sugar.

“Want a bite?” I said to Paul. He pretended to eat it.

I repeated my mother’s final act before she left us, pulling the oven door open, closing it shut, opening it again. The pie went in; the pie came out. My mother would return.

Ben created his own new ritual. We found his ordinary daily ablutions entertaining enough: he’d come home on the bus from high school in Glendale and go into the bathroom, scrub his face with Phisohex to ward off the acne, then brush his teeth and gargle. Gargle and gargle and gargle.

“As long as he kissed a girl for—that’s how long he has to gargle,” Paul said. “He’s trying to get her germs out of his mouth.”

Now Paul and I watched wide-eyed from the hallway outside the boys’ bedroom as Ben performed this new mysterious act. After he came out of the bathroom, he stood on the threshold of the boys’ bedroom with his hand towel draped over his arm. He muttered to himself and then walked methodically forward a few inches. He lingered there, deliberating, and then flung his towel purposefully onto his bed. Then he went over to the bed, picked up the towel, backed up into the hallway, stood at the same spot outside his bedroom, and threw the towel again.

Paul and I looked at each other, trying to figure out the rules. A certain number of steps from the bathroom to the hallway, from the hallway into the doorway, a position that his feet had to line up in at the threshold of the room, a particular spot on the bedspread the towel had to hit?

“What are you doing, Ben?” Paul asked. Teasing. “We can play too if you tell us the rules.”

“Leave me alone,” he said.

“Debbie and I are just trying to figure out what you’re doing.”

“Mind your own beeswax,” Ben bellowed.

My mother came home two days later with a cowgirl outfit for me. On the skirt, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans stood and smiled as Roy’s horse Trigger reared up powerfully behind them. I put on the skirt, along with the vest with studs and fringes, and the green and brown plaid flannel shirt, and abandoned my pie baking to play cowgirl. My mother removed the cloths from the mirrors. I stood back, aiming my black plastic gun at my own reflection in the mirror. I would be fierce.

In the days that followed I watched for clues. Eva was no longer the mother she’d become the day she received the bad news, but she was not the mother she’d been the day before that either.

Paul tattled on Ben about the towel-throwing ritual. My parents went into the boys’ room and sat down with Ben while Paul and I stood right outside the room. Ben confessed that if the towel had not hit the bed right, my mother’s plane would have crashed.

“How you throw a towel has nothing to do with a plane,” my mother said.

“You’re trying to control things that human beings have no control over,” my father agreed.

It was one of the few times I saw them come together and concur on a matter of child rearing.

“There’s been too much of Rebecca’s superstition in our house,” my mother said. Ben sobbed, no longer enslaved by the compunction to throw the towel.

Over the next week, my mother sat Shiva. We borrowed the metal folding chairs from the Jewish Center and lined them up in our dining room, pushed our dining room table up against the wall. Hives of chattering women invaded our kitchen. The smell of their clashing perfumes made me sneeze.

I worried about who the bad habit might kill next, but that did not stop me from doing it.