Don't Wait Up Page 4

  Jeff and I met her in the facility’s dining room. I hadn’t seen my mother in several years and she was barely recognizable. She was old for seventy-three—hunched over and drugged out of her mind. Her skin was sallow, her eyes sagged, her nose job . . . actually the nose job still looked pretty good. She wore a short, dirty-blond wig that sat crookedly on her head.

  She looked up from her lunch, which was four globs of some sort of Chinese-themed food. “Hi, sweetheart,” she mumbled.

  I leaned in, patted her shoulder, and kissed the air near her face, surprised that she didn’t smell too much like her lunch. I had to fight any feelings of compassion I had for this former-terrorist-turned-old-woman. I also had to fight my nausea.

  Sitting at her table, Jeff made small talk with her while I took in the atmosphere, the thin carpeting and plastic tables—nothing matching but who cared, no one stayed here long anyway. The wheelchairs, the oxygen tanks, the stale, medicinal, and weirdly cheese-and-cracker smell. The old people, diminished versions of their younger selves, some unable to hold up their heads, some surrounded by family that looked like they just wanted to get the hell out of there and get on with their day.

  All this led me to a decision I needed to share with my husband immediately. I texted Todd:

  I’m going to kill myself the minute I start showing signs of old age or sickness.

  Okay, he shot back.

  I loved him so much.

  Seriously, Todd, I continued. “So brave,” “soldiered on in spite of her condition,” or even “put up a good fight” will not be said about me.

  Cool, I’ll help, he responded immediately. He knew where I was, why I was saying what I was saying, and he also knew I meant it.

  So, we went back and forth, planning my Todd-assisted suicide. Todd was super helpful; I had no idea he was so creative that way. He told me that jumping off a building or roof wasn’t a great idea because there’s the possibility that I would survive and have to wear whatever the nurses put me in. He knows me so well.

  We were about to land on exactly how I would die (something involving a pillow and smothering, but enough pills so I wouldn’t fight him—again, his idea) when I heard a cell phone ring. I looked up from my own phone, to see Jeff checking his. He won’t take it, I thought, he wouldn’t possibly leave me here at the table.

  He stood up. “I have to take this,” he said.

  The asshole was actually going to take the call and leave me with our mother. I grabbed his shirt.

  “Don’t go,” I pleaded, grabbing his shorts as well. “Take the call here—put them on speaker!” It was understood (because I’d said it at least five times that morning) that Jeff and I would not leave each other’s sides during our visit.

  “I’m right around the corner,” Jeff said and took off.

  I looked across the table at my mother. Her once-nimble body, able to clear an ottoman in a single bound to grab Jeff and me by our legs, was now frail. Those sharp and bony fingers, now too arthritic and bent to inflict the sort of damage she’d made a career of. I could definitely take her in a physical fight (oy, what would that look like in this place?), so I knew I wasn’t in any physical danger.

  So, what was I afraid of? Why was I so angry—furious, really—as I sat there trying not to focus on the smell of her lunch, which I had thought was Chinese-themed food but now I wasn’t so sure? Maybe Mexican?

  I realized, this was the first time I was alone with her since I was six.

  • • •

  “HIT THE BOMB shelters!” Jeff would call each night around five, which was when our mother would start out on one of her hair-pulling, scratching, pinching, and biting rampages. Wherever I was in our split-level house, I would hear my big brother sound the alarm and head for the bomb shelter, and I’d race to meet him under my bed where, panting, our heads against the orange shag carpeting, we’d wait until our father came home to save us from her, usually bearing pizza and greasy donuts from Manhattan where he worked (because on the rare nights she attempted a meal, our mother’s cooking was a horror movie on a plate).

  Lost in junk food, I’d sit at the kitchen table, sowing the seeds for the comfort-eating that would soon make my life a delicious misery and watch as Dad would shove Mom against the wall and scream in her face while she scratched and kicked him. Every family has their dinnertime routine. This was ours.

  I was five and my brother was nine when our parents split up and our mother moved out. But it was while she lived with us, and her attacks were a regular event, that a tradition was born between me and my brother that continues to this day. During her rampages, when one of us needed to venture out from under Jeff’s bed to pee (Jeff) or to find a snack (me), we would say the words safe-safe to each other. Saying those words was our talisman, because our world was anything but safe-safe. Our safe-safe incantation continued into our adulthoods, and to this day it’s the last thing we say to each other before hanging up, as a reminder of what we survived and what we mean to each other. None of which was on display in the nursing home as Jeff continued his phone call and I sat alone with our mother, feeling not very safe-safe around her and getting increasingly pissed-pissed at my brother for leaving me there.

  My supposed-to-be-estranged mother and I sat in silence while I watched the door, waiting for Jeff to return. I couldn’t understand why he’d insisted on coming to visit her. It wasn’t like she’d ever given him any reason to justify his loyalty, and he’d lived with her four years longer than I had. But my brother was the only member of our family who had remained loyal to our mother when Cathy moved in with our dad, shortly after the divorce.

  Beautiful, kind, clean Cathy. Thirteen years younger than my dad, twenty-four when they met, with bouncy blond hair, rosy pink skin, and blue eyes, she looked like a princess. She was a “shiksa,” according to my Grandma Ethel. Shiksa is the Yiddish word for a gentile woman, meaning, not plagued with Jewish thighs or untamable curly hair. She arrived like a Fairy Godmother to me, always cooking and reading me bedtime stories, even making hot chocolate and gently brushing tangles out of my hair without getting even a little violent. She made me feel special. She made me feel cared for. She made me feel safe-safe without having to hide under a bed. It was one of the best times I could, or would, remember in my entire childhood.

  I now think that the reason Jeff stayed so fiercely loyal to our mother was because for all of the insanity and violence she directed our way, it was clear that I was her favorite, and he still craves her approval. Approval that he should pray never comes. I should know.

  Because being our mother’s favorite was nothing even close to a perk. And that was a big part of the reason I couldn’t breathe in her presence at that table in LA all those years later.

  A year after my parents divorced, Mom was living in Philadelphia with her mother, my Grandma Bea. Although (or perhaps because) Grandma Bea had spent time in a mental institution—complete with shock treatments—she was still unstable.

  Mother’s Day was coming up, and I was looking forward to spending it with Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy and my dad. My plans went into the shitter, however, when my mother—or “that witch,” as my dad called her—decided to come from Philadelphia with Grandma Bea to spend the weekend with Jeff and me. Her plans included an overnight with us at a nearby motel. I begged my father not to make me go. But from what I heard him say to Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy through his bedroom door, he didn’t have this thing called “custody” that he would need to say no to her, so I was screwed.

  That Saturday, my mother pulled up in her beat-up two-door, navy Dodge Dart (she had returned the Cadillac the year before). Jeff eagerly got inside. My mother looked and smelled exactly as I remembered—kind of sour, her black hair greasy and flecked with lint and dandruff. She wore a black turtleneck and dark-green puffy coat covered in patchy food stains. Grandma Bea was in the passenger seat, more put together with her bright red lipstick, and what looked like some kind of an animal sitting on her head. L
eaning in to kiss me, she instructed me not to touch her “mink” hat. Not a problem. Not even out of the driveway yet, and I wanted to go home.

  Jeff, now ten, wasted no time telling them about how he made it to the final round in the statewide spelling bee by correctly spelling the word agenda. Even though he lost for the county in the next round, with the word incarcerate. Thanks to him our school was in Long Island’s biggest newspaper, Newsday, for something other than vulgar graffiti on a teacher’s car.

  We stopped for dinner at a restaurant and after a near-brawl with the manager over their “No Sharing” policy, we all ate from a single plate of meatballs and spaghetti when no one was looking. When we left, I noticed the salt and pepper shakers that had been on the table were now gone and knew they were in my mother’s pockets. How many salt and pepper shakers did one woman need? I wondered. We drove to a motel, where we had another near-brawl with the guy at the front desk, who refused to honor my mother’s expired coupon, which also happened to be for a different motel, and we finally got settled into our room.

  I went right to sleep—I didn’t even want to watch TV. I figured the sooner I slept, the sooner I’d be reunited with Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy. But in the middle of the night, I made the grave error of getting up to pee. It wasn’t until I stood up that, aided by a sliver of blinking light coming through the curtains, I saw my mother sitting on the floor, crying. Instead of asking her what was wrong, I decided to get back into bed and hold it in. Callous, maybe. Definitely smart. But also too late—she’d spotted me.

  “Sweetheart?” she called into the dark.

  I stood frozen. Maybe she would think I was sleep-standing and leave me alone. I swayed a little for effect.

  Next thing I knew, she was next to me. Her long, bony fingers softly touched my hair, tucked it behind my ear. To this day, I flinch whenever I am being touched softly. I’d much prefer a punch in the face than a gentle caress. And don’t even go NEAR my ears.

  “Sweetheart . . . I want you to come live with me.”

  Oh shit. No no no.

  She said she wanted me. Not Jeff, just me.

  “A little girl should be with her mother,” she said.

  She added, for incentive, that if I lived with her, she’d give me Jimmy, which was not exactly a selling point. Jimmy was her dummy that she used during a short-lived career as a ventriloquist. He was a porcelain doll with a white face, bright red cheeks, and brown lacquered hair that came to a swirl on top. He had big blue eyes that rolled around in different directions, with lids that opened and closed at will. In short, Jimmy scared the living shit out of me. If my mother’s invitation to live with her had been unpalatable to that point, her invitation to make Jimmy my new brother was the ultimate deal breaker.

  My heart beating fast, I told her in my most grown-up voice, the one I’d modeled after Carol Brady, from The Brady Bunch, that I wanted to stay with Daddy. “I just think it’s better,” I said.

  She flipped on the lamp. Before my eyes could adjust to the light, she had lifted her dingy, coral nightgown with one hand and lowered the waistband of her giant, faded underwear with the other. Then she took my chin, held it tightly between her fingers, and directed my face to within inches of a large, puckered pink scar that ran the length of the rippled, loose skin of her lower abdomen.

  “You did this to me,” she said.

  What was THAT?! How did I do . . . whatever the fuck it was I was supposed to have done? Could I have forgotten maiming somebody like that? Was she sure it was me?

  She said it was because I was a “C-section” and that was the scar I’d caused. I could only figure that had something to do with my report card, but I was confused because the lowest grade I’d gotten so far was a B. Nonetheless, I apologized profusely for causing her . . . that.

  Which was when she asked me again to come to Philadelphia and live with her. Once again, I used my most grown-up voice. But this time, using the no bullshit one I’d modeled after Loretta Swit in MASH—I stood my ground about not wanting to live with her.

  She watched me get back into bed. She went to turn off the light but stopped, her hand on the switch.

  “Sweetheart . . .” she said again, “there’s a thing in this world called ‘retribution’—and you’ll get yours for abandoning your mother.”

  I didn’t know what retribution was. I just hoped it wasn’t anything like a C-section.

  The next day, the four of us made a hurried trip through some museum. My mother pulled us kids by our arms and shouted at Grandma Bea to keep up, all the time cutting Jeff off every time he started to spout facts about what we were seeing.

  “Butterflies are part of the class of insects in the order Lepidoptera,” he all but pleaded, “along with the moths and adult butterflies. Mom, adult butterflies—”

  “Let’s go, Jeffrey,” she snapped, yanking him into the next room.

  I wondered what the rush was but just assumed she’d stolen something pretty expensive, like a crown jewel or a dinosaur bone. That was usually why we rushed out of places.

  Finally, we were on our way home. With each familiar sight—the Busy Bee Flea Market, 7-Eleven, the mall, the local homeless guy—I got more excited. Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy, here I come.

  But my hopes were dashed by my mother’s announcement that we were “going visiting.”

  “Going visiting” meant seeing old friends of hers in her old neighborhood and inevitably included Betty, whom I only remembered as having hair that was very big, very brown, and very hard, as well as her mentally ill son named Jared, who licked his hands a lot.

  This was too much for Jeff, who hated visiting more than anything and wasn’t as adept as I was at tuning out his surroundings. My mother knew this, and in what seemed a rare moment of kindness, she said she’d drop him off at our house and we’d be back in an hour to take him for Baskin-Robbins ice cream. Baskin-Robbins was Jeff’s favorite thing ever, so he jumped out of the car and planted himself on our stoop to await our return.

  I tried to catch his eyes. Safe-safe, I prayed. Come on, Jeff—safe-safe. He didn’t look at me as we drove away, and I guess I was tired from the museum and from lying awake all night after seeing that scar-thing, because I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, it was dark outside. The car was cold. I sat up and looked out the window. There was this foreign city, with tall buildings and lots of traffic, and my mother was arguing with Grandma Bea.

  “Yes, I’m sure about this,” my mother shrieked. “She’s my daughter, I can take care of her—I have a towel for her!”

  Where was I? Where was Jeff? Had I missed the ice cream?

  “She’s up,” Grandma Bea said, turning to me. Her face pale, her head seemingly floating above the neck of her coat, her red lipstick just as red as before. Maybe redder.

  My mother looked into the rearview mirror. “Welcome home, sweetheart,” she said happily. “You’re in Philadelphia!”

  What?

  Grandma Bea nudged the arm of her puffy coat. “Paulette, give her something to eat.”

  Agitated, my mother reached into her pocket. She retrieved a packet of saltines and the salt shaker from the night before and shoved them at me.

  Grandma Bea told my mother that she’d better know what she was doing because her own condition left her unable to help.

  “I’m her mother,” my mom shrieked again, and I really wished she’d stop saying that. I also really wondered why either one of them would need to take care of me—I had Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy for that.

  We sped into an underground garage. My mother stopped the car short and got out, leaving Grandma Bea to help me out of the backseat, which apparently wasn’t good for whatever “condition” she had. Or my condition, which was having no tangible idea what the fuck I was doing in Philadelphia.

  We took the elevator up to a high floor in a fancy apartment building, like the “de-luxe apartment in the sky” on the The Jeffersons, with shimmery white walls and plush mint green ca
rpeted hallways. We got to Grandma Bea’s apartment, which I had never seen. Despite it smelling like tomato soup, it was immaculate in a sterile way, replete with hard-looking couches and chairs covered in plastic, which is what old people did to their furniture to keep it nice. I knew as much because my dad’s mom, my Grandma Ethel—or Ettie Apple, as we called her, because she had a housecoat with apples on it—did the same thing with her furniture. I loved Ettie Apple—she baked us cookies and took us on a city bus in the Bronx when we visited her. I missed her so much now I got a knot in my stomach. I also missed the Baskin-Robbins, I was sure of it.

  Grandma Bea took off her dead animal hat and announced she’d had a long day and she was going to lie down. She started down the hall to one of the two bedrooms, warning me not to touch anything with sticky hands before closing the door behind her.

  I turned to see my mother pick up a black rotary phone. “We’re going to call your father,” she said as she dialed.

  The knot in my stomach started to loosen. I was going home.

  “We’re going to tell him you’re living here now,” she continued, and the stomach knot tightened up again so fast I almost threw up.

  If there had been any doubt up to then that missing ice cream was the least of my worries, that was over. I wondered about my brother—if I was in Philadelphia and Jeff wasn’t with me, who would warn me when it was time to hit the bomb shelter? Where was the bomb shelter in this place? Who would keep me safe-safe? And would there really be no ice cream? Because food is comfort, and I needed comfort badly at that moment, and also promising ice cream and not getting ice cream was a mean thing even for a mean person to do.

  I heard my father answer the phone in a faint but frantic voice.

  “Les, it’s Paulette,” my mother said calmly.

  This was going to be bad. Calm was the only thing worse for my mother to be than not calm.

  After a lot of muffled screaming from the other end of the line, she told him where we were.