Baltimore (3 page)
Authors: Jelena Lengold
There is an old photograph of my mother and me: We’re sleeping, both with curlers in our hair. She’s wearing a thin, summer nightgown, which is rolled up around her thighs considerably, and I’m only in my bathing suit bottom. We’re lying on a king sized bed in some rented room at the seaside. I’m, let’s say, five or six-years-old. This means my mother is barely thirty. At that moment, my father is also thirty and he is watching us taking an afternoon nap in a house on the seaside, tired from swimming all morning and being out in the sun.
I try to picture him: A thirty-year-old man watching his wife and daughter. A scene both tender and erotic. And comical, of course, because of our curlers. He’s probably bored. He reads the newspaper and then takes out his little magnetic chess set and plays out the game published that day. Now he’s sitting there, waiting for us to wake up so that he can take us out for ice cream. What made him want to take a picture of us? What were his feelings at the time? Did he wake us up as soon as he took the picture? Were we awakened by the sound of the camera? Did my mother look at my father sleepily and say something like:
“Are you crazy? Taking a picture of me half-naked?”
But still, more than anything I would like to know: What was he feeling while he was taking our picture? For, if he took the picture because of something other than mere boredom, then I’m inclined to think that maybe we could have found a way to be happy after all. And we weren’t. I hope you’re not going to say he took our picture only so that he could make fun of my mother later? Or so that he could, from that moment on, claim that the two of us were only different versions of one and the same principle?
If this were a movie, whose main concern was for the characters to ultimately find peace, I would go to my father, reconcile with him, after so many years, and ask him about the photograph. And he would remember everything. He would say something like:
“Yes, I remember. Dubrovnik, 1966. The blinds were half drawn and the two of you looked so beautiful and peaceful in your sleep. I wanted to eternalize that moment of beauty because I knew it could never be repeated in the exact same way again. You were there, the two people I loved more than anything in the world….”
We’ll stop here. Both you and I know things like this don’t happen in real life. Not in your life, right? Nor in mine, believe me.
In real life, I will never find out even the basic facts like: Where we were vacationing; what year it was exactly; whether or not the break-up was already a subject of conversation, or if it just hovered over our plastic plates on the beach.
In real life, I certainly wouldn’t go to my father. And if I did, a conversation about an old photograph would not be possible.
In real life, we would only get into another argument, over something trivial and with a certain outcome.
I remember there was a dirt road near that house, leading down to the beach, and that all the shrubbery was dry and scorched by the sun. I remember the small branches of these bushes were completely covered in miniature snails, which were hanging on the twigs like buds. I remember taking one of those branches back with me to the room and how, by the next morning, the little snails crawled all over our beds, chairs, the floor, our clothing. And I remember my parents being extremely angry with me because of this. That photograph and those snails, I could almost swear it all happened precisely then, that summer. They were angry the entire time. And it was always my fault. And from then on, whenever I go to the seaside and I see small snails stuck to dry twigs, the same feeling of sadness comes flooding back.
And since you insist, I also remember this:
Last summer I was tidying up my garden. It was one of those ordinary summer days. A Sunday, probably, because only on a Sunday can I be compelled to take a broom into my hands and clear the fallen leaves for lack of a better idea.
I wandered a little deeper into the grass. I took one wrong step. And then I heard: crack!
A broken snail shell was right under my foot. Half of the shell was smashed. The snail, which was most likely injured, was curled up in the remaining half. What would you do with a broken snail? How would you feel? Do you think this is a good enough reason to shed so many tears? And did I really solve anything by picking it up and throwing it far into the neighbouring backyard? All right, it’s not going to die at my door, but does that really change anything?
This was one of those arguments my husband could not explain. He reconciled himself to the fact that this was probably one of those days of the month when women go mad.
I burst in there with a fury, straight from an argument with my mother. The lady whose session, as I’ve now come to realize, regularly runs into mine, is in there and once again I have my fifteen minutes on the little bench. But that’s all right, I’ll be taking fifteen minutes from the person who comes in after me and we’ll be even. We all get our share, only with a slight delay. This reminds me of something, but I can’t deal with that now, I’m too angry.
I know exactly what will happen. If I tell her I got into an argument with my mother just before coming here, she’ll think this definitely wasn’t a coincidence. Allowing my mother to get me so upset before leaving for my session? Maybe it isn’t a coincidence? I could have simply cut short our phone conversation and stopped insisting to that nonsense. But no! I couldn’t make myself stop until the whole thing turned into me screaming into the phone and her whining on the subject of why I’m so rude to her and why I’m torturing her. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! I’m sitting here and gasping for breath and waiting for them to let me in so that I can start complaining about my mother. Outside, it’s the most beautiful spring day imaginable; I could be doing so many other things instead of sitting in the waiting room of a therapist, anxious to start beating on the one who gave me life. I remember the dark spots that are starting to show on my mother’s face. They’ve become larger over the years, and I always look closely to see if they’re getting bigger too quickly or as quickly as they should. I remember how concerned I am about her well being.
Unless my concern is also a mask for something else, something I don’t even dare say out loud.
Here they are, they’re coming out, and now I already know where to sit. This time, I won’t be examining the Japanese violets. While still at the door, she asks me how I am and I start talking before I even sit down. I tell her this visit is like going to an emergency room. She looks at me, uncertain as to whether she should smile at this remark or not. I smile, to let her know it was a joke. An exaggeration. All right, you can smile, it won’t hurt my feelings. I say:
“Shortly before coming here, I got into a terrible argument with my mother.”
She looked at me curiously.
“It’s obvious, of course, that we’re going to have to talk about it, because now my mood is tainted by this, and I doubt I could talk about anything else.”
I’m grateful to her for not asking what the argument was about. One single argument isn’t important. They’re all important, I guess. I say:
“She always manages to push me into the same state: I start screaming at her like a child, and I don’t know whether I’m more angry with her for doing this to me, or with myself for always reacting in the same way. Why can’t I tell her what I think in a nice, calm, adult manner and leave it at that? Why?”
She gets up and takes a sketching pad and some magic markers from the table. She places them in my lap and says:
“Imagine this situation with your mother was a comic strip. What sort of comic strip would it be? Draw it!”
“But I don’t know how to draw!”
“It doesn’t matter, draw it any way you can.”
“I draw like a three-year-old.”
“That’s not important. Draw the first thing that comes to your mind.”
And here I am, drawing: A big elephant and a small elephant, and a bucket of water between the two.
At first she thinks the small elephant is me, but I explain to her it’s the other way around. I’m the big elephant. The small elephant is my mother. The small elephant is standing behind the big elephant.
“What are the two elephants doing?” she asks.
“The big elephant performs in a circus. It’s very busy, the audience is waiting for it, the circus is packed and it needs to get ready for its big act. The small elephant is getting in its way, it’s pushing this bucket filled with water under its feet, it wants to give it some water, it’s going to trip it….”
“What does the small elephant say to the big one?”
“It says: Take the water from the bucket, it’s good for you, it’s the only thing that’s good for you, all the other things people will try to give you are no good, I know some of the people from the audience will offer you candy and peanuts, but you shouldn’t take it because it’s not clean. Only the things I give you are good for you.”
“What does the big elephant say to this?”
“The big elephant says: Leave me alone, you pesky little elephant! I have a serious job ahead of me, I have to work; the whole circus is waiting for me, while you’re pestering me with that bucket, which is, by the way, bigger than you. You can’t even move it and still you won’t let it be! There’s no way you’re going to make me drink the water, you’re just getting in my way.”
“If this comic strip had a name, what would it be?”
“A Useless Attempt!” I replied, right off the bat.
I had no idea where this was coming from. Any of it. Those elephants, that bucket, or the “useless attempt.” It just burst out of me all at once. And the worst part of all was that I didn’t feel any shame whatsoever.
“Whose attempt was useless?”
“Well, the small elephant’s attempt to make the big elephant drink from the bucket was useless.”
“All right, what does the small elephant say next?”
“It says: If it wasn’t for me, you would never have become such a big elephant, you wouldn’t be performing in a circus, you would never have come this far, never stood under a spotlight as people applaud you… and now you’re pushing me away.”
“The big elephant?”
“The big elephant says: Leave me alone, go over there with the other small elephants.”
“And the small one?”
“The small one says there are no other small elephants. It’s the only one there.”
“So, the small elephant is alone?”
“Yes, all alone.”
“What does the big elephant say to that?”
“It doesn’t say anything. It also realizes there are no other small elephants.”
“How does the big elephant feel now?”
“It’s sad. Very sad.”
“What would happen if the big elephant also went on its way and left the small elephant?”
“A catastrophe. The small elephant would kill itself. It would drown itself in the bucket of water. For sure.”
“So, there’s no solution?”
“No.”
“Then whose attempt is useless?”
I know, I know, all right. I got it. You don’t have to keep jabbing the screwdriver into my kidneys.
I remember how, at the beginning of this session, I told her I didn’t want to repeat the concept of women-martyrs, which runs in our family so naturally, as though it belonged there and nowhere else. Now I get the urge to bash my head against the wall and swallow my own words, along with everything else I said about the years I spent analysing my mother’s behavior. Questions like: why she does the things she does, how her parents treated her, whether or not she got the love she needed, how she felt when she got a younger brother, and whether or not she was forced to grow up too soon. I heard her say many times that she never had time to be a child. My mother doesn’t like cartoons. She doesn’t have a great sense of humor. And she loves talking about illnesses and potential catastrophes. This is all because the child within her is acting like a grown-up, I explained to my therapist.
“It’s odd,” she said, “how much effort you put into finding excuses for her….”
“You don’t understand! By searching for excuses for her, I was actually searching for something that would make me feel better. Because, if she’s behaving the way she is because something was also missing from her childhood, then her behavior is not directed towards me. Then it’s just the result of her own personal pain, then she didn’t really have a choice!”
I was practically screaming.
“All right, I understand that, but it’s still a bit odd. When did you switch roles? Usually it’s the parents who look for excuses to justify the actions of their children. Only in rare cases do the children think about their parents in this way.”
What is she trying to say? That my mother is behaving as though she was my spoiled, selfish, capricious child whose actions I’m trying to justify? I was persistent.
“She is the one who benefits from this. It’s her game. She always has to be in the right. If she upsets me, she benefits. If I don’t let on that she had upset me, she benefits again because she knows it’s an act and that I’m just suppressing my anger. She wins either way.”