Devotion (20 page)

Our basement is filled with dead people’s stuff. Boxes line the walls, some of them still taped closed. Plastic bins contain college diplomas, award plaques, golf trophies. Sets of china, cut crystal.
The lifetime achievements of aunts, uncles, grandparents—what do you do with such things? Throwing them away is impossible. Recently Michael came upstairs from a foraging trip to the basement carrying a shoe box. Inside the box were several dozen tapes from different eras: regular-sized cassettes, microcassettes, even a size that I hadn’t seen before, midway between the two. Accompanying these was a clunky tape recorder.

“What do you think these are?” I asked.

We examined them. Some had dates, written in my mother’s hand.

“Maybe she taped her patients,” Michael said.

Here I had an ethical dilemma. My mother had gone back to graduate school when I was in college, and had become a psychotherapist. I had never been able to imagine my mother as a therapist. She had been a terrible listener, only able to talk about herself. Her response to any story was,
That reminds me of when I…
I marveled at the fact that she had patients, and had occasionally wondered about them. While my mother was ill, the phone rang one day, and it was a young woman who identified herself as a patient. “You must be Dani,” the young woman said. I was speechless. How did her patient know my name? “Your mother talked about you all the time.”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out.” Michael put some new batteries into the odd-looking recording device that had been in the box, and plugged in a random tape.

First there was a hissing sound. I sat hunched over at our kitchen table, half hoping the tapes would continue this way: a vast, impassable emptiness. But then, as if from a great distance, the sound of my mother’s voice became audible through the hiss.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Penny. It was a terrible weekend. Just terrible.”

My mother wasn’t talking to a patient.
Penny
. A name dredged up from the depths of the past. I felt like I was going to be sick.

“Do you know who she’s talking to?” Michael fiddled with the volume.

“Paul doesn’t have any life in him,” my mother went on. “He’s nothing but a wet noodle. And Dani—she’s eighteen years old, you’d think she’d—”

I reached over and pushed the off button.
Penny
.

In 1978, the film
An Unmarried Woman
was released, the story of a wealthy Upper East Side woman struggling to find herself in the wake of divorce. The tagline of the film read:
She laughs, she cries, she feels angry, she feels lonely, she feels guilty, she makes breakfast, she makes love, she makes do, she is strong, she is weak, she is brave, she is scared, she is…an unmarried woman
. In the film, the central character, played by Jill Clayburgh, goes into therapy. The fictional therapist in the film was played by a real therapist named Dr. Penelope Russianoff, who was already something of a celebrity, having written best-selling books such as
Why Do I Think I’m Nothing Without a Man?
and
When Will I Be Happy?

My mother saw the film and pictured herself as the sophisticated, urbane character portrayed by Jill Clayburgh. She then sought out Penelope Russianoff based on her performance in the movie. An image came to mind: a tall, handsome woman with long gray hair, wearing a flowing caftan, an arm stacked with bangles. A sunny office furnished only with pillows on the floor.

“These are my mother’s therapy sessions.” I turned to Michael.

“Oh, my God.”

“Exactly.”

We both stared at the cassette recorder as if it might be a nuclear device. What was on those tapes? In the privacy of a therapist’s office, had my mother found the courage to express something that she hadn’t been able to share with my father or me? Maybe the key to my mother’s psyche was on these tapes. Fear mingled with hope—and guilt. This seemed the ultimate violation of privacy. On the other hand, my mother knew the tapes existed. She knew she was dying. She’d had ample time to destroy them if she had wanted to.

“What do you want to do?” Michael asked.

My finger, as if of its own volition, hit the play button again.

“Dani couldn’t find her driver’s license,” my mother was saying. “She’s so immature. I had to drive her all the way to Trenton to get a new one.”

It was very nearly unbearable, listening to my mother’s voice. The way she said my name, she practically spit it out.

“I was
eighteen
,” I said out loud. As if maybe my mother could hear me.

“Irene”—now here was Penny Russianoff—“Irene, you’re a stunningly beautiful woman. You don’t have to put up with this shit. You look incredible for your age. If you don’t mind my asking, have you ever had a face-lift?”

Whaaat?
I had met Penny once. She seemed a little New Agey to me, but not like a complete and total quack. Why was she talking about face-lifts?

I switched off the recorder again.

“It’s too awful.” I felt numb, floaty. “She really hated me. I
mean, I knew it. I knew all this. But still—hearing it like this—and her therapist is an idiot—”

“You don’t have to listen to any more of it,” Michael said.

“No. I want to.”

I picked another tape and stuck it into the machine. More hissing. Then, a rambling description of a dinner party: the outfit she had worn, the way her friend’s living room was furnished, the meal itself. What was the point? Her voice was reedy with unhappiness, so tightly strung it seemed ready to snap, and yet the content of what she was saying was utterly inane. Why had my mother gone into therapy? Obviously she recognized her own misery, but she didn’t want to get to the root of it.

“If I were Penny, I would have fallen asleep,” Michael said.

I switched off the tape player. Over the next months, whenever I felt strong enough, I would summon up my nerve and plug in another one. My mother’s stories sounded rehearsed, as if she never lost sight of the tape recorder. Always, she saw herself as a rare and exotic bird—Jill Clayburgh trapped in the suburbs. Penny’s occasional responses to her seemed like a parody of a 1970s feminist therapist: “Irene, this guy”—that would be my father—“this guy sounds really depressed. What’s a vibrant woman like you doing with a depressed guy?”

I would listen for maybe five or ten minutes at a time. I still haven’t heard all of the tapes, and doubt I ever will. At a certain point, I realized that there was nothing new to learn—and that very nothingness was something more painful than the deepest, darkest revelation might have been. My mother would remain, as she had always been, a great source of sadness and confusion. How could she have been my mother? How could I have been her
daughter? When we first found the tapes, I called a friend to tell her about our discovery. “I’m worried for you,” she said. “I think you’re going to find out that your mother had some sort of secret life.” I didn’t know how to explain to her how much I wished my mother had a secret life.

I was having tea with one of my smartest friends when she asked me if I had arrived at an answer. Did I believe in God? I knew this friend was an atheist. She had been dubious about my search from the beginning. “Why,” she wanted to know, “would you take on such a thing? I mean, is this something you’ve thought a lot about? You’re not a religious scholar.”

There’s nothing trickier than trying to talk about personal belief. Add on top of that trying to talk about personal belief with a very smart atheist. But I had some things to say. And wasn’t that the whole point, really? To opt back in? To form—if not an opinion—a set of feelings and instincts by which to live?

“I would say yes.” I took a leap. “I believe in God more than I did a couple of years ago. But not the God of my childhood. Not a God who keeps score, and decides whether or not to inscribe me—or anybody else—in the book of life.”

“So what exactly
do
you believe, then?” She sipped her tea and waited for a better answer. I wanted to tell her that
exactly
and
believe
don’t belong in the same sentence.

“I believe that there is something connecting us,” I said.
“Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we’re gone. I’ve begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness.”

I looked at my friend for any sign of ridicule, but saw none. She was nodding.

“An animating presence,” she said.

That was as good a word as any:
presence
. As in the opposite of absence. By training my thoughts and daily actions in the direction of an open-minded inquiry, what had emerged was a powerful sense of presence. It couldn’t be touched, or apprehended, but nonetheless, when I released the hold of my mind and all its swirling stories, this was what I felt. Something—rather than nothing. While sitting in meditation or practicing yoga, the paradox was increasingly clear to me: emptiness led to fullness, nonthought to greater understanding.

“Where does Judaism fit into all this?” she asked.

“It doesn’t fit in,” I answered. “It just is. I’m Jewish. Michael’s Jewish. Jacob’s Jewish.” I thought of Sylvia Boorstein’s elegant phrase:
complicated with it
. We were complicated by our history, by the religion of our ancestors. There was beauty and wisdom and even solace in that. I no longer felt that I had to embrace it all—nor did I feel that I had to run away. I could take the bits and pieces that made sense to me, and incorporate them into the larger patchwork of our lives.

I reached into my handbag for the well-worn black notebook I carried with me everywhere, writing in it only passages I had come across that had great meaning to me. “This is the way I’ve come to think of it,” I said, turning the pages. The wisdom of a Catholic monk: “Here—from Thomas Merton. ‘Your brightness
is my darkness. I know nothing of you and, by myself, cannot even imagine how to go about knowing you. If I imagine you, I am mistaken. If I understand you, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain I know you, I am crazy. The darkness is enough.’”

It was hard to trust that everything really was okay. I knew what we had been told. The infantile spasms were infantile in nature. The medication had suppressed them. There was no reason to believe that they’d resume, or morph into something else. These seizures weren’t a lifelong condition, but rather a brief and fiery storm that we had been able to douse before it burned us all to the ground. But still—I quietly worried. I
zorged
—a Yiddish word I later learned from Sylvia—which means “to create unnecessary anguish.” We had been through the necessary anguish. Why was I still doing this to myself?

Jacob was three, then four, then five. He caught up to his peers. Almost no one in our new Connecticut life knew about his history. I was fierce, and fiercely private, about Jacob. He was thriving. Funny, smart, quirky, gorgeous. I choked back the tears I felt coming on when I watched him with a group of kids, kicking around a soccer ball, or singing in a chorus. But still—I couldn’t quite let go. Letting go, it seemed, was an invitation for disaster to strike. Once, in
shavasana
at the end of a yoga class, I was in a state of deep relaxation when a woman who had been in a headstand behind me fell over backward, her feet landing hard on my chest.
As I jolted upward, the feeling I remember wasn’t anger, or fear. It was akin to grief.
See? This is what happens when I trust that all is well
.

Vigilance was essential. Vigilance was the only answer in the face of all that could possibly go wrong. Wasn’t it? I tried to make sure that my anxiety didn’t rub off on Jacob, but I’m sure it did. To this day, he watches me carefully, assessing my mood.
What?
he’ll ask.
What’s wrong?

One day, when he was in kindergarten, I came to school to pick him up and saw that he was doing something funny with his head. A fast kind of nodding that looked involuntary. I felt it then—the other shoe dropping. Were his eyes flickering? Was I imagining the whole thing? When we got home, I called his pediatrician in New York. She suggested I take Jacob for a second opinion, and gave me a name that was familiar to me from a few years earlier, when I carried a list of national experts around with me like a Bible.

A few weeks later, Michael and I drove into New York with Jacob, and went to the hospital where the doctor worked. The whole way in, I wondered if this was overkill. I hadn’t seen the fast nodding again. There was no sign of anything wrong. Why subject Jacob to the poking and prodding of a stranger? My hypervigilance had once been very useful—it had saved Jacob’s life when I first noticed the tiny seizures and rushed him to the neurologist. But when was enough enough?

In his office, the doctor checked Jacob’s reflexes, tossed him a ball, asked him to write his name. He made notes about large and small motor functions. He looked into Jacob’s eyes with a pinpoint flashlight. All the while, he chatted with Jacob about kindergarten, asked what sports he liked to play.

When he was finished with the exam, he set down his clipboard. “Do you know how lucky you are?” he asked me.

Yes. I knew how lucky we were.

But then the doctor hesitated. “This is probably unnecessary, but as long as you’re here, why don’t we do an EEG on Jacob. Just to be sure.”

It had been nearly four years since Jacob last had an EEG. As a baby, he’d had more than I could count. Either Michael or I would cradle him as a technician applied cold, sticky goo all over his head, and then stuck a series of electrodes on top. The stuff had a sharp, chemical smell. He would cry and cry as he drank down a bottle of milk. He had to fall asleep before the test could commence. Now that he was a five-year-old, we had some explaining to do. A bottle of milk wasn’t going to do the trick. We promised ice cream afterward, and a trip to a toy store. With every ounce of limited acting skill I possessed, I told him it was no big deal. We needed a picture of his brain. He needed to lie still for a little while. That’s all.

As the goo was spread across his head, I wondered if he remembered the smell. Whether buried inside of him, there was a memory of the narrow room, the cold, sticky stuff, his parents holding him. The fear I tried not to let him see in my eyes. Now, in his Red Sox shirt and blue jeans, he lay there quietly as I held his hand. I hadn’t bargained on this. It hadn’t occurred to me that the doctor might order an EEG. This wasn’t simply a second opinion. Now we were in the realm of quantifiable results. Peaks and valleys on an EEG strip. Suddenly, I was terrified.

Afterward, we sat in the waiting area while the results were read. Ten minutes went by, then twenty. Breathing was difficult.
Michael and I flipped aimlessly through old copies of
Newsweek
, watched Jacob play with the requisite train set that always seemed to be in these offices. His hair was matted down, making him look older.

The doctor finally emerged from his office and strode over to us, smiling.

“A normal result,” he said. I could see on his face how rarely he got to say this to anxious parents. “A perfectly normal result.”