But for all intents and purposes, she’d moved in on the second date. I realized this when I came home six weeks after what my siblings and I were referring to as Mom’s Outage, and saw the writing on the wall.
Well, the poster on the wall. “Inspiration,” it read, above a picture of a cresting wave, “is believing we can all pull together.”
“Mom?” I called, dropping my bags on the floor. Nifkin, meanwhile, was whining and cringing by my legs in a most un-Nifkin-like manner.
“In here, honey,” yelled my mother.
Honey? I wondered, and walked into the family room with Nifkin cowering behind me. This time, the new poster was of frolicking dolphins. “Teamwork,” it said. And beneath the dolphin poster were my mother and a woman who could only be Tanya, in matching purple sweatsuits.
“Hey!” said Tanya.
“Hey,” my mother repeated.
A large tangerine-colored cat leapt off of the windowsill, stalked insolently up to Nifkin, and stretched out a paw, claws extended. Nifkin gave a shrill yip and fled.
“Gertrude! Bad cat!” called Tanya. The cat ignored her and curled up in a patch of sunlight in the center of the room.
“Nifkin!” I called. From upstairs I heard a faint whine of protest— Nifkin-speak for no way, no day.
“Do we have employees that we’re trying to motivate?” I asked, pointing at the teamwork dolphins.
“Huh?” said Tanya.
“What?” said my mother.
“The posters,” I said. “We’ve got the exact same ones in the printing plant at work. Right next to the “27 Days Injury Free” sign. They’re, like, motivational artwork.”
Tanya shrugged. I’d been expecting a standard-issue gym teacher, with sinewy calves and ropy biceps and a no-nonsense haircut. Evidently I’d been expecting wrong. Tanya was a tiny boiled pea of a woman, barely five feet tall, with an aureole of frizzy reddish hair and skin tanned the color and consistency of old leather. No chest or hips to speak of. She looked like a little kid, right down to the scabby knees and the Band-Aid wrapped around one finger. “I just like dolphins,” she said shyly.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I see.”
And those were just the most obvious of the changes. There was a collection of dolphin figurines above the fireplace where the family pictures had been. Plastic magazine racks were bolted to the walls, giving our family room the look of a doctor’s office— the better to display Tanya’s copies of Rehabilitation magazine. And when I went to drop my bags in my room, the door wouldn’t open.
“Mom!” I called, “there’s something wrong up here!”
I heard a whispered consultation going on in the kitchen: my mother’s voice calm and soothing, Tanya’s bass grumble rising toward hysteria. Every once in a while I could make out words. “Therapist” and “privacy” seemed to comprise a dominant theme. Finally my mother walked up the stairs, looking troubled.
“Um, actually, I was going to talk to you about this.”
“About what? The door being stuck?”
“Well, the door’s locked, actually.”
I just stared.
“Tanya’s kind of been… keeping some of her things in there.”
“Tanya,” I pointed out, “has an apartment. Can’t she keep her things there?”
My mother shrugged. “Well, it’s a very small apartment. An effi-ciency, really. And it just kind of made sense… maybe you can sleep in Josh’s room tonight.”
At this point I was getting impatient. “Ma, it’s my room. I’d like to sleep in my room. What’s the big deal?”
“Well, Cannie, you don’t… you don’t live here anymore.”
“Of course I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to sleep there when I come home.”
My mother sighed. “We made some changes,” she murmured.
“Yeah, I noticed. So what’s the big deal?”
“We, um… well. We kind of got rid of your bed.”
I was speechless. “You got rid of…”
“Tanya needed the space for her loom.”
“There’s a loom in there?”
Indeed there was. Tanya stomped up the stairs, unbolted the door, and stomped back downstairs, looking sullen. I entered my room and saw the loom, a computer, a battered futon, a few ugly pressboard bookshelves covered with plastic walnut veneer, containing volumes with titles like Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and Courage to Heal, and It’s Not What You’re Eating, It’s What’s Eating You. There was a rainbow-triangle suncatcher hanging in the window and, worst of all, an ashtray on the desk.
“She smokes?”
My mother bit her lip. “She’s trying to quit.”
I inhaled. Sure enough, Marlboro Lights and incense. Yuck. Why did she have to plant her self-help guides and her cigarette smells in my room? And where was my stuff?
I turned toward my mother. “You know, you really could have told me about this. I could have come down and taken my things with me.”
“Oh, we didn’t get rid of anything, Cannie. It’s all in boxes in the basement.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”
“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to balance things here”
“No, no,” I said. “ ‘Balance’ involves taking different things into account. This,” I said, sweeping my hand to indicate the loom, the ashtray, the stuffed dolphin perched upon the futon, “is taking what one person wants into account, and completely screwing the other person. This is completely selfish. This is absolutely ridiculous. This is…”
“Cannie,” said Tanya. She’d somehow come up the stairs without my hearing.
“Excuse us, please,” I said, and slammed the door in her face. I took a perverse pleasure in listening to her work at the door handle after I’d locked it with her lock.
My mother started to sit down where my bed used to be, caught herself mid-sit and settled for Tanya’s desk chair. “Cannie, look. I know this is a shock”
“Have you gone completely crazy? This is ridiculous! All it would have taken was one lousy phone call. I could have come, gotten my stuff…”
My mother looked miserable. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
I wound up not staying the night. That visit occasioned my first— and, so far, my last— stint at therapy. The Examiner’s health plan paid for ten visits with Dr. Blum, the smallish, Little Orphan Annie–looking woman who scribbled frantically, while I told her the whole crazy-father-bad-divorce-lesbian-mother tale. I worried about Dr. Blum. For one thing, she always looked a little scared of me. And she always seemed a few twists behind the current plot.
“Now, back up,” she’d say, when I’d segue abruptly from Tanya’s latest atrocity to my sister, Lucy’s, inability to keep a job. “Your sister was, um, dancing topless for a living, and your parents didn’t notice?’
“This was ’86,” I’d say. “My father was gone. And my mother somehow managed to miss the fact that I was sleeping with my substitute history teacher and I’d gained fifty pounds during my freshman year of college, so yeah, she pretty much believed that Lucy was babysitting until four every morning.”
Dr. Blum would squint down at her notes. “Okay, and the history teacher was… James?”
“No, no. James was the guy on the crew team. Jason was the E-Z-Lube poet. And Bill was the guy in college, and Bruce is the guy right now.”
“Bruce!” she’d say triumphantly, having located his name in her notes.
“But I’m really worried that I’m, you know, leading him on or something.” I sighed. “I’m not sure I really love him.”
“Let’s go back to your sister for a minute,” she’d say, flipping faster and faster through her legal pad, while I sat there and tried not to yawn.
In addition to her inability to keep up, Dr. Blum was rendered less than trustworthy by her clothes. She dressed as if she didn’t know there was such a thing as the petite section. Her sleeves routinely brushed her fingertips; her skirts sagged around her ankles. I opened up as best I could, answered her questions when she asked them, but I never really trusted her. How could I trust a woman who had even less fashion sense than I did?
At the end of our ten sessions, she didn’t quite pronounce me cured, but she did leave me with two pieces of advice.
“First,” she said, “you can’t change anything anybody else in this world does. Not your father, not your mother, not Tanya, not Lisa…”
“… Lucy,” I corrected.
“Right. Well, you can’t control what they do, but you can control how you respond to it… whether you allow it to drive you crazy, or occupy all of your thoughts, or whether you note what they’re doing, consider it, and make a conscious decision as to how much you’ll let it affect you.”
“Okay. And what’s thing two?”
“Hang on to Bruce,” she said seriously. “Even if you don’t think he’s Mr. Right. He’s there for you, and he sounds like a good support, and I think you’re going to need that in the coming months.”
We shook hands. She wished me good luck. I thanked her for her help and told her that Ma Jolie in Manayunk was having a big sale, and that they made things in her size. And that was the end of my big therapy experience.
I wish that I could say that, in the years since Tanya and her loom and her pain and her posters moved in, that things have gotten easier. The fact is, they haven’t. Tanya has the people skills of plant life. It’s like a special kind of tone-deafness, only instead of not hearing the music, she’s deaf to nuances, to subtleties, to euphemisms, small talk, and white lies. Ask her how she’s doing, and you’ll get a full and lengthy explication of her latest work/health crisis, complete with an invitation to look at her latest surgical scar. Tell her that you liked whatever she cooked (and Lord knows you’ll be lying), and she’ll regale you with endless recipes, each with a story behind it (“My mother cooked this for me, I remember, the night after she came home from the hospital”).
At the same time, she’s also incredibly thin-skinned, prone to public crying fits, and temper tantrums that conclude with her either locking herself in my ex-bedroom, if we’re home, or stomping away from wherever we are, if we’re out. And she dotes on my mother in the most annoying way you could imagine, following her around like a lovestruck puppy, always reaching to hold her hand, touch her hair, rub her feet, tuck a blanket around her.
“Sick,” pronounced Josh.
“Immature,” said Lucy.
“I don’t get it,” is what I said. “Having somebody treat you that way for, like, a week would be nice… but where’s the challenge? Where’s the excitement? And what do they talk about?”
“Nothing,” said Lucy. The three of us had come home for Chanukah, and we were sitting around the family room after the guests had gone home and my mother and Tanya had gone to bed, all of us holding the gifts Tanya had woven for us. I had a rainbow-colored scarf (“You can wear it to the Pride Parade,” Tanya offered). Josh had mittens, also in the gay-pride rainbow, and Lucy had an odd-looking bundle of yarn that Tanya had explained was a muff. “It’s to keep your hands warm,” she’d rumbled, but Lucy and I had already dissolved into gales of laughter, and Josh was wondering in a whisper whether such a thing could be dropped to the bottom of the pool for a little summertime muff diving.
Nifkin, who’d been given a little rainbow sweater, was in my lap, sleeping with one eye open, ready to bolt for higher ground should the evil cats Gertrude and Alice appear. Josh was on the couch, picking out what sounded like the theme song from Beverly Hills, 90210 on his guitar.
“In fact,” said Lucy, “they don’t talk at all.”
“Well, what would they talk about?” I asked. “I mean, Mom’s educated… she’s traveled…”
“Tanya puts her hand over Mom’s mouth when Jeopardy comes on,” said Josh morosely, and switched to “Sex and Candy” on the guitar.
“Ew,” I said.
“Yup,” confirmed Lucy. “She says it’s obnoxious how Mom shouts out the answers.”
“It’s probably just that she doesn’t know any of them herself,” said Josh.
“You know,” said Lucy, “the lesbian thing is okay. It would’ve been all right…”
“… if it had been a different kind of woman,” I finished, and sat there, picturing a more appropriate same-sex love: say, a chic film professor from UPenn, with tenure and a pixie haircut and interesting amber jewelry, who’d introduce us to independent film directors and take my mother to Cannes. Instead, my mother had fallen for Tanya, who was neither well-read nor chic, whose cinematic tastes ran toward the later works of Jerry Bruckheimer, and who didn’t own a single piece of amber.
“So what is it?” I asked. “What’s the attraction? She isn’t pretty…”
“That’s for sure,” said Lucy, shuddering dramatically.
“Or smart… or funny… or interesting…”
We all sat, silent, as it dawned on us what the attraction might be.
“I’ll bet she’s got a tongue like a whale,” said Lucy. Josh made retching noises. I rolled my eyes, feeling queasy.
“Like an anteater!” cried Lucy.
“Lucy, cut it out!” I said. Nifkin woke up and started growling. “Besides, even if it is just sex, that’ll only get you so far.”
“How would you know?” said Lucy.
“Trust me,” I said. “Mom’ll get bored.”
We all sat for a minute, thinking that over.
“It’s like she doesn’t care about us anymore,” Josh blurted.
“She cares,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. Before Tanya, my mother had liked to do things with us… when we were all together. She’d visit me in Philadelphia, and Josh in New York. She’d cook when we came home, call us a few times a week, keep busy with her book clubs and lecture groups, her wide circle of friends.
“All she cares about is Tanya,” said Lucy bitterly.
And I didn’t have an argument for that. Sure, she’d still call us… but not as often. She hadn’t visited me in months. Her days (not to mention her nights) seemed full of Tanya— the bike trips they went on, the tea dances they attended, the weekend long Ritual of Healing that Tanya had taken my mother to as a special three-month-anniversary surprise, where they’d burned sage and prayed to the Moon Goddess.
“It won’t last,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “It’s just an infatuation.”
“What if it isn’t?” Lucy demanded. “What if it’s true love?”
“It’s not,” I said again. But inside, I thought that maybe it was. That this was it, and we’d all be stuck, saddled with this horrible, graceless emotional wreck of a creature for the rest of our lives. Or at least the rest of our mother’s life. And after…