Lies My Mother Never Told Me (29 page)

Thrilled, I took the book home. I took it out of my bag and said to Eyrna, “This was Mommy's favorite book when she was little. Do you want me to read it to you?”

She sat on my lap on the living room couch and I began to read. By the time the baby bird reached the cow, Eyrna burst into tears. “Stop! Mommy, stop.”

“What's the matter?” I was crestfallen.

“It's too scary,” she said.

“But he finds his mother at the end,” I assured her.

“It's too scary,” she repeated, and slowly closed the book, her dimpled hand flat on the cover, a definitive statement.

I'm not one of these Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm's Fairy Tales types, who thinks it's important to let children know at a very tender age that the good guys suffer horrendous tortures and don't always win. They'll learn it soon enough. In second grade, at Christmastime in school in Paris, the teacher played us a record
of Hans Christian Andersen's
The Little Match Girl
. The little barefoot girl tries to sell matches in the street during a blizzard and freezes to death in someone's doorway, dreaming of a warm fire and Christmas dinner. I felt sick to my stomach for a week and did not enjoy Christmas that year. I never forgave that self-righteous bitch of a teacher for pulling such a lousy trick on us.

It certainly had not been my intention to upset Eyrna with
Are You My Mother?
I thought about it for the next couple of days, wondering why it had terrified her so, and why I'd liked it so much as a little girl. I realized that Eyrna had never for a second been away from me or wondered if I was coming back; I, as a little girl, anxiously wondered all the time where my mother was and if she'd return to me. The book was a great comfort to me, but for Eyrna, it was a fear she'd never known.

 

Since Kevin and I didn't have any other children and didn't know anyone with toddlers, other than Jamie and Beth, who lived in Washington, D.C., we read many books on parenting and did our best to muddle through. One Sunday night, driving back from dinner at our cousin Kate's house in Whitestone, Queens, Eyrna, around two and a half, was in her car seat in the back, next to a friend of Kate's who was riding with us back to the city. As we drove past La Guardia Airport on Grand Central Parkway, Eyrna turned to the man sitting beside her and said, “That La Guardia Airport. It's for near places. Faraway places, you go to JFK.”

“Really?” the man said.

“Yes. JFK is for Cafornia and Paris. They far away.” After a silence, she asked him, “You know the planets? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto. Pluto is
far away
. But maybe Pluto
not
a planet, they not sure yet…”

Discreetly, he leaned forward between the front seats and murmured, “Have you had your kid's IQ tested? I mean, that's not normal. Babies aren't supposed to know things like that.”

We didn't know what normal was because neither of us had ever experienced, in our families, anything that even came close to normal.

A few weeks later I took Eyrna to the Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center at the Museum of Natural History. I hadn't been there in years and had heard that the new computerized laser representation of the universe was mind-blowing. I explained to Eyrna that we were going to see a show that would let us see where we were, our Planet Earth, in the universe.

We sat down in our comfortable seats and stared up at the dimly lit, vaulted dome above us. The audience sat in a kind of awed silence, as if in a church. Eyrna began an enthusiastic countdown as the lights dimmed, and I joined her. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…Blastoff!” we shouted.

The first image was of a bird's-eye view of the building where we were, as if we were floating in the sky looking down on Eighty-first Street and Central Park West. Then, the point of view pulled back so we were looking down from space at the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then, pulling back yet farther, we saw the East Coast of the United States. Then, the entire continent; then the rounded blue globe of the world; and then, Earth shrank to a tiny marble circling the sun, along with all the other planets of our solar system. Then suddenly the solar system shrank into the distance, as if we were traveling rapidly through space, going farther and farther away until our sun and its planets were only a white speck of dust among thousands and thousands of solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy. Then, even the Milky Way galaxy shrank until it was just a swirling, tiny speck among millions of other galaxies. Everyone should be forced to see this, I thought. God is so much bigger than I thought…

Eyrna squeezed my hand. “Mommy, it's too far away. Make them take us home!”

 

Early the next spring, Kevin and I took Eyrna in her stroller to the Bronx Zoo to see a brand-new baby giraffe, six feet tall, born a few weeks earlier. Posters all over the zoo announced the opening of the new gorilla exhibit, so we decided to wait in line.

We stood in the warm sunshine among the strollers and babies and children and parents and grandparents and cotton candy and ice cream dripping everywhere and the chatter and laughter and howling, and I remembered that I'd been here once before, many years ago, with Dennis. After a marathon twenty-four hours of partying with his roommates in his apartment, on a Sunday morning we suddenly had the brilliant idea to drive to the Bronx Zoo. When we got to the zoo it was terribly hot, and the park was jammed with people.

We went into the monkey house—this was long before they remodeled—and were hit by an ammoniac smell that could have knocked out a rhinoceros. We tried to retreat, but the crowd pushed us forward, as if we were on a subway platform at rush hour. We had to keep shuffling toward the exit at the far end of the long, narrow building. The poor monkeys stared out listlessly from overlit, cavelike enclosures with glass fronts. Between the gibbons and the gorillas stood a ceiling-to-floor mirror with prison bars stenciled on it, with a sign at the top that read
THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL ON EARTH
. Dennis and I read the bottom of the sign before being pushed on. It said something like
THERE ARE ALMOST FIVE BILLION HUMANS ON PLANET EARTH, AND WE ARE THE ONLY ONES WITH THE CAPABILITY OF WIPING OUT THE ENTIRE PLANET.

Right behind us, a woman with one of those New York voices like a police siren read the top of the sign aloud, “
THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL ON EARTH
…gibbons?” she said in wonder. “And so small! Who would of thought?”

Dennis made his eyes cross so that his irises almost disappeared behind the bridge of his nose. “And we want to write
literary novels?” he muttered. I was overcome by such a bout of existential angst, I wished I'd never been born.

But here I was, with Kevin and Eyrna, taking in the day among the other families, and I had one of those moments of perfect joy, realizing that this was
me,
here, just standing in a crowd, one normal mom among other normal moms and dads, part of the human race. I had never been a part of anything when I was drinking, always an outsider, looking in. And none of these people knew that, really, I should have been dead and had no business being among them, having been given this extraordinary reprieve, a chance at life.

Finally we stepped into the gorilla exhibit, came around a dark corner and found ourselves in a wide, arching glass tunnel that made us feel that we were the ones enclosed and the gorillas were outside and free. Farther into the tunnel, a few feet from the glass and eye level with Eyrna, a mother gorilla was holding a tiny baby to her breast. The mother was regurgitating some kind of corn and vegetable mix and eating it again with great delicacy, a normal gorilla thing to do, but the boys just ahead of us screamed and laughed and made gross barfing sounds. Eyrna was too little to be grossed out, and as we approached the mother gorilla, Eyrna stopped and pressed both hands against the glass. I stood behind her and started talking to the gorilla, as I would to an interesting foreigner with whom I shared a good deal in common.

“Yes, you are a beautiful gorilla and your baby is a beautiful baby. I have a baby too, see my baby?” I laid my hand on Eyrna's shoulder.

The gorilla gazed at us for a while without expression, then ambled closer to the glass. She peered at Eyrna, then up at me, with bituminous eyes that seemed as wise as an old priestess's. Then she pressed both her palms against Eyrna's, and left them there.

“Oh, my God, Kevin, look!” I started to feel choked up. He
approached behind us and slowly lowered himself to his knee on the other side of Eyrna.

“She saying hi,” Eyrna said quietly, as if sensing that to move her hands or raise her voice would break the spell.

“Yes,” I said, blinded by tears, “she's saying hi to us.”

I sat down on the ground. “You're better off here,” I told the gorilla. “At least you're safe and your baby's safe. They'll feed you and take good care of you.” The noise of children shouting and laughing and babies crying all around us was deafening.

“Is she safe, Daddy?” Eyrna asked.

“Yes, she's safe,” Kevin said, his voice breaking.

“Oh, Mommy, why you crying?”

“Because she's so beautiful and so intelligent. I don't understand why she's in there and we're out here.”

And all the while the mother gorilla continued to gaze at us, her palms pressed against Eyrna's on the other side of the glass.

Here is my mother's favorite story about her troubles with the French language. Everyone who knew her well heard this at least two dozen times.

 

Upon first arriving in France, Jim bought an adorable Mercedes two-door sports convertible, which he loved very much. When I was born at the American Hospital in Neuilly, he drove Gloria and me, their brand-new miracle baby, home to the newly decorated apartment on Île Saint-Louis. He made Gloria sit in the back, which was not really even a backseat, but a storage shelf. She sat there, folded practically in two with the bundle on her lap, her neck bent at an excruciating angle because of the low convertible roof. He drove so slowly that he almost caused several car accidents because the French, being highly impatient and volatile drivers on their best days, were honking and shouting and giving them the “up yours” arm signal the whole way.

Gloria pointed out that maybe it was time to buy a different car, now that they had a family. This thought had apparently never crossed my father's mind.

A few weeks later, as they were driving in the city, they got into a heated argument—about what, Gloria could never remember. They yelled at each other, she told him to go fuck himself, and punched him in the arm. At a red light, he pulled the emergency break, got out, slammed the door, and walked away.

Gloria slid over into the driver's seat, but she had never driven the little car, and it stalled out. The light turned green, and now the French drivers behind her were really pissed off, shouting and honking up a storm. The commotion brought over a spiffy young policeman, who bent down to the open window, saluting, and politely asked my mother,
“Alors, qu'est-ce qui se passe, madame?”
Basically, What's the problem, madam?

Gloria, harried and upset, responded,
“Mon mari est en chaleur,”
my husband is in heat, instead of,
“Mon mari est en colère,”
my husband is angry.

“Et bien, vous en avez de la chance, madame. Rentrez vite chez vous!”

Well, you're very lucky, madam. You'd better get home quickly!

And he doffed his cap and walked away.

W
HEN
E
YRNA WAS ALMOST FOUR
years old and just about to start her second year of preschool, we heard that Richard Chun was offering a great deal on his peewee tae kwon do classes, so Kevin and I decided to sign her up. On a morning in early September, while Eyrna was with her babysitter, I went to the Korean martial arts school on East Eighty-sixth Street, which I'd been passing for years on my way across town on the bus. As I waited for the manager, I looked at the photos and placards along the walls. Some had yellowed with age, their corners curling, the silver award placards spotted with stains and rust. There were pictures of men and women, and even small children, flying through the air, their feet only inches from their opponents' faces, their legs so far off the ground that the photos seemed to be digitally enhanced.

I looked into a large, white room beyond a glass partition, which had a gleaming, amber-colored parquet floor, where a children's class was in progress. The students must have been between four and eight years old. I watched through the glass as they practiced, lined up in perfect rows. Clad in matching white uniforms and wearing belts that ranged from white to black, their arms and legs moved in fluid unison. Their young voices let out ferocious shouts, which seemed so full of confidence they made my heart swell with admiration.

I didn't have that kind of confidence as a child. I'd never had it as an adult.

The manager, a woman with a weather-worn face and cropped platinum blond hair, hurried in and sat behind the desk. She wore a white uniform with a black collar and a black belt.

When it came to my daughter, I felt very confident and sure of myself, and I displayed my impeccable mothering skills as I asked the woman about the dangers and risks of tae kwon do, the fees, and the purchase price of a uniform. A man in a uniform that had once been white appeared out of nowhere and was now standing a little to the side of the desk, tall and stately and commanding, his dark brown skin shining from a recent workout. The collar on his tunic and his belt were pale gray—I'd never seen this color before.

His body emitted a strong masculine odor that reminded me of the smell that used to waft out of the men's locker room in my college gym. “I regret that I never did this myself,” I said, more for conversation than because I really meant it. “Now I'm too old.” I gave a little laugh.

“What do you mean, too old?” the man chided. “You're a spring chicken compared to me. I'm sixty-two.” He barely had any gray in his short-cropped hair, his stomach flat as a door. He looked about fifty, which convinced me it was worth a try; it might knock ten years off without the plastic surgery my older—and richer—girlfriends had all done in one form or another.

“I was thirty-nine when I started,” he said. Then he added with a devilish smile, “You, you probably barely thirty.”

I know flattery when I hear it. But he made me laugh. I signed up both Eyrna and me for six months. I had to buy everything—uniforms, sparring gear (I looked quite mad in my red foam helmet, gloves, and boots), white belts, patches to be sewn on the breast of the tunics. I shelled out more than fifteen hundred dol
lars. I walked out into the hot September day sweating, saying to myself, What the hell were you thinking?

I kept hearing in my head, Klutz, klutz, klutz…

 

What a klutz
. That's my mother, laughing with her girlfriends during my first piano recital, in Paris. I was not the youngest of Madame Odile Budan-Daniel's students, but I was the worst, and that meant I had to play first, on a shiny and imposing black grand piano up on a stage, in front of a roomful of elegant Frenchpeople. After the scattered and unenthusiastic applause, I went back and sat down beside my mother, my face burning. I wouldn't look at her.

“Klutz,
” she said, and giggled. Her breath smelled of scotch, sweet and cool.

After that, I told my parents I wanted to quit piano. My father threw a fit. “You will not quit piano!” he bellowed. “I quit piano when I was a kid, and I regret it every day of my life!” So I was forced to endure five more years of lessons with Madame Odile Budan-Daniel, who came to the house every Saturday morning at ten, in her gray tweed suit and sensible walking shoes, smelling of talc. When I finally started to like her and began practicing in my free time, we moved back to the States, to Miami, where I found out I would have to learn new American names for the notes, and I simply quit. Strangely, giving up piano is not something I have regretted all of my life. I had quit everything I'd ever started: piano, ballet, gymnastics, tennis, yoga, aerobics, weight lifting. As soon as it didn't go my way, I went for the door. I hated to be made to feel a fool.

When Eyrna was three, she'd invited my mother to her first peewee ballet recital at Ballet Academy East. Gloria took the Jitney in from Long Island.

The little ones, clad in pink leotards, slippers, and tights, flitted around on the shiny floor, arms flailing. When it was Eyrna's
turn to dance alone, my mother, sitting beside me, murmured, “What a klutz.”

I felt blood rush to my neck, and my throat close up. “She's three years old, Mom,” I managed to say, my voice sounding all wrong in my ear.

“She's still a klutz,” said my mother with a laugh. I got a slight whiff of something pungent—a sweet, fermented fruit smell that was slightly nauseating—Binaca Blast? Or Listerine? They had alcohol in them. Should I warn her not to use them?

In any case, I felt like beating her to a pulp. I breathed deeply, calmed my heartbeat, as I'd learned to do in the mindful meditation I'd recently learned. I was so busy trying to calm down that I forgot to take out my camera and completely missed Eyrna's dance.
Am I responding to some old, atavistic wound?
Does this have anything to do with Eyrna at all? I had to talk myself down from the edge of calamity, because I felt capable of great emotional violence toward my mother. I told myself,
She can't hurt you anymore. You're the grown-up now.

I told myself,
Let it go.

 

Eyrna's first peewee class and my adult tae kwon do class were on a Tuesday, and by 9:00
A.M
., I was already freaking out. Kevin was home, having coffee in the living room. He'd recently left the airline business to pursue a career in Internet search engine marketing and his hours were no longer as stringent as they had been.

This was the morning of September 11, 2001, and it wasn't long before we heard about the terrorist attacks. I decided to pretend everything was fine and packed us up for tae kwon do.

The studio was empty except for Geraldine, the platinum-haired manager, who was rushing around, trying to close up. She had a tiny black-and-white TV behind the desk, and the images of the Twin Towers collapsing were playing over and over again.

“The worst terrorist attack in U.S. history and you show up for class?” she said to me, shaking her head.

“I figured if I didn't show up today, I never would,” I replied with an empty laugh.

“Come back on Thursday,” she said. “We'll be here. Unless they nuke us or something. Been here for thirty years.” She led us out and locked the door behind her.

“What's going on, Mommy? What is it?” Eyrna kept asking. That afternoon would have been the first day of her second year of preschool.

“Some very bad people crashed an airplane into a big building. But we're all right up here. Everything is all right.”

“It smells funny,” she said. Indeed, the air smelled of an electrical fire, of burning asbestos and…something else.

For five minutes I stood on the sidewalk, with Eyrna in her stroller staring up at me. I was paralyzed. I didn't know what to do. Everyone wore the same wide-eyed look of disbelief, as if we'd collectively been punched in the face by a total stranger.

From a pay phone I tried to call Kevin at home, but it rang busy, over and over. No one's cell phone seemed to be working, either. I decided to go looking for Nora, who lived in the East Sixties and would probably go to our favorite Greek coffee shop, ten blocks down First Avenue. Pete the Greek was behind the counter, and for once, he was speechless, looking down, shaking his head. Five minutes later, Nora came in, even paler than usual, so that her freckles stood out sharply against her white skin, thick red curls, and green eyes. We asked Pete for an order of dollar-size pancakes for Eyrna, and Pete made her a stack so tall it started to collapse on the way over to the table.

“Eat, little girl, eat. Is good for you.”

Outside on First Avenue a constant stream of people kept drifting by the window, their clothes, faces, hair covered in white ash. No one was talking. They looked like an army of ghosts,
their eyes wide with shock, arms and legs moving as if by rote. Pete grabbed some bottles of water and took them outside, holding them out to people as they passed.

The next morning, we were still glued to the TV set and to Peter Jennings, who'd rolled up his shirtsleeves and stayed up all night reporting the news as it came in. The phone rang—our land line—startling us.

“Hi, it's Matt.” He was a firefighter I'd met at the Caron Foundation rehabilitation program for children of alcoholics. We'd been put in the same group. When we'd acted out his family, he'd asked me to play his older brother; when we did mine, I asked him to play my father. On the way back to New York on the Martz public bus, he told me that every male in his family back four generations had been a New York City firefighter, and that his mother had died in a fire, passed out drunk in bed with a lit cigarette. Then his eyes filled with tears, and he admitted that he was still drinking; he thought it was keeping him from committing suicide.

I looked right in his eyes and said, “Matt, if you don't stop drinking, right now, you have no chance at all. For us, quitting is the
only
chance we have.”

Matt nodded slowly, then said, “So, can you help me?”

“I can,” I said.

He stopped drinking and believed I was responsible for his recovery, though I never thought so. He'd been ready to stop, that's all. And yet, I had the same feeling about Gianna, and nothing she could say or do would ever change my opinion, because I knew I would not have stopped drinking without her.

“Matt!” I shouted into the phone, into the noise of sirens and machinery grinding and whining behind him. Kevin looked up from the TV. “Is he okay?”

“Are you down there, Matt? Are you all right?” I shouted.

Matt had retired from the FDNY a few years ago, due to
a back injury sustained during a fire rescue. He'd moved to California but happened to be back in New York that week for a family wedding. As soon as he heard, he got his old firefighter's helmet out of storage and rushed down there, to Ground Zero. “I'm losing it,” he now said into the phone, his voice breaking. “Can I come up and see you guys for a few minutes?”

“How're you going to get here? The whole city's shut down.”

“There's cops all over the place just standing around with nothing to do. They
want
to help. I'll ask one of them to drive me up.”

Ten minutes later, as Eyrna and I sat on the front stoop waiting for Matt, we heard a police siren wailing and getting louder. A cop car with its lights flashing came flying down our street and screeched to a halt in front of our door. Matt, dressed in his firefighter's helmet, a thick blue jacket with the reflective yellow stripe, and boots, was covered from head to toe in that gray ash. He slowly pulled himself out of the backseat, his movements labored. We started to cheer, for Matt and for the cop who'd brought him, who now saluted us. Matt had clean streaks from tears or sweat running down his ash-covered face. He thanked the cop, closed the door, and came toward us, sitting there cheering and clapping. I felt choked up.

“Trust me,” he said, “you'll never see that again in your life—a fireman getting a friendly ride from a cop!” He sat down next to Eyrna on the steps and said, “Have no fear, little Eyrna. Fireman Matt is here, and you are safe.”

Eyrna jumped up and threw herself into his arms.

 

“Why is the teacher's belt gray?” I asked a lady Red Belt with impressive muscles on my first day of class, that following Thursday, September 13, in the locker room. I'd been feeling fearful since the attacks, but now I felt sick to my stomach with fear. She told me dismissively, as if I were an idiot, that Mr. Bill is a Sixth Dan Black Belt and that his collar and belt had faded from age. “It's a
cool thing,” she said with a slightly condescending smile. “You never wash your Black Belt.” I thought of my dad in World War II, who, along with the other wounded foot soldiers sent stateside to recover, would never wear their medals in public, only their Combat Infantryman Badges. It was a matter of pride. No one needed to know how much they'd bled for their country, or how brave they'd been, or any other goddamn thing about them.

We lined up in front of Mr. Bill, the master. Mr. Bill turned. He looked surprised to see me there, hiding in the back row. I didn't even know how I was supposed to stand.

He came and stood about two feet in front of me and said, “First of all, learn to tie your belts properly. Excuse me, ma'am, may I?” He pointed at my belt. I'd tied it like the belt on a robe, with a jaunty knot on the side. I nodded, and in a flash he untied it and repositioned it, looping one end under the first layer in front and tying a tight knot at the center, just under my navel.

“This ain't anything like your step class, ma'am, you know what I mean?”

“I don't go to step class.”

“Sir.”

“I don't go to step class, sir.”

He moved away, relaxed his shoulders, faced the class, around eight of us, ranging from Black, Brown, and Red Belts in the front row, Green, then Yellow, then me, alone in the back. He stood with flexed arms ending in fists, and looked into each pair of eyes. Finally he shouted,
“Joon-bi!”
and everyone snapped to attention. He said to me, in a distinctly Oprah-like voice, “You stick around and listen to me, pretty soon you gonna have a whole new attitude toward life.”