Riding Fury Home (31 page)

“I've just felt terrible on this trip. I know I've been snapping at you. I feel so guilty. It's like I'm a sullen twelve-year-old again, and I just can't seem to stop myself.”

My mother said, “I can take it. Why don't you express your anger now? I mean, the real anger.” She looked me in the eye, solemn-faced.

I clamped down. “I can't. I feel guilty.”

“If you change ‘I feel guilty' to ‘I resent,' you will get to your anger,” Mom said.

My stomach contracted. I wanted to, but I was terrified. The guilt rose, riding the old beliefs:
It's not her fault. What right do I have to get angry at someone who's sick? She can't handle it. This could kill her.

“You really can take it?” I asked in a half whisper.

She nodded.

I gathered my breath and tried to say, “I resented . . . ” and sputtered to a stop.

My mother just sat there, looking at me.

This time, I managed, “I resented being ashamed to bring friends home.” I stopped, my breath so shallow that I felt a bit faint.

“Yes, what else?”

I glanced over at my mother, then looked away.
Take a breath. Begin again.
“I resented putting you to bed at night, picking you up off the floor, putting out cigarette fires, helping you to the bathroom.” Once I started, it kept coming. “I resented being scared you would die. I resented dealing with your suicide attempts. I resented being left alone.”

Gloria listened, nodding. Then she said, “You're just speaking. You don't sound angry.”

My stomach was a fist, held and clenched. I could not say it louder, angrier. The old terror gripped me, its singsong voice chanting—
If you get angry, your mother will die. You'll kill her. She'll die she'll die.
I was jolted to realize that, of course, my mother knew all these things; she'd been there, after all. It was just that no one had ever once asked me how I felt.

I could do no more, but I felt an opening, a loosening of the hard knot inside me.

My mother reached for my hand.

“It was terrible for you,” she said. “I'm so sorry. So, so sorry.”

 

 

AFTER HAIFA, WE TOOK a
sherut,
an eight-person van, to Jerusalem, where we'd been invited to stay with Dinah and Gretta. The couple were my age, in their late twenties; Dinah was American, Gretta Dutch. They lived in a rambling old house made of golden Jerusalem stone with Gretta's two young boys, a rabbit, and a puppy. They welcomed us warmly into their messy, chaotic household.

My mother and I visited the Old City of Jerusalem, with its car-less cobblestone streets. In the souk, Yemenite and Bedouin dresses—black with red embroidery—hung from high hooks along the narrow alley walls. Spice stores filled the air with sweet, tangy scents. Light shafts poured through openings in the overhead arches, making the stone walls glow golden, lighting the street goods in their riot of colors: crimson, orange, saffron, black. It amazed me, to be in a place so alive and so ancient.

Before we were admitted to the Western Wall, we passed a guard station, where our bags were searched. Then we entered a huge open square with Israeli flags flapping, and on one side, there it was: the Wailing Wall. We approached the women's section, a much smaller section than the men's. I found a spot and pressed my face and arms against the warm limestone. My mother was right next to me, her hands raised with palms flat against the wall, her body leaning into it. I closed my eyes and was filled with the smell of stone, the sounds of women praying and—was it crying?—yes, crying all around us. And then I found myself crying, too. I hadn't expected this, hadn't expected to feel anything. My hands felt something in the stone, a memory, a whisper:
diaspora.
The point of exile.

Something was vibrating in me, shaking itself awake. Grief swept through me, a wordless mix of the communal, my own family's history, and what I had so recently expressed to my mother. Stories swirled in me: Grandma Katie, Dad's mom, crying for her lost family
. I was sixteen when I told my parents I was going out. I wore only my one set of clothes when I left Ukraine with your grandfather. They would never have let me leave. Oy gotenu, I never saw them again!
She was weeping for her grandparents, beaten to death during the Russian Revolution.

Grandma Katie and I cried together over the mass grave of Babi Yar outside of Kiev, where, we guessed, the Nazis had slaughtered the rest of her family. I thought of Grandma Miriam, churning with unhappiness at being stuck marrying a greenhorn in America, her hatred leaving her hard and bitter, depriving my mother of love. Isidor, my mother's dad, voicing his shame:
I was an ignorant Jew from the shtetl, an uneducated peasant—we knew nothing, there is nothing to tell you.
The stones accepted my grief, warm in their enduring.

Around me, women mumbled prayers and children giggled. I opened my eyes and looked around. Women, mostly old, were sitting on plastic chairs with prayer books, rocking their bodies as their lips moved, whispering the text. Others of various ages were writing their longings, wishes, and prayers on slips of paper to stick in the wall's cracks. I thought of our oppression as women in this segregated part of the wall—the unequally small portion allotted to us women. A fantasy came to me: a group of us, heads covered with shawls, bodies pressed against the wall, wailing and rocking until the power of our keening pushed down the divider.

 

 

MY IRRITATION WITH MY mother had, for the most part, left me. There was enjoyment now, at sharing an adventure together. We spent our days in Jerusalem wandering the Old City, and our evenings hanging out with the women who congregated at Gretta and Dinah's over long informal dinners, talking about the Israeli women's movement, clitorectomies of Arab women, and the Egyptian women the feminists were beginning to make connections with. Gloria and I told our stories of coming out to each other, to laughter and whoops from our listeners. I loved her like this: expressive, passionate. The Israelis shared how hard it still was to be out as gay in
such a small country, where everyone knows each other's business. Gossip, they told us, is the lifeblood of Israel.

One afternoon, my mother and I were alone in the Jerusalem house. Our trip was nearing its end, and we were both feeling melancholy. We were sitting on the couch in the living room, talking. Gloria suggested we take turns doing peer counseling to help us get through our doldrums.

My mother went first. “Would you hold me?” she asked. “I feel like I need to be babied.” I scooted closer and reached my arms around her, but as soon as I did, my stomach clenched with nausea. Rage nibbled at my throat. “I just can't do it!” I said, and dropped my arms. I couldn't keep from blurting out, “I mothered you too many years when I shouldn't have had to!” I was sweating, and my face felt hot.

“Oh!” My mother pulled away from me, averting her eyes, her mouth pursed. I thought she was about to cry. Silence ticked between us.

When she looked up, there was sadness and something else in her eyes: a look of recognition. “I'm glad you can say it. Of course. I understand,” she said.

I gazed at her, amazed. She did, she understood.

My mother moved close, took me in her arms, and began recounting her memories of mothering me: sitting in a rocking chair, singing me lullabies, building sand castles together at low tide in Atlantic City.

A painful pressure gathered in my throat. I remembered the sand castles clearly. The other images—of being rocked and sung to—floated as sensations in my body.

My mother began rocking me. The swaying loosed a sob in me that ripped itself upward from my chest. One sob followed another. We rocked and I wept. I felt the firm wrap of my mother's arms
around my back, and smelled the salt of my own tears on her neck where my head rested.

“But then,” Gloria said, “your mother got sick. I felt very guilty that I couldn't take care of you. I wish I could make it up. I couldn't help it. I was very sick.”

“I know, I know.” I grew quiet. On this, we agreed: Her grief and madness were not her fault. Her heart had been bludgeoned by a sexist society and homophobic psychiatry. This analysis relieved us; there was truth in it, although simplified. I could feel my mother's sorrow over our mutual loss. I felt suspended, there in my mother's arms, something akin to forgiveness hovering between us.

IN THE YEAR SINCE OUR TRIP to Israel, my mother decided to move to the West Coast, to my town, finally resolving the dilemma that had been tugging on us for ten years: Were we going to spend our lives three thousand miles apart? She was coming now for her August vacation right into the whirlwind of my life.

I was bursting with excitement to see Gloria, but a bit dizzy from the previous week's adventures. I'd slept with Emily for the first time, but it hadn't gone that well. I'd actually fallen asleep in the middle of having sex with her. I blamed it on the fact that I was exhausted from my predawn shift working as an engineer at a San Francisco television station, but it seemed a bad omen.

The next day, I'd gone on a camping trip with my friend Dee. I was friends with her lover Julie, but when Dee began to stroke my back as we sat staring at the full moon over the Russian River, I let myself slip into the reassuring thought that they were on the verge of breaking up. Back in the tent, we made love. This was new—for me to be the one with multiple lovers.

Now, I was flying with the thrill of being desired by two women. It gave me a sense of power. I'd slept with Emily on Thursday, and with Dee on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Gloria arrived on Monday. I ran to hug her as she came out of the jetway with her tabby, Sean, in a carrying case. We drove to my apartment, piled her things in the living room, and watched Sean sniff around his new environment. “Let's eat; you must be starved,” I said. “I'll make you something you've
never
had.” I got out the bag of tortillas.

In between flipping the tortillas in the frying pan, I gesticulated with the spatula, telling her about my romantic adventures. Gloria was sitting at my yellow Formica kitchen table. Her head was cocked to the side, and her shoulders bounced to the rhythm of her chuckling. It was a look that made me feel adored, that she took delight in my screwy life. I grinned proudly as I set our plates laden with tortillas, refried beans, avocado, tomato, and salsa onto the table. Gloria dug in, always game for something new.

 

 

BY FALL, I WAS DOWN to one lover. The high of being desired had turned into the strain of juggling. I'd made a mess of it, keeping each lover a secret from the other for too long, until circumstances pushed me into telling. One night, Emily and I went to a concert at La Peña, a leftist Latin American community center. We were sitting in the audience before the house had quieted, when I heard a hiss behind me. It grew louder.
What the hell?
I turned around to face—
oh God, Julie
—Dee's longtime girlfriend, whom Dee was in the midst of breaking up with in part because of me. Between clenched teeth, Julie spat, “How could
you
—a Jewish woman—
do
such a thing to me, another Jew? Shame, shame on you!” I blanched and turned back around, stiff with guilt. I knew I had done her wrong when I slept
with Dee; she'd been my friend, too, after all, although I didn't agree with the Jewish part. What did clan loyalties have to do with this? Emily leaned over and whispered, “What the hell was that about?”

“I'll tell you later,” I whispered back.

Neither girlfriend was happy, and I knew I had to choose. For a few weeks, I waffled. Weighing things rationally, it seemed I had more commonality with Emily, a middle-class, politically active Jewish woman, but I kept feeling sleepy around her. Bored, really. And my mother's comments about Emily—“That woman talks
a lot
. I mean, she doesn't
listen
”—had stuck with me and given me pause. And it wasn't simply Dee's difference as a working-class, butch, Catholic girl that intrigued me. There was something exciting in how she admired me, touched me, wanted me, and something intangible beyond that. That intangibility should have been a red flag, but I went with its pull, my Taurean bull head down, charging after my matador.

 

 

MY MOTHER DIDN'T JUST move to my city, she moved onto my block, three houses away. It was my doing. She had asked me to find her an apartment to rent, so when I noticed that a place was open on my block, I figured it would be a good starter apartment. Then I started to worry about my mother's need of me, how she wouldn't have any local friends and might cling. I started to panic:
My God, what have I done?

What I didn't consciously acknowledge was my need of my mother. But I soon found myself leaning into her. After a decade apart, our new routine became daily visits, popping back and forth between apartments. With her on the block, I stopped spending as much time with friends, and withdrew into the ease of hanging out with my mother.

She cooked me meals, which I ate with relish. Since the strict vegetarian days of my early twenties, I'd started eating chicken and fish again. Gloria reintroduced me to a forbidden delight: thick, juicy, bloody steak. I didn't tell my friends that she grilled me huge T-bones, served with a baked potato slathered with butter, chives, and sour cream. Our secret, carnivorous gluttony. This was food from my childhood. I even reverted to ketchup, pounding an upended Heinz bottle with the heel of my hand, listening for the
glug
of the red blob dropping onto my plate, mixing with the steak blood.

Gloria was more resilient than I'd imagined. She had given up a full-time therapy practice in Manhattan, but not long after her arrival, she began volunteering as a therapist at San Francisco's gay counseling center, Operation Concern. The staff gave her referrals, and within a year she established a practice. She made friends close to her age by joining an older lesbian organization. She found like-minded women, spiritual seekers who got together to listen to Ram Dass tapes and meditate. Soon, I was hanging out with her friends as well as my own.