Saturday's Child (2 page)

Chronologically
: “The first thing I remember are crib-slat shadows striped by sunlight, like the bars of a—” (Oh, who gives a damn. Besides, it would take forever.)

By dramatic events
: “I was four when the old man first felt me up.” Or: “I opened it—an acceptance note for what would be my first published poem.” Or: “Reader, I married him.” Or: “Reader, I divorced him.” (Lethal. A new genre: Soap Memoir.)

By central characters
: “The Mother and Aunts,” “Teachers,” “Lovers,” “Friends, Sisters, Colleagues.” (Limited, but has potential in shifting the focus to others and away from the self. Still, risks sounding like the
Reader's Digest's
moronic “Most Unforgettable Character I've Met.”)

By time periods
: “Childhood,” “The Teenage Years,” “Young Wifehood,” “In Jail and Out.” (Artificial, pompous, too like the chronology above. A fatuous pretense that living is linear.)

By subject matter
: “Sex,” “Poetry,” “Feminism,” “Mothering.” (Gross. Sounds like sections in a women's magazine.)

All of the above
: Deliberately eclectic, sometimes contiguous, sometimes fragmented. (Surprising, at least. Risky. More like existence itself. Has possibilities. …)

But which voice? The personal, philosophical, literary, political? Which style? That of a journalist, diarist, satirist, epistoler, historian, critic, essayist, novelist?
All
of the above? But two genres should be prohibited: polemics (too banal, been there lifelong, done that to death) and poetry (too profound, see elsewhere: six books of poems). Otherwise, what the hell.
Risk
it.
All of the above
—
the genre called
“
life
.”

11
.

Bracing advice to Reluctant Memoirist (RM) #2
:

Reluctance be damned. You still wear the curses of your sex and your generation: wanting to be
liked
. Forget it. A memoir is an exercise in narcissism no matter what you do or other memoirists claim. So stop moaning, distill your literary angst to the humble essence of a TV sneaker commercial, and Just Do It. After all, you have two major motivations, probably shared by every memoirist (though you may be the first one dense enough to confess them).

See where they dangle, like promised beta-carotene rewards:

(1) You get to set the record straight (or crooked) yourself. If you don't, others will. In fact, they will anyway. But this way your version is at least a contender.

(2) By the time you finish the thing, it will have grown on you the way every book you write does, and you will feel a certain fond loyalty to it. Besides, you can then live on the balance of the advance while you get back to writing poetry and fiction—because in poems and novels you can continue to
really
tell the truth. For that matter, in poems and novels (and certain essays and many unpublished letters) you've
already
written this memoir. But the genre wasn't formally “memoir,” so nobody believed you.

12
.

Elders among the indigenous Hopi people ask a floundering seeker to answer three clarifying questions.

What are the goals?

To tell emotional truths as well as literal ones. To see as clearly as possible, with a merciless eye. To describe as fairly as possible, with a compassionate
voice. To move backward and forward in time guided by an ethically charged compass.

What are the obstacles?

Memoir flirting as an act of flattery, manipulation, score-settling; memoir as the brandishing of a polemical tambourine. And most of the hyphenate “selfs” (except self-restraint): the whine of self-pity, the huff of self-justification, the bray of self-aggrandizement, the mumble of self-censorship. Fear.

What are the tools?

Love of language, of irony, of humor. Some experience navigating the rapids of imagination and obsession, as well as commuting those trade routes between received truth and experienced truth, related truth and deciphered truth. A lifelong tendency of choosing to speak out from fear rather than stay silent from fear.

13
.

What else but memory has taught us most of what, when, how, and even why we feel?

The amygdala, a tiny section of the brain, stores all emotional memory, even when conscious memory of how it got there has been repressed—usually through physical or emotional trauma. We gain access to repressed memory, if at all, from clues dropped by the amygdala.

Erase memory, that most intimate of tutors, and all emotive associations are cut loose from their moorings, adrift in helpless automimicry of those basic feelings already hardwired at birth: excitement, fear, desire, pain, rage, pleasure.

So memory is the scaffold, the skeleton of our emotions. If sometimes that skeleton is all that remains of what was once electric, living content, the memoirist's job is to revive or at least approximate that flesh, cartilage, skin, those joints and muscles and veins, that pulse.

This is autopsy in reverse: an attempt to discover the time and cause of life.

Erase memory, and all but the rawest primal knowledge vanishes.

Erase memory, and all means of self-identification disappear.

I remember, therefore I am.

¹
Except amnesia.

Part One

ONE

Matrilineal Descent

Nothing ever wipes out childhood
.

—S
lMONE DE
B
EAUVOIR

Every ancestry begins with the mother, but mine ends there, too.

I never met any of my grandparents. The maternal pair had emigrated from that permeable-membrane part of Eastern Europe that was one day Polish, another Russian, a third Prussian. My grandfather Reuben, for whom I was named, had been a rabbi in his village. According to family lore, he was a gentle, scholarly man with a sense of humor, an idealistic outlook, and a passion for softly scrambled eggs. However, his wife, Rose, was, according to all three of her daughters, a matriarch straight from the tales of the Brothers Grimm: fierce, strict, loud, a bully to her husband and children. She certainly looks formidable in the one picture I have of her and my grandfather: Reuben Teitlebaum, slouching, regards the camera with a slightly amused expression, just short of a smile, but Rose wears her frown like semaphore signaling a storm, and her posture is as rigid as the corset encasing her bulk.

Then again, she had reason to frown. Life had uprooted and disappointed her sorely. She had made a real “catch”—a man of prestige, a
rebbe
—married him, and started a family, only to be hauled away from her
village into a strange new world where he couldn't find a synagogue to hire him, so had to clerk in a hardware store. She, who was to have lived her life as a
rebbitzen
, a rabbi's wife, the most respected woman in the village, became a nobody—poor, without prominence, burying three infants in childbirth and raising the two sons and three daughters who survived in an immigrant Jewish community based in, of all places, Atlanta, Georgia. He consoled himself with books, Caruso's phonograph records, and scrambled eggs. She consoled herself with rage.

The sons, naturally, were the hope of the family. My memories of Uncle Aham and Uncle Samuel are so hazy they might as well be cut from gauze; I was barely a toddler the few times (I'm told) I met them. By then my mother, Faith, was already in flight from what remained of her family, except for her two older sisters, Sally and Sophie.

These three women shared a lifelong bond: resentment. They co-cherished indignation as if it were a family heirloom, and their lives provided them with ample justification, as in the case of their brothers: the boys had been sent to college, but the two older daughters were flatly denied higher education, while my mother was permitted to sample it but was yanked out after one tantalizing year. My uncles and what families they eventually had accordingly vanished into a category that, had it been acknowledged, would have been labeled “Don't-discuss-around-the-child-unless-absolutely-necessary-and-then-only-in-Yiddish.”

Both aunts, on the other hand, were vivid presences throughout my childhood. Much as each of the three sisters considered herself unique, they all shared the same body type (short and overweight), and they all exhibited certain similar characteristics. Among these was an excessive reverence for perceived authority: bus drivers and waiters were addressed as “Sir”—but this was definitely not out of any courtesy or respect for the working class; in Georgia, they
were
working class, yet under my grandmother's tutelage they carried themselves instead as Daughters of a Rabbi. More likely, such obsequiousness was rooted in first-generation-immigrant anxiety, or further back, in the periodic pogroms that would terrorize their native village. In any event, whatever rebellious energy the sisters possessed they reserved for use at the kinship level, to be expressed through continual railing against existence—in the guise of blood relatives.

They also shared a capacity for exaggeration that rocketed past puny art
into stratospheric lie. No doctor could be merely good; to warrant confidence, he (and it
was
“he” then) had to be “the top in his field,” “the best in the world,” the medicine-magician “sheiks journeyed from Arabia to see.” (I kept trying to figure out why he chose to practice out of a two-room office in Yonkers.) A low- or mid-level theatrical agent or a would-be producer became “the most powerful man in show business.” Even a plastic necklace cleverly molded into fake coral spikelets was once vigorously defended as “rare coral, imported direct from the Great Barrier Reef.” Since the sisters' own individual and collective histories were also prime subject matter for their exaggerative talent, they frequently reinvented themselves, their present, and their past. But they rarely did so in concert, which meant screaming matches over whose version was true. Sometimes I had a French great-grandmother named Yvonne who was “wildly popular at the court of the tsar”—and sometimes I didn't; sometimes the family had a branch of “great scholars among the Sephardic Jews back to the Middle Ages”—and sometimes it didn't. Consequently, I learned two lessons the hard way but early: that understatement was ineffective for making oneself heard at home, and that reality was decidedly relative. I grew up witnessing truth as the tennis ball in a match between Dionysus and Lao Tzu.

But however ectoplasmic facts may have been to these women, emotion was real—utterly, suffocatingly real. All three of them Drama Queens of Ashkenazic Family Theater, my mother and aunts performed their lives in operatic fashion and at decibels aimed for the fifth balcony's back rows. Each preferred arias, but they often went at it in duets, and their periodic trios were memorable.

The middle sister, Sophie, led the closest to what in those days was considered a “normal” life: she married (a distant cousin with the same surname, Teitlebaum), bore a son and a daughter, and seemed content to become an obsessive housekeeper and a wonderful cook. I can still remember the pungency of her cooking smells, their promise beckoning from far down the hall outside her apartment door: comforting chicken soups bobbing with
kreplach
, crisp noodle
kügles
, pot roasts with garlicky dumplings—and the heavenly, moist, almond-flour cakes she would bake in special molds the shape of lambs, then decorate with vanilla frosting and shaved-coconut curls, raisin eyes, and a maraschino-cherry mouth.
Unfortunately, I also remember the yelling, tearful fights she waged with my cousins, her son Jerry and daughter Dorothy, both already teenagers when I hadn't yet started school. Jerry fled to enlist in the navy and was based at Pensacola, Florida (to my child's ear and logic, this became Pepsi Cola, Florida, named after a product as was Hershey, Pennsylvania, which I knew about since I had once appeared there in a fashion show). Dorothy's revolt took the form of as many boyfriends as could be crammed into a given day—a tendency that had persisted, until I lost track of her, through three marriages and three more live-in relationships.

Still, Aunt Sophie cossetted me, let me help with cutting out cookies and decorating the “lambie cakes,” told me stories, and, unlike Aunt Sally, seemed to care more about my schoolwork than about my fan clubs. Her husband, Uncle Harry, a retired semi-invalid with a colostomy, made me nervous: he rarely said anything while shuffling through their apartment en route from bedroom to bathroom and back. Sophie could also unnerve me on occasion, as when she enjoyed removing her false teeth and snapping them in my face or chasing me around with her vacuum cleaner, an upright with a roaring motor and a single light glaring from its forehead like a robotic cyclops. Scaring young children is considered by many adults to be an act of good-natured fun, but it's always struck me as a sadistic display of grown-up power thinly disguised as “teasing.” The small-bodied people—children—get the message on all levels, and learn to respond with manic laughter signaling not so much humor as submission.

Aunt Sally was very different from Aunt Sophie. For one thing, she lived with Mommie and me. For another, her approach to cooking was to boil all vegetables a uniform grey color the consistency of mush and fry chops until they were so well-done they bounced on your plate when you tried to cut them. If in my childhood archetypes Mommie was cast as the Good Mother, Sally was the Evil Aunt.

The oldest of what in my adolescence I would come to name the Weird Sisters, Sally had been born in the Old Country—Russia? Poland? it depended on who was telling the story—and claimed to remember the boat trip to the New World, a journey she nonetheless refused to discuss. It would take me decades finally to see Sally for the poignant figure she was. In her youth, she'd apparently had a glorious voice (all three of them actually agreed on this), and had longed to be an opera singer. But for a
woman in that era and in the conservative European Jewish culture of her family, a life on the wicked stage was regarded as one lewd flounce away from prostitution. So her music was denied her. Then, so the story went, she fell in love with a Christian who cared enough to convert to Judaism in order to marry her. Rose, horrified at her daughter's defilement of the family by such a marriage, decided conversion was insufficient; she demanded that her new son-in-law be circumcised, a barbarous enough ritual when inflicted on a newborn and a particularly savage procedure when carried out on an adult. Still, Sally and her husband were, briefly, happy. Then she gave birth to stillborn twin sons, and, soon after, their father died in a car accident. My grandmother celebrated both tragedies as punishments from Yahweh, her jealous god's revenge on Sally for having loved a “goy.” Sally, left a childless widow, shifted her grieving attentions to her youngest sister—and eventually to her youngest sister's child.