Authors: Tama Janowitz
I
got home and my mother was still dead. And I thought, my mother would never again tell me she thought I was terrific, we would never sit around reading books and talking about them, we would never laugh together, I would never be able to show my mom whatever it was I was working on and have her say, “I think it really starts to take off around page thirty,” and I would never have her say to me again, “Look, I'm not rich, but you can always come and live here with me and it won't cost anything and we can be together.”
I had waited on line with my mom when she collected unemployment in the grim offices with the steelworkers who had also been laid off back in the seventies and were waiting to collect.
We had lived in bleak apartments and trailers and we had gone to the library and gotten out armloads of books and read and read and swapped back and forth while we ate tuna fish sandwiches.
We had shopped together for clothes at the Salvation Army and then at home tried everything on, pleased with our purchases even though we had spent more than we should have, but some of the things were half off and we knew the things were nice so we had splurged. When the three of us moved in 1970 to the rabbi's apartment outside Boston, it was so my mother could be near her sister. Although her sister had found her the apartment, not too far from her large Newton Highlands home, after we moved there, my aunt did not really want anything to do with us. My mom adored her sister, though. That's why we moved there. Mom got very sick. She got sicker and sicker. She lay in bed, coughing. I was fifteen. It irritated me to have my mother lying around, so sick. She kept calling her sister, but her sister was busy. I don't know why or how her sister could have been so busy. She only lived a ten-minute drive away. Days passed. Mom wasn't getting any better. I used this situation to my advantage. I told my mother I wanted a skunk. “No!” my mom said weakly.
I didn't care. I whined, I wheedled; I was going to get me a pet skunk. I think they might have been somewhat popular at that timeâthey were sold, de-scented, in pet stores.
Mom got weaker and weaker. Right before I thought she was going to die, I went out on a babysitting job. The family had a pet skunk. It was not nice. I came back. “Okay, you're not going to believe this,” I said. “The people I was babysitting for had a pet skunk. I don't want one now. It smelled, even though it was de-scented, and it wasn't nice.”
The next day Mom finally found a doctor who would make a house call. He came over and took her to the hospital.
She was almost dead, from pneumonia.
Her sister never came around.
I don't know why some families like each other, or at least are able to put on an act.
When my mom died, my brother quickly called my aunt. My aunt was older than my mom. In thirty years of my mom's teaching at Cornell she had never been to visit her. Now she called me up. She left a message. “Sam told me that Phyllis had died. I was surprised! I remember I always found her to be a very interesting person. I remember when my mother brought her home from the hospital. I was four years old. Mother put her on the bed. I thought, Oh, that's interesting. I always found your mother to be interesting. Would you send me her books?”
Here's the thing: my aunt was eighty-nine at that time. I know, that's pretty old. Still, you'd think that by then you would know what to say, like, “I'm so sorry your mother died, my heart goes out to you!” or something like that.
My mother had always given her sister her books of poetry when they were published, but I guess she had thrown them out.
Now my mom was dead and all her older sister could say was that she had found her younger sister to be
interesting
.
My mother would never again ask me to read one of her poems she was working on; I would never be able to pick up the phone and talk to her. I would never again be able to get her advice, her reassurance, her support. I would never have a mother again.
Y
ou know how in those books, the middle-aged woman in search of inner peace and a new way of living moves to Bali and meets a Brazilian, like the way Diane von Furstenberg did, and falls in love and brings him home? Like the books and real life, it was hot and heavy all right. But Diane von Furstenberg dropped her hot Brazilian shortly after being on the cover of
New York
magazine, and as for those romantic popular nonfiction books, they always ended before daily routine and existence reared its head.
The contractor decided he was better off staying with his Christmas shopâowner girlfriend and helping her find lichen for her reindeer. She didn't need him to go with her to a Wild Game Dinner at a sports club. She was independently wealthy and didn't go to that kind of thing.
It wasn't until almost a week after my mom died that the contractor came over. My kid was just back from a trip with her dad, hanging around for a week before she had to go back to university. He came bristling up the drive and he saw her and said, “Willow, did you get your brakes fixed?”
That's when I remembered, he had mumbled to me at some point that Willow should get the brakes fixed on her car. But you know what? My mom had died, I wasn't thinking straight.
“No, I don't need my brakes fixed.” She scowled at her mom's almost ex-boyfriend.
“Oh right!” I said. “Didn't you say you were going to get them fixed? My memory's gone. You have to keep up with this kind of stuff. You
need
to have them fixed.”
“They're fine. I've driven everywhere with them.”
“You have to get your brakes fixed! You're driving back to college on Sunday!” the contractor said.
“You can't drive with those bad brakes,” I told her.
“I have been driving with the brakes like this for months, it's fine. If I die, I die.”
“No, that is not fine! You will also maybe kill others.”
That night I went to sleep happy Willow was home. It had been hard, being alone in the house with my mom just having died. Then, when Willow got back from England and New York City (that was the Tuesday after my mom died on Sunday), she went right back to work at her job as turn-down maid at the hotel in Watkins Glen from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. I didn't try to stop her. Was she supposed to sit here in the house with me while I wept? She loved being a turn-down maid. Just because I was depressed didn't mean I had to spoil the end of her summer, did it?
So she worked Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and that job was finished. She would return to college on Sunday. She got back okay on Friday. I remember, because I would wait up for her to get back from work, due to the fact that her job ended at eleven at night, in a region where deer waited on the sides of the roads until a car came by and then would spring out and try to wreck the car and kill the person.
And when she got in, that Friday night, I heard her car and I finally fell asleep.
But around 1
A
.
M
., I woke up from a vivid dream, so real that it jolted me awake. In the dream the contractor was maybe four years old and he was just running around the room naked from the waist down, with nothing but a T-shirt on, the way little kids do when they escape from a bath before the adult has gotten a chance to reclothe the kid. There was wall-to-wall carpeting and the contractor (he wasn't a contractor at that age) was running toward a sofa where Doug, his older brother, was sitting.
I had never met Doug, but I knew it was Doug. That's what dreams do, you know. In the dream Doug was saying to the contractor, “Well, hello, Lacy!” The contractor was this little boy dancing, floating around, from the sofa across the carpeting, like a piece of lace.
I thought, “Hello, Lacy”?
What could that possibly mean? It was peculiar. I thought, That's rubbish! Maybe the older brother was saying, “Hello, Lazy”?
But no. In the dream, he had said, quite clearly, “Hello, Lacy!”
I tossed a bit. It was very unlikely. Take these tough rednecks who were hunters and worked rough: these guys in snowplowing, construction, logging, plumbing, garbage hauling. They didn't go around calling each other “Lacy.”
But, whatever. I went back to sleep.
In the morning the car fix-it shop was closed and wouldn't open all day.
I called the contractor, and he told me what parts to get, and I sent Willow with my credit card to the auto place. When she got the parts, he said, she should drive to his house. He would fix it.
A little while later she called me and said, “Mom, they have the parts I needed for my car. But I lost your credit card.”
I had to give my other credit card number over the phone, but at least that worked.
Now, how could she lose my credit card between when I handed it to her, in the house, and her going to the car? That's what being a mother means. I spent two hours searching for that card and calling to cancel it and so on.
Then I went to the contractor's house. He was fixing Willow's car. She drove it around the block. There was still something wrong with it. So he worked on it some more. It was fixed, but he still wanted her to go around the block again. While we were waiting for her to come back, his phone rang and he answered it. He looked at me. He had turned white. He said, “I gotta go.”
“Huh?”
“They found my brother Doug's body in the lake.”
So he left. Willow came back and asked, “Where is he?” but he had gone.
Once again he quit speaking to me. I was accustomed to it. I texted him, he wouldn't text back. I called him, he didn't call back. I knew the routine: he had just done this to me when my mother died.
He did not like emotional situations or stress or pressure. Maybe he just didn't like me, I do not know.
But I kept thinking about that dream I had had. After a few days I texted his sister Suzette. I wrote, “You wouldn't know the details of this because you are younger than the contractor, so I don't know if you were even born during the time that my dream took place.”
I told her about that dream, and how Doug was young and the contractor was young, and Doug called the contractor “Lacy.”
“No, I don't know what you're talking about,” said his sister.
I texted her, “Can you ask your father about my dream and see if he knows?”
And she told my dream to the contractor's father.
Then she texted me back. “My dad says, when the contractor was little, Doug called him Lacy.”
D
on't get me wrong, I'm not blaming my parents.
Of course I'm blaming my parents! Just as they blamed their parents and their parents blamed their parents, this has gone on since, gosh, I don't know, early hominid? In my opinion all of humankind is one bad genetic experiment. People should not be left to their own choices propagating the human race.
But then the problem arises that even if you select the finest Nobel Prize winner and breed her to the best possible male specimen on the planet, it still isn't going to work. There's a 99.9 percent chance it's just not going to turn out well.
After college, I moved back in with my mother. Then I went back to grad school and after that, when my mother was at Princeton as an Alfred Hodder Fellow, I moved back with her again. This was 1979. I mean, my mother was brilliant. She was a poet whose manuscripts had been chosen for publication by Elizabeth Bishop, by Maxine Kumin. After Princeton, A. R. Ammons picked her to teach at Cornell. This didn't happen until she was fifty years old.
She had been a dietician, married, fired when pregnant. Then, when the kids were nine or ten, this manâher husbandâwas screwing everything in sight. Other women have covered this territory in other books. Now, maybe it is not so shocking. Not so horrifying. Then, just imagine the lives for women: get married and have kids.
You just couldn't envision any other life for yourselfâbecause there wasn't any! And especially not if you came from a poor place. Of course she tried to hang on to her marriage, she was a nice Orthodox Jewish girl who had married a Jewish doctor who was . . . a scam artist, a con artist. A narcissist. At the end of the marriage, he had his secretaryâwith whom he was having an affair, who had divorced her husband over himâmove in with us, while they were still sleeping together! There was Mom, Dad, two kids, and Dad's mistress.
Anyway, I'm backtracking. At this point, I was twenty-two, twenty-three years old.
I had a B.A. from Barnard College, cum laude, I had just gotten an M.A. on a full scholarship from Hollins, I had just been accepted to the Yale School of Drama in playwriting, and I was working on another bookâmy second, or third, though I was still unpublished.
But I didn't have a job. I had moved back in with Mom. I wasn't asking Dad to support me. Nevertheless, the first hate letter arrived from my father: “You are NOTHING. You will NEVER amount to anything. You are WORTHLESS.” The letter was concise and to the pointâit was true, I didn't have a job, I was, for the moment, back with my mom. Wanting to be a writer was, after all, a pretty stupid idea.
I was devastated. Fortunately, a week or so later, my first book was accepted, but really the damage was done; my father wasn't impressed. When he read the book (
American Dad
), after it came out, he wrote to me how I had destroyed people's lives. On the other hand, he did add how he no longer felt alone on the earth, since finally someone was writing about him.
His hate letters were so vituperative and vitriolic. He sent them to me throughout my life, at random, with arbitrary venom not directed at anything that made particular sense. He would nag and nag me: “Come visit! When will you come visit!?” It was not easy to get up there, without a car, broke, all the way from New York City. Still, like Charlie Brown, who gets the football held up in front of him only to have Lucy jerk it away at the last second, I went, year after year.