What Remains (5 page)

My mother had no language yet to describe what she was feeling in 1973. For a year she drove white-knuckled over the Tappan Zee Bridge to the restaurant, willing herself not to drive off. Then at twenty-seven, with five children, she started her retreat. She put a lock on her bedroom door and enrolled in Rockland Community College.

There was a family vacation when I was eight, the only one I remember. We drove through Pennsylvania to Hershey and toured the chocolate factory, and I remember the smell of the chocolate and the great conch machines that stirred and smoothed it out. I remember the Hershey Motor Lodge with the five of us squirming in a bed. We rode horse-drawn buggies in the Amish country in Lancaster. We drove through Civil War battlefields—Gettysburg and Lexington—stopping at the chambers of commerce to pick up self-guide cassette tapes of reenacted battles. I have a vivid memory from that trip of my mother listening to the battle of Gettysburg with headphones in the front seat of the car. She gave me headphones, too, and I listened to the sounds of cannons and guns, the screams of dying young boys, and watched the tears run down my mother’s face. You remember when your mother cries. Tears came at odd times. As though she saved them until she couldn’t hold them anymore.

As families go, I held up Linda’s as the standard. Linda Rosenfeld appeared in my driveway two weeks after we moved to Madison Hill Road. My sister and I were jumping rope. She was with her mother, Vivian, across the street at the Merricks’, and Vivian sent her over. “Go and say hi,” she said, nudging Linda and her little sister, Nancy. “I’ll be right there.”

They had ponytails and were dressed in matching short sets, with bathing suit straps sticking out from under their shirts. Nancy was two years younger but taller, Linda chubby with crooked bangs. Vivian joined us from across the street, and we played hopscotch while our mothers talked on the front lawn.

Linda lived three houses up the street, number twenty-four. She had the same bedroom as I did, upstairs at the end of the hall, and our birthdays were three days apart. We made a well-worn path across my front lawn to hers, and after a while the grass stopped growing there.

It was nothing for me to be out of sight for hours at a time. No one worried about me. If I wasn’t home, I was at Linda’s house or somewhere with Linda. We spent afternoons in her basement holding talent shows and beauty pageants, writing plays and hosting game shows. We had skateboarding contests with Joey Tiso and the Spiegals. We explored fossil land in the woods at the dead end of Madison Hill—a burned-out, flat patch of land with buried metal, plastic junk, and rocks with animal skeletons hardened in them.

When our dog, Gigi, had puppies I gave one to Linda, and we named him Cocoa. Gigi was a pedigreed poodle, dropped off late one night under mysterious circumstances by my uncle Joey. It’s the sort of story that was a cliché in our house. Like in the movies if a man meets a woman on the train, they’ll become lovers by the second act. If there’s a pedigreed poodle at the DiFalcos’, it was delivered suspiciously and late at night. Then Gigi muddied the bloodline during an illicit romp with a German shepherd, and Cocoa was born. The DiFalcos could never quite summon a proper appreciation for lineage.

Linda’s father was an accountant; he wore a suit and tie and carried a large briefcase. And except for his toupee, he was like all the other fathers who drove to work each morning and returned in time for dinner. Then he and Vivian divorced. They were the first ones on the block. It separated them from the string of nuclear families that lined Madison Hill the way our weedy lawn separated us.

After her divorce, Vivian reinvented herself. Like a lot of mothers in our neighborhood, she’d had no reason to think she would ever take a job outside her home. But now she had to go to work in an office. From our view, little changed, though. She was still home by 5 p.m. and making chicken cacciatore. She drove us to Girl Scouts and band practice. She consoled us when Cocoa died of a heart attack after getting knotted up in his chain one hot July day trying to mount Sparky, Linda’s cat. Then Vivian explained the birds and the bees.

My admiration for Vivian was inexhaustible. She seemed everything my own mother was not. She sat down with us at dinner and asked about school. She signed permission slips and made grilled-cheese sandwiches. She kept potato chips and Ring Dings in the cabinet. She read trashy romance novels and had copies of
The National Enquirer
in her bathroom. She was available always, it seemed, at any time of the day, to drive us somewhere. She was my idea of the proper American mother.

Vivian married young, had children, and didn’t pursue anything else. But she encouraged Linda to study and go to college. My mother was less specific; she told me to be independent. It was the only advice she gave me. Everything I did was tied to the quest for independence. I washed my own clothes, found my own way home from school, paid “rent” when I started making my own money. “You have to be independent,” she said. So at fourteen I rode my bike to the Wendy’s just over the Jersey border in Ramsey. I filled out an application and lied about my age, and they hired me. I possessed a certain proficiency at work. I paid attention and I followed direction, and I sensed that these skills, somehow, would be my ticket out of Suffern. I applied at Caldor Department Store shortly after this, and they hired me in customer service. The pay was better, and I had more responsibility. At Caldor I had some authority. I handled returns and customer complaints. I resolved things. I made decisions. If your blender was defective or you bought sheets the wrong size, I took care of it. If someone needed to be paged over the speaker system, I was the one who paged them, and at a quarter of nine I announced, “Attention Caldor shoppers, we will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please bring your items up to the register.”

Grandma Binder died my junior year in high school. My father came home and found her collapsed on the floor of her bathroom. She’d been lying there for hours, too weak to move. He carried her to the car and drove her to Good Samaritan Hospital.

Grandma Binder was never sick—it was an indulgence she didn’t permit herself. Even in her seventies she walked the mile to Grand Union for groceries a few times a week. Then she went to the hospital with my father and didn’t come back. Now is when I developed an uncertainty about hospitals, a nagging distrust that I filed away after her funeral and pulled up again at thirty, when hospitals were part of my routine.

My mother was waiting for me when I got home from school, and I knew why she was there. The phone rang this morning, too early, and when I picked up the extension, a man’s voice said, “She took a turn for the worse. You should come as soon as you can.”

“Grandma died.” She didn’t wait for me to shut the door. “During the night. Your dad and I went this morning, but she was already gone.”

“Gone where?”

“She was in her hospital bed, very peaceful. She just looked like she was sleeping.”

Where was the doctor?
I wondered. I had an image of doctors whispering around her, this woman not dead yet but dying, and not wanting to disturb her so she’d look peaceful in the morning. So my mother could tell us she looked like she was sleeping.

“They did what they could, Carole. It was too late.”

Even at sixteen I was skeptical. I imagined interns shuffling in groups through sterile hospital wards—straight-A’d from medical school, fresh from their Hippocratic oaths. During the doctor’s morning rounds, leading a pack of them, he pulled the curtain around her bed.
This one took a turn for the worse,
and then he instructed his interns on the fine points of informing next of kin.

“Pneumonia,” her own doctor had said two weeks earlier, and then he sent her back home. “She’s fine, she just needs rest,” he told my mother. So Grandma rested and then got worse and my mother called the doctor and he told her again, “She needs rest.”

After she died I remembered a conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear, seeing Grandma at the door of my mother’s bedroom, standing in the hallway. “I’m scared, Helen,” she said. Her voice was ragged. She was standing in her nightgown, and I was not supposed to see that.

When she got to the hospital, they started running tests. My mother was relieved. Now they will figure out what’s wrong, she thought, and took the next train home. Grandma didn’t have pneumonia. Her kidneys had failed, and Sister Joseph Rita greeted my mother with this blunt news as she entered the emergency room.

“We gave her last rites.”

They didn’t have dialysis equipment then, so they moved her to New York Hospital that night. My mother took us to see her. The next day she died of heart failure.

My mother was serious, but there was nothing otherwise unusual in her manner or her voice to mark the occasion for me. Nothing in her expression that I could file under “death.” She might have known it would be easy with me. It wasn’t that I didn’t care or that I didn’t love my grandmother; I was just not surprised by this. I knew misfortune was simply a stumble from a curb, a distracted turn on a highway, one careless doctor away. After she told me, I walked to the back bedroom to watch out the window where a bus would pull up and my younger sister would step off. She was my grandmother’s favorite and the kind of little girl who thought Fortune was personal. She thought misfortune happened to bad people, that if she smiled and made her bed she’d be spared. My little sister thought Fortune picked favorites.

I watched from the window. The last moments of one life she knew and the first moments of another. It was a peculiar fascination, I suppose, but I was trying to understand the things no one explains. I was curious about death—about the power it has to change life so completely. The dead slip out quietly and leave furious holes in their wake. It’s Fortune’s strong suit. She keeps catching us unprepared, again and again.
Life,
we say at dinner parties or while we’re tsk-tsking the evening news,
is so short,
and then she proves it.

I wanted to see what would happen to my sister in the hall, on the other side of the door—what it would look like, her life changing. I wanted to see her physical response, how her body reacted, so I watched at the window, waited for her to run across the lawn to my mother in the hall. The bus pulled up and she got out, waving to her friends, to the driver. She was grinning the way kids do, excited to go to the next thing. She ran across the grass, jumping onto the steps. I watched the last few seconds of a life she had grown used to.
Don’t open that door
—
run away before they say it.
She could just as easily have turned down the street and gone to play at the Ochs’. She could have had her life for another few hours.

Tante came from the city for the wake at Wanamaker & Carlyle, the funeral at St. Anthony’s in Nanuet. They had Grandma’s hair done for the viewing, and her forehead was blue where the makeup had rubbed away from kisses.

After Grandma died, I found her passport in one of the boxes my mother had packed. The girl in the picture was unsmiling but pretty, and I wondered about the plans she had made for herself before taking that picture and getting on the boat to America. It was a life she might have been angry about missing but she wouldn’t have permitted herself to dwell on her loss. On the dresser in her bedroom was a mirrored vanity tray with a matching comb and hairbrush arranged carefully next to a tarnished gold compact and several crystal perfume bottles. Reminders of the life she might have imagined for herself at one time. Before ill-timed pregnancies, before circumstances recast her in a new country as a single mother when there was shame in that.

My grandmother had secrets, and my mother inherited them. It seemed everything was a secret. It was a secret that businesses had failed, that the house was perched on foreclosure, that we were on welfare for a time. The mundane, even, was a secret. I did not know, for instance, where my mother worked. Where she was going, what time she’d be home. When she was not home, I would sneak into her room and look through her pictures. She kept them loose in her desk drawer, in no order, hundreds of photos stuffed in bags and envelopes, and I took them out one by one, careless with fingerprints. She would have been angry if she’d caught me. I knew this, but I was too young to understand privacy. I thought it was harmless, sneaking in there. I just wanted to look. I thought they would tell me something, reveal something, although I couldn’t imagine what.

I held them up close and studied the backgrounds for clues. I lingered on the photos of my mother as a child. Black-and-white photos, the edges yellowed and slightly warped. Here she is at eight, holding her dog Brownie; at sixteen in a frilly white dress on a chair in Tante’s apartment, her hair around her face in tight blonde curls, her legs crossed at the ankles, long white gloves on her hands. There were no pictures of a father. Her father wasn’t discussed in our house. There was a sound bite:
He died in the war before I was born,
and that was all.

There was a picture of Tante and my grandmother in a cemetery in Austria,
September 1963
stamped on the back. They were each on one side of a tombstone, their brother Frank’s.
Franz Binder.
My grandmother’s name. She had two children, yet she never changed it.

It took me fifteen years after Grandma Binder died to ask Tante. She was ninety-six and in a nursing home in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. I went to visit her several times before I got the nerve.

“Who was my mother’s father?”

She was propped up in a twin bed with the radio on and looking straight ahead as she always did. Her eyesight was failing, but her stare was still hard and unyielding.

“I knew you’d be the one to ask,” she said without surprise. “You always asked too many questions. It’s too long ago now to talk about it.”

But I knew she wanted to tell me. It had been too long to keep a secret, even for her. I looked back at her with the same hard stare.

“His name was Nick. He was nobody. He was married. Your grandmother worked for the family.”

I was silent.

“Your grandmother was wrong to see him. She shouldn’t have and that’s that.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“I met him once or twice. He was tall. Italian. It doesn’t matter. He had a wife and children.”

I was stunned.
Tante knew him? She met him? Were they in love? Did he love her? She got pregnant and never saw him again?
Tante turned away from me.

I had waited a long time to ask. Three months later she died in her sleep.