Dry Your Smile (4 page)

I set the cup down gently in a small diamond of space on her bedside table, and stood there feeling the rug being whisked from under my feet. Where had this come from? Beyond pain, beyond fury, beyond fear or love or even renewable amazement, the
awe
of her struck me again. An unerring virtuoso at coincidence, a maestro of emotional derring-do, of the disarming statement, the shocking insight that threw all one's tactical troops, however well marshaled, into disarray.

She opened her eyes and looked at me, mildly accusing, as if she'd caught me not knowing my next line in answer to the cue she'd just fed me.

“What story was that, Baby?”

I cleared my throat again. “It was ‘The Burrow,' Momma. One of Kafka's greatest parable stories.” Could it be pushed further? “It's—it's about terror and denial and hoarding—”

“Yeah, yeah. Poor little animal.” She sighed.

“What made you think about that, Momma?”

She wheeled in her tunnel and glared at me.

“Nothing. I just happened to remember it, that's all. I have to give reasons?”

That entrance blocked. No numbskull fox was going to get in that way.

“I saw the Kafka stories on the bookshelf just now. Want me to get it for you? Would you like to reread it?”

“You know reading gives me a headache.”

“Well, you read those bloody stock reports all the time without complaining. But … if you like, I'll read it aloud to you …” Already on my way to the bookcase, self-righteously mature, in control, bliss in the heart at a possibility of spending the remainder of our time together
reading
, and
Kafka
, to boot.

“Forget it,” she said flatly. “Maybe some other time. We'll see.”

“Momma, ‘we'll see' are the two words a child of any age most dreads hearing from a parent. Come on, honest-to-god—”

“I don't want to. Please. Just sit down and have your tea.” Her voice had gone plaintive now, too fatigued to bully me, resorting to a wheedle. For how long had our meetings been an exchange of weariness, a surrealistic tennis match? The ball of exhaustion is now in your court, dear, oops here it comes back to me with one whack of your devastating backhand.

I sank into the chair and swallowed some tepid tea. Silence filtered in along with the afternoon autumn light and lay on the floor in stripes cast by her half-closed blinds. Finally I put my cup down.

“I have to call Laurence now, Momma. And I have to go soon.” Almost in a whisper, in case she was—as we both knew she wasn't—asleep.

“So? Call. Who's stopping you?” She wouldn't open her eyes.

Her pink Princess telephone was the same model she had wanted to get me for my sixteenth birthday, when I had crossed her by preferring a plain black regular telephone but
not
an extension, a line of my very own. We had compromised on a plain black instrument to fit in an extension jack, of course.

Laurence sounded barely awake. It was two in the afternoon. “Larry? You okay?”

“Uh, oh, Jule. Oh sure. I was just, uh, taking a nap. Where are you?” Did that mean he hadn't yet got up at all?

“I'm at Hope's. But leaving soon. I had the Clement memorial service this morning, remember? You were still asleep when I left.”

“Oh that's right. I forgot. Yeah … I guess we should talk when you get home, huh?”

“All right. I mean … well, let's see how we feel. It's been a bitch of a day.”

“Watch your mouth,” my mother mumbled, in unconscious alliance with my feminist sisters.

“Yeah, well, I had a rough day too, you know.”

“Look, I only meant—”

“Sure, sure,” he finished listlessly. “See you later.”

“Right. G'bye.” Princess receiver into Princess cradle. Sorry, Sleeping Beauty. No prince, slender-limbed and fierce-eyed, on the way to rescue. Prince already arrived, long ago. Prince fallen asleep under the same spell. Prince snoring.

“Well, Momma,” I announced, trying to establish the preliminaries-to-leaving atmosphere.

“You're going. So go.”

“No, I'll clear away the tea first. Look, you haven't even touched yours. Would you like me to warm it up or make fresh?”

No answer. The pre-departure sulk.

“Then I'll take these into the kitchen. Mrs. Dudinsky is coming around six, isn't she? So she'll bring you your dinner and visit for a while and tidy up.”

She gave her pillow a feeble punch and heaved her bulk sideways in reply.

Back in the kitchen again, washing out the cups and the teapot again, another Zen exercise in meaninglessness. Bone china, Haviland—but with fine cracks webbing the surface, chips serrating the edges.
Stupid idiot
, I thought,
stupid grown woman to stand here at this sink clasping a cup and crying. Stupid idiot to remind yourself of that favorite photograph of her, taken when she was seventeen in Mexico City, the single vacation of her life. The one free time and space she would ever know, on a prize trip as a student, when she could see the burnt-orange murals of Orozco, the Kahlo alizarine-splashed canvases, when she could break away from the Victorian shadows of the rabbinical home and stand in a bleach of lemon sunlight surrounded by trumpets of crimson hibiscus and toss back her hair and laugh into the camera lens
. Faded and cracked now, that life, like the ambering photograph, like the cup. Doomed.
Oh Momma
. If I'm the only one who remembers that long-ago-dead seventeen-year-old, the sole repository of an existence you've forgotten, so are you the only testament to some long-ago-dead image of me, smiling and curtsying, Baby Bernhardt, television's darling. Each of us haunted by the girlhood of the other. Each of us denying her own.

If only I could ever really write about it. Then I might come to understand it, forgive it. Not as some sophomoric catharsis; she would be with me past her own death and unto mine. Not as another act of vengeance against her; I alone bled from those. Not even as an expression of love; all the poems of anger or of longing I had written her, dared not show her, then dared show her, then dared surviving her indifference about—expressions of love all, they hadn't managed it. Not for her, then, and not even for me. This time, simply, to comprehend the secret—what I'd never written, though I'd sworn I had; what I'd never said, though I thought I had; what I'd never claimed as mine, though I believed I did. Had I ever committed an act pure of her? Had I ever loved anyone who wasn't her? This time,
this
time to
really
write about it, her wardrobe of faces and the faces she bequeathed me, lies appliquéd with the skill of a needleworker, possession and terror and hunger so inter-threaded and unacknowledged as to become inseparable from the fabric of living itself.
Fool, you'd have to dare become her even more than you fear you already have. You'd have to burrow behind the lies she lavished on you deep to some truth you've never known. You'd have to invent her truths—the way she herself did. And could you avoid the perils of yet another tale about childhood sorrow? Could you risk tracking her ghost through every path it stalks for you, Julian? How many masks—hers, yours—would you have to peel off or layer on before finding the mask of your own? Do you dare really write it, Julian, all of it? Isn't it easier to stand at her kitchen sink and cry? And who are you crying for, anyway?

Dry your smile, she'd always say, whenever I got teary with an attack of stage-fright (rare as time went on) or got scared being mobbed at one of those hellish personal appearances. Do not get drawn in. Cups in drainboard. Do not get sucked into scouring the kitchen. The more you clean up one thing—the greasy rotisserie, say—the more you will notice the stove-top is crusted. Control and restraint.
You call yourself an existentialist. Stop looking for miracles, then. Don't try to call her by her name
.

I got my coat from the rack by the door and crept back to her bedside, hoping she was asleep by now. But as I bent over, she half opened her eyes and murmured,

“Poor frightened little animal. I don't understand it.” She laughed drowsily. I tried to laugh, too. But all I could answer was,

“I'll let myself out. I'll use the key.”

“Good girl. Call me tomorrow.” Eyes already closed again.

“I love you,” I whispered.

And went and locked the door quietly behind me, glancing at the mazuzaleh nailed to the doorjamb, that small gold tube containing the Hebrew writing for the sacred unpronounceable name of what they always wrote in English as “G-D.” You knew what it was, and you knew everyone else knew what it was, too, but no one dared articulate it or entrust it to parchment. Like anything sacred: unnameable. As if, were it actually spoken aloud or attempted in letters of fire, the living presence would appear, manifest in terrible majesty—or else, once and for all, a hollow echo would confirm that there never had been anything there at all. And none of us knew which of the two possibilities was to be feared most.

PART TWO

October, 1941

“God! I'm dying, God! This baby's murdering me!”

“Stop with the screaming, Hokhmah. Dying you're not. Nobody's murdering nobody.”

“How would
you
know?” her sister wept softly. “You can't know till you go through it! They never tell you it'll be like this—ten hours, fifteen hours, eighteen hours—”

“So it's a long labor. The world should end?” Yetta rested her knitting in her lap and looked at her younger sister. “Don't make a production. You're making it worse than it is.”

“It couldn't
be
worse! It's—it's like some kind of devil inside me. It's like being—being drawn and quartered when the pain starts up. What do you know about it, Yetta?” She tried to shift position in the narrow hospital bed, but every part of her felt raw. Raw in the spine from arching and twisting, raw in the crotch from being hammered at inside, raw in the throat from screaming.

“I know you got yourself into this, that's what I know.” Yetta shrugged and picked up her knitting again. “You made your bed, you lie in it.” She nodded for emphasis.

“
He
was the big-shot doctor, I was the virgin,
what
was I supposed to know? Momma never told us nothing about that, and you and Essie never—”

“Don't start with the blaming everybody else, Hokhmah. It's your fault and your burden.”

She peered at Yetta through the bars of the bed, her sight blurred with exhaustion and tears. The heavy-set woman sat there implacably, thighs and arms like hams, hair already going gray, her glasses slipping down her nose. Not to become like her, not to be like them. They never heard you, they refused to understand.

“Yetta,” she began again, almost in a whimper, “you know I didn't want it once he said he didn't want it. What else could I do? Didn't know how to get rid of it—”

Her sister looked up sharply. “God forgive you for saying that!”

“—and nobody I could ask. God doesn't need to forgive me, God already knows I trusted Him to take it, to kill it!” She turned her face, wet with tears and sweat, to the ceiling. Plaster cracks, puke-green paint curling off, a huge flat expression with a hundred mocking grins. “It's not too late, God,” she cried out, “this is punishment enough,
please
let it die and let me live. Don't let it murder me this way! Don't let it be born and kill me all my life through, either, like Momma said!”

“Momma never said nothing about killing, Momma wouldn't never—”

“She did. That's what she said to me. She stood there in that housedress, the one with the daisies blotched all over it. Her face was—like a savage.”

“God
forgive
you for speaking so disrespectful of the dead! I won't let you—”

“I tried to tell her. ‘Momma, please,' I said, ‘Momma, I'm so sorry, please.' But you could never make Momma hear you, never.”

Yetta heaved her bulk out of the chair and stood, hands on her hips, trailing yarn behind her. “How dare you, Hokhmah!
Me
she never heard.
Esther
she never heard. But
you
she always—”

“She didn't, she
didn't
. She said I was a whore. She said in the old village they'd have flogged me in public and then run me out. She kept saying ‘How could you do this to me? My youngest daughter!' and then her face would shrivel up and she'd moan and wave her head from side to side. She said I deserved pain. She said if I didn't die giving birth to my curse, then I'd have to live with it all my life. One way or the other, she said, it'd destroy me, like I'd destroyed her.”

“You
did
destroy her! You killed your own mother!” Yetta's jowls quivered with grief and rage.

The young woman half rose in the bed, appealing to the older who loomed above. “I didn't! You and Essie keep
saying
that, saying I killed her! That's a horrible thing to say! You only say it 'cause you know she loved me best!” She dropped back against the pillows again. “Oh, Yetta, why couldn't she forgive me? ‘I turn my face from you,' she yelled. ‘I never want to see you again as long as I live.'
Why?
”

“Momma dropped dead of a heart attack less than a month after you told her, Hokhmah. So? You don't think that's the same as you killing her?”

“Momma had a bad heart for years!”

“Still? The shame you brought on her, on all of us? God forgive me, but it's a blessing Poppa's dead five years, God rest his soul, so at least
he
was spared—” Yetta saw her sister's face contort suddenly. She threw her knitting to the floor and moved swiftly to the bed.

“Oh God, ohhh it's starting again. I can't stay still, can't sit can't lie on my back or side can't breathe can't bear it! It's like my bowels bursting, like something's … chewing at all my bones and muscles oh
God!
”