If a Tree Falls (16 page)

My most persistent childhood memory was of waiting: waiting for my mother while she “worked on herself ” in front of her bathroom mirror. As if she might still bring her runaway father back? As if she might remake herself into someone worthy of his return? I’d never know all of the pieces, the shards she took up with a restorer’s attention, to fashion herself whole.

Whenever I walked into the bathroom, my reflection bouncing into my mother’s, she’d work on me, too. We could straighten my overly curly hair, she’d say. Her hairdresser could blow-dry it until it was fine and straight like baby grass. We could hunt down pleated shirts to narrow and conceal my growing breasts. Fix all that was wrong with me—my hair, my face, my body. My thoughts. My dreams.

Starving, I swallowed whatever she offered me. My mother was starving, too. Nothing could nourish her, fill her holes. As if literal food proved a mockery, she ate next to nothing. She reduced herself to a fragment, a figment. Less was more. But of course, less was less, as well.

My mother and I were the same, after all, in our wanting—she wanting him, me wanting her.

Her father did return after driving away. A year later, he appeared in the doorway of the Mount Vernon apartment. Hair tousled. Head cocked. All flair and fanfare. My mother couldn’t hide her excitement, even as my grandmother’s voice lilted with anger. He was beautiful, with almond eyes that brimmed with a like degree of hurt overlaying hope, overlaying hurt. A rally. They all rallied. But he couldn’t stay.

My mother searched for her father years later, when I was in college—hired a private detective who tracked him down in Florida. She wrote him a long letter; she was in her fifties by then, a practicing therapist, a wife, and mother of four children. She wanted to see him, to introduce him to her husband, her children. He wrote back a one-sentence note: he was ill and he did not want her upsetting him. She was to keep away.

It was in my mother’s crumbling reaction to her father’s note that I realized what intricate structures she had been erecting so painstakingly in front of the mirror all those years. The foundations and powders to cover up and hide every perceptible flaw, in a room where she alone could not
hear the feedback whistling from her damaged ears. Before this, I had perceived my mother’s attempts to cover my blemishes as criticism of me, and her obsession to fix her own, as self-absorption. But I saw then that her intentions for both of us—we were one and the same in her heart—were fiercely protective. Before this, I had viewed my mother’s withdrawals, her inattentions, as rejections of me. But I saw then that her retreat was just one more symptom of fatigue from her straining efforts to shore herself up, fill her holes, patch her half so that she might one day be made whole.

Sitting on the beanbag chair with Sophia and Juliet, I could see snowflakes drifting past the streetlights outside our window. A slight raise of my head, and I could see myself in the glass, my reflection. Fatigued. Fractured. I, too, knew the longing to be whole, for myself, for my family. The lure of powder to smooth the blemishes out. And I, too, knew the need to escape, to tune out my children. House chores, computer searches, journal writing sessions—they became justifications for retreat. I was drained and I yearned at times to be separate. But I also knew the need to hug tight, to clasp onto mother, even as she half-turned, inward. Away.

In the corner, high up on the bookshelf, I spotted a cluster of books by Martin Buber. I had read them in school. A baby gets its sense of self from its parent. I from Thou. A smile, a wide open “ah,” a nose-kiss. Before individuation, the pure infectiousness of love; it bounces in the air between a mother and child’s near-touching faces.

How could my mother help but falter? How could I help it?

 

 

 

Herschel is the family’s bright hope for a scholar. So smart. Nellie watches how he talks, even recites daily blessings; how Pearl and Moshe beam with pride. Nellie can’t help but flash with jealousy, knowing that she will never be adored, that she will never be a source of her parents’ pride. She swallows her feelings like lumps, so that she can accept Herschel’s eager embraces. Lately, he has become more and more attached to her
—
wanting her, watching her, following her everywhere and imitating her signs.

Nellie can sense the din in the room, the heat; the opening and closing of books, the raising and lowering of hands
—
though not Herschel’s. Nellie’s eyes fix on his, and she follows their path: darting quickly from the other children’s mouths to their eyes, mouths to eyes. She can see that his classmates are waiting for Herschel to speak; yet he remains silent.

As Nellie follows Herschel’s eyes
—
his outsider, unknowing eyes
—
a knot deep down in her stomach rises to her chest, a cresting wave. Is it possible that her brother cannot hear the children around him, cannot hear his teacher? Can it be, that he has been delighting his parents at home by reciting what he’d previously learned, all the while losing his handle on sound?

Pearl stares at her daughter’s hands, tucked for the moment in her lap. For her boy
—
her Herschel
—
things will be more difficult.

“I’m looking for a letter! That letter from Lill Baumann.” Pearl retrieves the rumpled envelope from her trunk. The address reads: 1742 Union Street. Kings County New York. “Lill and Sam
—
they live in a big apartment building. Samuel found good work in a printing press. Maybe they can help us, just to get settled.”

Pearl is wary of the deaf school. Nellie and Bayla would be better off in America, with Herschel. Herschel’s deafness will not be detectable to an inspector. Herschel knows how to read questions on lips, and he can speak out the answers. Nellie is at least cautious and watchful and she can control her voice. She can say her name; Rayzl has worked on this with her. Bayla
is another story. Her vocalizations are loud and unintelligible. Bayla might be the tip-off that prevents their entry to America. Ach. It doesn’t matter
—
the three deaf ones cannot manage such a trip by themselves. No.