Inventing Memory (20 page)

It would be sharp, sweet, sour, satirical, strange, loving, and hating all at once. It would have the clarity of life, the mystery of dreams, the wild, unexpected dividend of spring after a long winter. It would be Persephone's book, not Apollo's—but
when
shall I write it, if men and children keep chaining my feet to earth?

I have this fantasy that I am trying to write but some man is pinning me to the bed, fucking my brains out. "Let me up!" I scream. "Let me up!" But I am stuck here under a man!
When
will my hormones let me go?

And Sally—Sally has changed my life. I
want
to leave my work and go to her. I do not
want
to give up that pleasure, that annoyance. She is part of me. She is life. She is the future. But sometimes I also resent her and wish she'd disappear.

We women who write are monsters, dipping our scaly fins and mermaids' tails into the dream life, then coming up for air to feed mashed potatoes and carrots to our offspring from hands that have been fins paddling in moonbeams. Half human, half glowering sea monster or twinkling naiad, how can we make peace with our curious lot in life? We are required to be more schizophrenic than madwomen, only to survive and raise our troubled daughters!

Would Val understand if I wrote him this? No, not for all his writer's heart of light. The one being they cannot empathize with is woman. When he says "heart," he means "male heart." When he says "soul," he means "male soul." When he says "light," he means "male abstraction of light." When I say light, I mean Sally's eyes.

8

Salome Surrenders

1952

Say it, say it, the universe is made of stories, not of
atoms.

—MURIEL RUKEYSER

NOTEBOOK

1 June 1952

Mama and Papa came back today, cramping my style and spoiling Sally with marvelous smocked dresses which probably she will never wear. She's a tomboy. Loves work clothes, pants, sweatshirts, and those little blue smocks they use at "progressive" nursery schools.

Robin insisted on meeting Papa next time he's in town, and I'm worried about this. What trouble they could cook up together!

Meanwhile, I have been making notes for a new book, saving string, so to speak. I want to write as madly and freely as I do in my notebooks and journals. Even if the book never sees the light of day, I have to know that I possess the courage to write it! I have to claim my voice or die! The subject of the novel will be the contrast between a woman's inner life and outer life—how the two interweave and contradict each other. The book in your head versus the book of your life! How you can be at the dry cleaner or the playground or the butcher and still be having sex in your head with every man you meet. How you can be chained to the earth by domestic duties yet still be climbing your own spiritual mountain path through the mist.

Lately I am giving off such hot vibes that every man I meet seems to notice it. At a dinner party the other night with Papa and Mama and a bunch of art dealers and crazy artists, a very bald, cantankerous artist said to me,
sotto voce
, after talking to me all through dinner, "I could lay you right here on the dinner table."

I smiled like Mona Lisa, giving off that special sex smell.

"And what makes you think I
want
it?"

"You want it. I know you want it. You know you want it. You're wild."

"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

"Like fucking hell you don't," he said, and copped a feel of my right breast.

"I should slap your face," I said, impersonating some spinster from an old play. But I smiled like the Cheshire cat. So he fondled my ass for good measure.

"Nice," I said.

"You're the one that's nice."

"You too," I said, grabbing his ass.

He looked dumbfounded, maybe even scared. Probably no woman had ever done that to him before.

"What's sauce for the gander goes also for the goose," I said. "Or don't you think so?" I sashayed out of the dining room.

What is this perfume I'm giving off? My Sin? It's nice to know I still have the catnip!

NOTEBOOK

3 June 1952

Everything has stopped in my life while Mama and Papa reassert control in the household, entertain their clients and friends, and take over Sally's life. Mama takes Sally to the park—the zoo, the merry-goround—but fusses over her as if she were made of glass. It is as if she thinks
every
baby will be snatched away by Cossacks. How different her life was from mine. She used to drive me insane, but I have patience with her now, as I didn't when I was younger.

Robin was here to meet Papa. They laughed and talked, hit it off immediately. When Mama was in the kitchen, instructing Hannah about the making of a fruit compote—God forbid she should leave the help alone to
help
!—Papa looked at me, looked at Robin, and waved his right hand from Robin to me, from me to Robin, as if to ask, "You two together?" I blushed. Robin nodded.

"To mine opinion, not a bad match," Papa said.

Later Mama came to my room when Sally was asleep.

"I don't trust him," she said, unasked.

"Neither do I," I said quickly, surprising myself.

"It's as easy to love a nice man as a
vantz
," Mama said. "Since they're all
tsuris
, you might as well have one who won't keep you up at night in worriment."

My mama used to say "worriment" when she was trying to put on her best English.

"When a rogue kisses you, count your teeth," Mama said, quoting, of course, my grandmother.

Then she tucked me in as if I were five, went in to look at Sally and say some special
brucha
over her, and took herself to bed.

Someday I am going to have the guts to ask Mama about her love life. It should be part of the novel I'm writing. And how! What do I remember? I remember that white-haired, blue-eyed Mr. Lobel, who ran a brokerage house, how he used to look at Mama, and that English actor who played Hamlet and was reputed to be a womanizer. He was cute! Mama painted him costumed as Hamlet, dandling a skull on his knee. He looked fabulous in tights. Hung like a horse. Unless he was stuffed! And then there was Mr. Slansky the producer, who played host at her parties when Papa was away in Europe on buying trips. And of course Sim. She had never even
told
me about Sim. But now she
knows
I know, and we never talk about it. That's my mama. She knows how to keep her mouth shut as my generation
never
did. Is that the secret of her survival?

I fell asleep thinking of all these things. In my dream, Sally was counting my teeth with her little hands. Then I was following her up a mountain on foot while she rode a bicycle. A dog was clambering up behind us—Jacques, our black standard poodle. Every time there was a tunnel cut through the mountain, I'd worry we'd lose the dog because dogs were not allowed in the tunnels. But the dog always scampered up after us somehow, following our scent. I saw that Sally was going to be okay and so was Jacques. At the summit, I put out a bowl of water for Jacques and took Sally in my arms. Way below us, at the foot of the mountain, were Aaron, Robin, Marco. They were waving white handkerchiefs.

"Should I save them?" I asked myself. I woke up pondering this question, and I worried about it all day.

NOTEBOOK

5 June 1952

The Rosenbergs have been in custody for almost two years. Their death sentence was affirmed and committees are being organized to protest it, but things look bleaker and bleaker. Papa warns me against getting involved in the protest,
any
protest, but my heart
breaks
for them—separated from their two little boys, immersed in a political maelstrom, unable to escape the judgment of the mob, of the greedy politicians. I sit here, knowing I am no better than Germans who watched Jews being slaughtered and did nothing.

This is our very own Dreyfus case, and I am turning inward rather than outward, and I am hating myself for it. I feel like such a coward! If they are killed, I shall be one of their murderers. Every night I go to sleep feeling as if I should be in jail with them.

Marco believes the answer is meditation, to reform the human race from the inside out. But it is hard to imagine Senator Joe McCarthy meditating. Sometimes I think Marco has his head in the sand. He stays in his cocoon of twelve-tone music, tea ceremonies, and Zen proverbs, while the world goes down its slimy spiral into hell.

NOTEBOOK

12 June 1952

It seems Aaron has attempted suicide again. We are all in the car on the way to Stockbridge. Papa is driving in his usual maddening way, straddling the center lane,
causing
accidents if not actually
having
them! I can barely read my reversed handwriting. More later.

NOTEBOOK

Stockbridge

14 June 1952

Aaron is dead. He was dead when they found him—dead and bright pink. I kissed him goodbye. His cheek was shockingly cold.

Papa said: "To mine opinion, they had him in the meat locker overnight. What do
goyim
know about the
malech ha-movis
? They would have
embalmed
him at the
goyishe
funeral chapel if we hadn't got here!"

"Sha, Levitsky!" Mama said, Mama always says.

Apparently Aaron locked himself in a running car after having attached a hose from the exhaust pipe into a back window. He was found dead in the garage that the kitchen staff and doctors sometimes use. Supposedly getting
better
, he was no longer on "Disturbed." Nobody knew where he'd got the bicycle chain and the padlock with which he had shackled himself to the steering wheel. The clinic was concerned they'd be blamed or sued: you could see from the way they were busy distancing themselves from the "case," as they called it.

Dr. B. had us all in his office: Mama, Papa, me. Hannah had taken Sally to the Weekses' place, where she was given native strawberries and cream, as if to compensate for having a dead father.

Dr. Bartlow said: "There is a certain point where you have to trust in a person's will to get better, and Aaron's need to die was, sad to say, stronger. We believe here that depression is an
illness
, not a shame or a weakness, but the tools we have to treat it are not yet perfect. Perhaps someday we will understand it better."

But I knew why Aaron kept attempting suicide till he succeeded. The dead had more power over him than the living.

That was the Nazis' primary murder, I thought, the murder of the will to live. Our lives are made of certain things: the presence of predictable schedules, going to school, warm houses, shoes with laces, working toilets, elementary grooming, waiting parents. Take away those lodestars of habit and, predictably, most people will crack open into madness. I certainly would have. I would never have wanted to survive the
Aktionen,
never mind Auschwitz!

"Do you think shock treatments might have helped?" I asked the doctor, who had once proposed them as a last resort.

"We don't know. We never know," the doctor said.

"He always told me he wished he had succeeded in committing suicide," I said.

"But maybe later he would have been glad to be alive," the doctor said.

I didn't answer. I held my tongue, like Mama. I knew the doctor was wrong. Aaron would
never
have been glad to be alive. Aaron could never rest till he joined his dead family. Aaron was too
guilty
to live. What did I feel? Relief. Gladness. Freedom. And then horrible, horrible guilt. The father of my only child was
dead
! His death would simplify my life. And then I doubled over from the weight of my bad conscience.

After I had identified the body, Mama said, apropos of nothing: "Years ago I knew a beautiful woman from Russia called Luba. She worked with me for the sweater—excuse me—in the sweatshop. She used to say to me, 'Sarah, I
danced
all the way to America.'

"'Danced? Who—excuse me—whom did you dance with?'

"'With a very handsome man—who can remember his name? In those days a pretty girl wasn't expected to
sleep
with everyone.'

"'
Nu
, so why didn't you marry him?'

"'He wasn't Jewish,' Luba said, just like that."

"What's the point of this?" I asked impatiently. I knew Mama had a moral here. She never told stories otherwise. "Are you trying to tell me I'm better off with my crazy Jewish husband
dead
?"

"No, but that's what
you
think, Salome."

How could Mama
read my mind
? Can all mothers do this? Will I be able to do this with Sally?

"How
little
you know me," Mama said. "The point is, Salome, even in the sweatshop, we
knew
who we were, what we were, what we were not. Dying you could
always
do. You didn't have to run to it with open arms. 'For death you always have time,' my mama used to say. Your grandmother also said: 'No one can do to you the harm you can do yourself.' Life is a gift, but you have to know how to
receive
the gift."

I knew now exactly what she meant, but I wouldn't give her the satisfaction of saying so. So much that happens between parents and children is unexpressed yet communicated. Somehow, despite all her
mishegas,
all her curious restraint toward me, she had always let me know that life was a gift.

There was no way I could have communicated that gift to Aaron. I
had
tried. But I would communicate it to Sally—or
die
trying! And Mama, in her own way, was trying to give me permission to free myself. She was trying to give me permission to unfetter myself from
guilt.

Later, as we were walking alone—Mama was with Sally—Papa said to me: "The worst thing about getting old, to mine opinion, is that your
minyan
dies."

"
Minyan
?"

"The ones who have witnessed your life—your friends, your enemies. At forty, it begins. At fifty, it becomes an epidemic. At sixty, they're dropping like flies. 'For dying you always have time,' as your grandmother used to say."

"That's what Mama just said."

"Great minds think alike," Levitsky said.

How do I feel about Aaron's death? Numb at first, then furious. It seems that whenever I start to get my life and Sally's life together, he throws another monkey wrench in. Now we have to plan his funeral, settle his estate, sell the school. It's too late for me to go back to the Berkshires. I'm settled in New York now.

Did Aaron die just to interrupt my novel? I think so. A year will go by before I'm free of this
chazerei
. Ah, well, better to have the storm break, the rotten tree fall. At last it's over. I'm free. Or maybe I
will
be. Someday.

NOTEBOOK

15 August 1952

Deluged by the mess Aaron left by dying. Caring for him had swallowed up my life again, but now I am enraged at him for engulfing me by dying, for being indifferent to the possibility of leaving Sally fatherless. He wants to take away my precious time. He wants to eat up my life, even from the grave! But in the wee hours of the morning, I am writing, writing with the wind at my back, as if the angel of death—
the malech
ha-movis—
were pursuing me. And he
is
! Mama and Papa have taken Sally to Beverly Hills with them for the summer. We have not yet told her her daddy is dead. Hannah has gone with them. And I am here in the unearthly peace of the white shoji screens and raked sand garden, trying to make sense of the life I have lived so far, a woman in the dead middle of the century, traveling, as if on a train, back to Paris in the thirties and forward toward the future, the millennium, the end of the century, when I shall be old.