Mother Daughter Me (28 page)

“Well, I’ll leave you to your stomach flu,” she says, and goes back to bed.

I know I’m in for a bad night. I fall into a deep sleep, only to be awakened by the second wave. My gastrointestinal tract is now a thing unto itself, the rest of my body incidental. And so it goes, hour after hour, well after I have given the toilet all I have to offer.

By dawn, the worst of the emetic crisis seems to have passed. I feel so depleted that I’m a blank slate, ready for life to begin anew. But the entire episode has left me too weak to sit up. I lie in bed and wait for the rest of the house to stir. At 7:00
A.M.
Zoë pokes her head into my room to ascertain that I survived the night, then leaves for school. I send a text to my friend Carolyn, a primary-care doctor, who calls in a prescription for an antinausea medication. She offers to make a house call, but I warn her away. “This thing is evil.”

Besides, I don’t want Carolyn. And I don’t want Bob. I want my mother.

I keep waiting, and by 8:00
A.M.
I finally detect sounds of her downstairs. I hear her walk across the kitchen floor, turn on the burner under
the teakettle, put a few stray dishes away, and open the dishwasher, preparing to empty it. I pick up my cellphone and call her separate home line. I hear her walk to the phone in the front hallway.

My voice is so weak it alarms her, and she comes straight up to see me, bad knee be damned. She feels my forehead (a mother’s instinct) and goes to the pharmacy to fill the prescription that Carolyn had called in. She returns with not only the prescription but ice cubes and ginger ale. I’m dehydrated but also weak, and I suck on the ice cubes while slowly sipping the ginger ale.

My mother becomes my Florence Nightingale. She rushes home from her continuing education class to minister to me, hover at my bedside, replenish the Canada Dry once it’s gone, and give me another antinausea pill. Can I eat anything? Oh, God, no. By the late afternoon, I’m sitting up in bed, quickly regaining strength. My gratitude to my mother is immense.

By the next day, I have recovered enough to go with my mother to a session with Lia, whom we’ve been seeing roughly every other week since October. Each visit has become a trial. Now that we have launched the plan to live apart, we are no longer working on the practical issues that had brought us into therapy in the first place. But since that session early on, when I broke down and talked about the prelude to my mother’s loss of custody, instead of closing the door on those memories again I’ve wanted to wedge it open just a bit more. Now, in the safe haven of Lia’s office, I am trying to get my mother to hear a little more about what happened during those periods in our past that are a complete blank to her.

Somehow we get onto the topic of money—who paid for what when Sarah and I were children. Once the subject is introduced, my mother sees an opening to what might have been at the top of her agenda for this session all along.

She turns directly to me and says, “I feel like the only reason you asked me to come to San Francisco was for my money.”

I’m flabbergasted, but before I have a chance to collect my thoughts, Lia jumps in. “You’re sure about this?” she asks.

“Oh, yes. I know exactly; I can call every shot. I’ve been holding it
in for the last six and a half months.” Her voice has taken on a small childlike quality, with a lisp.

“You’ve done something huge just now, Helen,” Lia says. “You were able to come in and say something, open up, to give yourself permission to say it.”

While my mother sits quietly, taking in the “attagirl” for her courageous comment, I’m thinking that if ever there was a wrong time for “good for you for expressing your feelings” therapy blabber, this is it.

I sit in stony silence, my mind racing. Her money? Assuming she’ll live well into her eighties, she has barely enough to last until then. Had I wanted her money, I never would have suggested she move to one of the most expensive cities in the world. In fact, I’d never have allowed her to leave San Diego and
Norm’s
money. I’d have told her to strap the poor demented man to a chair, not let him out of her sight, and get a restraining order on his daughter. And the
Playboy
s? Who knows? Maybe they were worth something. Maybe the Marilyn Monroe issue was in that stack.

Now Lia is asking me to respond. But my mother’s accusation feels so egregiously beyond the pale that I’m stunned into speechlessness. I don’t know how to take the charge in, much less respond to it.

Instead of saying what the impact of my mother’s words has been, instead of expressing my outrage, perhaps because the emotion is so intense—and so frightening—I do my best to strike a measured tone. “I’m not sure where you’re getting this,” I say, my voice quiet but steely. “Maybe you sense that I feel a need for compensation.” In case there’s any doubt about what I mean by needing compensation, I remind them that I had been left to myself as a child, and had largely worked my way through college.

Money is a subject that has come up with Lia before, but never in such an explosive way. Over the past months Lia has warned us that every adult child with an elderly parent runs into it, often in the context of a tiff over a family heirloom. Now, trying to take the tension down a few notches, she explains that while family fights may seem to be over money, the subtext is almost always about power and control. Elderly people, in particular, she says, often feel that they are losing control and can become very—and she chooses her next word carefully—“sensitive,”
in place of the word I am sure she means, which is “paranoid.”

My mother’s accusation about my motive for bringing her to San Francisco is preposterous, but it’s also a symptom—of dashed hopes. Both of us had held on to a belief that everything would be just fine once she got to San Francisco, partly because of our “best friends” fantasy, which was built on wishful thinking and mythology. Now I see that we needed physical distance for our fantasy of closeness to work. Once the relationship was put to the test of reality, it was doomed to failure.

Our time is nearly up, but Lia isn’t about to let us walk out the door with all these emotionally charged particulates floating freely in the air. She takes a stab at closure, giving voice to the idea that my mother and I are both stuck in our respective childhoods, replaying old hurts and grudges that torment us still. Nice try, but Lia’s diplomacy strikes me as ludicrous in the face of my mother’s all-bets-are-off statement of ten minutes earlier. And my mother doesn’t have much use for it either.

“I’m sure I did terrible damage to my children,” she responds instantly, “but all that is almost half a century ago, and I can’t go back and hear the horror stories. I carry my own stories, but I don’t want to go into those stories either.”

“Well, ideally, if you were able to really open up about your own bad story—”

My mother cuts her off. “I know my bad story, and there’s not a damned thing I can do to change it.”

With that tip of her hat to the Serenity Prayer, my mother is out of her chair and through the door. The session is over. I look at Lia and she looks at me. I follow after my mother and drive her home, where we retreat to our separate quarters.

The next day, I’m still livid but I try to be polite, as does my mother, who goes on as if nothing had happened in Lia’s office. Perhaps now that she’s said her piece, she’s feeling unburdened and ready to move on. That afternoon she asks if I’d like to take a walk down to the grocery store. We begin by making small talk, but halfway into our ten-minute journey, she says, “More than love me, I want you to like me.”

At this moment, she is asking too much. Do I like this woman, the one who just accused me of wanting her in my life for nothing more than her money? Do I find likable this person who has misread my motives so profoundly that she is causing me pain that feels almost physical? I feel that I owe her my love and my sympathy—she’s my mother, after all. But do I like her? I stay silent.

———

T
HE SURPRISE PARTY FOR BOB’S FATHER IS AT THE COUNTRY CLUB
in Boca West, a 1,400-acre subdivision of Boca Raton. It’s the quintessential well-to-do Jewish retiree community, Long Island shifted 1,200 miles south, complete with palm trees, fake waterfalls, four golf courses, three dozen tennis courts, and bountiful flower beds. It’s the land of the early-bird special, a place where people begin plotting their next meal before they’ve finished their last. Bob, of course, reminds me that on
Seinfeld
, Jerry’s parents lived in an ersatz Boca West, called “Del Boca Vista.”

The country club is sprawling and opulent. The preparations for the party have been elaborate, and Bernice, Bob’s mother, has managed to keep everything a well-guarded secret. When we get there, an hour before the couple is supposed to show up for “lunch at the club,” guests are already mingling. Many have flown in from far-flung places to celebrate with these people whom they love so much.

At the club, a crowd of nearly a hundred friends gathers, and when
Bob’s father, Murray, enters the room, only to see people from all eras of his long life standing there, his brief moment of shock turns to delight and then to what Bob tells me later is a typical Murray reaction. His eyes settle on his wife, with a “how did you pull this off?” look, then he says to her, “Who’s paying for this?”

To get the entertainment part of the celebration started, Bob sings the song he wrote—Murray’s life set to the tune of “If I Were a Rich Man” from
Fiddler on the Roof
. Each of Bob’s sisters, Andrea and Lori, speaks, and Lori shows a video montage she put together, with footage from family movies going back many decades: Murray and Bernice in the Catskills with their parents, Ida, Jack, Adele, and Julius; Bernice glowing while very pregnant with Bob; Murray horsing around with his young children and doing his best imitation of Wild Bill Hickok, twirling a fake revolver; Brandy the collie pulling three-year-old Bob on a tricycle; and finally Murray and Bernice with their five grandchildren.

By the end, guests are wiping tears from their eyes. I met Bernice and Murray an hour ago, and I’m crying too. Bob has told me how untroubled his childhood was, but it isn’t until I’m here, taking all of this in, that I truly understand what he means. It’s the generational continuity that gets to me—the a priori assumption that, as your own parents did for you, your most important role in life is to make a world for your children, that you are the weight-bearing pillar for these young lives.

I know better than to get too starry-eyed. Even in this family there have been resentments over time, conflict and subterfuge. One of Murray’s brothers, for example, isn’t here—they haven’t spoken for years. And Bernice’s relationship with her sister is strained. But it’s a family as cohesive as any I’ve encountered, a Jewish version of Matt’s. I’m already pleased to have come, and I know the entire trip has been worth it when I see Murray dancing with his youngest grandchild, fourteen-year-old Amanda. In a private moment I happen to catch, she looks up at her beaming grandfather and mouths the words “I love you.”

Family friends lavish attention on Bob, the Big Successful Doctor. As much as Bob enjoys the adoration, which keeps him busy conversing with his parents’ friends, I also sense a protective eye on Zoë and me. He must be keeping us in his peripheral vision, because he knows where to
find us at all times: Every ten minutes or so he appears at my side and places an arm around my shoulder.

Given what has just happened back in San Francisco, I find myself thinking about Bob’s family and how
they
are about money. I can tell that they like having it. In Bob’s parents’ circle—upwardly mobile second-generation Jewish immigrants from the New York area—the signs of success in life are your wealth and your kids’ accomplishments. Murray did well in the women’s clothing (“schmatta” to insiders) business in New York, and Bob has told me that his father talks about money constantly but has never taken it very seriously and certainly never used it as a bludgeon. Bob grew up assuming that there would always be enough money to go around and that his parents used it as a means to an end, which was the happiness of the people they loved.

At one point during the festivities, Zoë turns to me and asks, “Mom, what do you think Grandma Helen would do in a situation like this?” My daughter may be a stranger to all of this, but what she sees is a loving, connected family that radiates warmth and humor. What my mother would see is a collection of well-to-do Florida Jews who are nothing like the well-to-do Florida Jews who spawned the likes of her father, the famous physicist. Many of the guests have been in the same circle for fifty-five years, and many were the first generation to attend college, or even high school. Bernice and Murray have one semester of college between them. These are self-made people who live for their families, enjoy their lives, complain about their ailments, and eat their meals at the country club. “Sweetie,” I say to Zoë, “I have no idea.”

WHEN WE RETURN FROM
Florida, my mother is in the throes of preparing for the move to her new apartment. She has scheduled it for the end of March, and Cheryl is flying up from San Diego to help with both ends of the move.

The Steinway is a hulking presence in the living room, untouched and unmentioned.

My mother and I need a break from the tension that has poisoned the air between us ever since our session at Lia’s. And since boxes from
Amazon have been arriving at an unprecedented clip—two or three a day, filled with coffee mugs and canisters, dishes and a dish drainer, and numerous other kitchen items for her new apartment—I hit on the idea of driving across the bay to Ikea. The store contains everything she could possibly need, most of it far less expensive than anything she will find on Amazon. It also seems like the perfect field trip, one we will both enjoy. I suggest the outing, and my mother’s face lights up.