Just As I Thought (6 page)

Unfortunately, science and literature had turned against her. What use was my accumulating affection when the brains of the opposition included her son the doctor and her son the novelist? Because of them, she never even had a chance at the crown of apple pie awarded her American-born sisters and accepted by them when they agreed to give up their powerful pioneer dispositions.

What is wrong with the world? the growing person might have asked. The year was 1932 or perhaps 1942. Despite the worldwide fame of those years, the chief investigator into human pain is looking into his own book of awful prognoses. He looks up. Your mother, probably, he says.

As for me, I was not paying attention. I missed the mocking campaign.

*   *   *

The mother sits on a box, an orange crate. She talks to her friend, who also sits on an orange crate. They are wearing housedresses, flowered prints, large, roomy, unbelted, sleeveless. Each woman has a sweater on her lap, for coolness could arrive on an after-supper breeze and remain on the street for the summer night.

The first mother says, Ellie, after thirty you notice it? the years fly fast.

Oh, it’s true, says the second mother.

I am so shocked by this sentence that I fall back against the tenement, breathing hard. I think, Oh! Years! The next sentence I remember is said about twenty minutes later.

Ellie, I’ll tell you something, if you don’t want to have so many children, don’t sleep in a nightgown, sleep in pajamas, you’re better off.

Sometimes even that doesn’t help, says the second mother.

This is certainly an important sentence, I know. It is serious, but they laugh.

*   *   *

Summer night in the East Bronx. The men are inside playing pinochle. The men are sleeping, are talking shop. They have gone to see if Trotsky is still sitting on a bench in Crotona Park. The street is full of mothers who have run out of the stuffy house to look for air, and they are talking about my life.

At three o’clock in the autumn afternoon, the American-born mother opens the door. She says there is no subject that cannot be discussed with her because she was born in this up-to-date place, the U.S.A. We have just learned several words we believe are the true adult names of the hidden parts of our bodies, the parts that are unnameable. (Like God’s name, says a brother just home from Hebrew school. He is smacked.) The American-born mother says those are the worst words of all, never to use them or think of them, but to always feel free to talk to her about anything else.

The Russian-born mother has said on several occasions that there are no such words in Russian.

At 3:45 the Polish-born mother stands at the kitchen table, cutting fine noodles out of dough. Her face is as white as milk, her skin is so fine you would think a Polish count had married an English schoolmistress to make a lady-in-waiting for Guinevere. You would think that later in life, of course.

One day an aunt tells us the facts, which are as unspeakable as the names of the body’s least uncovered places. The grandfather of the Polish mother was a fair-haired hooligan. He waited for Easter. Through raging sexual acts on the body of a girl, his grief at the death of God might be modulated—transformed into joy at His Resurrection.

When you’re home alone, lock the door double, said the milky Polish mother, the granddaughter of the fair hooligan.

On Saturday morning, at home, all the aunt-mothers are arguing politics. One is a Zionist, one is a Communist, one is a Democrat. They are very intelligent and listen to lectures at Cooper Union every week. One is a charter member of the ILGWU. She said she would leave me her red sash. She forgot, however. My friend and I listen, but decide to go to the movies. The sight of us at the door diverts their argument. Are you going out? Did you go to the bathroom first? they cry. We mean, did you go for
everything?
My friend and I say yes, but quietly. The married aunt with one child says, The truth, be truthful. Did you go? Another aunt enters the room. She has been talking to my own mother, the woman in whose belly I gathered flesh and force and became me. She says, There’s real trouble in the world, leave the children alone. She has just come to the United States and has not yet been driven mad by all the requirements for total health and absolute sanitation.

That night, my grandmother tells a story. She speaks the common language of grandmothers—that is, not a word of English. She says, He came to me from the north. I said to him, No, I want to be a teacher. He said, Of course, you should. I said, What about children? He said, No, not necessarily children. Not so many, no more than two. Why should there be? I liked him. I said, All right.

There were six. My grandmother said, You understand this story. It means, make something of yourself.

That’s right, says an aunt, the one who was mocked for not having married, whose beauty, as far as the family was concerned, was useless, because no husband ever used it.

And another thing, she said, I just reminded myself to tell you. Darling, she said, I know you want to go to the May Day parade with your friends, but you know what? Don’t carry the flag. I want you to go. I didn’t say you don’t go. But don’t carry the flag. The one who carries the flag is sometimes killed. The police go crazy when they see that flag.

I
had
dreamed of going forth with a flag—the American flag on July 4, the red flag of the workers on May Day. How did the aunt know this? Because I know you inside out, she said, since you were born. Aren’t you
my
child, too?

The sister-mother is the one who is always encouraging. You can do this, you can get an A, you can dance, you can eat squash without vomiting, you can write a poem. But a couple of years later, when love and sex struck up their lively friendship, the sister was on the worried mother’s side, which was the sad side, because that mother would soon be dying.

One evening I hear the people in the dining room say that the mother is going to die. I remain in the coat closet, listening. She is not going to die soon, I learn. But it will happen. One of the men at the table says that I must be told. I must not be spoiled. Others disagree. They say I have to go to school and do my homework. I have to play. Besides, it will be several years.

I am not told. Thereafter I devote myself to not having received that knowledge. I see that my mother gazes sadly at me, not reproachfully, but with an anxious look, as I wander among the other mothers, leaning on their knees, writing letters, making long phone calls. She doesn’t agree with their politics, what will become of mine? Together with the aunts and grandmother she worked to make my father strong enough and educated enough so he could finally earn enough to take care of us all. She was successful. Despite this labor, time has passed. Her life is a known closed form. I understand this. Does she? This is the last secret of all. Then for several years, we are afraid of each other. I fear her death. She is afraid for my life.

*   *   *

Of which fifty years have passed, much to my surprise. Using up the days and nights in a lively manner, I have come to the present, daughter of mothers and mother to a couple of grown-up people. They have left home. What have I forgotten to tell? I have told them to be kind. Why? Because my mother was. I have told them when they drop a nickel (or even a shirt) to leave it for the gleaners. It says so in the Bible and I like the idea. Have I told them to always fight for mass transportation and not depend on the auto? Well, they know that. Like any decent kids of Socialist extraction, they can spot the oppressor smiling among the oppressed. Take joy in the struggle against that person, that class, that fact. It’s very good for the circulation; I’m sure I said that. Be brave, be truthful, but do they know friendship first, competition second, as the Chinese say? I did say, Better have a trade, you must know something to be sure of when times are hard, you don’t know what the Depression was like, you’ve had it easy. I’ve told them everything that was said
to
me or
near
me. As for the rest, there is ordinary place and terrible time—aunts, grandparents, neighbors, all my pals from the job, the playground and the PTA. It is on the occasion of their one hundred thousandth bicentennial that I have recalled all those other mothers and their histories.

—1975

Like All the Other Nations

I want to read this story to you first and then I want to say a few things. This is called “A Midrash on Happiness”; I don’t think this is really a midrash, but I called it that.

*   *   *

What she meant by happiness, she said, was the following: she meant having (or having had) (or continuing to have) everything. By everything she meant, first, the children, then a dear person to live with, preferably a man, but not necessarily (by live with, she meant for a long time, but not necessarily). Along with and not in preferential order, she required three or four best women friends to whom she could tell every personal fact and then discuss on the widest, deepest, and most hopeless level the economy, the constant, unbeatable, cruel war economy, the slavery of the American worker to the idea of that economy, the complicity of male people in the whole structure, the dumbness of men (including her preferred man) on this subject. By dumbness, she meant everything dumbness has always meant: silence and stupidity. By silence, she meant refusal to speak; by stupidity, she meant refusal to hear. For happiness, she required women to walk with. To walk in the city arm in arm with a woman friend (as her mother had with aunts and cousins so many years ago) was just plain essential. Oh! those long walks and intimate talks, better than standing alone on the most admirable mountain or in the handsomest forest or hay-blown field (all of which were certainly splendid occupations for the wind-starved soul). More important even (though maybe less sweet because of age) than the old walks with boys she’d walked with as a girl, that nice bunch of worried left-wing boys who flew (always slightly handicapped by that idealistic wing) into a dream of paid-up mortgages with a small room for opinion and solitude in the corner of home. Oh, do you remember those fellows, Ruthy?

Remember? Well, I’m married to one.

But she had, Faith continued, democratically tried walking in the beloved city with a man, but the effort had failed since from about that age—twenty-seven or -eight—he had felt an obligation, if a young woman passed, to turn abstractedly away, in the middle of the most personal conversation, or even to say confidentially, Wasn’t she something?—or clasping his plaid shirt, at the heart’s level, Oh my God! The purpose of this: perhaps to work a nice quiet appreciation into thunderous heartbeat as he had been taught on pain of sexual death.

For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table. By work to do, she included the important work of raising children righteously up. By righteously, she meant that along with being useful and speaking truth to the community, they must do no harm. By harm, she meant not only personal injury to the friend the lover the co-worker the parent (the city the nation) but also the stranger; she meant particularly the stranger in all her or his difference, who, because we were strangers in Egypt, deserves special goodness for life, or at least until the end of strangeness. By bread on the table, she meant no metaphor but truly bread, as her father had ended every single meal with a hunk of bread. By hunk, she was describing one of the attributes of good bread.

Suddenly she felt she had left out a couple of things: love. Oh yes, she said, for she was talking, talking all this time, to patient Ruth, and they were walking for some reason in a neighborhood where she didn’t know the children, the pizza places, or the vegetable markets. It was early evening and she could see lovers walking along Riverside Park with their arms around one another, turning away from the sun, which now sets among the new apartment houses of New Jersey, to kiss. Oh, I forgot, she said, now that I notice, Ruthy I think I would die without love. By love, she probably meant she would die without being
in
love. By
in
love, she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs’ longing for more and more breath in the presence of that friend, or nearly drowned to the knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years.

Oh sure, love. I think so, too, sometimes, said Ruth, willing to hear Faith out since she had been watching the kissers, too, but I’m really not so sure. Nowadays it seems like pride, I mean overweening pride, when you look at the children and think we don’t have time to do much (by time, Ruth meant both her personal time and the planet’s time). When I read the papers and hear all this boom-boom bellicosity, the guys outdaring each other, I see we have to change it all—the world—without killing it absolutely—without killing it, that’ll be the trick the kids’ll have to figure out. Until that begins, I don’t understand happiness—what you mean by it.

Then Faith was ashamed to have wanted so much and so little all at the same time—to be so easily and personally satisfied in this terrible place, when everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth’s nation-states—hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all. So for all these conscientious and technical reasons, Faith was ashamed. It was clear that happiness could not be worthwhile, with so much conversation and so little revolutionary change. Of course, Faith said, I know all that. I do, but sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world.