On Tuesdays, They Played Mah Jongg (10 page)

The man she winked at earlier leaned over to her table and lit her cigarette.

~~~~~

When Michael finished telling the story, he waited for a reaction.

“That was an interesting story, Michael,” the doctor said as he took off his glasses and looked up from his notes. “However, I don’t see how it is disturbing.”

Michael did not say anything, as he smiled at the doctor, who continued, “I mean it is unusual for a woman’s husband to have an affair with her goddaughter, but not earth shattering …” He stopped. Then he muttered to himself, “Sapperstein … Sapperstein.” He then put his glasses back on and flipped through his notes and asked Michael, “Was Myra Rona’s daughter?”

“Morton’s, too,” Michael answered.

10

Hannah was sitting at the kitchen table, looking down as she read the morning paper. There were a half empty cup of coffee and an ashtray to her left. Her left elbow rested on the table, and her left hand was next to her head with a lit cigarette and a dangerous length of ash. Whenever she smoked, ashes ended up everywhere. Her hair was in curlers, and she was wearing a velvet turquoise bathrobe with matching fuzzy slippers. She was also wearing no makeup …

~~~~~

“OK, I know it is cliché, Dr. Mikowsky, the turquoise robe, curlers and fuzzy slippers, but that is how she looked in the morning,” Michael said. “It was the one time of day she did not wear makeup.”

After a few sessions of Michael telling the story, Dr. Mikowsky was finally comfortable enough to interrupt his patient without fear of having him shut down and not finish. However, there were a couple of lingering issues. The screenplay was never finished. What if there is no end to the story? This breakthrough could go on for years. Michael could take the ending to his grave. He could have a fear of finishing the story.

“Alright, then a velvet turquoise bathrobe and matching slippers it is,” Dr. Mikowsky acquiesced to Michael. His mind then gave rise to another part of Michael’s story that disturbed him. Michael was telling the story as if he were there watching everything unfold. Could he be making it all up? As a therapist, Dr. Mikowsky knew it was not unusual for a patient to exaggerate and stretch the truth or even to lie outright. How could he find out whether this was the truth or not? So, in an unusual move for Dr. Mikowsky, he decided to take a break from listening to the story and ask Michael a few questions in order to clear up some of these issues.

“Michael, were you away at school during most of the time all this was happening?” the doctor asked him.

“Yes, until I graduated in May 1985, why?” Michael responded as he gave the doctor a puzzled look.

“It just seems that you were privy to conversations and situations that only an eyewitness could recount,” Dr. Mikowsky observed. He waited, for he knew he would either get a defensive or an irrational response.

Michael knew why the doctor was asking, for he himself wondered if the doctor would believe any of this story.

“I have always asked a lot of questions and had an almost too perfect memory,” Michael said. “Being the only gay child, or shall I say out-gay child, of my mother and her friends, the girls tended to confide in me more than anyone else. Let’s just say I had an inside track. They would tell me things they would not tell each other, their husbands or their own children. Since I really did not have many friends growing up, I was always with my mother and her friends, and this enabled me to become like one of them.”

This was not the answer Dr. Mikowsky expected, although it was a new insight into Michael’s rarely discussed childhood.

“That is interesting,” Dr. Mikowsky said, “Do you find that shaped who you are?”

“Definitely,” Michael answered, “It made me into a middle-aged Jewish woman before I turned 20, and it became the basis for everything I wrote at the start of my career. There was one drawback though.”

“What was that?” the doctor asked.

“My mother’s friends really liked me … they loved me … but for some reason that really bothered my mother,” Michael continued. “At times, she would get angry if I ran into her friends and would have lunch or just sit and talk with them. She was always worried about what I was saying to them, and she would become quite outraged at times.”

“Did the anger make you stop being friends with these women?”

“No. At that point, I started to confirm something I suspected for years but always denied,” Michael said.

“What was that?” the doctor asked realizing this was the most Michael had opened up about his mother.

“My mother never liked me,” Michael answered.

Michael had never said his mother never liked him. He had once told of the occasional verbal abuse and his feelings of inadequacy as she never encouraged him and displayed classic narcissistic behaviors, but this was startling. Here he was, telling the story of this woman and her friends, and one of the characters is someone who he believes never liked him — his own mother.

Dr. Mikowsky bit on his pencil eraser as he decided to pursue this subject even further. “Do you think your mother loved you, Michael?”

“I think my mother loved me because she was supposed to, but I don’t think she cared about me. She only cared about one person — herself,” Michael answered.

“Did you love your mother?”

“Yes, and I wanted her love back. More than anything, I wanted her to love me and to like me,” Michael said as he started to cry.

Dr. Mikowsky handed him a box of tissues and watched Michael, who for the first time since he took him on as a patient, cried.

Michael’s crying had intensified as he shook and yelled, “How can a mother not like her own child? Why? I never got in trouble. I didn’t do drugs. I followed all the rules. Why did she hate me?” He pleaded.

Hate. Dr. Mikowsky knew he was in uncharted territory with Michael. But Hate? Michael never used the word hate when describing anyone’s feelings, but now, he went from his mother not liking him to his mother hating him. Dr. Mikowsky felt inadequate for the first time since he took Michael on as a patient. Michael was always loyal, always on time, always paying in full, always dependable, always putting the magazine back exactly as he found it and always with his emotions in check. Now, his favorite patient was falling apart in front of him, and he knew that if he did not respond appropriately, what little progress there was so far could be lost.

Michael continued to cry as he leaned forward, reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He handed Dr. Mikowsky the check for the day’s session and got up to leave.

“Michael, wait,” the doctor pleaded.

“I have to go,” he said between sobs, “Don’t worry, I will be back on Tuesday. Just let me go for now.”

He left.

Dr. Mikowsky sat in his chair staring at the door Michael just closed behind him. He was convinced more than ever that this story was more disturbing than Michael wanted to reveal.

~

The following Tuesday, Michael arrived on time.

Dr. Mikowsky asked if Michael wanted to talk some more about what happened during the previous session, but Michael asked if he could continue the story.

The doctor acquiesced reluctantly.

~~~~~

While Hannah was reading the paper that morning, the phone rang. She glanced at the clock and saw that it was a few minutes after 8:00 am. It rang again, and she got up slowly to answer it.

“Hello? Hello?” The voice on the other end was inaudible, so she hung up, figuring it was a prank. She resumed her position at the table and turned a page of the newspaper. As she went to pick up the cigarette, she noticed it had burned out completely and was nothing but a long ash, so she lit another Eve. The phone rang again. “Oh for Pete’s sake,” she said as she slowly got up to answer it again.

“Who the hell is this?” she yelled into the phone. And again, the caller strained to speak, but this time Hannah thought she recognized the voice on the other end.

“Hello?” she shouted into the phone, and the caller faintly said, “Hannah.” She knew who it was.

“Florence … Florence … what is the matter? Are you sick? Say something.”

The phone went dead.

Hannah started to panic as she dialed. “Pick up, dammit!” she yelled. “Rona, thank God you are still home … It is Florence, I think she has mixed up her medications again, I am going over there right now … No, I didn’t call an ambulance … They will just lock her up … Listen, I will meet you over there … Call Arlene and Doreen.”

Hannah immediately rushed upstairs, changed into a pair of jeans and a red T-shirt and when she returned to the kitchen to get her pocket book, she was dressed and in full makeup, and it only took her ten minutes. She ran to the front door, and when she looked in the mirror in the foyer, she realized she forgot to take out her curlers.

“The hell with it,” she thought, “I will take them out in the car.”

Hannah rang the bell and knocked on the door of Florence’s condo for what seemed like ten minutes before Florence answered the door. The first thing Hannah noticed was Florence’s pale appearance. Her hair was matted down to her head. She had perspired through her nightgown and looked as if she could die any minute.

“Come on, Florence, let’s get you into a cold shower and sober you up,” Hannah yelled at her.

“I am sober,” Florence responded weakly.

Hannah turned around and looked closely at Florence and was not convinced. “Florence, this is Hannah, you can tell me. What did you take?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

Rona opened the front door and entered Florence’s home with Arlene and Doreen right behind her. “OK, first let’s make a pot of coffee … Hannah, what did she take?” Rona barked.

“Nothing,” Hannah said and shrugged her shoulders as she looked at Rona, Doreen and Arlene.

“Nothing?” Doreen said. “Look at her.”

“She looks awful,” Arlene confirmed, “Florence, what have you done?”

The women circled poor Florence, who apparently could not convince her friends that she took nothing, but she gave it another try.

“I have not had a drink, I have not taken a pill, and I have not taken as much as an aspirin in over four days,” she said.

“Oh my God,” the four of them said in unison.

Florence Friedman Greenberg Mirmelstein Einstein Kennof was sober for the first time in almost 40 years. Not even an aspirin had passed through her lips.

The girls had never seen Florence sober, at least not really sober. She took pills to go to sleep, pills to get up, pills to get through the day, and when she did not take pills, she occasionally drank.

Up until the past few months, she was never sloppy, never drunk or doped up, just slightly numb. When she threw up on Karl Stein at Doreen’s dinner party, she knew she had a real problem. Florence was always in control, or at least she convinced herself she was, but her body could no longer handle the abusive combination of prescription tranquilizers, painkillers and amphetamines anymore. She even started drinking more heavily after her last divorce.

Florence first started taking tranquilizers in the 1940s to calm her nerves during her first marriage. Taking tranquilizers was very common those days. All of the girls took prescription painkillers, muscle relaxers and tranquilizers at some point. Hannah took prescription diet pills for years calling them “water pills.” But, it was Florence who grew dependent. Florence’s medicine cabinet was filled with every color pill an apothecary could imagine, and she never hid it from anyone. The girls always whispered to each other about Florence’s pill popping, but they did little to stop it. They figured they were all prescriptions and perfectly legal, so it was not their place to intervene.

Florence walked between Rona and Hannah, breaking the circle, and she made her way toward the bathroom. The girls looked at each other and soon followed her. They found Florence standing in front of the medicine cabinet, which was open and lined with all her bottles. Although they had seen the pill bottles in her purse and occasionally on the bathroom sink, they had never seen the shelves in the medicine cabinet. At the sight of the neatly lined up pill bottles, their mouths popped open.

Ironically, I always knew about the medicine cabinet. When I was little and I would spend the night at her house in Hampton, she would instruct me as to which pills to retrieve from the medicine cabinet before she could even get out of bed. I can still remember her saying, “Bring me two of the blue and white capsules, one of the pink ones, and a glass of water.”

There were also the toe exercises she had to perform to get the blood circulating in order to step out of the bed without getting dizzy and fainting. I had actually tried this myself, and it worked.

The girls’ shock at the sight of the pills was unbelievable. I figured they regularly went through each other’s medicine cabinets. I guess I was wrong — or they were putting on an act to convince Florence they never looked in
her
medicine cabinet.

“You take all those pills?” Rona asked.

“How do you keep track?” Doreen inquired.

“What are they all for?” Arlene wanted to know.

“I wanted all of you to be here when I flushed them down the toilet,” Florence said as she reached for a bottle.

With each bottle, she announced what the pills were for before opening the bottle and pouring its contents into the toilet, and the girls watched with pride and a bit too much fascination.

“These are for getting up … going to sleep … tension,” she began, “headaches … lack of appetite … too much appetite … muscle aches … hypertension … low blood pressure … sluggishness … hot flashes …”