Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  Scotch-taped to my mother’s scrapbook is a thumb-sized lavender picture viewer, which, when you look through the eyehole and hold it up to a light, magnifies a tiny picture of her and Jacob Fish on New Year’s Eve at a big hotel in the Catskills. On the outside of the viewer is printed in gold script, “Kiamesha Lake, N.Y.,” and there is a small gold chain attached to it, so you can hang it somewhere or twirl it around your fingers. Inside of it, when you peer through, my mother is standing next to Jacob Fish, both done up like prom royalty, my mother in a strapless apricot dancing gown, her hair piled up on top of her head, fastened with pins and one pale rose, and Jacob Fish, short and tow-headed, just about her height, with a navy blue bow tie, a kindness and graciousness in his face, which, I can tell, made my mother happy, made her smile, timelessly holding his arm in the little lavender capsule.

  Saturdays were motherless—she went in to Crasden to shop—and my father would sometimes make pancakes and play cards with us: “Go Fish” and “War.” Sometimes he would do tricks: we would pick a card and he wouldn’t know what it was and then we would put it back in the deck, which he would shuffle, cut, make piles, rows, and columns with, and eventually he would find our card. All his card tricks were variations of this. Sometimes it seemed that we were the ones to find it ourselves, as when we held the deck and he’d karate-chop it, the sole remaining card in our hand being, miraculously, the one we had chosen. “Aw, how’dya do that?” James would want to know and he would grab the cards and try to figure it out as my father put on an exaggerated, enigmatic smile, shrugged his shoulders, folded his arms. “I’ll never tell, will I, Lynnie?” My dad would wink at me.

  I never wanted to know. It was enough to sit in the living room in my pajamas and smell pancakes and be reassured that my father was special. To discover or expose the wheels and pulleys behind the tricks, I knew, would be to blacken Saturdays and undo my father. If his talents, his magic, his legerdemain, didn’t remain inimitable, unknowable, if they weren’t protected and preserved, what could he possibly be, to us, for us, what could he do?

  A picture of Mom and Jacob Fish on a beach. Mom’s one-piece is black like her hair and the water is gray and the sand is white. There are buckets, a small shovel, and a blanket. Jacob Fish holds a fistful of sand over Mom’s head. She laughs with her eyes closed, a momentary shutting out, the only way sometimes one can laugh.

  The fall I turned ten, my father played Billy Bigelow in the Crasden Playhouse production of Carousel. Halfway through the show Billy Bigelow sings a song about his plans for his child to be, warbling through a lilting list of parental love promises. My mother brought us to the Sunday afternoon rehearsals (the real performance was too late for us, she said) and sat stiff and pinched through that song, staring narrowly at my father as he walked through it, following the snow-haired director’s commands for the placement of his feet (“Damn it, Sam … you sing like a god, but you just can’t dance”). Off to one side two stagehands were painting a merry-go-round red and green. “Bad colors,” my mother said, shaking her head critically. A blonde woman a few seats away piped up: “Last week somebody stole all the good paint. Our budget is tight.”

  “What is beautiful is seized,” murmured my mother, and the blonde woman looked at her oddly and said, “Yeah, I guess,” and after a few minutes got up and left. Years later my mother would say to me: “That song your father sang in Carousel. What wonderful lies. He never spent time with you kids, never sang to you or took you places.”

  And when she said it, it became true. But only then, when she said it. Until then it seemed Dad was just Dad, was somehow only what he was supposed to be.

  A picture of Jacob Fish standing by a river with a suitcase in one hand and a hat in another. That was the City River, opposite the train station, my mother said. The suitcase was hers. So was the hat. He was trying to look dignified and worldly and had requested props.

  She cries, slumped over at her dressing table, and dreams that someone comes up behind her and bends down to hold her, to groan and weep into her neck with her, to turn her around and lift up her face, kiss her eyes, mouth on water, on cheek, on hair. But there is no one, just my father, sitting way across the room from her, in a white and rose upholstered chair (something later moved to my room at college, something I would sit in, stare at), an icy anger tucked behind his face, locked up like a store after hours, a face laced tight as a shoe. His arms are crossed behind his head like a man on vacation, but he is not relaxed. His features arrange themselves in straight, sharp lines.

  “Your numbness,” my mother cries softly, “is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.”

  He picks up a porcelain pill box on the lamp table, hurls and shatters it against the wall. “That’s what I have to say to you,” he says. “I won’t do your little dances.” And he walks out, slamming the door.

  I only heard parts of this. She told me the rest years later when she was dying, and I spent hours brushing and brushing her hair. She liked me to do that, always managing a smile and sinking back into her pillow. “My legs, Lynnie. Can you do my legs today, dear?” she would ask. And I’d take the Norelco razor from the nightstand drawer, pull up the covers from the foot of the bed, and glide the razor up and down her calves. She liked her legs smooth and hairless, and I think she liked the metallic friction and buzz of it. That, too, made her smile.

  A picture of my parents on bikes before they were married. They are at a gas station where they have stopped to fill up their tires with air. Mom smiles. Dad makes a goofy face, both hands on the handlebars. Both of them wear long, Jamaica-style shorts. An Esso sign behind them is missing the O. Yiddish for “eat,” my mother told me once.

  “They want to take things and destroy them,” my mother sighed the same month she died, when we were talking of our lake house, which had been sold at first to a funeral home and then bought by the federal government, who tore it down for vaguely military purposes no one ever bothered to explain.

  “They want my hair,” she said another day, winking weakly at me when a nurse came in with scissors and suggested a haircut. My mother shook her head, but the nurse’s air was insistent.

  “I don’t think she wants one,” I said, and the nurse looked at me dumbly and padded out on the soundless rubber soles those who surround the dying always wear.

  My mother coming into our room at night. My childhood sometimes simply a series of images of her swirling into the doorway, in white, over and over again, coming to hear our prayers, to sing us songs, to whisper that she loved us, to kiss me wetly on the mouth, hair dangling, making a tent in which just our faces, hers and mine, lived and breathed forever. She’d rub my nose, and James’s too, and whisper, “See you tomorrow,” and at the doorway, “Good night, my sparrows.”

  She dreams that he is trying to kill her. That he has a rifle and is calling her out of the bathroom. In the bathroom she has knives and axes. She bolts awake and he is looking at her, chilly, indifferent. “Your face,” she says. “My god. It is a murderer’s face.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he says.

  The year after Carousel was The Music Man, and the woman who played Marian the librarian used to call our house fairly regularly, purring like older women do at babies. She would ask if my Daddy was home.

  “My father’s not here,” I almost always said, even if I knew he was upstairs with lesson plans. I think of all the things I did as a child, this was the boldest.

  She would ask me to tell him that Marcia called. Sometimes I would. I’d knock on the door to his study, walk in, and say: “Marcia called. She wanted you to know.”

  And he would turn and look at me vacantly, as if he wasn’t quite sure who I was talking about, and then say, “Oh, right. About rehearsal. Thanks.” And he would turn his back to me and continue working at his desk, and I would just stand there in the doorway, staring at the back of his sweater. It seemed
when he corrected papers and things that he always wore the same Norwegian sweater: green with a chain of rectangularized gold reindeer around the top, across his back and shoulders.

  “Did you want anything else?” He would twist around again in his seat and lower his glasses.

  And I would say, “No. I mean yes.”

  “What?”

  “I forgot,” I would say, and turn and flee.

  In the wedding photos they wear white against the murky dark of trees. They are thin and elegant. They have placid smiles. The mouth of the father of the bride remains in a short, straight line. I don’t know who took these pictures. I suppose they are lies of sorts, revealing by omission, by indirection, by clues such as shoes and clouds. But they tell a truth, the only way lies can. The way only lies can.

  Another morning, I heard my parents up early in the bathroom, my dad shaving, getting ready to leave for school.

  “Look,” he sighed in a loud whisper. “I really can’t say that I’ll never leave you and the kids or that I’ll never make love to another woman—”

  “Why not?” asked my mother. “Why can’t you say that?” Even her anger was gentle, ingenuous.

  “Because I don’t feel that way.”

  “But … can’t you just say it anyway?”

  At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other’s gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning. But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, “Your father. He was in a dance. And he just couldn’t dance.” Earlier that year she had written me: “That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls—we all have a bit of that—but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.”

  These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts—a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster—but the touches and the words and the moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like a carnival huckster, giving the world a peek. They will not stay quiet. No matter how you try. No matter how you lick them. The envelopes will not stay glued.

  “Dear Mom, The extra courseload makes life hectic, but I think I’m getting used to it. Spring break is the 19th. Yikes. So much to do before I can leave. See you then.”

  When I was thirteen, my mother left rice burning on the stove and half-tried to drown herself in the lake. At seven o’clock, my father not home yet and James late at Chess Club, I stepped out the back door and called for her. It was March and the lake was not even completely melted yet—a steely slate green with a far-off whitish center, like some monstrous wound. I walked down to the dock; sometimes she went down there “for air” just before making dinner. I found her on the shore—we really had no beach, just a stoney straggle along the waterline for jogging and rock-skipping. She was on her back, her blouse soaked and transparent, her black hair plastered in strings across her face, water lapping at her like an indifferent cat. She was clutching fistfuls of gravel and smearing them across her cheeks, down the front of her body, her legs still but her mouth opening and closing noiselessly, twisted and stretched, the first of two such expressions of hers I would witness. I couldn’t move. Even years later I would see that face—in my own, in photos, in mirrors, that severely sculpted anguish moving behind mine, against mine, against my less dramatic bones and thick, squarish mouth, struggling to emerge. I cried. I didn’t know what to do. I ran back to the house, burst into the kitchen, and saw my father, who had just gotten home, scraping black smoking rice angrily from the bottom of the pan. “Mom, it’s Mom,” I panted, and pointed toward the lake. And he shouted, “What?” and hurried out and down the path.

  At eight o’clock an ambulance came and took her away. She came back, however, the next morning, looking a little pale and raccoon-eyed, trudging upstairs on my father’s arm. She glanced at me, it seemed, apologetically.

  My father spent that next day down on the dock, singing out at the lake, something Italian, a Puccini aria or something. He actually did this about twice a year while I was growing up, a way of releasing things inside of him, my mother said, in a way, he hoped, that would not disturb the neighbors (who were a quarter of a mile away on each side). Sometimes I would stare out the back-door window and be able to make out the outline of him, sometimes sitting, but more often pacing the dock cross-planks, his voice floating up toward the house. But not his school voice or his theater voice—this was something else, a throbbing, pained vibrato, like some creature that lived inside of him that he didn’t understand, that embarrassed him, that he didn’t know quite what to do with. Sometimes I would leave the house and go for a walk in the opposite direction, up past the road, through the woods, across the old train tracks. There was a boarded-up building, a small factory of some sort, and an unusable old road, bordered with ancient gaslight posts with the jets yanked from them, hollowed as skeleton eyes, and James and I both would sometimes go up there to look for berries and make up stories and dares. Dare to run to the door and back. Dare to tear off the PRIVATE PROPERTY poster. Dare to climb in the window. To touch the electric fence. To this day it remains a mystery to me what was inside the place, or what its original function was. All nailed and shuttered and papered with No TRESPASSING signs. Sometimes we swore we heard noises inside—James would call it grumbling, but I always thought of it as being like my father on the dock, blockaded and alone, singing in its strange foreign language, a need to be exploded somehow, a need to disgorge an aria over the lake. Finally some people came from the city and did blow it up. Laced it up with dynamite and blasted out its corners, its flat roof, its broken windowpanes, its black insides laid bare and smoldering in the daylight, neighbors well beyond a quarter-mile off hearing it at breakfast, kids talking about it at school, and bits of nails and plaster we found later stuck like shrapnel in the posts of the gaslights, like a war, like there had been a war.

  Another photo of my mother in her wedding dress, standing next to her mother, whose smile and hat are too big for her face; she seems vaguely eyeless, noseless. And her daughter looks not at the camera but off to one side somewhere.

  I was fifteen when my father left us and my mother had her mastectomy. Both things happened suddenly, quietly, without announcement. As if some strange wind rushed in and swept things up into it, then quickly rushed out again; it simply left what it left.

  When your parents divide, you, too, bifurcate. You cleave and bubble and break in two, live two lives, half of you crying every morning on the dock at sunrise, black hair fading to dusky gray, part of you traveling off to some other town where you teach school and tell jokes in an Italian accent in a bar and make people laugh.

  And when your mother starts to lose her mind, so do you. You begin to be afraid of people on the street. You see shapes—old men and spiders—in the wallpaper again like when you were little and sick. The moon’s reflection on the lake starts to look to you like a dead fish floating golden belly up. Ask anyone. Ask anyone whose mother is losing her mind.

  When I was sixteen, I came home from school and found my mother drunk in her bathrobe, lying flat on the coffee table in the living room, spread out on top of the magazines. She was out of control with laughter, hysterical wine-tears trickling out of the swollen slits of her eyes.

  “Mom, come upstairs. Let me put you to bed,” I said, setting down my books and helping her upstairs. She was leaning on me, still laughing helplessly. “My god,” she said. “They lopped off my breasts, can you believe it? Lopped them right—” and she made a quick motion with her hand in the air.

  I tucked her in and kissed her face and she cried into the neck of my blouse. “
I’m cold. I’m thirsty. Don’t leave me, honey. You’re warm. If you leave I’ll have to put on a sweater.”

  “Get some sleep,” I said softly, pulling up the blue quilt, drawing the blinds, standing in the doorway, just a moment, to watch her fall asleep, the lake beating like a giant watery heart against the dock.

  She takes long, silent showers, slumped against the ceramic wall, the steady jets of water bouncing off one of her shoulders, splashing against the plastic curtain, shampoo lather drizzling down into her mouth.

  “Even his I love you’s,” she said, “were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but who is incapable of a passionate confession, of melting into a sob.”

  I tuck her in. I kiss her.

  A series of pictures here of mothers and daughters switching places—women switching places to take care of one another. You, the daughter, becoming the mother, the Ceres, and she the daughter, kidnapped to hell, and you roam the earth to find her, to mourn her, leaving the trees and grain to wither, having no peace, you have no peace.