I didn’t know I was going to light a candle for my Italian grandmother until I entered the yellow sandstone church in Manarola. Strewn along the rocky cliffs of the Italian Riviera, the small fishing village was laid out like branches of a tree. As I panted up one of the snaking cobbled streets awash in a sheen of midsummer sweat, I came upon a pocket-sized piazza where the Romanesque church squatted, its massive wooden doors inviting against the beating sun. I slipped inside to the flapping of a bird’s wings overhead, the only sound in the soft breeze drifting up from the Mediterranean. For days I’d been hiking along the sea looking for answers in the calm waters. I was searching for my mother, and hoping to find myself.
Tucked away from the jagged edges of the Italian coast, I was here to try and understand why, when I was diagnosed with cancer at nineteen, my mother didn’t come to the doctor’s office in the cancer hospital to hear the result of the tests. A hospital volunteer found me wandering around the hollow blue reception area in a daze and led me to the telephone near the entrance.
"Mom, it's me," I said, bursting into tears. "He said I have tumors!" The doctor had called it Hodgkins Disease. I didn’t know what Hodgkins Disease was, but I knew tumors meant cancer. "Can I come and see you?”
"No," she said, her voice cold over the telephone wire. "I think it's better for you to go home."
Home; a place I’d been trying to find since she’d thrown me out three years earlier for not obeying her.
But during the six months I was in the hospital for surgery, recuperation, and radiation treatment, my mother came to visit almost everyday. She would draw her face close to me, peer into my eyes and exclaim, “The whites of your eyes are so white, you can’t be that sick!”
Pint-sized at five-foot-one, she would sashay over to my bed wearing white shag, bright pink lipstick and white boots with a fringe. "Here," she’d say cheerfully, her eyes vacant and glistening as she drifted over to my bed. "I brought you some tomatoes."
"Thanks," I said, feeling ashamed by my embarrassment at her looks. "That's really nice of you." I bit on the shiny red skin and sucked the juice from the pulp. The sweet liquid shot into my mouth, strewing its seeds onto my gums and down my throat. She knew tomatoes were my favorite food and I gnawed on them greedily.
Enveloped in the cool darkness of the church, I sat gazing at the pastel statues of the Virgin Mary and other saints perched inside little alcoves along the stone walls of the church. I felt a twisting in my chest, a curve in the riverbank, as I noticed the tall white candles stacked in rows beneath iron candleholders. I was brought up an atheist; my parents could never let anyone have power over them, not even God, and anything remotely akin to a spiritual world lay outside the realm of possibility. But there was something about the sanctified air of Catholic churches that flowed through me like a warm river and I went into churches whenever I could, bathing in the glow of stained glass angels in the glorious azures, roses and golds of Italy and beatific Virgin Guadalupes in Mexico. Last winter while on a short trip to Pátzcuaro, I had stood in line with Purépecha women behind the altar to place a hand on the crimson robe of Santa María de la Salud and whisper a prayer for my health, stifling the memory of my mother’s sarcastic, “Only idiots believe in God.” In the absence of religion, she and my father were to be the voice of God to us, their seven children.
“No, we’re not Catholic,” I was constantly explaining when strangers exclaimed over how many children we were. I was confused why my parents had had so many; Catholic would have been easy, allowing some tenderness to the explanation my mother gave, “Dad liked me the most when I was pregnant,” as if it were his fault, and my father’s, “Mom was bored,” as if it were hers.
When I was feeling generous, I would think that, after her own miserable childhood, my mother wanted to give herself a family. The only problem was that she needed parents, not children. Plus the fact that for women in her generation, marriage and children were the only route to economic security and a place in the world, a buoy in an otherwise fathomless sea. I imagined the larger the family, the safer the place she thought she’d have. She had wanted an even dozen, and stopped at seven only because her body gave out.
Mother, Holy Mother, hallowed be Thy name, I thought now wryly, remembering my father’s white-lipped insistence on our always addressing my mother as “Mom.” “Who’s ‘she’?” he’d say. “The cat’s dinner?”
“She” made my mother ordinary, like us. “Mom,” in his voice, asserted her divinity. At every meal, his instruction to chant, “Thank you, Mom,” was our grace. My mother would nod under her dyed black bouffant, obviously pleased with her Authority.
My mother would have laughed to see me here, gravitating towards the thin white candles, leaning against the stand to light one with another and placing it in a holder. She was an atheist but in the many cities and towns where we lived when I was growing up, she would talk about how much she loved church music and sometimes go to a church to listen to it. She even joined a church choir. Perhaps she, too, was searching for her own mother who, she said was an Italian opera singer. Her mother had died when she was a child, and she vaguely intimated it was from a stroke.
The rare times my mother spoke of her past, I would stare at her, hanging on to every word. I would try to figure out who she was, this woman who was designated God, this woman who stood so aloof and yet spoke through every cell of my body. I thought if I knew where and what she came from, I would know who she was. I would hold in my hands something real, tangible. She would be real, instead of the facade of a mother who stood before me. I would have a mother.
“My mother’s family was from the south,” she said, sometimes meaning southern Italy, other times the southern United States. The bare offerings of her childhood that I tried to stitch together quickly unraveled into no more than that, strands of loose thread leading nowhere. One day when she was ten, she said, a social worker had turned up at her class at school and removed her, along with her three sisters, whose names she said were Miriam, Irene and Regina. “They took us to a halfway house that housed prostitutes while the state figured out what to do with us,” she said, her head tilted to the side.
In one version of her story, my mother said her mother had been taken to the hospital. “I don’t think she knew we were in there,” said my mother, her eyes brown and flat. A few weeks later her mother died. My mother, the oldest, was allowed out of the halfway house with her sisters to go to the funeral. They took the subway.
My mother laughed a short laugh when she said this, a helpless, wounded sound she normally concealed under thick patches of eye shadow, a smear of garish pink lipstick reaching up to her nose, collagen and wigs. She had always masked herself, slathering her face with makeup, dyeing and curling or straightening her hair, wearing tight clothes to over-emphasize her curves when she was thin enough, baggy overthings when she wasn’t, high heels, girdles, looking like anything but what she really was. Her idol was Elizabeth Taylor and she made herself up to look like Cleopatra, never taking off her turquoise eyeshadow, fake eyelashes and red lips, her cleavage bulging under loud, floral print dresses. In my twenties she changed her name, from Lilyan to Lily Ann, whether to match the necklace she wore or because she felt separated in half, I didn’t know. I suspected it was to match the necklace and give her a Southern flair, perhaps a thin echo of her supposedly Southern mother’s past. She would tsk angrily if someone didn’t pause between the Lily and the Ann. The force of that tsk, from ever since I could remember. The sharp intake of breath, a hot explosion between her lips.
“That must have been terrible,” I said, my voice thick with her pain.
“Yeah, it was,” she said coldly. The flood swelling inside me hit a bank, tipped over to the other side, the side where my pain lay. She knew I wanted more and she wasn’t going to give it to me.
In another version of the story, she would have the same expression on her face and say, “My mother died, and then we were taken away.” She and her sisters were never allowed to go home again but instead were sent to an orphanage from which the state farmed them out to various foster homes until they came of age. According to my mother, she and her sisters were taken away because their father, “an English parson,” had a fight with the landlord.
“He was carrying groceries home and when the landlord came out and tried to get him to pay the rent, my father hit him over the head with a shopping bag,” she said with her high, breathless laugh and expressionless eyes.
Then again, she told my brother her father was Irish.
“Was he born in Ireland?” my brother asked.
“No, he never was in Ireland,” she said.
“So his parents were immigrants?”
“No, his parents never came to the States.”
“Mom,” said my brother incredulously, “How could your father be born in the States if his parents were never there?”
I could imagine the glazing over of her eyes as she answered vacantly, “Oh yes, you’re right.” My brother shut up after that to protect himself, as we all did, from her stinging anger and icy, absolute detachment.
On a tip from my sister, I found some photographs of her family once, buried in a black plastic garbage bag in her closet. They were buried along with the detritus of our childhood, old report cards, greeting cards, tattered drawings and a pile of photos of us as children stuffed into a dusty plastic bag that had held a toilet brush holder. To me, her father looked Eastern European with his pale face, downturned fleshy nose and baggy eyes, possibly Jewish.
“There’s no such thing as looking Jewish,” tutted my sister when I showed her the photo.
There was no picture of my grandmother. But I knew from one of my mother’s rare admissions that my grandmother had repeatedly tried to kill herself.
“We would come home from school and find her with rat poison on her lips,” she once confided to my sister. “Sometimes she would be standing on a table trying to hang herself.”
In the shadows cast by the faint light streaming through the story of Christ stained on the glass windows of the church, I struggled to turn my gaze inward, to imagine how my mother had felt when her mother died. I couldn’t tell if she had cried, my sister had reported there had been no tears in her eyes as she told the story, no lines of mascara running down her cheeks, no furrow in her brow indicating she had felt anything at all. There was only her slouched shoulders, the way she held her head high as if angling for the next blow, or maybe preparing to be carted away by social workers.
But why would she be afraid of that with us? We were her children.
In the dank air of the Catholic church with tears rolling down my face, surrounded by saints of women whose names I didn’t know, I told my grandmother I didn’t believe she had died of a stroke. I told her I believed she had killed herself and, even though we were in a church that disowned suicides, I was lighting a candle to pay tribute to her memory. I was lighting that candle, even if my mother never had.
Standing in front of the altar, I stuffed the three thousand lire payment into the wooden box, lifted a white candle from the pile and lit it with the flame of another already snug in the metal stand. As I held the flame to the wick, I said, “I love you, Grandma.”
I felt like an idiot. What did I know about lighting candles? But I carried on, weeping with my head hunched over the stand. In the cold, pale glow of the flame, the musty air of the church tightly squeezed into my chest, I told my grandmother how much I missed her. I told her I hardly knew anything about her, or who my mother was, and because of that, I might never know who I was.
I didn’t even know if I should have been praying to an Italian grandmother.
I couldn’t even be sure where my mother herself was from. When I asked her where she was born, she said, “I don’t remember.”
“It was New York, right?” I prodded, confident of what she had let slip years earlier.
Tsk! “You’re not going to start that again, are you?”
But it was my mother’s cruelty, not her distorted sense of reality, or silence, or even neglect or violence that hurt the most. Yes, she slapped me time and time again when I was a child, making my neck snap to the side, her bony fingers leaving their mark on my cheek, and yes, she refused to take me to the hospital when I broke one arm at two and another at four, or during all those other childhood and teenage mishaps and infections. And, yes, I did come home from nursery school at four to find my family had moved out without telling me, leaving a strange man in their place who I thought was the man she had warned me about who raped and killed little girls in our neighborhood, and her disregard for my tear-streaked face when we arrived at the new apartment. And then at seven, eight, nine, eleven and thirteen, being told we were going on vacation when we were really moving. And yes, how dirty I was all through my childhood, making my sixth grade teacher jump back in disgust at my black feet when I had to take my shoes off to be measured, and the way she drew away from me when I tried to hug her no matter what age I was, and all those countless other things, times seven children.
It wasn’t any of that. It was her look of satisfaction and self-righteousness as she kicked me in the ribs when I was ten and lying on the floor listening to the radio in a dreamy haze instead of helping her in the kitchen. It was the glee on her face as she watched my father paddling our bare toddler backsides with a hard red ping pong bat when he came home at the end of the day to punish us for the crimes she had listed, obviously enjoying our punishment. “You’re lucky you have a father,” she said, stabbing her finger in the air accusingly. And the way she stood at the door of the living room when I was a teenager while my father punched me in the abdomen and yanked my hair so hard my neck snapped back for daring to defy them and their Godly rules, her face hard and cold, eyes smouldering with hatred. Standing at the door so I couldn’t escape, her look of tight-lipped pleasure that he was throwing me on the floor and kicking me.
It was her saying, “You should see your father’s hand,” when I tried to get sympathy from her for my black and blue ribs the morning after, her face twisted in blame for all the misery I and her other children had caused her. “You’re wicked,” she snarled at me as she pulled herself up to match my height, a religious word, overpowering her atheism and my whimpers, assuring my condemnation to Hell. I went back to my room and prayed on my knees, sobbing, for a real God who would rescue me from my parents.
Now, with the jagged edges of my heart pressing into me, I gazed upward to the arched ceiling of the church glistening golden light glistening between the cracks. My mother couldn’t always have been like that, she couldn’t have been born that cruel, that cold. I had to close my eyes against the light and find that girl with curly brown hair and a shy smile in the photograph of her standing close to her father that I had dug out of the garbage bag. I had to see in my mind’s eye the six-, eight-, ten-year-old coming home from school and finding white powder on her mother’s lips, a cardboard box of rat poison on the kitchen counter labeled with a skull and scrossbones, or the rope strewn across their dinner table. Did she giggle when she saw her mother like I did at nine when my siblings and I found her half-dead on her bed in a stupor, clutching a bottle of whiskey, an empty bottle of pills on the mustard colored carpet? She looked funny lolling on the bed with her mouth hanging open, so unlike the upright stiffness with which she normally held herself. As we grouped around her bed not knowing what to do, I felt wicked and gleeful, like we had finally caught her doing something she shouldn’t. Is that how she’d felt when she found her own mother?
When the social worker turned up in her classroom and called out her name, did she stand stiffly at attention, not sure what to do next? I had to conjure her up at a wooden school desk, scratched from boredom with hairpins -- she was not interested in our education, was it safe to assume she had never been interested in hers? -- looking up when her name was called by the tall white lady with the gray bun poking her head into the classroom. “Reid, Lilyan Reid,” the woman calling, the name listed under “Mother” on my birth certificate. My mother flushing red, squirming in her seat before reluctantly getting up and moving to the front of the classroom. “Get your things,” the woman must have said, knowing my mother would never be coming back.
Or was my mother more like me at that age, already bursting with rage at anyone in authority from all the beatings and neglect, mouthing “Fuck off” not quite under her breath and sauntering down the aisle like she didn’t care? The frigid stiffening of her back, her head tilted forward as she and the social worker moved together to pick up one sister after another, Irene, Miriam, Regina, the sisters I am still trying to track down and have not yet been able to find. The slow walk through the schoolyard, feeling the stares of the other children from the windows watching them being stolen away, like criminals.
Is that when her unspoken cry began: “Why should you have it when I never did?”
Or was she born without a heart? How much more comforting to float in that golden glow emanating from the ceiling of the church and believe if not for an accident of birth, my mother could have turned out to be a saint, not a sadist, a mother from the heart, not just biology.
The last time I saw my mother, I was on my way from San Francisco to here in Italy to teach a writing workshop, as I did every year. I stayed with her for a few days in London where I grew up, and where she and four of my siblings continued to live. My father had disappeared into the ether years earlier, ever since there were no longer children living at home to blame for the cracks in my parents’ relationship. I had long moved back to America where I’d been born, seeking warmth from the cold of England, and my mother -- and she had long been spending her time on ships cruising around the world, where she found solace living as Elizabeth Taylor as much as she wanted.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. My eyes darted in shock about the flat to which she’d moved, the outer facade of refinement of the regal Chelsea apartment building just one more fiction in my mother’s life. I felt like I’d been pitched underground. The materia of her life was strewn about everywhere, all of it covered in dust and dirt, a mound of artifice under which she lay buried. Her kitchen floor was so sticky, I had to pry off my shoes as I walked, the clicking sounds carrying over the aluminum threshold. In the open plan living and dining room, every surface of her rosewood cabinets and onyx side tables, glass coffee tables, television and window sills were littered with vials of nail polish, small change and souvenir bells from the various countries where she had cruised, magazines, nail files, false eyelashes, lipstick and perfume, everything viscous and grimy. Crusty ten-year-old shampoo containers, bottles of pills and suntan lotion were scattered on top of her dust-carpeted bathroom cabinet. The same went for her two bedrooms, her desk, chest of drawers and the pink velvet vanity table concealed under the mess.
Overflowing with resentment and hurt at all she had withheld from me, and desperate to distinguish what I thought my mother was from what she actually was, I became a hunter, shivering with guilt but sharp with killer instincts. This was my chance; armed with my video camera I was going to record everything about her that lay around me and find out who and what she was if it was the last thing I did. I wasn’t just on a search for the truth, I wanted to punish her. She hid from me, so I’d find out for myself. I’d expose her for what she was. She had violated me, now I was going to violate her.
I wasn’t holy either. I was going to get her. Everything she had denied me was mine for the kill.
While she was out, I took out my camera and began walking around her flat, recording. Holding my breath in fear she’d catch me, as merciless as a spy or mercenary, I reached over and opened the two drawers of her vanity table. Inside lay scores of plastic boxes holding false eyelashes, so many she’d have to live for two hundred years to use them all. She must want to hide that much, I thought, my skin crawling. She was as panicked as a smoker being caught without cigarettes, the wall of eyelashes her buttress against connection with who she really was. What exactly was she hiding? I jerked back, squirming, taking cover behind the camera, feeling nauseated and ashamed like I’d found her with her underpants down. I hadn’t realized she was that warped.
I continued on until I entered the bathroom. My skin curdled when I saw on the wall in the bathroom a poster of a naked woman dressed only in a suspender belt and bra. In place of her vagina was a devil’s head with horns. I was so disgusted and shocked at its lewdity, at the unconcealed madness and self-hatred my mother must have felt about her own body and all women in general, I turned off the camera.
Only then did I realize it had been a progression. The year before she had slipped in the bath, grabbing for the first thing, the toilet seat, which had broken off in her hands. Even though she was so wealthy she lived on the interest of the lump sum my father gave her, never having to touch the capital, she didn't get it fixed because it cost money. Every time she sat on the toilet, it was clear she was in danger of sliding off and cracking her head on the side of the bath. During that visit, I’d said, “I’ll call the plumber,” but she waved her hand dismissively, “Oh, don’t bother.”
The following year, the toilet seat still had not been fixed, and now the shower curtain rod was down. She had slipped on the same bathmat she still hadn’t replaced and this time, to stop her fall, she grabbed the shower curtain. Now she was putting a towel on the floor to soak up the water that poured out because she hadn’t replaced the curtain. The join between the wall and floor was cracking apart and black with mold. She hadn’t cleaned the sink in months. I cleared off the rancid bottles from her medicine cabinet and scrubbed it down, ashamed, repulsed, and still seeking her affection.
“What did you do that for?” she said disinterestedly, not noticing how her rejection made me recoil in pain and embarrassment that I was still trying.
She used to hire a maid. Twice I asked her if she was going to have her flat cleaned. Both times she said, “After you leave.”
I went off to Italy and on my way back, two weeks later, it was even filthier. “Mom,” I said more forcefully, barely hiding my disgust, “Why don’t you have your flat cleaned?”
“I will after you go back home,” she said matter-of-factly. It wasn’t personal; she was just panning me off so I’d stop asking.
But I still wasn’t sure who or what my mother was. Other people might have clearly seen from her appearance and behavior there was something wrong with her, but I thought she was intentionally hurtful, that she blamed me and her other children for her unhappiness. I doubted the very ground I walked on, my grasp on reality only so much straw in my hands. I was preoccupied with the question: Was I delusional, or was she?
If I tore away my veils of illusion, scratched away my need to have a mother who acted like a mother, there was plenty of evidence about where the land lay. There was the suicide attempt I witnessed which, according to my oldest sister, was only one of three times, but the only one I knew about. Then when I was seventeen, she couldn’t get out of bed for six weeks and was taken to the Royal Northern Hospital on Holloway Road for electric shock treatment. Another sister rushed down from where she was living in Glasgow to try and persuade her not to have it. “They give it to pigs to make them docile,” she desperately pleaded at my mother’s bedside. But my father thought she should have it, that was what the doctor was recommending, and my father was her anchor, so she did.
What did it feel like to have rubber shoved in her mouth, "Bite hard, Mrs. Perin"? And then for her to have a convulsion, then another and another? Currents of fear rivered through me as I stared at the burning flame of the candle in the chapel. The thick hard rubber, the attendants standing on either side of her bed, the metal machinery. Her tongue protected from her teeth, a massive bolt of electricity surging through her body, electrons charging her neurons, making her neutral.
She had always been spaced out, not there, out to lunch, but when she came back from having electric shock treatment, she had no short-term memory and became even more scattered and vague, disappearing into flat beige, a brief sparking to life with the electric shocks, then out altogether. Her brain fried, her heart jolted and stilled, silencing even the faintest glimmer of love that might have one day stirred beneath the facade.
When people say crazy, they don’t mean “crazy,” they mean nuts, bonkers, a screw loose, nobody home, out to lunch, the elevator doesn’t go to the top floor, and everyone laughs. But this was my mother. Even though somewhere I must have known she was suffering from a mental or emotional disorder, because she had never been diagnosed, at least not to my knowledge, I was flitting between the worlds of reality and imagination. I was constantly doubting whether I was seeing her as she actually was, or whether my vision was blurred by my needing a mother. She was the only mother I knew who had no maternal feelings. Even the worst complaints my friends had about their mothers still indicated their mothers loved them or, at least, felt connected to them.
Once I asked my mother if she cared about me. We were going down the escalator in Waterloo train station to catch the tube to my sister’s flat, the cold, smoky air casting a gray shadow on the passengers rushing to and from the platforms. I was trying to catch her by surprise so she’d answer the question.
Short and egg-shaped, my mother, sixty-five if my birth certificate was to be believed -- the birth certificate she’d “lost” along with those of her children, making me have to apply for mine -- was now peroxiding and teasing out her hair, and looked like a feather duster on fire. One of her false eyelashes lay unglued at the corner of her eye as she turned to look at me from the metal step below. "Of course I care about you. I've known you since you were born." She gave a short disbelieving laugh, that burst of breathless laughter.
Her laugh was so easy, her response so immediate, she caught me by surprise. I didn’t think it strange she seemed to think she just happened to be in the delivery room at the time of my birth. I was relieved she said she cared about me, happy.
As we paraded to the tube platform at Waterloo, bystanders staring at my mother’s psychedelic appearance in disbelief, she changed her sunglasses to large red-framed eyeglasses. “I just bought these on the ship,” she said adjusting them firmly on her thin nose. “I want to see the world through rose-colored glasses.” She turned her head, laughing defiantly, her small pearl-like crowns perfectly even, the same crowns she’d had put in decades earlier along with having elocution lessons.
The rose-colored glasses were merely a glimmer on the surface. She had already begun her passage on cruises, spending months dancing on a ship, shopping and visiting ports of call, barely able to distinguish one from another in her life of fantasy. Her taking to the waters was to lose herself. Mine now, surrounded by the clear Italian seas, was to find land.
On one of those cruises she met Bob, who wasn’t told she had seven children. She would have told him she didn’t have any, like she told everyone else, except that when he came over he asked about the photos scotch-taped to the wall which showed three of us with her grandchildren. Why she had them up there I didn’t know. It would have been so easy to take them down before he came over. And then I turned up, not one of the children on the wall, and there I was, standing in the hallway the day he came over. He didn’t ask who I was, perhaps he was just as confused as I was, but I was under strict orders to indicate I was ten years younger than I was. “He doesn’t have to know how old I am,” my mother said, tossing her hair. Apparently, either did I. To her children, or anyone else, she never revealed her age.
As I stood in her bachelorette kitchen with its layer of silt, she laughed, "I’d rather tell Bob I don't have children. It’s none of his business.” Her head was tilted back and around her eyes lay crinkles of mirth. She expected me to laugh along with her and I almost did, but at her, not with her. I wanted to throw my mouth wide open in an uproarious, murderous laugh. I wanted to humiliate her, make a mockery of all her plastered makeup, scream that she was nothing but an old bitch. I wanted to tear her hair out for being so selfish and insensitive she could deny my existence to my face, and expect me to empathize with her. A thick and punishing roar to throw the pain right back in her face.
My mother carried on obliviously, coating more nail polish on her already layered nails. “If you tell people you have children, that’s all they want to talk about.”
About this, at least, she was consistent. At twenty-five, when I was still living in London, I ran into her at the cinema. She was with another woman of about her age. “Hi, Mom!” I exclaimed, leaning over to try and hug her.
“Sshh,” she whispered harshly under her breath, “Don’t call me Mom.”
That last morning I saw her, it was early as I packed the final things in my case in the living room. All the furniture was faded pink and sagging, with dents in the armrests and fluffy fall-out on the floor. She appeared at the top of the five stairs, loosely dressed in a disheveled terrycloth bathrobe smeared with makeup stains, her feet tucked into sagging slippers. A few days earlier, she had been concerned about where her money would go when she died. “I don’t want it all to go to death taxes,” she’d said with an anxious look in her eye.
“What about your kids?” I asked with a start, grinning foolishly at her. That she would worry about the government more than her kids had never crossed my mind.
She flapped her hand and stood up, moving towards the sink with her breakfast plate. “I don’t believe in leaving money to children,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s better for them to be independent.”
Again that dull thud of hurt. No matter how long I’d known my mother (ever since I was born, after all), she still had the power to stun me into silence.
Now she said as she watched me push the last sweater into my case, “When are you leaving? I want to take a bath.”
"In ten minutes," I said, raising my head like I used to as a child before leaving for school in the morning. I would want to kiss her but she would turn away, hating for anyone to touch her, flinching at our attempts to embrace her.
"Okay, I'll take my bath now,” she said, and headed for the bathroom.
"Don't take a bath," I called out after her, stung, forgetting I had told myself not to expect anything. The cog in my solar plexus, the cog that made me keep seeing her, keep trying to get her to love me, keep trying to understand who she was, turned to resentment. After that would come anger, then guilt, then hope, and then it would start all over again, as I kept stubbornly trying to force the fiction of “mother” to be real, and what was real to be fiction.
It wasn’t just recognition I was looking for. I needed a mother. Mother, hallowed be Thy name. A black saw worked its teeth through my gut, mangling my thoughts, twisting my desire for her into a thirsty pit of need, as empty as her heart.
"Come and sit with me until I leave," I begged.
“Okay,” she said and shuffled down. She sat in the armchair, her feet not touching the floor. She looked off into the distance with blank eyes like she had hung up a sign saying “Closed” until I brought my cases to the front door and said goodbye. Then whatever it was behind those eyes opened again and she peered out the door, smiling and waving all along the hallway until I reached the elevator.
I was utterly confused. Why she would want to take a bath while I was still there, then stand at the door waving as if she were going to miss me? Why wouldn’t she come to the doctor to hear I had cancer, and then visit me almost everyday in the hospital? I couldn’t understand why didn’t she care about what happened to her children after she died. Let her keep the money for herself when she was alive, I thought numbly, a dull ache in my stomach, but it would make no difference to her when she was dead. She neglected me, lied to me, kicked me out of home, denied I was her child. Now her money after she died. She must hate me, and all of us, that much.
I couldn’t deny it any longer. The world wasn’t paying for what had happened to her, but her children would.
Three months later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, caused by the radiation that had cured me of Hodgkin’s Disease. I’d had no contact with my mother since she had waved me down the hallway. She hadn’t called me but this wasn’t new as it was almost always up to me to make contact. But after that last visit, depressed at how pointless it was to carry on trying to get her to care about me, I couldn’t bear to be in touch. But now I had cancer for the second time, and it was cancer of the breast.
My breast had been changing shape and I thought it was due to age. As she grew older, my mother’s body had lost its shape and I thought mine would too, as if one’s mother’s body naturally carved out one’s future. We might struggle against looking like our mothers, but our bodies come from them. Our life itself comes from them. And, to a child, the mother’s breast is life itself. It is the very antithesis of death. But it is more than that. It is love, it is warmth and softness, it is being hugged, held close, protected from danger. In the depths of my despair, my thoughts crowded in on themselves, running circles around each other. My mother was my body, and I was her body, and her mother’s body too, and even if my mother didn’t feel connected to me, we were, and it was directly through my breast and her breast. My grandmother’s breast had given my mother life. My mother’s breast had given me life. The breast was life. The breast was love. I was to lose my breast. I could lose my life. My breast was life. I had to lose it to save my life. A child’s cry took up its anguished wailing inside me. Where was my mother?
But the adult part of me knew, like the cancer itself, my mother was toxic. I felt hopeless, angry and sick when I had anything to do with her. I became blind, crazy. I was petrified of dying and devastated by losing the most beautiful, womanly part of me, the most sexually desired part of me, the home of safety and nourishment. I had to think about nurturing myself, protecting myself, being my own mother so I could get through it. But she was my mother. My breast, her breast, my grandmother’s breast. It was a spiral I couldn’t get out of.
My grandmother, according to my mother, was forty when she died. My mother said she herself was ten at the time. That meant my grandmother gave birth to my mother at thirty. Like my mother I, too, was born when my mother was thirty, if her birthdate on my birth certificate was to be believed. In my delerious thinking, that meant we were a holy trinity of sorts, and not just in age. My grandmother abandoned my mother. My mother abandoned me. My grandmother felt so much pain she killed herself. My mother felt so much pain she tried to kill herself, and ended up quieting her brain with electric shock treatment. And me? Just as self-destructive, I thought; cancer, the preying of cells upon cells, the festering rot of cellular memory.
In my darkest moments, crying into my pillow in terror of dying, I fixated on this trinity like a shining light at the tip of my consciousness, convinced the amount of pain I felt was not just my pain, but my mother’s pain and her mother’s before her, and maybe my great-grandmother’s and her mother’s before that. I felt deep in my bones that my body was no more than the receptacle of what they had lived through, and I was no more than a deposit of all the pain that had gone on before me. A whole lineage of women whose pain split them apart like so many burnt trees, exploding in me in a firestorm of cancer. My grandmother and mother had bent under the weight of their pain. Now I was terrified I would bend under the weight of mine.
Just like truth, pain will eke out, it will find a route, a channel, an isthmus to release itself. I lay in my bed, curled in a fetal position before and after the surgery, the curtains drawn, the green reflection of the digital clock clicking away in the mirror, too paralyzed with fear to get up. I squeezed my fists together like I used to plead there was a real God when I was a teenager, praying all the rivers inside me would rise up in a huge tidal wave and crash right out of me to the sea. But the pain was so immense the rivers dessicated into cavernous quarries of dust. There was no hope the flow would force its way to the ocean and finally release the pain of all the generations of women before me. There was just too much of it. I lay rigid, buried under its magnitude.
I wanted to call my mother. I didn’t want to call her. I dialed once and her answering machine picked up. I put the phone down again, her cold words from when I was nineteen echoing in my mind, “I think it’s better if you go home.”
I didn’t know what to do if she called me, whether I would tell her or not. But it didn’t matter because she never did. I turned to my partner and sisters, a brother and friends for help as I struggled to keep afloat. I tried to force my thoughts away from her, thoughts like black freighters moving stealthily across the night horizon.
But on my birthday, three months after my breast had been removed, she did call.
“Marci?” I heard her voice at the other end of the line. That was my partner’s name.
“No, it's Margo.” I kept my voice even, hard. “Who's that?” One good turn deserves another, I thought bitterly, feeling the walls of my heart lock together. She doesn’t even remember my voice.
“It's Mom.”
My throat caught at the word. “Oh, hi Mom,” I answered casually, leaning against the white doorframe of the room as I cradled the phone.
“I just wanted to call you on your birthday,” she said, her voice high and thin.
I took a breath. “Thank you. That's nice of you.”
“How are you?” Always that breathy faintness.
“I got breast cancer.” I said it nonchalantly, almost like I didn’t care. The worst of it was over, I thought, feeling unsteady in my legs. I got through it without her. She could do nothing to me now.
“What?” The shock in her voice echoed through the wire.
“I had to have a mastectomy,” I said. I kept my voice light but I felt spiteful, like I wanted to rub it in her face. Maybe the shock would catapult her into caring. Maybe I could pay her back for every time she had hurt me. Maybe she would care so much, she would feel hurt.
She sounded astonished. “Oh, my God. You're kidding.”
“No, it's been terrible.” My voice broke and against my will I heard myself begging for sympathy.
She gave her small breathless laugh. “I've been sick myself. I've had shingles for six months.”
I staggered, then stiffened back to attention. “I'm sorry,” I said bluntly. “I can't listen to anyone else's health problems right now.”
Her voice was surprisingly sympathetic. “No, of course not. How awful.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling myself soften. Maybe she was remembering the first time I’d had cancer. Maybe she would remember she did care if I could make her remember we had some history in common, that she had visited me in the hospital. Maybe she would think of my breast. Maybe she would think of her own breast. Maybe she would remember she had given me life. Maybe she would think about my life, now that I might be dying.
Without my noticing, the veils of illusion had slipped over me again. “It turns out it was from the radiation for Hodgkin’s Disease.”
Her voice was tentative. “Are you okay now?”
I struggled to remain reasonable, unemotional, but I felt my bark cracking. “I was lucky it didn't spread but there might be something going on in my other breast. I'm going to have a biopsy next week.” My finger was turning blue from the coil of the phone wire.
“When?” she said.
“Wednesday. I'll get the results on Friday.” I started crying silently, unable to staunch the torrent of fear. If I lost my other breast, my panicked reasoning told me, I wouldn’t be a woman at all. I would be as good as dead.
“I'll call you Friday,” she said.
“Thank you,” I choked, feeling the floodgates widen another inch. “That was nice of you to remember my birthday.”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
She didn’t call again until two weeks later, a week after my results were back. She left a message on my machine while I was at the hospital having the stitches removed. “Hi, Margo,” she said breezily, “Give me a call sometime.”
I returned her call as soon as I heard the message but she was out. “The biopsy was inconclusive and I have to go back into surgery,” I said to her machine. I felt warm, almost happy. She had called. That meant she was worried about me. That meant I had a mother to call. A tomato. “I’ll ring you with the results,” I added, unconsciously saving myself from the pain of waiting for her to telephone me again.
The night I got the results of the second biopsy, her machine picked up again. “You have reached . . .” Her voice was melodic, little-girlish.
“Hi Mom, it’s me,” I spoke clearly into the machine. “They found irregular cells but thank God they didn’t find more cancer.”
Two weeks later she called when I was at a follow-up appointment. “Hi, I’m in Spain,” her voice rang cheerily on my machine. “I’ve come with Bob. It’s been so cold in England.”
I punched the stop button, then kicked the small wooden table on which the machine rested, sending the phone and machine flying. I was so stupid to think she cared. I pummeled the wall, then myself, slapping myself on the face over and over again. You idiot! You fucking pathetic idiot!
I would never speak to her again, I resolved tearfully. I was better off without her. I would make her not matter. I would make her disappear altogether.
I never called again, and I stopped visiting England on my way to Italy. But eighteen months after her phone message from Spain, an insistent ringing broke through dinner at the rose covered, stone-walled Tuscan villa where I was teaching.
“Margo, it’s for you,” someone called. Still chuckling at a student’s joke, I moved to the telephone which was perched on top of a blazing fireplace in the deep cave of a living room adjoining the dining room. My sister’s voice sounded deliberately cool and formal through the phone, as if she didn’t want me to get upset. My throat swelled with nervousness and I clasped the phone to my ear, straining to hear what she was saying. Against a background of the students clinking their glasses of Chianti and cracking up with laughter, I dug the receiver deep into my ear.
“Mom is in a temporary residential care unit,” she said. “She has something called atrophied muscular syndrome and she fell down and cut her face. The brothers put her there because she can’t take care of herself and they want to see if she gets adjusted. If she does, they’ll move her to long-term care until...,” she paused, “the end.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. I stared in fear at the black marble over the fireplace. No one had told me she was sick. My siblings had understood and supported my decision not to be in touch with my mother. Some of them had helped me make the decision. Others weren’t talking to her themselves. But now I felt like an outcast, as if I had no family at all.
The cog in my solar plexus that I had been trying to ignore for the last year and a half started turning again. All my old feelings staggered through me, guilt, anger, betrayal, love. I wanted to call right away, then I didn’t want anything to do with her. I peered sullenly through the iron-barred window at the stone houses down the hill which were radiating red and gold in the setting sun.
“What if she dies?” I blurted, prickles of fear coursing down my spine. I felt a surge of love, and guilt, all wrapped up in one massive rope wound around my throat and heart. I hadn’t gotten rid of her at all. I had merely put my feelings on hold, fobbed them off as she had so often fobbed me off.
“It’s too late in the evening to call her now. You don’t even have to call her,” my sister said, her voice strong and decisive over the phone. “You don’t have to do anything. I just wanted to tell you so you would know. Anyway,” she added, “once they get her on the right medication, she could last for years.”
I hung up and squeezed into a dark corner of the living room until I could still the anxiety rolling through me. Mom, dying, deadly disease. She could hardly walk. Her words were slurring. Should I catch the next plane? Should I run to her bedside, take care of her?
All night long I fretted about what to do, my stomach tied in knots. In the middle of the night, I slipped out of bed and stood in the trickle of moonlight beaming through the open-shuttered window, gazing at the rise of hill and empty fields rolling in a quilt of feather beds, the same hills one of my students had painted in the shape of breasts so soft and round I had wanted to bury myself in them. Over the pointed cypress trees the sky hung like charcoal as I imagined my mother already dead. I wondered whether I would feel relieved or scraped raw. What if I never talked to her again? Never saw her again? Surely it couldn’t harm me to be in touch with her. Maybe I was being too rigid. Unloving. Like her.
I looked down at my hands, bony and dry, with protruding veins, so like my mother’s. I often worried about whether I was like her on the inside, examining myself for whether I was cold, uncaring, selfish, inconsistent, aloof. If I couldn’t turn to her in her hour of need, it would only prove I hadn’t been able to put her behind me as she had so obviously put me.
Early the next morning, while the birds were scratching at the tree outside the window, I picked up the phone before I could change my mind, a wall of cold air in my chest. My mother answered from her hospital bedside after three rings.
“Hello?” her voice sounded surprisingly firm, considering what my sister had said.
“Hi, Mom, it’s Margo,” I said, almost giddy with relief. How easily I slipped back into my old self, the one who kept trying, the one who kept hoping.
“Margo!” she exclaimed, as if I had been the one to reject her. “How are you?”
I flushed in an eruption of joy as I fought to keep my heart closed. Her sounding so happy split my vision in two, as if the world had once more dipped behind double-bevelled glass.
“I’m fine,” I stammered. Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe I simply could not see that she did love me. “How are you?”
She told me about her fall and the disease she’d been diagnosed with. “It’s like Parkinson’s, but it’s not,” she said, her voice getting weaker and more shaky the longer she talked.
Her frailty sent a wave of disorientation through me. “Are they treating you okay?” I said hesitantly, seeing her lying limply in her nightclothes, pale under her makeup.
“Yes, it’s fine,” she said. There was always something wrong, always something to complain about, always that tsk. She must really be sick, I thought anxiously.
I heard a muffled sound in the background. “I have to get off the phone now,” she said. “The nurse has come to give me some medication.”
“I’ll call you again later,” I said. “Lots of love, Mom.”
Lots of love, Mom.
In that one instant of saying “lots of love” I felt something give in the pit of my belly. The love I had always felt in spite of her, the love that was so painful for me to access in the face of her neglect and violence, the love that was continuing to flood through me now, no matter how absolute her lack of concern whether I would live or die, no matter that she didn’t love me. I could feel love after all she’d done to me, after losing my breast, the home of love. In the pale rose light of the living room, the house silently rocking to the hushed sound of the students sleeping in their beds, I slowly replaced the receiver and found myself wandering to the back garden that lay fertile with poppies, lavender and apricot trees. I stood there breaking and folding a stem of lavender, inhaling its rich fragrance, shivering slightly in the cool dawn.
She couldn’t still that beating under my breast, or the breast I had lost. Her disconnection from the child to whom she had given birth couldn’t disconnect that child from the force of life. This was no blind stupid love, but a love that connected me to the pulse of life, something much larger than myself, more powerful than anything I had ever been aware of, more divine and all encompassing than, as a child, my parents had always appeared to me.
For the first time, there was no trying to get her to love me so I could feel I was somebody. I could love, ergo I am. I felt right in my body, at home. I had survived Hodgkin’s Disease without her. I had survived breast cancer. And now, whatever might happen to her, I was surviving her. Only now could I really live, freed from needing her to live. The river of pain would flow to the sea, it had already begun charting its course, and soon it would be gone.
I could hardly breathe from the rush of air sweeping through my lungs, raising me higher and higher until I felt like I was soaring in a river of light cascading over the green-misted valley. Finally, I was liberated, freed from the resentment, the longing, the waiting for her to change into the mother I thought I should have, the mother I needed, a mother who was not a sadist but a saint. No longer did it matter that twice I could have died and she didn’t care. I could feel love. I had overcome the circumstances of my birth. I had broken the legacy.
As the last of the flame for my grandmother flickered in the rays of late afternoon sun beaming through the stained glass windows of the church, the flagstones smooth and shiny beneath me, I rose to my feet. Cramped from kneeling so long, I made slowly for the door and the brightness outside. As I began to walk through the thick wooden doors, tawny with age, out of the corner of my eye I saw a bent-over, middle-aged woman walk officiously up to the candles and blow them out. I stood watching her, amused, as she pulled them out of their holders, piled them in her hands and brought them to a side room to store for future use.
But apparently not for my future use. After my mother died, my sister found the name of the orphanage where my mother had gone as a child through a chance greeting card she uncovered in the black garbage bag stuffed at the back of my mother’s hallway closet. After we made inquiries to the orphanage’s alumni association, and much fumbling around trying to find my mother in the records, the coordinator came back with no trace of anyone called Lilyan Reid. It was only through trying again with just the first names of my mother and her sisters, their relative year of attendance, and my mother’s day of birth (not year: she subtracted a decade even as she lay dying), that we discovered the origins of what my mother had been hiding all those years. It came in the form of a letter:
Dear Ms. Perin,
I think what I’ve been able to find in the records of your mother and her sisters will answer most of the questions you have about the family.
Our files indicated that Lillian Rothschild’s father Benjamin was born in Hungary in 1885. His wife, Bertha Rosengarten Rothschild, was born there as well, in 1890 or 1891. They were married on 7/23/10 and came to the United States in 1922. Benjamin was an orthodox rabbi. He is described as a large man who spoke English fluently, but with a “foreign” accent; we have no description of Bertha. Benjamin and Bertha had four daughters – Lillian, born 5/12/25; Ida born in 1927; Regina, in 1929 and Miriam, in 1931.
The sequence of events that led to the girls’ placement seems to have been as follows: Benjamin was unemployed and the family was in financial distress. Then in the summer of 1938 Bertha became ill and was hospitalized for treatment of both hypertensive heart disease and depression. At the time of her admission to the hospital she was malnourished. By January of 1939 her condition was critical, and she died (probably in Morrisania Hospital) on 6/5/39.
The Rothschild children most likely came to the attention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as a result of the family’s need for financial assistance from governmental agencies. The family court became involved and made a finding of “inadequate guardianship.” The four girls were admitted to an SPCC facility on 11/10/38 and transferred from there to Pleasantville on 1/6/39. It appears the family’s address at the time of Lillian’s admission to Pleasantville was 778 East 175th Street in the Bronx. Lillian was attending either P.S.42 or 44. Both her work and conduct were excellent.
Benjamin remained unemployed during the sisters’ years in care with the agency (with the exception of temporary jobs at hotels during the Jewish holidays). He lived alone in a furnished room. Benjamin appears to have suffered from some sort of paranoid illness and for this reason attempts were made to restrict visits with his daughters. These attempts were largely unsuccessful; Lillian in particular had a strong feeling of responsibility for him.
At Pleasantville, Lillian was seen as very intelligent and for a time held a position of leadership in her cottage (first commissioner). Despite Benjamin’s orthodoxy he attended her bat mitzvah (1/21/40) and seemed both pleased and proud.
Lillian stayed at Pleasantville until 11/15/40 when she was transferred to the Foster Home Bureau (the “HB”) because she’d gone as far as she could in the Pleasantville school....
The records become unclear and disjointed at the end. My sense is that Lillian returned to live with Benjamin in October of 1942 (a note says she was “transferred to supervision of Youth Service” on 10/3/42). Benjamin died in August 1946 (cause not given). Lillian and Regina tried living together at some point but it didn’t work out. Lillian had her own apartment and planned to be married. Mention is made that she was in some form of psychotherapy.
I hope what I’ve found adds to what you already know and is in some way helpful to you and your family.
Sincerely yours . . .
I didn’t know I was going to light a yarzheit candle for my Hungarian grandmother and my own Jewish self until I entered the rain-washed synagogue in Budapest …
Tucked away from the jagged edges of the Italian coast, I was here to try and understand why, when I was diagnosed with cancer at nineteen, my mother didn’t come to the doctor’s office in the cancer hospital to hear the result of the tests. A hospital volunteer found me wandering around the hollow blue reception area in a daze and led me to the telephone near the entrance.
"Mom, it's me," I said, bursting into tears. "He said I have tumors!" The doctor had called it Hodgkins Disease. I didn’t know what Hodgkins Disease was, but I knew tumors meant cancer. "Can I come and see you?”
"No," she said, her voice cold over the telephone wire. "I think it's better for you to go home."
Home; a place I’d been trying to find since she’d thrown me out three years earlier for not obeying her.
But during the six months I was in the hospital for surgery, recuperation, and radiation treatment, my mother came to visit almost everyday. She would draw her face close to me, peer into my eyes and exclaim, “The whites of your eyes are so white, you can’t be that sick!”
Pint-sized at five-foot-one, she would sashay over to my bed wearing white shag, bright pink lipstick and white boots with a fringe. "Here," she’d say cheerfully, her eyes vacant and glistening as she drifted over to my bed. "I brought you some tomatoes."
"Thanks," I said, feeling ashamed by my embarrassment at her looks. "That's really nice of you." I bit on the shiny red skin and sucked the juice from the pulp. The sweet liquid shot into my mouth, strewing its seeds onto my gums and down my throat. She knew tomatoes were my favorite food and I gnawed on them greedily.
Enveloped in the cool darkness of the church, I sat gazing at the pastel statues of the Virgin Mary and other saints perched inside little alcoves along the stone walls of the church. I felt a twisting in my chest, a curve in the riverbank, as I noticed the tall white candles stacked in rows beneath iron candleholders. I was brought up an atheist; my parents could never let anyone have power over them, not even God, and anything remotely akin to a spiritual world lay outside the realm of possibility. But there was something about the sanctified air of Catholic churches that flowed through me like a warm river and I went into churches whenever I could, bathing in the glow of stained glass angels in the glorious azures, roses and golds of Italy and beatific Virgin Guadalupes in Mexico. Last winter while on a short trip to Pátzcuaro, I had stood in line with Purépecha women behind the altar to place a hand on the crimson robe of Santa María de la Salud and whisper a prayer for my health, stifling the memory of my mother’s sarcastic, “Only idiots believe in God.” In the absence of religion, she and my father were to be the voice of God to us, their seven children.
“No, we’re not Catholic,” I was constantly explaining when strangers exclaimed over how many children we were. I was confused why my parents had had so many; Catholic would have been easy, allowing some tenderness to the explanation my mother gave, “Dad liked me the most when I was pregnant,” as if it were his fault, and my father’s, “Mom was bored,” as if it were hers.
When I was feeling generous, I would think that, after her own miserable childhood, my mother wanted to give herself a family. The only problem was that she needed parents, not children. Plus the fact that for women in her generation, marriage and children were the only route to economic security and a place in the world, a buoy in an otherwise fathomless sea. I imagined the larger the family, the safer the place she thought she’d have. She had wanted an even dozen, and stopped at seven only because her body gave out.
Mother, Holy Mother, hallowed be Thy name, I thought now wryly, remembering my father’s white-lipped insistence on our always addressing my mother as “Mom.” “Who’s ‘she’?” he’d say. “The cat’s dinner?”
“She” made my mother ordinary, like us. “Mom,” in his voice, asserted her divinity. At every meal, his instruction to chant, “Thank you, Mom,” was our grace. My mother would nod under her dyed black bouffant, obviously pleased with her Authority.
My mother would have laughed to see me here, gravitating towards the thin white candles, leaning against the stand to light one with another and placing it in a holder. She was an atheist but in the many cities and towns where we lived when I was growing up, she would talk about how much she loved church music and sometimes go to a church to listen to it. She even joined a church choir. Perhaps she, too, was searching for her own mother who, she said was an Italian opera singer. Her mother had died when she was a child, and she vaguely intimated it was from a stroke.
The rare times my mother spoke of her past, I would stare at her, hanging on to every word. I would try to figure out who she was, this woman who was designated God, this woman who stood so aloof and yet spoke through every cell of my body. I thought if I knew where and what she came from, I would know who she was. I would hold in my hands something real, tangible. She would be real, instead of the facade of a mother who stood before me. I would have a mother.
“My mother’s family was from the south,” she said, sometimes meaning southern Italy, other times the southern United States. The bare offerings of her childhood that I tried to stitch together quickly unraveled into no more than that, strands of loose thread leading nowhere. One day when she was ten, she said, a social worker had turned up at her class at school and removed her, along with her three sisters, whose names she said were Miriam, Irene and Regina. “They took us to a halfway house that housed prostitutes while the state figured out what to do with us,” she said, her head tilted to the side.
In one version of her story, my mother said her mother had been taken to the hospital. “I don’t think she knew we were in there,” said my mother, her eyes brown and flat. A few weeks later her mother died. My mother, the oldest, was allowed out of the halfway house with her sisters to go to the funeral. They took the subway.
My mother laughed a short laugh when she said this, a helpless, wounded sound she normally concealed under thick patches of eye shadow, a smear of garish pink lipstick reaching up to her nose, collagen and wigs. She had always masked herself, slathering her face with makeup, dyeing and curling or straightening her hair, wearing tight clothes to over-emphasize her curves when she was thin enough, baggy overthings when she wasn’t, high heels, girdles, looking like anything but what she really was. Her idol was Elizabeth Taylor and she made herself up to look like Cleopatra, never taking off her turquoise eyeshadow, fake eyelashes and red lips, her cleavage bulging under loud, floral print dresses. In my twenties she changed her name, from Lilyan to Lily Ann, whether to match the necklace she wore or because she felt separated in half, I didn’t know. I suspected it was to match the necklace and give her a Southern flair, perhaps a thin echo of her supposedly Southern mother’s past. She would tsk angrily if someone didn’t pause between the Lily and the Ann. The force of that tsk, from ever since I could remember. The sharp intake of breath, a hot explosion between her lips.
“That must have been terrible,” I said, my voice thick with her pain.
“Yeah, it was,” she said coldly. The flood swelling inside me hit a bank, tipped over to the other side, the side where my pain lay. She knew I wanted more and she wasn’t going to give it to me.
In another version of the story, she would have the same expression on her face and say, “My mother died, and then we were taken away.” She and her sisters were never allowed to go home again but instead were sent to an orphanage from which the state farmed them out to various foster homes until they came of age. According to my mother, she and her sisters were taken away because their father, “an English parson,” had a fight with the landlord.
“He was carrying groceries home and when the landlord came out and tried to get him to pay the rent, my father hit him over the head with a shopping bag,” she said with her high, breathless laugh and expressionless eyes.
Then again, she told my brother her father was Irish.
“Was he born in Ireland?” my brother asked.
“No, he never was in Ireland,” she said.
“So his parents were immigrants?”
“No, his parents never came to the States.”
“Mom,” said my brother incredulously, “How could your father be born in the States if his parents were never there?”
I could imagine the glazing over of her eyes as she answered vacantly, “Oh yes, you’re right.” My brother shut up after that to protect himself, as we all did, from her stinging anger and icy, absolute detachment.
On a tip from my sister, I found some photographs of her family once, buried in a black plastic garbage bag in her closet. They were buried along with the detritus of our childhood, old report cards, greeting cards, tattered drawings and a pile of photos of us as children stuffed into a dusty plastic bag that had held a toilet brush holder. To me, her father looked Eastern European with his pale face, downturned fleshy nose and baggy eyes, possibly Jewish.
“There’s no such thing as looking Jewish,” tutted my sister when I showed her the photo.
There was no picture of my grandmother. But I knew from one of my mother’s rare admissions that my grandmother had repeatedly tried to kill herself.
“We would come home from school and find her with rat poison on her lips,” she once confided to my sister. “Sometimes she would be standing on a table trying to hang herself.”
In the shadows cast by the faint light streaming through the story of Christ stained on the glass windows of the church, I struggled to turn my gaze inward, to imagine how my mother had felt when her mother died. I couldn’t tell if she had cried, my sister had reported there had been no tears in her eyes as she told the story, no lines of mascara running down her cheeks, no furrow in her brow indicating she had felt anything at all. There was only her slouched shoulders, the way she held her head high as if angling for the next blow, or maybe preparing to be carted away by social workers.
But why would she be afraid of that with us? We were her children.
In the dank air of the Catholic church with tears rolling down my face, surrounded by saints of women whose names I didn’t know, I told my grandmother I didn’t believe she had died of a stroke. I told her I believed she had killed herself and, even though we were in a church that disowned suicides, I was lighting a candle to pay tribute to her memory. I was lighting that candle, even if my mother never had.
Standing in front of the altar, I stuffed the three thousand lire payment into the wooden box, lifted a white candle from the pile and lit it with the flame of another already snug in the metal stand. As I held the flame to the wick, I said, “I love you, Grandma.”
I felt like an idiot. What did I know about lighting candles? But I carried on, weeping with my head hunched over the stand. In the cold, pale glow of the flame, the musty air of the church tightly squeezed into my chest, I told my grandmother how much I missed her. I told her I hardly knew anything about her, or who my mother was, and because of that, I might never know who I was.
I didn’t even know if I should have been praying to an Italian grandmother.
I couldn’t even be sure where my mother herself was from. When I asked her where she was born, she said, “I don’t remember.”
“It was New York, right?” I prodded, confident of what she had let slip years earlier.
Tsk! “You’re not going to start that again, are you?”
But it was my mother’s cruelty, not her distorted sense of reality, or silence, or even neglect or violence that hurt the most. Yes, she slapped me time and time again when I was a child, making my neck snap to the side, her bony fingers leaving their mark on my cheek, and yes, she refused to take me to the hospital when I broke one arm at two and another at four, or during all those other childhood and teenage mishaps and infections. And, yes, I did come home from nursery school at four to find my family had moved out without telling me, leaving a strange man in their place who I thought was the man she had warned me about who raped and killed little girls in our neighborhood, and her disregard for my tear-streaked face when we arrived at the new apartment. And then at seven, eight, nine, eleven and thirteen, being told we were going on vacation when we were really moving. And yes, how dirty I was all through my childhood, making my sixth grade teacher jump back in disgust at my black feet when I had to take my shoes off to be measured, and the way she drew away from me when I tried to hug her no matter what age I was, and all those countless other things, times seven children.
It wasn’t any of that. It was her look of satisfaction and self-righteousness as she kicked me in the ribs when I was ten and lying on the floor listening to the radio in a dreamy haze instead of helping her in the kitchen. It was the glee on her face as she watched my father paddling our bare toddler backsides with a hard red ping pong bat when he came home at the end of the day to punish us for the crimes she had listed, obviously enjoying our punishment. “You’re lucky you have a father,” she said, stabbing her finger in the air accusingly. And the way she stood at the door of the living room when I was a teenager while my father punched me in the abdomen and yanked my hair so hard my neck snapped back for daring to defy them and their Godly rules, her face hard and cold, eyes smouldering with hatred. Standing at the door so I couldn’t escape, her look of tight-lipped pleasure that he was throwing me on the floor and kicking me.
It was her saying, “You should see your father’s hand,” when I tried to get sympathy from her for my black and blue ribs the morning after, her face twisted in blame for all the misery I and her other children had caused her. “You’re wicked,” she snarled at me as she pulled herself up to match my height, a religious word, overpowering her atheism and my whimpers, assuring my condemnation to Hell. I went back to my room and prayed on my knees, sobbing, for a real God who would rescue me from my parents.
Now, with the jagged edges of my heart pressing into me, I gazed upward to the arched ceiling of the church glistening golden light glistening between the cracks. My mother couldn’t always have been like that, she couldn’t have been born that cruel, that cold. I had to close my eyes against the light and find that girl with curly brown hair and a shy smile in the photograph of her standing close to her father that I had dug out of the garbage bag. I had to see in my mind’s eye the six-, eight-, ten-year-old coming home from school and finding white powder on her mother’s lips, a cardboard box of rat poison on the kitchen counter labeled with a skull and scrossbones, or the rope strewn across their dinner table. Did she giggle when she saw her mother like I did at nine when my siblings and I found her half-dead on her bed in a stupor, clutching a bottle of whiskey, an empty bottle of pills on the mustard colored carpet? She looked funny lolling on the bed with her mouth hanging open, so unlike the upright stiffness with which she normally held herself. As we grouped around her bed not knowing what to do, I felt wicked and gleeful, like we had finally caught her doing something she shouldn’t. Is that how she’d felt when she found her own mother?
When the social worker turned up in her classroom and called out her name, did she stand stiffly at attention, not sure what to do next? I had to conjure her up at a wooden school desk, scratched from boredom with hairpins -- she was not interested in our education, was it safe to assume she had never been interested in hers? -- looking up when her name was called by the tall white lady with the gray bun poking her head into the classroom. “Reid, Lilyan Reid,” the woman calling, the name listed under “Mother” on my birth certificate. My mother flushing red, squirming in her seat before reluctantly getting up and moving to the front of the classroom. “Get your things,” the woman must have said, knowing my mother would never be coming back.
Or was my mother more like me at that age, already bursting with rage at anyone in authority from all the beatings and neglect, mouthing “Fuck off” not quite under her breath and sauntering down the aisle like she didn’t care? The frigid stiffening of her back, her head tilted forward as she and the social worker moved together to pick up one sister after another, Irene, Miriam, Regina, the sisters I am still trying to track down and have not yet been able to find. The slow walk through the schoolyard, feeling the stares of the other children from the windows watching them being stolen away, like criminals.
Is that when her unspoken cry began: “Why should you have it when I never did?”
Or was she born without a heart? How much more comforting to float in that golden glow emanating from the ceiling of the church and believe if not for an accident of birth, my mother could have turned out to be a saint, not a sadist, a mother from the heart, not just biology.
The last time I saw my mother, I was on my way from San Francisco to here in Italy to teach a writing workshop, as I did every year. I stayed with her for a few days in London where I grew up, and where she and four of my siblings continued to live. My father had disappeared into the ether years earlier, ever since there were no longer children living at home to blame for the cracks in my parents’ relationship. I had long moved back to America where I’d been born, seeking warmth from the cold of England, and my mother -- and she had long been spending her time on ships cruising around the world, where she found solace living as Elizabeth Taylor as much as she wanted.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. My eyes darted in shock about the flat to which she’d moved, the outer facade of refinement of the regal Chelsea apartment building just one more fiction in my mother’s life. I felt like I’d been pitched underground. The materia of her life was strewn about everywhere, all of it covered in dust and dirt, a mound of artifice under which she lay buried. Her kitchen floor was so sticky, I had to pry off my shoes as I walked, the clicking sounds carrying over the aluminum threshold. In the open plan living and dining room, every surface of her rosewood cabinets and onyx side tables, glass coffee tables, television and window sills were littered with vials of nail polish, small change and souvenir bells from the various countries where she had cruised, magazines, nail files, false eyelashes, lipstick and perfume, everything viscous and grimy. Crusty ten-year-old shampoo containers, bottles of pills and suntan lotion were scattered on top of her dust-carpeted bathroom cabinet. The same went for her two bedrooms, her desk, chest of drawers and the pink velvet vanity table concealed under the mess.
Overflowing with resentment and hurt at all she had withheld from me, and desperate to distinguish what I thought my mother was from what she actually was, I became a hunter, shivering with guilt but sharp with killer instincts. This was my chance; armed with my video camera I was going to record everything about her that lay around me and find out who and what she was if it was the last thing I did. I wasn’t just on a search for the truth, I wanted to punish her. She hid from me, so I’d find out for myself. I’d expose her for what she was. She had violated me, now I was going to violate her.
I wasn’t holy either. I was going to get her. Everything she had denied me was mine for the kill.
While she was out, I took out my camera and began walking around her flat, recording. Holding my breath in fear she’d catch me, as merciless as a spy or mercenary, I reached over and opened the two drawers of her vanity table. Inside lay scores of plastic boxes holding false eyelashes, so many she’d have to live for two hundred years to use them all. She must want to hide that much, I thought, my skin crawling. She was as panicked as a smoker being caught without cigarettes, the wall of eyelashes her buttress against connection with who she really was. What exactly was she hiding? I jerked back, squirming, taking cover behind the camera, feeling nauseated and ashamed like I’d found her with her underpants down. I hadn’t realized she was that warped.
I continued on until I entered the bathroom. My skin curdled when I saw on the wall in the bathroom a poster of a naked woman dressed only in a suspender belt and bra. In place of her vagina was a devil’s head with horns. I was so disgusted and shocked at its lewdity, at the unconcealed madness and self-hatred my mother must have felt about her own body and all women in general, I turned off the camera.
Only then did I realize it had been a progression. The year before she had slipped in the bath, grabbing for the first thing, the toilet seat, which had broken off in her hands. Even though she was so wealthy she lived on the interest of the lump sum my father gave her, never having to touch the capital, she didn't get it fixed because it cost money. Every time she sat on the toilet, it was clear she was in danger of sliding off and cracking her head on the side of the bath. During that visit, I’d said, “I’ll call the plumber,” but she waved her hand dismissively, “Oh, don’t bother.”
The following year, the toilet seat still had not been fixed, and now the shower curtain rod was down. She had slipped on the same bathmat she still hadn’t replaced and this time, to stop her fall, she grabbed the shower curtain. Now she was putting a towel on the floor to soak up the water that poured out because she hadn’t replaced the curtain. The join between the wall and floor was cracking apart and black with mold. She hadn’t cleaned the sink in months. I cleared off the rancid bottles from her medicine cabinet and scrubbed it down, ashamed, repulsed, and still seeking her affection.
“What did you do that for?” she said disinterestedly, not noticing how her rejection made me recoil in pain and embarrassment that I was still trying.
She used to hire a maid. Twice I asked her if she was going to have her flat cleaned. Both times she said, “After you leave.”
I went off to Italy and on my way back, two weeks later, it was even filthier. “Mom,” I said more forcefully, barely hiding my disgust, “Why don’t you have your flat cleaned?”
“I will after you go back home,” she said matter-of-factly. It wasn’t personal; she was just panning me off so I’d stop asking.
But I still wasn’t sure who or what my mother was. Other people might have clearly seen from her appearance and behavior there was something wrong with her, but I thought she was intentionally hurtful, that she blamed me and her other children for her unhappiness. I doubted the very ground I walked on, my grasp on reality only so much straw in my hands. I was preoccupied with the question: Was I delusional, or was she?
If I tore away my veils of illusion, scratched away my need to have a mother who acted like a mother, there was plenty of evidence about where the land lay. There was the suicide attempt I witnessed which, according to my oldest sister, was only one of three times, but the only one I knew about. Then when I was seventeen, she couldn’t get out of bed for six weeks and was taken to the Royal Northern Hospital on Holloway Road for electric shock treatment. Another sister rushed down from where she was living in Glasgow to try and persuade her not to have it. “They give it to pigs to make them docile,” she desperately pleaded at my mother’s bedside. But my father thought she should have it, that was what the doctor was recommending, and my father was her anchor, so she did.
What did it feel like to have rubber shoved in her mouth, "Bite hard, Mrs. Perin"? And then for her to have a convulsion, then another and another? Currents of fear rivered through me as I stared at the burning flame of the candle in the chapel. The thick hard rubber, the attendants standing on either side of her bed, the metal machinery. Her tongue protected from her teeth, a massive bolt of electricity surging through her body, electrons charging her neurons, making her neutral.
She had always been spaced out, not there, out to lunch, but when she came back from having electric shock treatment, she had no short-term memory and became even more scattered and vague, disappearing into flat beige, a brief sparking to life with the electric shocks, then out altogether. Her brain fried, her heart jolted and stilled, silencing even the faintest glimmer of love that might have one day stirred beneath the facade.
When people say crazy, they don’t mean “crazy,” they mean nuts, bonkers, a screw loose, nobody home, out to lunch, the elevator doesn’t go to the top floor, and everyone laughs. But this was my mother. Even though somewhere I must have known she was suffering from a mental or emotional disorder, because she had never been diagnosed, at least not to my knowledge, I was flitting between the worlds of reality and imagination. I was constantly doubting whether I was seeing her as she actually was, or whether my vision was blurred by my needing a mother. She was the only mother I knew who had no maternal feelings. Even the worst complaints my friends had about their mothers still indicated their mothers loved them or, at least, felt connected to them.
Once I asked my mother if she cared about me. We were going down the escalator in Waterloo train station to catch the tube to my sister’s flat, the cold, smoky air casting a gray shadow on the passengers rushing to and from the platforms. I was trying to catch her by surprise so she’d answer the question.
Short and egg-shaped, my mother, sixty-five if my birth certificate was to be believed -- the birth certificate she’d “lost” along with those of her children, making me have to apply for mine -- was now peroxiding and teasing out her hair, and looked like a feather duster on fire. One of her false eyelashes lay unglued at the corner of her eye as she turned to look at me from the metal step below. "Of course I care about you. I've known you since you were born." She gave a short disbelieving laugh, that burst of breathless laughter.
Her laugh was so easy, her response so immediate, she caught me by surprise. I didn’t think it strange she seemed to think she just happened to be in the delivery room at the time of my birth. I was relieved she said she cared about me, happy.
As we paraded to the tube platform at Waterloo, bystanders staring at my mother’s psychedelic appearance in disbelief, she changed her sunglasses to large red-framed eyeglasses. “I just bought these on the ship,” she said adjusting them firmly on her thin nose. “I want to see the world through rose-colored glasses.” She turned her head, laughing defiantly, her small pearl-like crowns perfectly even, the same crowns she’d had put in decades earlier along with having elocution lessons.
The rose-colored glasses were merely a glimmer on the surface. She had already begun her passage on cruises, spending months dancing on a ship, shopping and visiting ports of call, barely able to distinguish one from another in her life of fantasy. Her taking to the waters was to lose herself. Mine now, surrounded by the clear Italian seas, was to find land.
On one of those cruises she met Bob, who wasn’t told she had seven children. She would have told him she didn’t have any, like she told everyone else, except that when he came over he asked about the photos scotch-taped to the wall which showed three of us with her grandchildren. Why she had them up there I didn’t know. It would have been so easy to take them down before he came over. And then I turned up, not one of the children on the wall, and there I was, standing in the hallway the day he came over. He didn’t ask who I was, perhaps he was just as confused as I was, but I was under strict orders to indicate I was ten years younger than I was. “He doesn’t have to know how old I am,” my mother said, tossing her hair. Apparently, either did I. To her children, or anyone else, she never revealed her age.
As I stood in her bachelorette kitchen with its layer of silt, she laughed, "I’d rather tell Bob I don't have children. It’s none of his business.” Her head was tilted back and around her eyes lay crinkles of mirth. She expected me to laugh along with her and I almost did, but at her, not with her. I wanted to throw my mouth wide open in an uproarious, murderous laugh. I wanted to humiliate her, make a mockery of all her plastered makeup, scream that she was nothing but an old bitch. I wanted to tear her hair out for being so selfish and insensitive she could deny my existence to my face, and expect me to empathize with her. A thick and punishing roar to throw the pain right back in her face.
My mother carried on obliviously, coating more nail polish on her already layered nails. “If you tell people you have children, that’s all they want to talk about.”
About this, at least, she was consistent. At twenty-five, when I was still living in London, I ran into her at the cinema. She was with another woman of about her age. “Hi, Mom!” I exclaimed, leaning over to try and hug her.
“Sshh,” she whispered harshly under her breath, “Don’t call me Mom.”
That last morning I saw her, it was early as I packed the final things in my case in the living room. All the furniture was faded pink and sagging, with dents in the armrests and fluffy fall-out on the floor. She appeared at the top of the five stairs, loosely dressed in a disheveled terrycloth bathrobe smeared with makeup stains, her feet tucked into sagging slippers. A few days earlier, she had been concerned about where her money would go when she died. “I don’t want it all to go to death taxes,” she’d said with an anxious look in her eye.
“What about your kids?” I asked with a start, grinning foolishly at her. That she would worry about the government more than her kids had never crossed my mind.
She flapped her hand and stood up, moving towards the sink with her breakfast plate. “I don’t believe in leaving money to children,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s better for them to be independent.”
Again that dull thud of hurt. No matter how long I’d known my mother (ever since I was born, after all), she still had the power to stun me into silence.
Now she said as she watched me push the last sweater into my case, “When are you leaving? I want to take a bath.”
"In ten minutes," I said, raising my head like I used to as a child before leaving for school in the morning. I would want to kiss her but she would turn away, hating for anyone to touch her, flinching at our attempts to embrace her.
"Okay, I'll take my bath now,” she said, and headed for the bathroom.
"Don't take a bath," I called out after her, stung, forgetting I had told myself not to expect anything. The cog in my solar plexus, the cog that made me keep seeing her, keep trying to get her to love me, keep trying to understand who she was, turned to resentment. After that would come anger, then guilt, then hope, and then it would start all over again, as I kept stubbornly trying to force the fiction of “mother” to be real, and what was real to be fiction.
It wasn’t just recognition I was looking for. I needed a mother. Mother, hallowed be Thy name. A black saw worked its teeth through my gut, mangling my thoughts, twisting my desire for her into a thirsty pit of need, as empty as her heart.
"Come and sit with me until I leave," I begged.
“Okay,” she said and shuffled down. She sat in the armchair, her feet not touching the floor. She looked off into the distance with blank eyes like she had hung up a sign saying “Closed” until I brought my cases to the front door and said goodbye. Then whatever it was behind those eyes opened again and she peered out the door, smiling and waving all along the hallway until I reached the elevator.
I was utterly confused. Why she would want to take a bath while I was still there, then stand at the door waving as if she were going to miss me? Why wouldn’t she come to the doctor to hear I had cancer, and then visit me almost everyday in the hospital? I couldn’t understand why didn’t she care about what happened to her children after she died. Let her keep the money for herself when she was alive, I thought numbly, a dull ache in my stomach, but it would make no difference to her when she was dead. She neglected me, lied to me, kicked me out of home, denied I was her child. Now her money after she died. She must hate me, and all of us, that much.
I couldn’t deny it any longer. The world wasn’t paying for what had happened to her, but her children would.
Three months later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, caused by the radiation that had cured me of Hodgkin’s Disease. I’d had no contact with my mother since she had waved me down the hallway. She hadn’t called me but this wasn’t new as it was almost always up to me to make contact. But after that last visit, depressed at how pointless it was to carry on trying to get her to care about me, I couldn’t bear to be in touch. But now I had cancer for the second time, and it was cancer of the breast.
My breast had been changing shape and I thought it was due to age. As she grew older, my mother’s body had lost its shape and I thought mine would too, as if one’s mother’s body naturally carved out one’s future. We might struggle against looking like our mothers, but our bodies come from them. Our life itself comes from them. And, to a child, the mother’s breast is life itself. It is the very antithesis of death. But it is more than that. It is love, it is warmth and softness, it is being hugged, held close, protected from danger. In the depths of my despair, my thoughts crowded in on themselves, running circles around each other. My mother was my body, and I was her body, and her mother’s body too, and even if my mother didn’t feel connected to me, we were, and it was directly through my breast and her breast. My grandmother’s breast had given my mother life. My mother’s breast had given me life. The breast was life. The breast was love. I was to lose my breast. I could lose my life. My breast was life. I had to lose it to save my life. A child’s cry took up its anguished wailing inside me. Where was my mother?
But the adult part of me knew, like the cancer itself, my mother was toxic. I felt hopeless, angry and sick when I had anything to do with her. I became blind, crazy. I was petrified of dying and devastated by losing the most beautiful, womanly part of me, the most sexually desired part of me, the home of safety and nourishment. I had to think about nurturing myself, protecting myself, being my own mother so I could get through it. But she was my mother. My breast, her breast, my grandmother’s breast. It was a spiral I couldn’t get out of.
My grandmother, according to my mother, was forty when she died. My mother said she herself was ten at the time. That meant my grandmother gave birth to my mother at thirty. Like my mother I, too, was born when my mother was thirty, if her birthdate on my birth certificate was to be believed. In my delerious thinking, that meant we were a holy trinity of sorts, and not just in age. My grandmother abandoned my mother. My mother abandoned me. My grandmother felt so much pain she killed herself. My mother felt so much pain she tried to kill herself, and ended up quieting her brain with electric shock treatment. And me? Just as self-destructive, I thought; cancer, the preying of cells upon cells, the festering rot of cellular memory.
In my darkest moments, crying into my pillow in terror of dying, I fixated on this trinity like a shining light at the tip of my consciousness, convinced the amount of pain I felt was not just my pain, but my mother’s pain and her mother’s before her, and maybe my great-grandmother’s and her mother’s before that. I felt deep in my bones that my body was no more than the receptacle of what they had lived through, and I was no more than a deposit of all the pain that had gone on before me. A whole lineage of women whose pain split them apart like so many burnt trees, exploding in me in a firestorm of cancer. My grandmother and mother had bent under the weight of their pain. Now I was terrified I would bend under the weight of mine.
Just like truth, pain will eke out, it will find a route, a channel, an isthmus to release itself. I lay in my bed, curled in a fetal position before and after the surgery, the curtains drawn, the green reflection of the digital clock clicking away in the mirror, too paralyzed with fear to get up. I squeezed my fists together like I used to plead there was a real God when I was a teenager, praying all the rivers inside me would rise up in a huge tidal wave and crash right out of me to the sea. But the pain was so immense the rivers dessicated into cavernous quarries of dust. There was no hope the flow would force its way to the ocean and finally release the pain of all the generations of women before me. There was just too much of it. I lay rigid, buried under its magnitude.
I wanted to call my mother. I didn’t want to call her. I dialed once and her answering machine picked up. I put the phone down again, her cold words from when I was nineteen echoing in my mind, “I think it’s better if you go home.”
I didn’t know what to do if she called me, whether I would tell her or not. But it didn’t matter because she never did. I turned to my partner and sisters, a brother and friends for help as I struggled to keep afloat. I tried to force my thoughts away from her, thoughts like black freighters moving stealthily across the night horizon.
But on my birthday, three months after my breast had been removed, she did call.
“Marci?” I heard her voice at the other end of the line. That was my partner’s name.
“No, it's Margo.” I kept my voice even, hard. “Who's that?” One good turn deserves another, I thought bitterly, feeling the walls of my heart lock together. She doesn’t even remember my voice.
“It's Mom.”
My throat caught at the word. “Oh, hi Mom,” I answered casually, leaning against the white doorframe of the room as I cradled the phone.
“I just wanted to call you on your birthday,” she said, her voice high and thin.
I took a breath. “Thank you. That's nice of you.”
“How are you?” Always that breathy faintness.
“I got breast cancer.” I said it nonchalantly, almost like I didn’t care. The worst of it was over, I thought, feeling unsteady in my legs. I got through it without her. She could do nothing to me now.
“What?” The shock in her voice echoed through the wire.
“I had to have a mastectomy,” I said. I kept my voice light but I felt spiteful, like I wanted to rub it in her face. Maybe the shock would catapult her into caring. Maybe I could pay her back for every time she had hurt me. Maybe she would care so much, she would feel hurt.
She sounded astonished. “Oh, my God. You're kidding.”
“No, it's been terrible.” My voice broke and against my will I heard myself begging for sympathy.
She gave her small breathless laugh. “I've been sick myself. I've had shingles for six months.”
I staggered, then stiffened back to attention. “I'm sorry,” I said bluntly. “I can't listen to anyone else's health problems right now.”
Her voice was surprisingly sympathetic. “No, of course not. How awful.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling myself soften. Maybe she was remembering the first time I’d had cancer. Maybe she would remember she did care if I could make her remember we had some history in common, that she had visited me in the hospital. Maybe she would think of my breast. Maybe she would think of her own breast. Maybe she would remember she had given me life. Maybe she would think about my life, now that I might be dying.
Without my noticing, the veils of illusion had slipped over me again. “It turns out it was from the radiation for Hodgkin’s Disease.”
Her voice was tentative. “Are you okay now?”
I struggled to remain reasonable, unemotional, but I felt my bark cracking. “I was lucky it didn't spread but there might be something going on in my other breast. I'm going to have a biopsy next week.” My finger was turning blue from the coil of the phone wire.
“When?” she said.
“Wednesday. I'll get the results on Friday.” I started crying silently, unable to staunch the torrent of fear. If I lost my other breast, my panicked reasoning told me, I wouldn’t be a woman at all. I would be as good as dead.
“I'll call you Friday,” she said.
“Thank you,” I choked, feeling the floodgates widen another inch. “That was nice of you to remember my birthday.”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
She didn’t call again until two weeks later, a week after my results were back. She left a message on my machine while I was at the hospital having the stitches removed. “Hi, Margo,” she said breezily, “Give me a call sometime.”
I returned her call as soon as I heard the message but she was out. “The biopsy was inconclusive and I have to go back into surgery,” I said to her machine. I felt warm, almost happy. She had called. That meant she was worried about me. That meant I had a mother to call. A tomato. “I’ll ring you with the results,” I added, unconsciously saving myself from the pain of waiting for her to telephone me again.
The night I got the results of the second biopsy, her machine picked up again. “You have reached . . .” Her voice was melodic, little-girlish.
“Hi Mom, it’s me,” I spoke clearly into the machine. “They found irregular cells but thank God they didn’t find more cancer.”
Two weeks later she called when I was at a follow-up appointment. “Hi, I’m in Spain,” her voice rang cheerily on my machine. “I’ve come with Bob. It’s been so cold in England.”
I punched the stop button, then kicked the small wooden table on which the machine rested, sending the phone and machine flying. I was so stupid to think she cared. I pummeled the wall, then myself, slapping myself on the face over and over again. You idiot! You fucking pathetic idiot!
I would never speak to her again, I resolved tearfully. I was better off without her. I would make her not matter. I would make her disappear altogether.
I never called again, and I stopped visiting England on my way to Italy. But eighteen months after her phone message from Spain, an insistent ringing broke through dinner at the rose covered, stone-walled Tuscan villa where I was teaching.
“Margo, it’s for you,” someone called. Still chuckling at a student’s joke, I moved to the telephone which was perched on top of a blazing fireplace in the deep cave of a living room adjoining the dining room. My sister’s voice sounded deliberately cool and formal through the phone, as if she didn’t want me to get upset. My throat swelled with nervousness and I clasped the phone to my ear, straining to hear what she was saying. Against a background of the students clinking their glasses of Chianti and cracking up with laughter, I dug the receiver deep into my ear.
“Mom is in a temporary residential care unit,” she said. “She has something called atrophied muscular syndrome and she fell down and cut her face. The brothers put her there because she can’t take care of herself and they want to see if she gets adjusted. If she does, they’ll move her to long-term care until...,” she paused, “the end.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. I stared in fear at the black marble over the fireplace. No one had told me she was sick. My siblings had understood and supported my decision not to be in touch with my mother. Some of them had helped me make the decision. Others weren’t talking to her themselves. But now I felt like an outcast, as if I had no family at all.
The cog in my solar plexus that I had been trying to ignore for the last year and a half started turning again. All my old feelings staggered through me, guilt, anger, betrayal, love. I wanted to call right away, then I didn’t want anything to do with her. I peered sullenly through the iron-barred window at the stone houses down the hill which were radiating red and gold in the setting sun.
“What if she dies?” I blurted, prickles of fear coursing down my spine. I felt a surge of love, and guilt, all wrapped up in one massive rope wound around my throat and heart. I hadn’t gotten rid of her at all. I had merely put my feelings on hold, fobbed them off as she had so often fobbed me off.
“It’s too late in the evening to call her now. You don’t even have to call her,” my sister said, her voice strong and decisive over the phone. “You don’t have to do anything. I just wanted to tell you so you would know. Anyway,” she added, “once they get her on the right medication, she could last for years.”
I hung up and squeezed into a dark corner of the living room until I could still the anxiety rolling through me. Mom, dying, deadly disease. She could hardly walk. Her words were slurring. Should I catch the next plane? Should I run to her bedside, take care of her?
All night long I fretted about what to do, my stomach tied in knots. In the middle of the night, I slipped out of bed and stood in the trickle of moonlight beaming through the open-shuttered window, gazing at the rise of hill and empty fields rolling in a quilt of feather beds, the same hills one of my students had painted in the shape of breasts so soft and round I had wanted to bury myself in them. Over the pointed cypress trees the sky hung like charcoal as I imagined my mother already dead. I wondered whether I would feel relieved or scraped raw. What if I never talked to her again? Never saw her again? Surely it couldn’t harm me to be in touch with her. Maybe I was being too rigid. Unloving. Like her.
I looked down at my hands, bony and dry, with protruding veins, so like my mother’s. I often worried about whether I was like her on the inside, examining myself for whether I was cold, uncaring, selfish, inconsistent, aloof. If I couldn’t turn to her in her hour of need, it would only prove I hadn’t been able to put her behind me as she had so obviously put me.
Early the next morning, while the birds were scratching at the tree outside the window, I picked up the phone before I could change my mind, a wall of cold air in my chest. My mother answered from her hospital bedside after three rings.
“Hello?” her voice sounded surprisingly firm, considering what my sister had said.
“Hi, Mom, it’s Margo,” I said, almost giddy with relief. How easily I slipped back into my old self, the one who kept trying, the one who kept hoping.
“Margo!” she exclaimed, as if I had been the one to reject her. “How are you?”
I flushed in an eruption of joy as I fought to keep my heart closed. Her sounding so happy split my vision in two, as if the world had once more dipped behind double-bevelled glass.
“I’m fine,” I stammered. Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe I simply could not see that she did love me. “How are you?”
She told me about her fall and the disease she’d been diagnosed with. “It’s like Parkinson’s, but it’s not,” she said, her voice getting weaker and more shaky the longer she talked.
Her frailty sent a wave of disorientation through me. “Are they treating you okay?” I said hesitantly, seeing her lying limply in her nightclothes, pale under her makeup.
“Yes, it’s fine,” she said. There was always something wrong, always something to complain about, always that tsk. She must really be sick, I thought anxiously.
I heard a muffled sound in the background. “I have to get off the phone now,” she said. “The nurse has come to give me some medication.”
“I’ll call you again later,” I said. “Lots of love, Mom.”
Lots of love, Mom.
In that one instant of saying “lots of love” I felt something give in the pit of my belly. The love I had always felt in spite of her, the love that was so painful for me to access in the face of her neglect and violence, the love that was continuing to flood through me now, no matter how absolute her lack of concern whether I would live or die, no matter that she didn’t love me. I could feel love after all she’d done to me, after losing my breast, the home of love. In the pale rose light of the living room, the house silently rocking to the hushed sound of the students sleeping in their beds, I slowly replaced the receiver and found myself wandering to the back garden that lay fertile with poppies, lavender and apricot trees. I stood there breaking and folding a stem of lavender, inhaling its rich fragrance, shivering slightly in the cool dawn.
She couldn’t still that beating under my breast, or the breast I had lost. Her disconnection from the child to whom she had given birth couldn’t disconnect that child from the force of life. This was no blind stupid love, but a love that connected me to the pulse of life, something much larger than myself, more powerful than anything I had ever been aware of, more divine and all encompassing than, as a child, my parents had always appeared to me.
For the first time, there was no trying to get her to love me so I could feel I was somebody. I could love, ergo I am. I felt right in my body, at home. I had survived Hodgkin’s Disease without her. I had survived breast cancer. And now, whatever might happen to her, I was surviving her. Only now could I really live, freed from needing her to live. The river of pain would flow to the sea, it had already begun charting its course, and soon it would be gone.
I could hardly breathe from the rush of air sweeping through my lungs, raising me higher and higher until I felt like I was soaring in a river of light cascading over the green-misted valley. Finally, I was liberated, freed from the resentment, the longing, the waiting for her to change into the mother I thought I should have, the mother I needed, a mother who was not a sadist but a saint. No longer did it matter that twice I could have died and she didn’t care. I could feel love. I had overcome the circumstances of my birth. I had broken the legacy.
As the last of the flame for my grandmother flickered in the rays of late afternoon sun beaming through the stained glass windows of the church, the flagstones smooth and shiny beneath me, I rose to my feet. Cramped from kneeling so long, I made slowly for the door and the brightness outside. As I began to walk through the thick wooden doors, tawny with age, out of the corner of my eye I saw a bent-over, middle-aged woman walk officiously up to the candles and blow them out. I stood watching her, amused, as she pulled them out of their holders, piled them in her hands and brought them to a side room to store for future use.
But apparently not for my future use. After my mother died, my sister found the name of the orphanage where my mother had gone as a child through a chance greeting card she uncovered in the black garbage bag stuffed at the back of my mother’s hallway closet. After we made inquiries to the orphanage’s alumni association, and much fumbling around trying to find my mother in the records, the coordinator came back with no trace of anyone called Lilyan Reid. It was only through trying again with just the first names of my mother and her sisters, their relative year of attendance, and my mother’s day of birth (not year: she subtracted a decade even as she lay dying), that we discovered the origins of what my mother had been hiding all those years. It came in the form of a letter:
Dear Ms. Perin,
I think what I’ve been able to find in the records of your mother and her sisters will answer most of the questions you have about the family.
Our files indicated that Lillian Rothschild’s father Benjamin was born in Hungary in 1885. His wife, Bertha Rosengarten Rothschild, was born there as well, in 1890 or 1891. They were married on 7/23/10 and came to the United States in 1922. Benjamin was an orthodox rabbi. He is described as a large man who spoke English fluently, but with a “foreign” accent; we have no description of Bertha. Benjamin and Bertha had four daughters – Lillian, born 5/12/25; Ida born in 1927; Regina, in 1929 and Miriam, in 1931.
The sequence of events that led to the girls’ placement seems to have been as follows: Benjamin was unemployed and the family was in financial distress. Then in the summer of 1938 Bertha became ill and was hospitalized for treatment of both hypertensive heart disease and depression. At the time of her admission to the hospital she was malnourished. By January of 1939 her condition was critical, and she died (probably in Morrisania Hospital) on 6/5/39.
The Rothschild children most likely came to the attention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as a result of the family’s need for financial assistance from governmental agencies. The family court became involved and made a finding of “inadequate guardianship.” The four girls were admitted to an SPCC facility on 11/10/38 and transferred from there to Pleasantville on 1/6/39. It appears the family’s address at the time of Lillian’s admission to Pleasantville was 778 East 175th Street in the Bronx. Lillian was attending either P.S.42 or 44. Both her work and conduct were excellent.
Benjamin remained unemployed during the sisters’ years in care with the agency (with the exception of temporary jobs at hotels during the Jewish holidays). He lived alone in a furnished room. Benjamin appears to have suffered from some sort of paranoid illness and for this reason attempts were made to restrict visits with his daughters. These attempts were largely unsuccessful; Lillian in particular had a strong feeling of responsibility for him.
At Pleasantville, Lillian was seen as very intelligent and for a time held a position of leadership in her cottage (first commissioner). Despite Benjamin’s orthodoxy he attended her bat mitzvah (1/21/40) and seemed both pleased and proud.
Lillian stayed at Pleasantville until 11/15/40 when she was transferred to the Foster Home Bureau (the “HB”) because she’d gone as far as she could in the Pleasantville school....
The records become unclear and disjointed at the end. My sense is that Lillian returned to live with Benjamin in October of 1942 (a note says she was “transferred to supervision of Youth Service” on 10/3/42). Benjamin died in August 1946 (cause not given). Lillian and Regina tried living together at some point but it didn’t work out. Lillian had her own apartment and planned to be married. Mention is made that she was in some form of psychotherapy.
I hope what I’ve found adds to what you already know and is in some way helpful to you and your family.
Sincerely yours . . .
I didn’t know I was going to light a yarzheit candle for my Hungarian grandmother and my own Jewish self until I entered the rain-washed synagogue in Budapest …