“You’re never really alone anyway. You have people all around you,” she whispers. “And energy, too.” Indigo has always been one of my biggest fans.
She unlatches the baby and puts him to her shoulder. While she burps him, she studies me. It’s then I realize I have been crying the entire time. Unfair! I wouldn’t have cried if I hadn’t gone to therapy first. That loosened the gears. It’s not my fault, I want to tell Indigo. It’s someone else’s fault.
Indigo offers me a glass of wine, but I say no because it’s eleven a.m., even though yes, obviously, I would love a glass of wine, nearly all the time.
“I’m fine. I’ve just been going from zero to sixty lately for no reason at all.”
“It took you so long to come and see me, I thought something must be wrong. Or that maybe you were mad at me.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I say. “I could not tell you one thing that is wrong with my life except that it is exactly the same.”
She offers me the baby. “Here,” she says. “Hold Effy. He’s the best picker-upper I know.” I would rather have a glass of wine. But I hold Effy. And he is all the things you want a baby to be. He smells like sweet cream and his hair is petal-soft. All right, show me what you got, kid, I think; let’s see what you know. Indigo coos in the background, the fan shuddering behind her. I look into his eyes. She promised me wisdom. I do not see the wisdom of the ages. But, for a moment, in the tenderness of this baby’s existence, in his blank and gentle ease, I see the relief.
You don’t know anything yet, I think. You don’t know a goddamn thing. You lucky baby.
Evelyn
My mother tells me she’s moving. She finally retired, and she’s going to New Hampshire to help my brother, David, and his wife, Greta, take care of their sick child, Sigrid, who is four years old and dying, who might die soon. They live in a small town where there are no Jews, a thing that might be important to my mother, so I point it out. She shrugs. “Grandchild trumps Jews,” she says. We are eating whitefish salad and bagels downtown, a thing we do most Saturdays now, meet in the middle between my house and her house. What about whitefish, I want to say. Do they have whitefish in New Hampshire? And what about me? What do I trump?
She starts talking about her plans for her apartment, which is rent-stabilized. Without it, we never would have survived our poverty-stricken childhood. She can’t give it up, I tell her. It has to live on in our family forever. I always thought I’d get it someday, or that David would come back. “I’ll leave it empty,” she says. “For now.” While she’s talking about what she’ll take with her and what she’ll leave behind, I experience a minor panic attack. “But I don’t know when I’ll be back,” she says. “It could be a year. It could be three. Maybe never.” I stop eating. I push my plate forward. “Maybe I’ll love New Hampshire, stranger things have happened, all those trees and fresh air.” I’ll never see her again. Now I’ll have to make fun of the people who scoop out their bagels all by myself. Criminals, my mother calls them.
“Andrea, don’t waste that, that’s good whitefish,” my mother says. “You eat it,” I say. “You’re going to miss it when it’s gone.” “They have food in New Hampshire,” she says.
I am struck by this feeling that she will die in New Hampshire. New York City is her electrical socket. Her friends, the streets, the trains, the restaurants, the parks, the museums, the myriad free lecture series available. My mother loves lectures. She and her best friend Betsy from her activist days go to at least three a week, the two of them with their shining gray hair, sitting front and center, Betsy, childless Betsy, knitting another scarf for charity, my mother nodding and taking notes, which she sometimes types up and emails to me and some of her friends the next day. “Just thought I’d share what I learned last night,” every email starts. Forget the whitefish, forget me, what about the lectures?
“Don’t leave me,” I say. “Change is good,” she says. “Change is terrible,” I say. “You’ve had me long enough,” she says. I eat the whitefish.
A conversation with my therapist:
ME:?My mother is leaving me and moving to New Hampshire.
THERAPIST:?And how does that make you feel?
ME:?It makes me feel like she doesn’t love me.
THERAPIST:?Hasn’t she proved to you she loves you already?
ME:?How?
THERAPIST:?By caring for you, nurturing you, supporting you, raising you to be the person you are today.
ME:?All of that comprises a rational argument but can I just ask you a question?
THERAPIST:?Sure.
ME:?Whose side are you on, anyway?
A few weeks later I offer to rent a car and drive her to New Hampshire, even though I object, I object, I object!
She has two suitcases and a few boxes of personal possessions, which I poke through when I arrive at her apartment. It’s mostly books on parenting and grandparenting and a few books on faith. There are also copies of The Feminine Mystique and The Prophet, which seem dated when I consider how studious and forward thinking my mother has been for her entire life. I stand there, holding them. “It comforts me that they’re near,” she says. I wave them at her. “Old Betty and Kahlil, who knew?” I say. “They remind me of a certain time,” she says. “They remind me of your father.” “OK,” I say. “Let’s just go,” she says. She hustles us both out of the apartment, leaves it locked, airless, dark, for the time being.
We listen to NPR for the first two hours on the road, the strange comfort of bad news reported in reasonable tones, my mother sliding in and out of commentary. She buys pretty much everything NPR is selling, but she has her moments of doubt: some reports seem superficial to her. “What would they do if they had more time with that story?” she wonders. “Two more minutes on the lives of the people who grow the vegetables we eat, would it kill them?” I ignore her.
She makes me pull in for coffee at a rest stop in Connecticut. “Let’s sit for a second, come here, sit with me, my dear daughter,” she says. I slump in a booth. “You haven’t said two words this whole trip.” “I don’t feel like talking,” I say. “I’m sad you’re leaving, that’s all.”
“You know, you didn’t even like me very much until your thirties,” she says.
“Well, that’s true,” I say. “It was hard sometimes, growing up in our house.”
“I had a rough ride with your father,” she says. “It took me a long time to recover.”
“I’m not asking for an explanation,” I say. I think about all the dinner parties she had after Dad died. All the men in the house. All those laps I sat on. All the attention.
“I’m just saying you’ve lived without me appearing regularly in your life before, you’ll do it again,” she says.