Braided Lives (74 page)

We will be together; I have not since early childhood known the taste of certainty. He is promised to me like dawn and dusk. Those broad bones in his thighs and forehead, the mossy hair, the wintry eyes and stubborn mouth: he will not walk away. All my brambly ways now stand revealed as roads leading to him. All accidents and blows I gave and got, needful preliminaries. We’ve grown out of each other and now we grow back together, round as a poem.

“How’s he going to support you? Some people when they think they’re in love believe the moon’s made of green cheese and they can eat it with a long-handled spoon. Listen to me, Lady Jane: life in a cold-water flat will be hard on a girl who’s been taking it easy in college all these years instead of out earning a decent living.” Mother’s hair bristles and flutters like black flames. Her small plump body prances on alert. To and fro she marches banging pans on the stove and dishes in the sink.

“Mother, who supports me now? Me. I’m not about to quit work.” At the wobbly kitchen table I pause with knife in midcarrot, struck by how much she is enjoying this drama. Before her energy the house feels rickety, as if she might break through its walls, flimsy as stage scenery: but she never does.

“What do you know about keeping house? You’ll be scrubbing your fingers to the bone for a boy younger than you who’ll be tired of you in no time and chasing after high-school girls.” She grasps me by the upper arm. Dark eyes scrape my face. “Are you in trouble?”

“No. I’m not pregnant, I do not plan to be pregnant.”

“Ha! How many women plan to be caught? There’d not be half the people on this street if babies listened to planning!”

I laugh. It strikes me that she can be salty. If she were not my mother, would I appreciate her more?

She intones mournfully, “You’re too young to settle down.”

“You were younger. The first two times.”

“Shhhh! Oh, in years. But I knew the world, chickie. I’d boiled water for my brothers to be born and wiped their bottoms and bargained with the undertaker for coffins—they’ll rook you every time. How can you marry into a graveyard family? A father to bury his mistakes, now isn’t that something?”

It is one of her virtues that she never for a moment considers Howie a good catch. “His father’s been dead for years, Mother. They kicked his mother out of that house. She lives in a three-room apartment with his grandmother.”

“Poor boy!” She clucks her tongue. “He lost his papa young, the way I did. Poor woman! To be uprooted and stuck in a little bitty apartment with no yard or garden and I bet the neighborhood isn’t safe.”

It’s supposed to be safer than this one, but I keep my mouth shut. Take any source of good feelings available.

When Howie comes to dinner, mother is a steel kitten. Defiantly she wears an old housedress when he arrives. Then she disappears. Dad is hearty and miserable. He huddles in his armchair smoking furiously, his eyebrows meeting in embarrassment. His hands harden into the bole of a gnarled winter tree. Alone with me these days, he talks about last night’s game between the Tigers and the Yankees. He seems primarily worried I may have become a Yankees fan.

Mother emerges in a purple frock festooned with sequins. As we march toward the dining room table three feet away, she pinches Howie’s arm. Under the lopsided chandelier of four light bulbs we sit down to pan-roasted chicken. Relax, everyone! If I did, I would slide under the table. L
OVE
T
HY
D
INNER
P
ARTNER
, a neon sign flashes over my head in hearts-blood red and truelove blue. Howie is ensconced on his dignity like a hard cushion. Mother tilts her head coquettishly, fluttering her lashes; then throws him dark musty glances of scorn and mistrust. Dad daydreams of fishing in an icy mountain stream a mile above our plates.

“A civil ceremony with some justice of the peace you rout out of bed—call that a wedding? Bad start, bad end.” Mother nods sagely over the chicken breast.

“We’ll need the money after we’re married.” Howie is practical and foursquare here, everything battened down. Wise but distant—his medical manner to be.

“We’ll see what your mother says.” She cocks her head as her black eyes needle him. “What will people think if you have some hasty hole in the wall wedding?”

I say quickly, “Nothing they’ll still be thinking in a year. We don’t want a whole Fourth of July parade and fireworks.”

“Why not?” Mother tosses her hair back with a queenly nod. “You won’t get another chance. Of course these times you never know. Some people get married every other year to a new person.”

A smothered groan escapes Dad: he sees this going on, every two years a new suitor he must play the father for.

Howie and I avoid each other’s gaze. He has a sentimental preference for my father, who speaks American, has a regular job, watches the ball games. With my mother Howie turns political, searching for weaknesses on which to rest an alliance or push an advantage. He disapproves of her for not resembling his own pallid suffering refugee mother. I want him to admire her sass, to understand how a lack of scope for her energy and imagination has warped her, to gauge the richness living has withered but not without traces, like the fossils of vanished jungles in rock. I am the product of her imagination and her poverty of outlets. I watch them try to manipulate the other, wanting each to catch at least a glimpse of what compels my love.

We expected trouble from his family, but I am the compromise candidate. At first his mother is stiff with me, her eyes plowing my face. But once we have eaten together, she begins to thaw. I have the feeling of a breath held and held, now let out in a long sigh. As Howie explains later, his mother said, “We were afraid you’d marry the other one. The Greek.”

For hours measured by the drip, drip of an old cuckoo clock, stalactite of time leaking to stone, I sit on the flowered couch beside her. His grandmother twisted with arthritis crouches in the armchair before us. Across the room Howie has the TV on.

“After the chasseneh, you can get, eppes, a better job, a smart girl like you,” Grandmother urges.

“Then Howie won’t have to work long hours in the hospital every summer,” his mother chimes in. “He needs a vacation.”

“Going to medical school is enough work for him,” Grandmother says in her turn. “Let’s talk tachlis, you can’t get a full-time job?”

I look to him for help but he watches TV, shutting out our voices. At night his mother sleeps on this couch. She gave up her twin bed to Howie, while Grandmother sleeps in the other twin. “I write. That’s the real work I do. The jobs I take are to make a living so I can write.”

“Writing poetry, that’s fine in college. You did well in college, I remember.” His mother nods encouragingly at me. “You had a good scholarship. Poetry, playing music, it’s nice. Later you’ll have something to give your children.”

“But now you’re getting married, nu. You have your husband to think about. No children till he’s settled in a practice.” The grandmother waves her swollen forefinger at me.

“It’s your job to watch out for that,” his mother whispers.

“Oh, absolutely, I agree. No children for years.”

“I’m a grandmother three times, I’m in no hurry already,” his mother pleads. Her voice is gentle, caressive. Although she has no accent, it is the softness, the texture of her voice that are foreign. All her sentences rise on the ends. Even when she is trying to bully me into becoming a proper wife, her rising inflection makes the remarks sound like wondering questions. “Later on you’ll give me grandchildren.”

“Not too much of this later. I’ll hold on, halevai, but I’m not seventy anymore,” the grandmother says.

“He must be settled in a practice first,” his mother says. “He’ll start out in debt. You can’t give them more money. Your savings will be gone by the end of his schooling.”

Grandmother mutters something inaudibly, glaring. Her savings have meant power and she does not want ever to see the end of them.

Now his mother brings out a fat album. Hours of Grandmother’s children, aunts and their husbands, of grandchildren, of Howie’s father who was once a baby in Poland, a child in Germany, a teenager voyaging across the wild wide ocean. Hours of Howie’s brother Milt. I suspect his mother prefers her older son, for with him the ground is certain. He lives half a mile distant. She talks to him every day. I want to thrust the album from me. That child in faded sailor suit dragging a wagon, what can I do for him? Then suddenly Howie’s sixteen-year-old face glowers from its veil of fat. With a pang of queasy guilt I meet its squinted wary stare: was marriage what we meant? Are we wiser or more foolish?

My days are run like an airport, appointments just missing collision. Mother plays traffic control. Forced to choose between Yahweh and the God of the County Court, we go off for a nervous chat with a reform rabbi who married Dick Weisbuch five years ago. The families have negotiated over our heads that we are to marry in Detroit at Thanksgiving. The wedding is clearly not going to be quite as simple as we had imagined; on the other hand, it is not going to happen immediately. I suspected when Howie took control of my life that we were to be married in Detroit as soon as we told our respective families. Mother gives me to understand preparation takes months.

electric toaster

6 towel sets, assorted colors

7 linen dish towels

canister set

wall can opener

good
knives

Father has removed to the basement, where the protesting whine of his saw accuses us as it bites wood to soothe him. That night Howie said we would marry, I did not dream of aluminum bread boxes.

“Donna never writes me any longer,” Mother complains. “Out of sight, out of mind. Thick as thieves when she’s in town and then kiss her good-bye.”

I cannot tell if Mother grew to like Donna or if she simply wants to be in on the story. With hindsight I know that Donna forced the intimacy to fill the gap of doing without me. Now that she has worked out a way to see me without Peter being aware, she has forgotten my mother. Donna is narrow in her passions, whether of love or friendship, but long-lasting.

“Howie may not be as showy a catch as Peter but he’s a good boy and Jewish. When you come down to it, Donna should marry her kind and you should marry yours. That way, you both know what you’re getting…. Is he
affectionate,
Jill?”

My skin crawls with memory. In my room, sultry summer. I stood squirming, trying to hide my love for Mike where she could not damage it, while she probed. For a moment I feel wary and defensive as one of my apartment’s roaches. I want to turn with my teeth bared and shout, Look I am playing this bloody stupid family game but don’t push me too hard. Blandly I say, “Yes, Mother. He has a pleasant disposition.”

“Um.” She sucks on it. “Well, he’s more of a mensh than that Mike Loesser you brought home.” As if the same memory had been triggered in her. What makes me feel betrayed are the little comments that reveal she too imagines that I will buckle down to the boring routine she calls being a woman and give up everything I want to do. “You can always write an evening now and then. Once the children are in school you’ll get a little time for hobbies again.”

My mother: the miracle is that in middle age we are friends. As I get older, she admits to being older and older. I still do not know how old Pearl is, but I know she took a big risk in having me. Actually the story of her early years makes more sense if you have an extra five years or so to play with. Why did she stop
disapproving of me? She likes the row of books. A couple of years ago, she began to talk about dying. She said that she is sorry she could not love me when I was younger, but that she can love me now; except that she still can’t use that word with me. She still asks me if men are affectionate. She asks me that about Josh: “Is he affectionate, Jillie?”

I am finally not embarrassed. “Yes, Mother, he is. He’s the most affectionate man I’ve ever met.” I mean that; I also mean the other if affectionate has been all these years a code word for sexual passion. I am still not sure.

Mother, the romantic still and eternally, in her mid-eighties preferred Josh to all my other men because she found him more attractive herself than any other man of mine she had met. “Age, phooey,” said my mother grandly. “All the women in my family marry younger men. If he isn’t ten years younger, you aren’t properly matched. They wear out sooner, and who wants to be left a widow? Don’t you have to train them no matter what?”

Now that I am in my forties, she tells me I’m beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

Howie and I are silent on the plane and on the airport bus. We are stuffed, glutted, talked out. He goes up to his apartment near Columbia to get his gear together for registration. I head home. I’ll call in for a work assignment tomorrow morning, but I may have to wait till next Monday for a job.