Dissident Gardens (7 page)

“Mother, where did you acquire all the history you throw in my face? In school or elsewhere—at meetings, in coffee shops?”

“How do you think I became the one who Solomon Real needed to answer his telephones, to repair his double-entry books, to master shorthand for immortalizing his peasant’s prattle. Those poor Jews didn’t stand a chance!”

“Couldn’t I answer Sol’s telephone?
You
taught me English.”

“I didn’t have your opportunities, to throw away like they were worthless.”

“You never speak of your school days except for the bewilderment of learning that Yiddish wasn’t actually what was spoken there. The shock of realizing you had to start over making yourself American. But I grew up speaking right, because you taught me. The history you want me to recite, you learned it marching in the streets. You learned it reading books they don’t have in the Queens College library. I’ve read those books. Your shelves are better than theirs, Ma.”

“Ma,”
Rose scoffed, but she’d been superbly derailed by Miriam’s flattery. “You sound Italian. Maybe I should have gotten you out of Queens.”

“I can do Italian,” said Miriam the Mimic, now looking to make Rose laugh. She simply ventriloquized her schoolmate Adele Verapoppa—too easy. “I can do Yid, too,” she said, in perfect Uncle Fred. “I know the difference between Queens and Brooklyn—
Toity-Toid Street. You
taught me them all, a by-product of teaching me not to
have
an accent.”

Miriam, her mind a fog of exhaustion, amazed that night had
smeared into this atrocious day without a single blink or nod of sleep, had nonetheless continued to dress herself; the clean dry underwear, the new brassiere and stockings made her feel covered and with some possibility of renewal or escape. But she’d overreached in her flattery. Or something else had turned sour. As she began stepping into a dress, Rose’s face contorted again.

“Where are you going?” Rose’s voice gripped a lower rung of hysteria. “To
him
?”

“Oh, Mother. I’m only putting on clothes.”

“Could it have been me that purchased for you a whole wardrobe of nothing but poodle skirts and party dresses? Was I such an idiot? Perhaps I’m really to blame, perhaps somehow I shoved you out the door to find a man to lay you because I’m finished myself, dry down below—”

“Stop, Rose.” Miriam thought better of making mention of her mother’s lover, the lieutenant. Who knew what cataclysm that might set off.

Yet why think cataclysm was circumventable?

Rose’s hands tugged at the margins of her robe again, but a repeat performance wasn’t enough, this wanted escalation. Rose sobbed theatrically and collapsed to the floor, absurdly recalling Jackie Wilson, the soul singer Miriam had seen at the Mercury Ballroom in Harlem, she and Lorna Himmelfarb having snuck up on a dare, their white faces beacons of risk and delight in a sea of black. They’d been tolerated, perhaps indulged or even protected, but it wasn’t a chance Miriam would take again without a Negro companion for escort. Now Rose artfully also blocked the door, a grain of pragmatism in her histrionics. The way Rose heaved tears so reminded Miriam of the singer that she found herself issuing a sharp guffaw.

“How could you. If I was dying it wouldn’t stop you doing as you wished. No doubt you’d step over my body on your way to Greenwich Village or to a man like that one whose name you won’t even condescend to share with me. Step over my dying body on your voyage to where the
squares
wouldn’t go. But I hardly imagined you’d shower me with laughter as you went past.”

“You’re not dying, Rose.”

“I am inside.”

That’s how you know you’re still alive
, Miriam wanted to tell her. Dying inside was for Rose a way of life. Within her mother was a volcano of death. Rose had spent her whole life stoking it, trying to keep the mess inside contained but fuming. In Rose’s lava of disappointment the ideals of American Communism had gone to die their slow death eternally; Rose would never die precisely because she needed to live forever, a flesh monument, commemorating Socialism’s failure as an intimate wound. Rose’s sisters’ unwillingness to defy, by their marriages, by their life stories, the obedient Judaic domestic-life scripts Miriam’s grandparents had salvaged from that shtetl that was neither Poland nor Russia but some unholy no-Jew’s-land between; this rage too had to smolder eternally inside the radioactive container, the unexploded bomb that was Rose Zimmer. God himself had gone inside her to die: Rose’s disbelief, her secularism, wasn’t a freedom from superstition but the tragic burden of her intelligence. God existed just to the puny extent he could disappoint her by his nonexistence, and while he was puny, her anger at him was immense, almost Godlike. Finally, if you dared argue, if you needed proof of Godlessness in this vale of outrage, the Holocaust. Each of the six million was a personal injury nursed within the volcano, too.

Rose crawled on her hands and knees to the kitchen. Miriam, in her dress now but barefoot, found a correlative response, a non-sequitur antidote to what was before her: She lifted up a magazine that happened to lie on the foyer’s small table, alongside a bowl of keys.
Life
, Mamie Eisenhower in a flowery yellow hat. Miriam padded after Rose, ostentatiously thumbing through the glossy pages, while her mother slithered to the foot of the stove and reached up. Miriam’s duty was to witness Rose; this had been required of her for what seemed centuries already, inside Miriam’s seventeen years. Witness, confirm, recognize. So: into the kitchen. Lana Turner, in the magazine’s culture pages, looked identical to Mamie on the cover; squint, and they were one woman. Rose flipped the gas dial, then wrenched the oven’s door open like a black mouth and crawled onto its pouting lip to deliver her head inside.

“I don’t want to live to see you put with child and abandoned as I was by that son of a bitch who was your father. My life’s been nothing but one long heartbreak since the moment he first laid a hand on my
body, now you’re walking out the door to finish the job. But I’ll finish it for you. It’s fine, I’ve lived too many years past the destruction of everything that once mattered. I can’t bear to live through the trials of your stupidity and suffering as I did my own. As if I taught you
nothing
.”

“You’re not making sense, you put too many things together, Rose.” Miriam flapped the magazine under her arm but refused yet to intervene, to take a step in Rose’s direction. “My father isn’t responsible for everything in your life, he wasn’t around long enough for that. My father, for instance, didn’t humiliate the Soviet, you know. Khrushchev did that.” Could Miriam’s scorn embarrass Rose from her demonstration? Rose flopped her arms as though trying to clamber deeper into the oven, a whale going ashore. If Rose could see her own ass from this vantage she’d quit immediately.

“I’m already alone, leave me to die as I should have done the moment that thief stole my life and put me with child. I should have taken the baby in my arms and jumped from a bridge.”

“The baby is me, Rose.”

“Fatherless a child is worse than dead. We’re castoffs, you and I.” Rose reasoned from within the oven, absurdly. Yet the room had begun to fill with that cloying, fartlike odor Miriam had been expertly trained to regard as a life-or-death disaster.
Call the gas company! Open all the doors, run out, find a neighbor!
Families they knew hid beyond the walls in both directions, perhaps hearing Rose’s moans and shrieks as they sat at morning coffee and newspaper. Rose was off speaking terms with every single member of them.

“Speak for yourself. What lies, Rose. After all this time. If you’d wanted me to have a father you could have told me where he was. You wouldn’t let me write a
letter
.”

“He tossed you aside without a glance. You think that man had learned to love a child who was barely doing more than combing her doll’s hair by the time he vanished? You couldn’t give him the satisfaction of making an audience for his great rhetorical postures, you couldn’t buy him a drink, you couldn’t prop up his vanities any better than I could. What would you say to such a man in a letter?”

“A man, everything that happened to you was done by a man. For a revolutionary your heartbreak is awfully pedestrian, Rose.”

“Pedestrian!” It was, admittedly, a peculiar word to throw at the block-watcher, the Citizens’ Patroller, the consummate enraged flaneur that was Rose Zimmer. Rose was the Pope of Pedestrianism, scalding all of Sunnyside with her inquisitions-on-the-hoof. The stink of gas continued to expand in the room, a headache with the ambition to cure you of every future headache.

“Rear guard, Mother. Weren’t men and women to be equally responsible for their lives in your revolutionary blueprints? Or are those now going into the oven as well?”

Every word Miriam hurled at Rose, as well as the exquisite torque with which it was hurled, came straight from Rose herself. Miriam relished this notion, that Rose must feel she faced a renegade self, the demon memorizer of her inmost hypocrisies.
You wanted a witness?

“Rear guard?”
Rose cried. Like an animal freeing itself from a burrow in which she’d nosed against a hostile occupant, Rose came clear of the oven. From her knees she tackled Miriam to the floor. For one instant Miriam found herself swept into her mother’s incoherent embrace, arms of iron, bosom of cloying depths, corkscrewed face corroding her own with its bleachy tears. Then, as if she was and had always been only a child, her body to be handled, limbs shoved through sleeves, hoisted bruisingly here and there, a terrifying slackness came over her, feeling Rose’s next intention. Every strength unavailable to Miriam had apparently flowed into her mother’s monstrous wrists and shoulders, her wrestler’s grip. Rose shoved Miriam’s head into the oven. Miriam only slackened. Perhaps it didn’t even matter, so much gas filled the room already. Miriam still preferred not to credit Rose with calculation, despite essentially having begun by sealing the rooms of the apartment. One inspiration flowed into another. This was how you earned the right to inflict murder: by showing a willingness to murder yourself first.

Perhaps Rose was testing Miriam. Perhaps Miriam tested her back by the absence of struggle: She anyway wanted to believe she’d been defiant, rather than suicidally helpless, when an instant later Rose’s vise clench loosened. Miriam was carried into her mother’s lap as they both fell backward, Miriam’s crown thudding on the oven’s top lip as she came free of it. “You’d do it, you’d die to get away from me,” Rose groaned. She writhed loose from underneath, cutting short their
mother-reading-storybook-to-child tableau before the flooding oven, to drape herself in a morose, shuddering heap. One breast found the rent in her nightdress and pooled like pancake batter on the kitchen’s tile.

Miriam shut off the gas. Then stood, smoothed her disarranged clothing, and went to the kitchen windows, raising the shades to light, the sashes to fresh air. Stepping over her mother without a downward glance, she made the rounds of the apartment’s windows, inviting the cool morning to draw the poison out. It would take a while. By the time Miriam circled to the kitchen door Rose had departed to her room, aligned sepulchrally on its high narrow bed like a figure in a marble crypt, Grant or Lenin.

“You’re killing me,” Rose intoned when she detected by some radar Miriam’s tiptoe at her door. Rose’s head didn’t inch, black curls and gray temples sworls forged of stone.

“A family tradition.” Did Rose deserve to be teased? Miriam did it for her own sanity.

“I can’t live with you in this house.”

“First I’m killing you by leaving, now you’re kicking me out?”

“Go to him.”

Rose was less a mother than some preening and jealous Shakespearean lover, a duke fantasizing her rivals into solidity. This, in turn, led to an image of Miriam costuming herself as a man, like Rosalind, to smuggle herself into the sanctum of the Columbia dorms. Anything for a night’s sleep at this point. It was all too comically impossible to make Rose understand, how the disaster of her arrival on the scene had shipwrecked the tenuous excursion with the college boy. Miriam wondered again whether she’d see Porter a second time. Appropriate to her Shakespearean fugue, he seemed a figure from a dream. Maybe the gas had already done its work, snuck in and muddled her brain, and so she might as well have left her head lying on that oven rack and died. Shakespeare flashed before her eyes because, like any New York City public-school child before her, Miriam had memorized the plays before she stood any chance of understanding them and was doomed to spend the rest of her life seeing how the playwright had detailed every agony and absurdity of the existence to come, from his perch
in history. Rose, the fiend for education, would be proud if she knew. Miriam’s legs jellied and she sagged into the cradle of Rose’s doorway. Rose, on her bed, seemed a mile high.

“There’s no him,” Miriam whispered.

“Unless you return to college, pack your things and live elsewhere.”

“Not Queens.” Two mummies, entombed side by side, bargained at the affairs of the living from their holes beneath the earth.

“Then what?”

“The New School.”

“You didn’t get enough of Trotsky from Mr. and Mrs. Abramovitz and their son who’s too good for anything but Harvard, you need to go bask in that hotbed of do-nothing I-told-you-so’s?”

“I’m not interested in Trotsky one way or the other, Mother. I want to study ethnic music.”

This was good enough for a shriek from the statue-corpse.
“Ethnic music?”

“You said return to college.”

“That’s
college
?” No matter how it might appear to anyone less versed in Roseology, the tragic sobbed interval between the first and second notes of this song indicated concession to the inevitable. (A Jackie Wilson sob again.) Achieving this, some butterfly-broken-on-a-wheel part of Miriam managed a smile.

And more: The butterfly raised a wing, tested the sky. “But not this semester, Rose. It’s too late. I want you to send me to Germany.”