The Year My Mother Came Back Read online

  We banged and crashed the pans and screamed our heads off. It was loud and exciting. The jays got scared and flew in circles right over our heads—we could feel the wind from their wings. They were squawking and wanted to peck us, I could tell, but they didn’t. They flew in circles, higher and higher and higher.

  They didn’t attack us ever since then. Nor did they go near Mom.

  JENNIFER AND I picked a bouquet of wildflowers and went back in the house. Dad played piano and my sisters and I danced around the living room. He sang the funny songs he learned growing up in Brooklyn. While accompanying himself on the piano, he made a pretend ugly face and sang,

  There once was a man named Dirty Bill!

  He lived on top of Garbage Hill.

  He never took a bath and he never will.

  Ach, Poo! Dirty Bill!

  The three of us climbed on his lap and begged, “More, Daddy! More!” And he sang with a pretend mean face, while banging out minor chords.

  Oh Dunderbeck, oh Dunderbeck, how could you be so mean,

  To ever have invented the sausage meat machine?

  Now all the little cats and dogs will never more be seen,

  ’Cause they’ve all been ground to sausage meat, in Dunderbeck’s machine.

  “More, Daddy!”

  He recited a rhyme he learned when he was growing up:

  “There were toidy poiple boids sitting on the coib, on da corner of Toidy-toid and Toid, a-choipin’ and a-boipin’ and a-eatin’ woims. When along comes Hoib and his girlfriend Moitle, what woiks in the shoit factory. Gee, they was pertoibed.”

  He played songs from Gilbert and Sullivan, and we spun around the living room to “Three Little Girls from School Are We,” from The Mikado.

  He played “Hava Nagila.” Madeline, Jennifer, and I grabbed hands and danced the hora in such a fast circle, we all got dizzy and flopped on the green couch.

  Mom woke from her nap. The birds flew off the hammock, and she went into the kitchen to make dinner. I followed her and gave her the bouquet. “It’s gorgeous,” she said, and put in on the table in a glass jar. I helped her make a salad while the spaghetti was boiling. We set the table, nibbled on cheese and crackers and carrot sticks, and talked about birds and our vacation. I liked being in the kitchen with Mom. She was usually busy, but she always had time to talk to me while she was cooking.

  After dinner, she washed the dishes in a sink full of soapsuds and I helped her dry. She put Jennifer to bed and came back to work at the kitchen table. While she typed, I sat next to her and drew a picture of our backyard, using all the colors in my crayon box.

  “What a beautiful drawing, Alice.”

  “It’s for you.”

  “Thank you, darling, I’ll put it on the refrigerator. Time for bed.”

  I got in my pajamas and she tucked me in.

  “Will you do ‘X Marks the Spot’?”

  “Sure, Sweetie.”

  She sat on the edge of my bed. I rolled onto my stomach, and she stroked my back with her warm hand, under my pajama top. This was my favorite thing in the whole world.

  “X marks the spot, with a dot, dot, dot . . .” she recited in a soft, singing voice, her finger tracing an X and three dots, with the lightest touch.

  “And a dash, and a line, and a big question mark.”

  Her finger drew a huge question mark on my back.

  “Trickle up, trickle down. Trickle all around.”

  The trickling up and down and all around was the best part. It could go on indefinitely, her fingers touching my skin so softly I got goose bumps. It felt amazing. It was ecstasy. I didn’t want it to stop, but it did.

  “With a pinch and a squeeze, and a cool ocean breeze.”

  She blew gently on my back.

  “Again,” I murmered, almost asleep.

  “X marks the spot, with a dot, dot, dot . . .”

  THAT NIGHT, SOMEONE dumped garbage in our backyard. In the morning, we found the smelly heap, decomposing in the weeds. We were pretty sure the garbage was courtesy of the DiNapolis, our very mean, very fat neighbors, who ran the rooming house behind our house. But it could have been some of our other neighbors on the block. Dad said they were angry because of our unmowed lawn.

  I climbed the tree in our yard and surveyed the neighborhood to look for clues about the garbage incident. I liked it up in the tree, where I could see everyone but no one could see me. From the tree, I heard Mrs. DiNapoli tell her husband that she was going to poison our cat if it went in their yard again. I warned Amanda to stay on our side of the fence. She was a smart cat, and she steered clear.

  Three days later, when we woke up, we found our bicycles with slashed tires, and graffiti covering our driveway. Enormous black letters, painted in a child’s handwriting, spelled J-E-W, big enough to reach all the way across the driveway. I had a feeling the Donahue boys at the other end of the block were responsible, because sometimes they whispered “Jew” at me and Jennifer, as if it was a bad word, when we walked past their house.

  Mom and Dad had whispered conversations.

  I didn’t exactly know what it meant that we were Jewish, since we didn’t go to synagogue or Hebrew school. I just knew we were the only Jews in the neighborhood, and now it seemed like it was the only thing about us that mattered.

  Mom hired one of the teenage boys on the block to mow the lawn. “But please leave the buttercups and dandelions.”

  He stared at her with his mouth open for a moment. “How do you mow a lawn but leave the buttercups and dandelions?”

  “Just do your best.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Cohen,” he said, rolling his eyes. He pushed the heavy lawn mower in circles, leaving haphazard islands of tall grass and wildflowers scattered through the yard.

  A week after the bicycle incident, Jennifer and I were outside eating popsicles in the front yard. The Ramirez kids, Miguel and Rosalia, were riding bikes up and down the block, and Rosalia called out, “Jennifer, Miguel loves you even though you are Jewish.”

  Sally from across the street came over to play. She was two years older than me, and she wasn’t very nice, but not as mean as her little brother Kevin, who was my age. Kevin threw rocks at me and kicked me in the shins. But Kevin’s mother and my mother were friends, and they thought we kids should play together.

  Sally and I were in my room, building blocks.

  “You’ll never go to Heaven,” Sally said, out of the blue.

  “Why not?” I asked her, having no idea what Heaven was.

  “Because you’re Jewish.”

  “So what?”

  “Because the Jews killed Christ.”

  “Why did they kill Christ?” I asked, having no idea who Christ was.

  “How should I know? But that’s why you can’t get into Heaven.”

  “What’s Heaven, anyway?”

  “You don’t know what Heaven is? You must be retarded.”

  “I am not retarded!” I said, having no idea what retarded meant.

  “And your mother is crazy!”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Yes she is. She’s old and she’s crazy.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Is not.”

  “Is too. Your mother is crazy.”

  I threw a block at Sally. It chipped her tooth, and she ran home, crying.

  Eliana climbs out of the camp bus after the nine-hour ride, looking healthy and beautiful, although her long hair seems not to have been brushed for weeks. When we get home, she drops her bags in the middle of the floor and runs to her room for a reunion with Harry Potter the Hamster. Harry eagerly climbs into her hand from his cage—a large plastic globe with winding tubes and other hamster-friendly amenities. He displays his affection by sitting in her palm and exuberantly grooming himself, until he makes it clear that he’s had enough socializing.

  I sit Eliana down to comb her hair, gently as I can, except when the tangles require more force. She wiggles a loose
tooth and tells me about her cabinmates and counselors, llamas, tie-dyeing, and marshmallow roasts. Her euphoric monologue about camp lasts all day and into the next.

  “Alex is my favorite llama,” she tells me while watching the sea lion feeding at the zoo. “He’s a really nice guy. I took him for a walk every day.”

  “YELP!” Grab.

  She doesn’t notice my new tic. She holds my left hand, leaving me free to grab my breast with my right. “And it’s true, llamas do spit when they’re mad, but only at each other,” she continues, while we row a boat on the Central Park Lake.

  “YELP!” Grab.

  “Animal care was awesome. I took care of pot-bellied pigs and rabbits and donkeys and kittens,” she continues, in front of Calder’s Circus at the Whitney Museum. “We fed and mucked and cleaned and brushed them. Oh, and Gross Out Day this summer was the best ever.”

  “YELP!” Grab.

  At home, she flops down on the sofa and wiggles her tooth. “Do you have any more questions for me about camp, Mom?”

  When I run out of questions, I ask, “Do you have any questions for me?”

  “Um, yeah. Why are you having surgery?”

  “Ah, good question. Because . . .”

  This won’t be easy. I’m determined to do this differently than my mother did. I’m not going to keep my cancer a secret from my daughters.

  “Because I have breast cancer. The surgeon will remove the part with cancer. It’s called a lumpectomy.”

  “Will you get better?”

  “Yes. My doctor says I’ll get completely better.”

  “Good.”

  That was easy! Was it too easy? Nah. I wish Mom had told me, when I was twelve, why she was going to the hospital. On the other hand, my doctor has assured me that my cancer is curable. Mom had no such guarantee.

  “Do you have any more questions?”

  “Ummm.” she wiggles her tooth meditatively. “Yeah. Is there really a tooth fairy?”

  “Ah . . .”

  “Tell me the truth, Mom. Who puts the money under the pillow?”

  I remember confronting my mother with the same question.

  Sally, the mean girl across the street, had revealed the big, fat parental conspiracy. “Your mom is lying to you.” “No, she’s not!” “Is, too. There’s no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, stupid! Only babies and retards believe in fairies!”

  “You’re right, Alice,” my mother confessed, “I’m the one who puts the quarter under your pillow when you lose a tooth.”

  I burst into tears—betrayed, humiliated, and terribly sad. “Why did you lie to me?”

  “It wasn’t a lie, Alice. It was a fantasy. It was true for you. The tooth fairy is a gift parents give to their children when they’re young enough to believe in fairies.”

  She struggled to explain a deeper truth about fairies than I was able to understand. This was my first existential crisis, and it was all the fault of mean, stupid Sally. I wasn’t ready to stop believing, but there was no turning back.

  However, Eliana initiated this.

  “How truthful do you want me to be, Eliana?”

  “Totally truthful.”

  “Okay. The tooth fairy isn’t real. Daddy and I put the money under your pillow.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Any more questions?”

  “Yeah. Will I still get money if I put my tooth under the pillow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “Any more questions?”

  “Um, yeah. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. How come I look so much more like Daddy than I look like you, when I grew up inside your body, and all Daddy did was give you a wedding ring?”

  “Ah . . .”

  Cancer! Tooth fairy! Sex! Whoa, isn’t this a bit much for one afternoon? Eliana’s questions are a checklist of the Secrets of Life. I can’t wait to return to our conversations about llama care and Gross Out Day.

  “I’m so glad you asked that question,” I say, half-truthfully, stalling while I try to remember my parenting strategy for this moment. I do in fact have a plan, which includes visual aids. I scan the bookshelves, looking for the book I planted there a year ago.

  “I bought this for you,” I say, reaching to the highest shelf for a children’s book about reproduction, illustrated with drawings and photographs of a ruddy-cheeked Swedish family, the father and pregnant mother uninhibitedly sharing the facts of life with their adorable little kids.

  We sit on the sofa, and I begin reading. “When a man and a woman—”

  “I know how to read, Mom.”

  “May I read it to you?”

  “I’d rather read it myself.” I hand her the book and watch her eyes getting wider as she reads. I hope I’m doing this right.

  I was eleven years old. All the fifth-grade girls went to the auditorium to watch a movie, for girls only, about growing up. Top secret. A few of the girls giggled during the screening. I didn’t get the joke. I didn’t get anything. The movie made absolutely no sense to me. It was in a secret code that I couldn’t decipher. There were eggs inside us girls, and once a month, our eggs might turn into babies.

  Huh? Eggs? Humans? This was crazy! It couldn’t be true. When we walked back to class, I started singing “I Won’t Grow Up!” from Peter Pan, hoping the other girls would join me. I did it to get a laugh. But really and truly, I didn’t want to grow up. The girls just stared at me like I was mental, so I stopped singing. I guess they actually wanted to grow up.

  When we got to the classroom, the boys went to the auditorium to see the boy movie, and the girls were each given a booklet called The Birds and the Bees: What Every Girl Should Know, which had nothing to do with birds or bees, and which was as incomprehensible as the movie.

  “Your homework is to ask your mothers to read this with you and give you ‘The Talk,’ ” said my teacher, Mrs. Strange. More giggling ensued from my classmates who were in on the joke.

  Mom looked irritated when I showed her the book after school. She flipped through the pages with a scowl. “Ugh. This looks like the same book they gave us in school when I was your age.”

  “For homework, you’re supposed to read it with me and give me ‘The Talk.’ ”

  She groaned. “Maybe tomorrow.” She went back to her typing.

  I pestered her, day after day, until all the other girls in my class had reported to Mrs. Strange that they’d had The Talk with their mothers. Now they all knew things I didn’t. I wasn’t part of the inner circle of fifth-grade female wisdom. When all the boys in the class had had The Talk (presumably a different talk) with their fathers, everybody in the class was in on the joke except me.

  After a week, Mom finally sat down with me for The Talk.

  “Alright, Alice.” She flipped through the book and put it down. “This is what you need to know. You’re growing up, and pretty soon you’ll start bleeding every month, and you’ll have to wear sanitary napkins.”

  “Huh?”

  I waited for further explanation. None was forthcoming. I started to cry.

  “What’s wrong, Honey?”

  I cried harder and harder.

  “Sweetie, what’s the matter?”

  I was convulsed in sobs. Mom hugged me.

  “Alice, Sweetiepie, it’s not so bad. It’s just nature taking its course. You’ll get used to it, I promise. Madeline gets her period. You can ask her about it. It’s completely normal. My goodness, Alice, why are you so upset?”

  “Where—” sob “—will I—” sob “—be bleeding—” sob “—from?”

  “Where? Why, from . . . you’ll bleed from your . . . private parts, of course.”

  “My whaaaat?” (Sob!)

  “From . . . from your vagina.”

  “Oh.” I wipe my nose on my shirt.

  “You know what your vagina is, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, of course I do.”

  Vagina was one of the code words that made the girls giggle dur
ing the top-secret fifth-grade girl movie. I would look it up in our Worldbook Encyclopedia.

  “What did you think I meant?”

  “I thought you meant I’d be bleeding from everywhere.”

  “Oh dear!”

  “I thought I’d be gushing blood from my entire body.”

  “Good heavens. No wonder you were upset.” Mom held me closer.

  “I thought that every month I’d have to wrap my whole body in napkins.” I giggled through my tears. “Sanitary napkins—” I started to laugh “—like a mummy wrapped in really clean napkins.”

  Now, Mom was laughing with me. “I’m sorry, Sweetie. I’m no good at talking about this kind of thing. I admit that I’m kind of uptight about sex. I mean, talking about sex.”

  “That’s okay, Mom.” (Sex? Is that what we had just talked about?)

  “Good. So we’ve had ‘The Talk,’ right?”

  After The Talk, I still didn’t know anything about sex. When my gullible little sister Jennifer (who believed everything I said) asked me, “What does mating mean?” I made an educated guess. “Mating is when a boy cat bites a girl cat’s neck,” I told her, while we spied on Amanda, as she lay down seductively in front of a virile tomcat and let him have his way with her.

  Eliana reads silently, her mouth agape.

  “Ewww. Did you and Daddy really do that?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “You never asked before.”

  I don’t ask Eliana if she has any more questions. That’s all I can handle for one afternoon.

  Did I deal with Eliana’s inquiries better than my mother did with mine? I hope so. In any event, this was light stuff, relatively speaking: Motherhood 101. Answering these inevitable childhood questions was a breeze, compared to the onerous maternal challenge that lies ahead—helping Eliana through her complicated and grueling medical ordeal. Have Michael and I adequately prepared her for what’s going to happen? Is it better not to tell her too much? Will I have enough energy after my radiation treatment? How do I prepare, physically and emotionally, to help her?

  I wish I could talk to my mother about it. Am I doing this right? For the first time in ages, Mom, I want to ask your advice—