Elegy
There was that time Mom almost broke my arm, remember? It was right before I left for college, the day of the blackout when New York City came together and drank on its collective stoop and I missed it because I wasn’t yet a part of that ineffable, synergistic mass of sweat and dirt and hands and palpable loneliness; I was still at home having fights about nothing with my mother. It’s one of those things you read about, I guess, in teen magazines. They say mothers and daughters fight before the kid leaves for college because they’re trying to hate each other to make the parting easier, but I thought they just cut up each other’s credit cards or something. That’s the way normal people do it, right?
I don’t remember exactly what happened, even. I had been at the mall, and the lights went out in Saks and the traffic lights were blinking yellow and we all had that residual anxiety about terrorist attacks and then I had come home and she did something and I called her a cunt and wound up with my face pressed into the couch and my arm twisted behind my back until I knew it was only a matter of time until I’d hear some sickening pop or another.
She snapped out of it instead, I think, and I, idiot, called the police and hung up. They called back and insisted on coming, and then the two men who showed up at my house looked at burdensome me like I was garbage for calling them on a false alarm (after it was they who insisted on coming!) and for arguing with my mother in Hungarian in front of them so that I could tell her she really should just go to jail because she had hurt me, and she could tell me I had better lie and say it had been nothing because did I want to be taken away and put in foster care and raped because that is inevitably what happens.
I didn’t want to hang around for mom to mutter and fume and dad to yell and guilt me, and Joey was entertaining Cliff and Shane in the garage (the one who got married and the one who lost weight and gets girls now, even though I still think he’s ugly) so I ran away to your house. You didn’t have power either, of course, but I slept on your downstairs couch where the floor tiles are buckling, the same one I slept on with Brian once when we had nowhere to go, only you didn’t know that, or you did but you didn’t need to say. I kept checking and checking to see if the TV would turn on.
My mother still wasn’t speaking to me when I left for school, so it was you and dad who saw me off, who unlatched me there on Broadway. Grandma may have been there too. She cried with me when I got in, you know? I called her first that day I didn’t feel like going to school, the day the FedEx truck drove up with my acceptance packet as I was sitting on the kitchen counter eating cereal for breakfast at noon. I called Grandma and we cried together and she told me proudly that Henry Kissinger had gone to school there, too. Actually, his chair appointment had been rescinded. I called the store and dad asked me if I’d heard from Harvard yet.
I’m sure you remember this, too. I don’t, to tell the truth, but I’ve heard it told so many times it may as well belong to me. There was a terrible storm one night, they say, and I was staying at your house. I must have been two or three or four, young enough that Joey wasn’t born yet, or was still so little she had to stay at home. I wanted to eat cereal, but the milk had gone a little sour. Dedi had force-fed me yogurt from your fridge (rusted and heavy with magnets) until I was sick enough times that I wouldn’t hear of touching the stuff.
You gave me anything I wanted, you know, so instead of making me choose something else to eat, you announced you’d brave the storm so the flakes or o’s would have wherein to float. I turned to you, they tell it, and I said, “Grandpa, don’t go. It’s dark and it’s raining and there’s thunder and lightning…” Then, I turned again, and (from the mouths of babes), “Grandma, you go.” Now, when I leave my mother with a stack of overdue library books or a bag of beaded dresses and suit jackets bound for dry cleaning, she’ll pass them off to my father or hand them right back to me with, “Grandma, you go.” It’s a treatise on the unfailing honesty of children, of course, a masterwork, but it’s also I love you.
There was the time last January when we came down to see you. You picked us up from the airport and as we drove the fifteen minutes of eight-lane highway past the dog track where grandma used to take me when I was little and I advised her against the trifectas, you asked us what we wanted to do for the week. Joey’s request was that you take us to the seafood restaurant she had gone to with you and dad on the trip when grandma woke up and thought she was in Vienna in the wintertime. I asked to go to some thrift stores because there are prime dead people sweaters to be had in West Palm Beach. When I had come down alone for spring break and grandma kept asking why Joey wasn’t coming to the table for dinner, you let me shop for vintage Lacoste and Escada while you slept in the car. You could have just dropped me off.
“You girls don’t want to go to Disney World?” you asked. Of course we did. We had been too old for it once, but not anymore. You drove us all the way to Orlando and we parked for free because we still had grandma’s old handicapped permit hanging from the rearview mirror. It expires this month, you know, and you were sorry you couldn’t renew it now that she’s gone because, let’s be honest, it came in handy. We stayed until closing and watched the fireworks and the line for the tram was long and you were impatient (I get that from you) so we walked all the way back to the car. “I hope you girls had fun,” you said, “because this is the last time we’re coming.”
