IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE

Where I come from there are walls that cannot be torn down, couches and chairs covered in plastic that sticks to every exposed part of you, polished black speckled tiles under your feet instead of plushy rugs, window shades that flap against the sun that cannot find its way in…

At the dinner table my mother stands against the small stove, stirring the chicken soup, frying the fish I won’t eat because of the bones, the bones I fear will stick in my throat. My father is silent, his face made of chiseled stone, my sister is kicking her small feet under the table and singing in her little girl voice and I, the rebellious teenager, am digging my pink polished nails into the palms of my hands.

Then she comes to the table in her frayed sunflower housedress holding a platter with the shimmering fish, its brown eye staring directly at me. It is a familiar scene. I will scream: I’m not eating it! My father will slam his fist on the Formica tiled table, my sister’s big blue eyes will fill with tears and my mother’s soprano voice will shriek against the walls that cannot be torn down. She tells me I have to eat it and I scream: NO, I won’t! And the dinner ends, leaving me still seated at the table, waiting for her to release me from what she calls my crazy behavior.

That night I dream of fish, belly up, floating in my bed. I try to spear them with a serrated kitchen knife but they are as strong as my mother’s resilience and slide quickly down my throat, making me gasp for air. I wake up screaming. She comes running in to see what’s wrong while my father continues snoring. I close my eyes, pretending to be asleep. My sister in the other bed sits up then slides down back into her dreamland.

The next day I put on hot pink lipstick, pegged jeans, a red bandanna, ready for school. When she sees me she says: No way are you going to class like that and her eyes get darker, her red mouth turns into a grimace. It’s like that every day—like a ’78 stuck in a groove on a record player.

Sometimes I’m racked with guilt, especially when I see her lying on the plastic couch

with a wet wash rag over her eyes because I have given her one of her horrible migraines.

I stare, heart racing, wondering if this is the moment, the one she promises will come and her death, because I have been killing her with aggravation all of her life.

When my father comes home, he glares at me, wants to know what I did to upset my mother. I want to say “I was born.” And in a way, that is the partial truth. When I was born she suffered a blood clot in her leg, since she had a heart condition due to having diphtheria as a child. This left her with a serious murmur. She had to lie still after giving birth, so as not to let the clot dislodge and travel to her heart. I was most likely crying in my bassinet—with no one to hold me until my father finally found an aide who was willing to take care of us both at a reasonable rate. Since we didn’t have much money, my father working in the garment district of Manhattan as a salesman, I wonder what could be considered reasonable at that time. Of course I have no memory of any of this, nor could I. It was told to me much, much later on by my aunt, my mother’s sister, and it explained a lot. It wasn’t something that could be told to a young child.

As the years went by I was the “bad girl” and my sister, the “good girl”, who ate everything, went to school, graduated, while I dropped out at sixteen to work in an publishing office in the city, typing, as it was all I had learned from my on and off school days. I suffered continuously from anxiety attacks and psychosomatic ailments—a condition that in those days was not understood or even addressed in the school arena. The claustrophobia that plagued me, causing me to lose many a job because I couldn’t ride in elevators or be stuck in crowded subways, never let up…  I would ride the Staten Island ferry before going home so no one would suspect I had lost yet another job.  I spend time at the New York Public Library reading, and by then, writing poetry. I was also in therapy with a kindly therapist who was trying to help me make sense of the whole scenario. 

Then I do the final, almost unforgivable thing—I marry out of the orthodox Jewish faith I grew up in. I give her that final disappointment, except for one wonderful thing she could revel in—a grandson.  An adorable blonde haired (like his dad) little guy with a baseball cap and a toothless grin, stretching his chubby arms around her waist to hug her. I knew then I had done something ‘right’.

 I left the Canarsie projects, still looking back, even whimsically, at the place where I had been captive in a home where the walls could not be torn down, fish bones that aimed for the jugular, a place where the sun could not find its way through the flapping window shades and a mother who laid on those crinkled slipcovers with a wash rag over her eyes, and waited to die... 

Here is a poem I write later on that, I think, captures it all:

IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE

every wall

stood at attention

even the air knew

when to hold its breath

the polished floors

looked up

defying heel marks

the plastic slipcovers

crinkled in discomfort

in my mother’s house

the window shades

flapped

against the glare

of the world

the laughter

crawled like roaches

back into the cracks

even the humans sat—

cardboard cut-outs

around the formica table

and with silver knives

sliced and swallowed

their words