she could not put all this into words when she was young, she knew what had happened, felt it in her bones, and with every breath she took she sensed the creeping emptiness. He gave her jewels. She honked the horn of the car. He threw himself into his work. She went shopping. It was a standoff.
He kept her idle and adorned her so that she would be the most beautiful object in town. He prohibited her from working, when all she wanted was to try different things, anything to get her out of feeling that she was now more dead than alive. She found other kinds of freedom, or so she thought. By the time she reached Atlanta, she had confronted her own unreality. She was what others made of her. Everyone compared her to a movie star. A certain specimen of glamour, she was nothing more than a body that danced, her head topped with fruit-filled turbans, a Carmen Miranda or Lupe Vélez. Exotic, she appeared a lady of pleasure in the glitter and cigarette smoke of party nights, with men who leered and women who envied her beauty, even as they mocked her accent.
That’s what I grew up watching, none of which she could tell me in words. Instead, I was punished, the offspring of a deadly marriage. She told me her pain by inflicting it.
You Go to My Head
___________________________________
AFTER I LEFT HOME for good, I would open a dresser drawer, and out would come the sound of my mother’s laughter. Her laugh was not a giggle, but a snort and shriek. She laughed at Pépé le Moko, her poodle, when he humped the legs of visitors. I wish I had asked her why she called a randy, albino dog with squinting eyes and freckled pink skin by the name of Jean Gabin’s impertinent and alluring gangster. She laughed at dirty jokes, or when she heard a ribald comedian like Belle Barth. In what my mother called “the back den,” she played a motley set of records for her three closest friends — Zenobia, CG, and Molly: If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends, along with Nancy Wilson’s Yesterday’s Love Songs, Today’s Blues, and Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely. She loved his “Blues in the Night” with its warning: “My Mama done tol’ me,” and droned his lament for nature gone wrong: “The evening breeze will start the trees to cryin’/And the moon’ll hide its light/When you get the blues in the night.”
The ladies were gorgeous. Zenobia was tall with black hair piled high. Everyone talked about her drinking too much, but they said she was Indian and couldn’t help it. She always stood apart from the crowd, though men circled around her. “Like moths to a flame,” my mother said. CG was a regular item of gossip. Blonde and muscular, she taught me how not to be too feminine. She golfed as well as a man, and after the game, she always drank in the Oak Room, the one room at the Standard Town and Country Club that was off-limits to women. I remember she sat on men’s laps, but I might just be imagining it. Her legs held a particular fascination for me. I have never forgotten the buoyancy of those blonde hairs.
My mother’s closest friend, Molly, used to walk into the den, look at me, smile and say with her head tilted to one side, the voice gliding down like molasses, “Gone possum hunting.” She was tall, too stout to be statuesque, and wore a lot of make-up. As a child I wondered why she looked at me the way she did and why she spent so much time saying “possum,” which she drew out into a sound like “paws some,” her mouth turned into a tight oval, pink and wet. “Gonna eat me some possum, ain’t nothing so sweet,” Molly crooned, adding in a lowdown voice, “They got pussy and the men are going after it.” Men talking about a hunt, whether for possum or pussy, it didn’t matter much. That’s what she thought of their ways of loving you. Pussy and possum, that’s about as close as I can get to my sense of the South: sticky, hot, and unusually cruel.
One night my father sat down by my bed and showed me a picture of lemmings. Thousands of these warm-bodied creatures were darting over cliffs and into the sea. He told me that they were lemmings, Norwegian, lemmus lemmus, who for reasons no one knew killed themselves by rushing away from their homes, running through the woods, and finally drowning themselves in the dark waters below. They appeared before me as if in a dream, a blur of fur and feet bounding down the mud bank and into the creek behind my house. I never forgot their headlong plunge into oblivion. It appears before me as something momentous and beguiling. My father always found ways to link what he reckoned as love and the death of animals.
Death hung around my house. No way around fate, that’s what my mother told me. “Once something bad happens, it will happen again.” My rabbits ate their babies. I buried my turtles alive, thinking they had died when they were just in hibernation. My mother’s canary drowned in a glass of orange juice. My hamster got stuck and died behind the stove. A car ran Pépé down one afternoon when my mother left the door open. A neighbor’s German Shepherd attacked Johnny the Pekingese — the dog we left outside — and bit his neck so hard that his eyes popped out. One eye was put back in. Everyone called him One-Eyed Johnny. A few years later Johnny was adopted by one of my mother’s friends. She renamed him Precious, kept him in her bed with lace sheets, and told everyone he was her sacred lapdog from China.
Everything happened to the tune of Sinatra’s singing, his chic and casual disregard: “Witchcraft,” and “Those fingers in my hair.” I took a deep breath. “That sly come-hither stare.” Perhaps that was the problem. Even in a lament for a woman he loved now lost, there’s a boozy kind of pleasure, a lingering sense of sex. I had a strange feeling in my stomach when I stood at the top of the stairs and saw my father in the basement taking what he called “dazzle photos” of my mother sitting spread-legged on a stool wearing a corset. She had ordered the corset and a push-up bra from Frederick’s of Hollywood.
I began to repeat words prayed on the Day of Atonement to ward off evil and temptation. “But repentance, prayer, and righteousness shall avert the severe decree.” I read Ezekiel and thought about dry bones. They could save me from the stench of flesh. One afternoon I walked into the den and saw my mother undressed again, this time right
down to her bra and panties, sitting on Bernard’s lap, with a bottle of Chivas in her hand. Bernard was married to the woman who took on Johnny the Pekingese.
But there was another side to my mother, a woman who believed in undying love. “The Lady of Camellias.” Not the woman who told me, “A rich man is just as easy to love as a poor man.” Back I go into her voice, into the song she repeated again and again, only a few lines of it, when I least expected her to break into song.
Our Love,
I feel it everywhere.
Through the nighttime
It is a message of the breeze.
I can hear it
In every whisper of the trees.
And so, you’re always near to me
Wherever you may be.
I see
Your face in the stars above.
In the sitting room of the Standard Town and Country Club, my father took a photo of her.
Set atop greensward with a challenging golf course, swimming pool, and tennis courts surrounded by woods, the Club was the Jewish answer to the exclusive Cherokee Town and Country Club and Piedmont Driving Club, which allowed only white Christians: blondes with long straight hair, the easy confidence of good breeding, a heritage of immaculate inclusion that was never at risk.
I never forgot the way my mother looked on Saturday night: diamonds, martini in hand, overly plucked eyebrows and tightly controlled hair. Not expectant or appreciative, but quite still in her elaborate, almost fleshless articulation of what should be ease but instead
