This is Toby hurtling toward me on Fifth Avenue: a blond puff of hair, a determined stride and raptor eyes that one moment register her surroundings and the next brim with alarm that a terrorist will spring from a bush and take her hostage. I don’t see my mother often. I had dinner with her on her eightieth birthday, and she looked coherent in a blue silk suit. Maybe her coif wasn’t directly out of the beauty parlor. Maybe her lipstick was a little chewed off and gummy at the corners. We skipped the next four years, and then I saw her again while she was recovering from a ferocious bout of pneumonia. She looked awful. Shorter and pale and hollowed out. Her hearing was on the skids. She was shrunken in every dimension except for her personality, which consisted, as usual, of humor and fury. She is the cheapest person on the planet, so when she underscored her vow not to smoke again by dumping a new carton of cigarettes down the incinerator, I was impressed.
She was still smoke-free two years later. The pneumonia reunion had gone up in flames a few months after she recovered. We didn’t see each other for another year, and then we both showed up at my sister’s sixtieth birthday party and chitchatted without leaving behind a crime scene. Wildly out of character, she called six months later on my birthday to say, in sphinxlike fashion, that she wished for me whatever I wished for myself and that she couldn’t talk because she had to eat. “Let me hear from you,” she finished, slamming down the phone, and I ranked the conversation among our most successful. Three months later I called and asked if she wanted to see some art. I thought of the Giacometti show at the Modern but then took a chance and suggested the just-opened Neue Galerie. On the plus side was that the museum was founded by Ronald Lauder, a right-wing Jew, like Toby. On the risky side was that the art displayed was by Germans and Austrians, and my mother might take them all to be Nazis. When she leapt at this plan, I assumed she knew about the German connection and was okay with it.
As we passed through rooms filled with art by Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Josef Hoffman, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, Toby proclaimed at top volume—though not in an ill-tempered way—that each was a Nazi. It was less a condemnation than the reflex of a dog pissing on the corners of its territory or an ape pounding its chest. When I offered that so-and-so hadn’t actually been a Nazi because the artist predated the period, or was Jewish, or had opposed the Nazis, Toby took this in stride, expressing neither relief nor trust in my knowledge. The museum was crowded with foreigners, some speaking German. Toby made no accommodation to them. On the contrary, she wanted to declare that the only reasonable association one could make to matters German was Nazis.
I was used to being with my mother in public and watching strangers scatter. She was like a motor boat in a tranquil nature preserve, causing ducks and herons to lift off in terror, and leaving behind decapitated water lilies bobbing in her wake. One of Toby’s eyes was failing, due to macular degeneration, so she needed me to read aloud the wall texts. She enjoyed listening, making her way around the exhibit and inciting only one direct conflagration. In front of a vitrine that housed silver flatware, a friendly woman told my mother that she was from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and Toby screwed up her mouth and said, “Yuck.” The woman flinched back in bewilderment and horror, as if she’d been slapped for no reason by a lunatic.
I allow my mother’s targets to fend for themselves. Nothing good has ever come from intervening. My mother’s only questions to me are about money: whether I am making any. I tell her nothing. She has more than I do. She has never saluted her roles as wife and mother and no longer asks me to explain why I haven’t chosen them. She says she wouldn’t have elected them herself if she’d had other choices. She’s less surprised to have a daughter who isn’t reliant on men than that a child of hers likes having sex with non-Jews. When, on occasion, I’ve filled her in on standard sex practices, she’s shot me a crooked smile and said, “Who believes you really do such things?”
She prefers to dwell on the body apart from sex, and that is the place where we meet: the body. In the Neue Galerie, I wasn’t ruffled by her Nazi routine, because earlier, at the coat check, she’d broken my heart. Helping her out of her jacket, I’d noticed how shabby it was. She was wearing a navy pea coat. I remembered her boasting of having bought it on sale eight years before. I saw that the fabric was badly pilled, the collar and cuffs soiled and threadbare. Under it her blouse, vest, and skirt looked faded and in need of cleaning, though that wouldn’t have resurrected them. Her clothes were ready for the trash. “Ma,” I said, “you can’t wear that coat anymore. It’s falling apart.”
She laughed. She likes stories in which she’s shown losing her grip. Her favorite is about arriving at her dentist’s office at the exact moment he got there and watching the bridge that had come loose in her mouth fly out and land on his foot. About her coat, she said, “Go way. I’ll have it cleaned. It’ll be fine.”
After we looked at the art, she wanted to get coffee in the museum’s café. There was a long line. I knew the place was expensive, so to head off a scene I got a menu and reported that the price for coffee was $4.50. “They should go get killed,” she said, matter-of-factly, in Yiddish. And we took off.
I suggested the Guggenheim’s cafeteria, three blocks north. She slipped her arm through mine, though she didn’t need me to steady her. She complained of the usual pain in her metatarsals. The fleshy pads in her feet had worn away. But she still walked everywhere. If not she took buses—never the subway and under no circumstances a cab. Her own mother had lived into her mid-nineties, though I didn’t know the exact year of her death, because by then Toby had stopped talking to her mother as well as the rest of her family.
At the Guggenheim, we got trays and looked at the food. Toby selected a chocolate chip cookie, extracting sworn testimony from the woman behind the counter that it was free of nuts. “Nuts will kill me,” she explained. The water for her tea wasn’t scalding enough, so she sent it back, and after the curtain descended on that tragedy, we found a table and Toby withdrew two documents from her purse. I knew what they were. My sister, Ellen, had gone to Ellis Island and brought back copies of the manifests from the ships my mother’s parents had sailed on to America. One said that my grandfather, Chaim Bilder, had departed from Rotterdam in 1899, at age eighteen. My grandmother, Pesha Baum, had left from Hamburg in 1906, at seventeen. Both had lived in Poland, but their nationalities were listed as “Hebrew.”
I’d seen home movies of my grandfather holding me in his arms, though I didn’t remember him from life because he died of a stroke when I was one. I remembered my grandmother as a plump woman with thin gray hair who cooked large amounts of smelly food when we visited her in Brooklyn. She spoke with a thick Yiddish accent. She wrote English in a child’s wavy scrawl that made me uncomfortable because I wrote better. By the time I was born, in 1946, all the members of her family and of my grandfather’s who’d remained in Europe had been killed during the Holocaust. Pesha spoke to my mother in rapid-fire Yiddish, which had been Toby’s first language, although she’d been born in the States. My mother didn’t learn English until she went to school. I didn’t remember pictures of my grandmother as a girl, and I asked Toby if she had any and what Pesha had looked like.
“She was gorgeous,” Toby said, as if all she could see was her mother’s young flesh. “I don’t know what happened to the pictures. Maybe Ellen has them.”
I looked at my mother’s face, and she looked at mine. Sometimes Toby didn’t meet people’s eyes, gazing past them or to the side, as if she was leery of intimacy or didn’t want to see the person’s reactions to her. It was a shyness I was never prepared for. I reminded myself that my mother was afraid of many things, that she often felt ineffectual and underestimated.
Though Toby, at eighty, had looked younger than her years, the pneumonia at eighty-four had changed her, and although now, nearing eighty-seven, she looked better than when she’d been sick, age was taking its undeniable toll. Her skin was finally wrinkled. There were creases around her deep-set eyes, and flesh hung, wattle-like, under her chin. She had always been careful about her figure and she still starved herself most of the day, but she’d lost her shape. Her middle was thick, with a beach-ball belly. Her waist wasn’t distinguishable from her midriff and hips, and she’d lost inches from her height. Her back was straight and no hump was imminent, but several fingers on both hands were crooked from arthritis, which hurt her, though she wouldn’t take aspirin. She had a doctor, Postley, though she generally avoided people in white coats. Toby has never seen a gynecologist and never had a mammogram. She depended on her body to heal itself. Her organs were in good shape, except for her lungs, though since she’d quit smoking she’d had fewer colds.
The Pesha I’d known had been a wreck, but my mother’s good looks were owing to her mother’s genes. Pesha looked like a Tartar, and maybe there was Tartar blood mixed in us, Cossacks sweeping down from the steppes of Central Asia and creating offspring. Pesha could have been a cousin of Nureyev, with her jutting cheekbones, hairless tawny skin, and deep-set eyes that had darted mischievously even in old age. My mother’s sister, Etta, had told Toby that Pesha had been a sexual adventurer before she’d married, and if looks had been her snare, she’d had them.
My mother’s features weren’t quite as Tartar as Pesha’s, although those traits defined her. Toby had been a beauty and had remained arresting well past middle age. She’d worn stylish clothes that my father—who’d been as free with money as my mother was tight with it—urged her to buy. She’d been slender, though she didn’t do sports. She couldn’t swim or ride a bike. She did stretching exercises and walked. She must have known that she was stunning, but she didn’t act vain, nor was she ever intentionally seductive. The way my mother lived in her body had less to do with being looked at than with controlling some part of her life.
I have pictures of Toby and my father, Murray, when they were young: sleek and stylish, their hair thick and wavy, their angled faces catching light. Sometimes they’re posed in unlikely settings—on horseback and on skis—sports they didn’t know how to do. The country surroundings make them look all the more urban. My father was eight years older than my mother. By the time he met her, he was making enough money as a traveling salesman to dress well and own a car. Later he would manufacture children’s coats and own a successful business. In my parents’ minds, though, they were never far from the stinking tenements and brutishness of their childhoods, where each of their families of seven had lived crammed into two rooms. I had known about their childhoods growing up. They referred to poverty all the time, and they were awkward amid the bourgeois manners their money exposed them to. When they lived in the suburbs, they were happiest in Manhattan, making pilgrimages to the Lower East Side. What I hadn’t understood but in later years would see was that, emerging from their abject worlds—with scant education and little fortitude to acquire it—the one glory they’d possessed was youth’s body: power that required no social lineage, class entitlement, or cash subsidy. It was their link to romance, imaginative flight, largeness that could not be revoked or denied.
They had wanted to pass this endowment to their kids, though they didn’t articulate it and may not have been aware of it. The way it worked was that it was okay in my family to enjoy the way you looked. If you had brains or some other talent, you could be vain about them, too. There was no hiding your light under a bushel. There was no shame about being embodied, being alive.
Toby popped a piece of cookie in her mouth. “I never eat now. I’m only doing it to please you.”
I sipped coffee and opened a packet of pretzels.
“Wizard number one wouldn’t talk to me,” Toby said, referring to the first eye doctor she’d seen about her failing sight. “Even a dog you talk to, so to him I must have been a flea. He spoke into a tape recorder and sent it to Postley. Postley said he didn’t like the report. He sent me to wizard number two. Everyone in this office told me to wait and be patient, but it was taking hours, so I walked down the hall and marched into the big man’s office and asked if he was God, it was that hard to see him. ‘Am I going to go blind?’ He looked up. ‘Read my lips.’ He did this with his mouth, ‘No.’ I was thinking, ‘I’m going blind, not deaf.’” She sipped her tea and pursed her lips. “I have the bad kind of macular degeneration, the wet kind. The dry kind they can treat. Postley didn’t believe it, but it’s true. Maybe I won’t go blind completely, but the doctor said, ‘Read as much as you can, now.’ So you know what that has to mean.”
I asked her to describe a poster of Paris on the wall. She made out the details, could read all the writing. She met my eyes. “When you were a baby, people didn’t believe you were real. I was afraid they would steal you. When you were small, there was a man in the A&P who asked if he could marry you when you grew up. You were that gorgeous. You still don’t have a line on your face. How is that possible?”
“I had a facelift, Ma. You know that.”
“Who believes you would do such a thing?”
“Ellen and I never had your looks.” I liked granting her that.
“Go wan. You don’t have to be nice.”
“I’m not nice.”
“No, you’re not.” Her eyes narrowed. “How come you’re suddenly being nice to me, now? Huh? How come?”
I didn’t answer, and she let me drift beside her, body to body, the way I liked it, without words. We differed about the meaning of words. Almost all words. She’d wanted me to see danger and risk, Nazis and Cossacks, where I hadn’t seen them, and I’d refused, and my refusal had been intolerable. Now she was bearing it, along with the loss of her vision and the pain in her feet, or maybe I was contributing something. Maybe something was rising off my body that came from looking at her, and she was receiving it.
My sister inherited Murray’s tapered knees. I have Toby’s chunkier ones. Both Ellen and I have Murray’s wide dog eyes, not our mother’s shadowy orbs. We have Toby’s heart-shaped face and her breasts with their large, dark aureoles. My ass is more curved than my mother’s, her legs slimmer and less muscular. Her belly protrudes not only from weight gain but childbirth. Mine used to be flat, though lately it’s become more rounded, as have my hips. I have my mother’s bony, veined hands. I have her soft skin and small pores.
I’ve seen people’s bodies leave them. Murray died of liver cancer. He wasn’t sick long, but the end was violent, and he wasted away. The same thing happened to Gardner, a man I loved for a long time who died of bone marrow cancer. As my friend Robert was dying of AIDS, his body became a wraith. If I close my eyes, I can see Toby in a two-piece bathing suit, shapely legs leaning against my father, who is bare-chested, squinting, and flashing teeth. My mother attributes her weight gain to quitting cigarettes. She’d light up in a second if she thought it wouldn’t kill her. Maybe she can’t see the wornness of her clothes, the frayed buttonholes and stains. Every day, she still slips on nylon stockings and a girdle. She pencils her eyebrows, applies blush and lipstick, does her hair. Her mind remains hers. She searches for names, though no more, it seems, than I do. It is the loss of her body that has changed the way I see her, a reality I can’t believe and at the same time feel eclipsing everything else about our connection. I look at her smallness, the out-of-kilter skitter of her, her forefinger frozen in the shape of a C, and nothing else seems important. When people exult in their flesh, I feel part of my family.
Toby and I walked down Madison Avenue. The streets were thronged with kids getting out of school and women with headbands walking dogs. Toby petted a cocker spaniel, placing her hand gingerly on the animal’s caramel head.
“I’m afraid of dogs,” she said to the owner. “That’s how I was raised.”
“You don’t seem afraid,” the woman said.
“I’m afraid of everything. You have no idea. I could tell you.”
We passed a bakery. Toby stood at the window imagining how all of the pastries tasted.
“You could buy one.”
“Are you crazy?”
At a flower shop, I bought her a bunch of hyacinths. “Put them beside your bed. They’ll make your room smell like perfume.” The stalks were long, the buds unopened.
“What are they? They look like vegetables. Are you sure I shouldn’t cook them and eat them?” She laughed.
I waited until her bus arrived, and when it did we kissed. She climbed inside and dipped her Metro card into the slot. She charged to the back, tottering, but still upright. As the bus pulled away, I saw her talking intently to a man in a fur hat.
Laurie Stone’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Village Voice and The Nation. She is the author of a novel, Starting Out with Serge, and a memoir collection.
