Chapter 30
30
You remember when things started to loosen. Not for you, but for us. I hope you believe me when I say that I never saw Alice again. Not ever. That doesn’t surprise me, you say. You were absolutely no fun during that era. What kind of affair?
You give a little laugh. You are amazing like that.
You remember, sometimes, in the beginning, and on good days, forgetting you weren’t healthy—because some days, it seemed like you were. You could take the stairs two by two, eat a box of cookies. You could take a cab to Bea’s studio just to be with her making things and with her. You remember, sometimes, in the beginning, on good days, forgetting what I’d done.
Was that the sickness or some kind of protective mechanism? you wonder. Perhaps that’s the only thing that the sickness protects.
You remember how, in the beginning, sickness felt like more of a nuisance than an issue of life and death. Death too. Or maybe: you remember realizing how the opposite of pain isn’t simply painlessness and realizing that you are never not depleting your quota of breaths. The realization that you’ve been breathing and dying your whole life.
You remember how the prognosis was horrible but you can’t remember the numbers. The pain was the least of it, in a way. What was the most? Not being creative. Being a mother. Both.
You remember, on bad days, remembering what you missed already: coffee, the final chapters of good books, painting blue, hyacinths, chipmunks and how they looked toward the sky sometimes. Me (it took a while), my mother, Max. Sometimes, you’d wake up and he was asleep on the floor next to you. Never ever did you wake him up. You just watched him, trying to figure out who he was, who he’d be—as if you could tell in this way. And whether you’d live long enough to know.
You remember wondering about the last time for everything, checking the date on a tin of peaches and wondering if they’d outlast you. If you’d ever see Max in a grown-up suit. If you’d ever paint in a studio in France.
You remember how much my parents helped even though my father aged quickly and didn’t know what to do with himself without work. Some days, you remember, he took Max to the Park. He tried to steer him away from the arts. But that is a different story. For a different story. This part is about you.
You remember, we came back together, slowly slowly slowly.
Like beads of rain? I ask. You’re not sure you can imagine that.
I’m just trying to change the subject.
You fan your hands in front of your face. What a time, you say. We were holding on to so much.
You remember I didn’t write for months, and didn’t ever mention it. Instead, I followed my mother’s recipe for chicken soup, talked to Max about you, memories he’d never heard and how he liked that. And how it helped us. You remember when Max asked you what hurt and how you tried not to weep in front of him and instead answer plainly. And you did. You were like that. Are.
I remember the bones in your hips and chest and wrists and how sometimes the longing felt physical. I felt that if I could just push something away, shove it, keep it from touching you. And then not. There were days when I didn’t feel I could stand up. It is not the point. It just goes to the idea of power. And having none.
You remember months later, showing up to Collette Cooper’s and how already she knew. You sat on her sofa, knees to knees. She was a breast cancer survivor. And you remember she did: she sold the hell out of your work. Because or despite or whatever. It doesn’t matter, you say. She just did.
You remember the day she gave you your biggest check, you were in bed. She put the champagne to your lips. I remember listening at the door.
You remember at an important show in Chelsea, you were seated the whole time. You remember you had to buy new lipstick. Everything made you look like old melon, you say, or maybe dead. This makes you laugh.
You remember the first time you asked me to tell you about Alice, who she was, who she was to me. And I asked you if you were sure you wanted to hear it. And you said you weren’t. And so I didn’t tell you. I never did.
She was no one, Jane.
You remember one time asking Max if he’d miss you. He was seven. It was a dark moment; you wouldn’t have otherwise. You remember how he said, Stop.
You remember sometimes, with him, keeping the words in your mouth like toothpaste water, wanting to spit. You remember wishing you could start over with him. Be a different mother from the get-go. You were more whole now, despite everything.
You remember that the cancer did do something to shift the configuration of things: you and me and Max. And the expectations. You just couldn’t. And in a way, you were grateful for that. I shouldn’t have needed an excuse, you say. I am his mother.
You remember that time wasn’t the worst time—though, in a way, it was. The newness. The shock of it even if you’d never not wondered. You remember that you were young, had a lot of fight in you. And you fought. It was not in your lymph nodes or pelvis that time. The tumor was the length of two nickels, a triple-A battery. You remember the exhaustion like an elevator closing on your head only to open and close again, and again. You remember the fear of not knowing.
That time, you did three rounds of chemo, six cycles each. You lost all your hair, and it came back within a year, no wave, lighter.
You remember—and me too—that time we hired a driver to take us to Orient so you could see the light on the oyster ponds in March. You remember imagining moving here, wind and the smell of rust and metal and fire, salt on the windshield. I remember how you looked at me, like an arrow shot. Let’s end up here, you said.
Gosh, that was lifetimes ago.
You remember it was not long after that when they told you that you were in remission. You remember the relief, but also the beginning of eggshells forever, living on borrowed time. You remember that we went every weekend to Orient, sat by the shore, ate figs or crackers or passed a can of cream soda between us. It felt as if we were wishing, or praying. The water will do that. And also remission.
You remember feeling that you’d learned how to hold your breath for months at a time. You remember feeling like you’d learned to fully exhale too.
You remember Max being brilliant at school, telling you a long-winded story about soccer, and that if you ever tried to offer your two cents…
You remember one teacher: He is one of the smartest we’ve ever seen. And one of the most charismatic. But he’s also got a temper. Perhaps it will serve him, you said to her. She was surprised by you. You remember never not being astonished by who he was.
You remember I was working on my fourth novel, the one about the two architects restoring an estate in Maine. You loved that one. I wrote in your studio sometimes. Sometimes, you doodled as I wrote on the couch.
And sometimes, you’d remember you hadn’t thought about Alice in days.
You remember, once, finding Max staring at a painting you’d done of him in orange and yellow. What do you see? He just nodded. He was eating capers by the handful. That was the phase in which every day, he’d eat us out of house and home. Do you remember that? Of course you do.
You remember that when you weren’t sick, he liked you more. Was more gracious. You couldn’t blame him. He’d lean on you, sometimes, in the kitchen and ask if you could pour him some milk. It wasn’t lost on you that on your bad days, your hands shook. You couldn’t have helped him even if you tried.
You poured him the milk.
You remember thinking, At least I can do this. Your mother could not.
You remember my brother visiting. How he’d still not told my parents he was gay but he’d told me. You went for cappuccinos in Little Italy and you held hands across a rickety table and neither one of you talked about what was fair and what wasn’t. That was something you two always had between you. You swam in the same sea.
You remember crunching leaves on Central Park West, the first time you did the Lower Loop alone, without losing your breath. You kept an eye on a horse and its carriage, just in case. You remember how everything was brighter after the chemo—the sun, orange trees. You remember how everything tasted sickeningly sweet: strawberries, herbal tea. You remember needing glasses for the first time. And wondering: Was that the cancer or was that the not dying?
You remember the first year we rented a house in Orient with Bea and her boyfriend, Lupo. He was an astrologer and said, about you and Max, Of course. It’s in the stars. And wanting to throw him out.
You remember packing tuna sandwiches and berries, wading into the water deep deep deep and looking back, seeing me flattening sand with my palms. You remember Max reading alone on the beach and, sometimes, praying for him. It wasn’t religious or even superstitious. It felt biological. Please, you’d pray. Be all right.
It seemed like he was.
You remember learning to knit, a neon sculpture installation on Canal, Saint-Sa?ns, peppermint oil when you got a headache, roasting salmon and fennel, and when I sold my fifth book— The Material .
You remember when my father died. You were in the room with him. My mother and I were in the kitchen. You remember how you’d never been close really, but saying goodbye felt important. It felt, to you, like you understood that in a different way. You were telling him a story that your mother had told you about a woman who sold chickens. When he went, you say, nothing changed in the room. It was silent before. It was silent after. And how that struck you. May his memory be a blessing.
You remember, after that, paying everything off. And that that was when David told my mother. You were with them both too. Hands in each other’s hands.
You remember Max getting older and, some days, you two reading next to each other on the couch. It wasn’t that you’d grown closer, but rather that you’d grown around a hole. You remember he still liked to make little sketches in your notebooks in black ink. He loved the coffee you brewed. He would sometimes ask to wear your glasses because he liked the way they made the art look. Not specifically yours.
You remember that when your mother landed in America, she had lice and fleas and the twig of an orange blossom plant that her mother had tended in her pocket still. It was like a bone. You ask me if I think trauma passes down like cells, but unlike bones.
I do, I say. I do.
You remember, some days, getting called into the principal. Max had been writing quotes from Basquiat on the walls in your lipstick. You barely even wore lipstick. Maybe that was his point?
Here’s a thing that we love: when he was tiny, he called it lip dick.
You remember when it was clear to us that he’d lost his virginity—though he never said so. How he wore it like a cape.
You remember volunteering with the kids at PS 84—Max was at 334 for gifted kids—and how it made things worse with Max. He could shut you out for days. But at 84: you remember feeling that you were doing something useful, reciprocal. One gave you a black eye. You remember, it was worth it. You could have been a kid like that, you said. Angry. You remember telling him, Michael Dedo. Your pain will be useful. Decades later, we saw his jazz performed at Lincoln Center. His pain was.
It is interesting, but I do not mention it: how you could not say that to Max.
You remember reading Anna Karenina on the M7, the record store on Amsterdam, the guy who sold purses made of rubber bands. You remember bringing the kids clothes you’d bought for Max and he never wore, and would never wear. You remember a girl named Lita whose father had tattooed her arm. An S . For what, you asked her. She didn’t know. She was twelve. You taught her to make an apple tree around it with washable pen. Sometimes, you’d do it for her: a butterfly, a barn, a snake breathing lollipops and candy apples instead.
You remember when Bea moved to Dublin for three years to teach and how lonely it left you. Ours, you say, was a love story too. Some days, when you were really sick, you’d fall asleep and Bea would stay with you for hours, a hand on your hand.
You remember buying bras on Seventy-Eighth, keeping our citrus trees in the shower for moisture, washing windows with newspaper, losing your father. It was slow; he’d been in a home. It was my mother who hosted shiva for the second time that year. Both of Max’s grandfathers. Good cop, bad cop but nothing’s simple. My father did his best. And perhaps without you, I never would have even thought: he wasn’t enough.
You remember it was not long after that that I finished the novel about a couple not unlike us but not quite like us. You remember not taking any of it personally exactly but it feeling exactly personal. You remember believing in it. And you remember that it was not just because you loved it and not just because you loved me.
That is the thing about fiction, I think. I’m not trying to make a point here, and yet. We were on the mend. You were all right, for the time being. Max was selling old copies of Playboy , was nationally ranked in chess, would run for fun, miles and miles around the Park. He was tall, charming, provocative. And we were hopeful. As in: there were so many reasons to hope.
Too, you remember how often I used the word mistake . Even many years later. I want you to know that’s what it felt like. Just that. I want you to understand. I do, you say. I do.
Some days, it is late when we stop remembering. You’ve fallen asleep or your eyes get glassy or you keep moving your legs. Some days, you aren’t asleep, but you aren’t awake either. I’m not sure when you’ve stopped talking and what I’ve filled in.
Some days, I watch the rise and fall of the white blanket on your chest and I put my hand above it just to be with you.
Some days, I tell you about how the light is changing. It’s indigo and orange at four thirty now. I tell you about how you’ve taken to setting one foot outside the sheets, socked. A kickstand. A refusal, betrayal of the rest of your body, so idle against the mattress. I tuck it in again. Out it goes. Wanting to keep you warm but also. How proud it makes me. Fight, fight, my Jane. Foot out forever. Some days, I whisper that.
Some days, I fall asleep myself, and when I wake up, I can’t tell if it’s because of your voice or because of mine or when my fingers stopped typing.
Some days, I’m not sure of where the memory ends and the story begins. Where the story ends and the writing begins. It’s a Mobius strip. And yet, the more life, the more memories. The more memories, though, the less life. There’s a mathematical equation in there somewhere. Or maybe just a mortal truth.
Some days, when you’re asleep, I tell you what I don’t remember. Which is also what I do remember, inside out. It’s where story comes in.
I do not tell you that I’ve begun praying again. I can remember just two hymns in Hebrew. The mourning one we sang at funerals and the one for Hanukkah, which seems less condemning. I sing that.
For so many years, I’d forgone our faith, and though it isn’t Hanukkah and there are no candles, it feels ceremonial, here in the dark, half dreaming, wishing, praying, singing or hearing the hymn from somewhere inside.