NW at easel (1989)
September 9, 2001, was a Sunday. Late that afternoon I dropped my manuscript off at the home of my advisor. Normally I would have sent Jan my packet in the mail, but perhaps I was late in getting it off. I don’t remember. Anyway, we both lived in Brooklyn, not too far apart, and I had a ride. I was a graduate student at the Low-Residency Program at Goddard College then. This latest revision was crucial.
I was in my final semester. The book had already been in progress four and a half years. That was part of it, but what really worried me was my new beginning. My daring new beginning, starting off with my mother’s revenge. I wondered what Jan would think of it? But Jan Clausen was the one who said the memoir was really about my relationship with my mother. At last someone told me what it was about! I prayed she would like this latest version.
Jan told me later that she began reading my memoir two days later, on the morning of September 11th. As the planes were hitting the World Trade Center, she was reading my book. And she kept on reading even as the Twin Towers fell. Even as people were being pulverized. Even as Lower Manhattan was blanketed in smoke and rubble, and dazed pedestrians were covered in ash, she kept reading. She chose not to watch the TV. Different people have different ways of coping with disaster, and hers was to keep to her reading schedule. I was not so disciplined. My schedule went to pieces as I tried to take in the magnitude of events that day.
Later though, what I could not get out of my head was that my memoir was being read on 9/ll. The two things became intertwined, my story, and 9/11. My life and 9/11. It was odd really, because I was writing about the past. My manuscript ended in the late 70s. It began in the late 70s too, then went back in time. It began with a story of revenge. My mother’s revenge, not mine. Yet somehow, because of term schedules and manuscript due dates, and Jan reading it during the chaos of 9/11, I was finally able to see how my mother’s revenge could have been mine too. For hadn’t she told me that she conceived me in revenge for World War II?
It was a bizarre thing to say, I know. But coming from my mother, it sounded perfectly rational. She made the confession in 1977. I didn’t know what to do with that information until 9/11. In brief, this is how it happened.
She met my father on a bus. It was February, 1949. She was twenty-three, going to Nevada for six weeks to divorce her first husband. She got on in Illinois. I don’t know where Milton got on, but he was on his way to a government job in Tonopah, Nevada, and wore an army uniform. She said he had a shy smile and dark wavy hair. He was Jewish. She had never met a Jewish man before. Her five-year-old daughter from her first marriage was staying with her parents in Decatur. Her fiancé was waiting in Chicago. But on the bus she met Milton. And instead of going all the way to Reno, she got off the bus at Tonopah. By the end of March when her divorce came through, she was pregnant. She went to Chicago anyway, and married her fiancé, Frank Wait. I was born in December as Frank’s child. That was how it began.
My mother told me this story when I was nineteen. Because of that, and what followed, and many other things besides, I left the country. Then, when I finally came back home to live after seven years abroad, she said, “I conceived you in revenge for World War II and the Waits.”
The confession that I was her revenge was said in anger. She was still angry after all these years. We were sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee. My mother had dropped by after work, seemingly in a good mood. I don’t remember what set her off. Anything could set her off and it never seemed to have anything to do with me. I was tired. I had been working all day too, and wanted to relax.
I asked her to leave. I said, “I’d like you to go now,” and “Please leave,” because the way she was carrying on about whatever it was, I could see that her mood wasn’t going to improve anytime soon. I’d only recently started hanging up on her when she went into tirades over the phone, and that was only because my boyfriend told me I could. “You can just hang up on her,” he said. “You don’t have to listen to that.” And then he told me I could throw her out of my apartment too. At first I didn’t believe him. I thought I could never do that. But I didn’t want to listen to her venom. She always went on about the same things—how wronged she’d been, how badly she’d been treated by everyone.
“Alright, I’ll go,” she said angrily, haughtily. Her face was flushed, her features vivid. Her hair jutted out from her face in soft, frizzy black curls. She was fifty-two and a little overweight, but still attractive. I stood holding the door open while she gathered up her things, and then she came and stood next to me. She was five-feet-two but looked taller in high heels. I was amazed that she was listening to me, that I could actually tell her to go and she would. I’d never felt this powerful with her before.
Her dark hazel eyes bored through me, to some deep wound from long ago. I felt guilty. I always felt guilty somehow for her unhappiness. And when she delivered her parting shot—“I conceived you in revenge for World War II and the Waits,” I felt a wave of heat pass through me. It was like an electrical charge, resonating in my gut. As if in a queer sort of way I had always known this—or something like it. She left then, and I closed the door. The clack of her high heels echoed down the stairs and faded away.
Revenge. It’s such a loaded word.
Ever since the night she told me about Tonopah, her eyes moist and bright, as if Milton was the love of her life, I had thought of myself as a “love child.” I had dealt with being half-Jewish, and the fact that Dad, the man I thought was my father, wasn’t by blood. Now I would have to deal with this too. But I just stood there for a while, leaning against the door. It seemed as if she was always giving me shock treatments.
Like my mother’s confessions, drawn out slowly over the years, my understanding has taken a long time to develop. It has taken me a long time to piece things together, longer perhaps, than it should have. In my twenties I used to wish things had been different. I fantasized a marriage between my mother and Milton, imagining her happier, and by connection, myself happier too. But when I went to a psychic, which I did a lot in those days, and complained, “If only my mother had married my real father!” she said, “But my dear, you chose your parents! You chose everything to be exactly the way that it was.”
I didn’t know how to deal with that information, any more than I’d been able to deal with what happened. It has been like weaving a tapestry—the images don’t make sense until the entire rug is woven together. Yet it finally hit me, why she was so impatient with me when I was growing up. I was the least likely candidate to avenge anything.
