Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
family came on the train to visit. I had sat on her lap and pressed my body against the shelf of breast that extended from her neck to her waist. I’d followed the thick braid that wrapped round and round the top of her head with my eyes, amazed that I could not locate the beginning or ending of that one seemingly infinite loop.
We all went back into the house then; I needed to see my mother. The news on the phone had blanched the color from her face. I followed her into the bedroom, though she did not acknowledge my presence. Loss had rendered me invisible to her. I watched as Death threw her down on the bed, curled her up in a fetal position, convulsed her body in sobs. It was going to dissolve her and me along with her.
“Mommy,” I said. “What’s wrong?” I knew, of course, I knew, but I just needed to hear the reassurance of her voice.
“How can you ask that?” she said. “My momma . . .” Unable to complete the sentence, she sobbed deep, impenetrable sobs that felt as if they could break her in two, break me in two.
“Just leave me alone,” she said, her voice a sharp blade breaking through a watery surface, confirming my culpability.
My mother remained curled up on the bed, in the dark, from that night until the next afternoon. Until that moment, death in people had been confined to Roy whose image I felt responsible for rehearsing lest he be lost forever to me. Now I understood that even mothers could die. Mother-loss was a disease that spread through my mother’s body, blighted her from the inside out. Filled her with some foreign material. From my grandmother’s sick heart in Detroit to my mother’s grieving heart to mine, mother-loss was contagious. Death could make mothers disappear.
And I understood instantly that my love for my own mother, which I’d believed to be singular, special, charmed, was not. I loved my mother, my mother loved her mother, and that mother had died.
My mother emerged from the bedroom the next day wearing a somber gray sheath dress. Circles of rouge congealed in blotches over the unnatural pallor of her cheeks. I can still see her leaning over the low broiler shelf in our kitchen, smoke in her face, fanning the flames off three T-bone steaks, gray and shriveling, shrinking within their rim of fat. With a large fork, she turned the steaks over as they spat and kicked grease into her face. Uncle Nathan had gone to pick up Rebecca, who would move in to take care of us. Rebecca kept kosher and would not cook traif meat for our dinner. So my mother’s parting act was to feed us.
“Be good for Grandma,” she said, producing a dry kiss. “You know she doesn’t put up with any trouble.” Her body felt stiffer than ever, as if she’d steeled herself from the inside out against her own grief. Then she was gone to get on a plane to Detroit for the funeral.
When I got out of bed the next morning, something besides my mother was missing. It was me, the reflection of me in the large square mirror over my mother’s dresser. The mirror in which I used to look at myself next to her had been blacked out with a cloth. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and there, the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet was also covered. I flew from mirror to mirror then—the mirror behind the door of the hall closet, even the small pane of mirrored glass on the front of my mother’s upright piano—all covered.
My grandmother watched me bounce from one covered surface to the next.
“What! You’re so vain you need to look at yourself all the time?” Rebecca spewed the words, digressed into Yiddish, and then surfaced in English again. “You don’t need to admire yourself when your grandmother has just died,” she said. I could only imagine what Rebecca would do if she discovered me doing the bad habit.
I found my father in the office, puzzling over one of his own notes from the day before. My mother usually stood over his shoulder and translated his writing for him.
“Jeannie’s coming over to help me,” he said. He sounded worked up. My father said that my mother was regal with her long neck and broad, square shoulders. But Jeannie was one of the sexy women my father favored. They wore pedal pushers and bright coral lipstick, and screamed at his jokes, and ate with their fingers. They had honeyed East Coast accents and showed off their painted toes in golden sandals. Their breasts looked like ice cream cones planted upside down on their chests.
Eva wore what she called “tailored” dresses and never left the house without stockings on. She only owned one tube of lipstick. She had no patience for women who indulged in frivolous activities like card games and shopping and gossip. She hated the women who giggled and flirted with my father but lacked the power to banish them from our house.
“Grandma scared me,” I said to my father.
“What, did she hit you?” Before her visit was over, Rebecca would slap me across the face, chase me into bed, and put me across her lap and give me an enema when I couldn’t get hard stool out of my rectum. For the latter act, I would be grateful. As of that moment, she had only harangued me in Yiddish.
“The mirrors,” I said. “Why did she do that to the mirrors?”
“It’s part of Shiva. When someone dies, you cover up the mirrors, and take off your shoes, sit on a low bench, and wear black. A man doesn’t shave. A minyan of thirteen men gathers to say Kaddish.”
“Why can’t I look in the mirror?” I said.
“When someone dies, you turn away from your outward appearance, and turn your attention inward.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. “It scares me.”
In preparation for my mother’s return and the week’s Shiva, my father took me with him to the market, where we bought silver foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses.
“These are what people brought over after my zayde passed away,” he said. “I remember so vividly the afternoon he died, hovering outside the room in our house where people from the shul sat with him. I kept staring at the crack under the door, thinking that if I just kept watching, I’d see the Malech-Hamovess, the Angel of Death, slip out under the door and carry away his soul.”
“Did you see anything?”
“Nothing. Not so much as a shadow. I wanted some sign so I could keep on believing. I was so angry at God. Then people brought us Hershey’s chocolates. You have to understand, Rebecca would never bring candy into the house. She caught me gorging myself on the chocolate. ‘How can you enjoy yourself?’ she said. ‘Chocolate! Feh!’ She made me feel guilty because if my grandfather hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have gotten the chocolate, and I loved the chocolate so that must mean I was happy he had died. ‘If you’d really loved him as much as you say, you wouldn’t be able to indulge yourself; you wouldn’t even want to eat chocolate; you wouldn’t even want to look at chocolate,’ she said. I felt terrible. She took away the only small consolation I had.” I patted my father on the arm. He continued. “Rebecca was wrong. It’s only human to crave a sweet taste in your mouth when you’re sad. It’s okay to feel two things at the same time. You never have to feel bad just for being human.”
I understand my grandmother’s ritual with the mirrors differently now. The Malech-Hamovess that my father failed to see lurked all around us. It had destabilized the energy fields, opened the portals between the living and the dead. We had to cover the mirrors; otherwise my grandmother’s death could take advantage of our vain desires and pull in others after her, through the permeable membranes of our own reflections.
While Rebecca readied the house for my mother to sit Shiva, Paul and I spent a lot of time outdoors. For my birthday that year, my mother had given me a play oven that I kept on the concrete wall in the lower portion of our yard. “Try to guess what it is,” my mother had said, when she presented me with the square package. “I’ll give you a hint: it has buttons.”
“Is it a dress?” I asked. “A sweater? A coat? A blouse?”
“No,” she said, “it’s not clothing, but it has buttons.” The only objects I knew of with buttons were clothes. I’d asked for a stove, but I knew it couldn’t be a stove because stoves had knobs, not buttons. The