Lost and Found

Janet Hobhouse had published a few novels before The Furies, and she had something of a presence as a critic in the 1980’s art world, but she was more of a figure than a writer in those years. Ask anyone who knew her and they comment on her beauty, her almost scary charm, her incisive wit. Ahh, Janet. They grow misty eyed, and then stutter to a halt. If pressed, they mention her marriage, or the break-up of her marriage, or her affair with a very famous American man of letters. They talk about her loft, her skin, the color of her eyes. But what they don’t talk about is her work itself—they don’t mention the early novels because they aren’t really worth mentioning; and they don’t talk about The Furies, because it is the novel Hobouse wrote while she was dying, of ovarian cancer, at the age of forty-three. Ahh, Janet. Too painful to be read. But still, they’re curious. Is he in it? they’ll ask of the famous American man of letters. As if, to the end, Hobhouse’s outsized romantic life was more important, or more interesting, than the work she left behind.

As it happens, The Furies is a masterpiece. Billed as a novel when it was published, it reads more like memoir. One flips to the stamp-sized author photo on the back flap and searches the planes of the face there for clues. Reading the book, one falls into the branches of a family tree so complicated that it requires a map—and Hobhouse provides just that on the thirty-fifth page, a diagram in the shape of an egg, of all things. An egg-shaped guide to a matriarchy, the family tree of the author, who herself will be dead of cancer of the egg before the book is completed.

The Furies is written from a place of no fear. No fear, at least, of judgement, either from the people depicted within its pages, or from anonymous readers. Judge me if you can, the book seems to be saying. Judge me if you dare. It is the story of Hobhouse—her history, her impoverished New York City childhood with her crazy, beautiful mother, her years at Oxford, her life in London and New York, her marriage and its betrayals, and yes, of course the famous American man of letters. It is the story of her mother’s suicide, of a series of fateful accidents which would seem like just too much if they were piled onto the fragile arc of a novel, which, after all, can handle only so much tragedy—but because we are led to believe this is true, all of it, all we can do is shake our heads in sadness and disbelief. Bad things happen and keep happening. Suicide isn’t a hedge against fire. Fire doesn’t protect you from theft. And suicide, fire, theft, divorce, heartbreak do not stop you from dying far too young.

But it isn’t the crash-and-burn value of The Furies that makes it great. It’s the kinetic, intelligent prose that gallops across its pages as if the writer is writing for her life. “I finish my novel while the snow falls on the skylights. I am working day and night now in the artificial light, the daylight blocked by snowfall. I am in my own darkness, pushing like a mole, harder and harder as though something is hurrying me on. Never have I worked so fast. Something is chasing me. I feel it at my back and in the dark weight of snow overhead, and I’m so busy staying ahead and away from it I haven’t time to be curious what it is.” (258)

Read The Furies for the intricate, crumbling beauty of its prose. Read it for it’s excavation of a complex and damaged family. Read it for the courage of it’s author, who faced down her demons until the end. Read it for the ellipses inserted by the publisher where Hobhouse wasn’t quite finished. Never before have ellipses been so eloquent. Hell, even read it to figure out the identity of the famous American man of letters. (It’s not hard.) But more than any other reason, read it to see how, like Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, a book itself can be the ultimate redemption of it’s author’s life.

Plane Crash Theory

These are the first words I’ve written since J. fell down the stairs, unless you count lists. I have lists in my pockets, lists tacked to the bulletin board above my desk. Small lists on Post-its ruffle like feathers against walls and bureaus. Chunky baby food, milk, Cheerios. Diaper Genie refills. Huggies overnight diapers. This is what I do now. I cross things off lists. The more items I cross off, the better I can breathe.

J. was just seven weeks old when we moved from Manhattan across the river to Brooklyn. We bought an old four-story brick townhouse with a dogwood out front. A green-painted front door with glass panels led into a foyer with a pale pink chandelier dangling overhead. An antique cherry banister curved in one fluid line up two steep flights of stairs. The staircase itself was polished, with creaky, uneven steps.

My husband and I looked at a lot of places before we decided to live in Brooklyn. Manhattan was out of the question-we needed four bedrooms-so we explored Montclair, South Orange, Hastings-on-Hudson. We considered the country. Litchfield, Sag Harbor. During a trip to Seattle, on a sunny day when we could see the mountains, we thought about moving out west. We kept reminding ourselves that we’re writers, and writers can work from anywhere. But Brooklyn won us over-so close to our friends, to everything we knew. And then, after a parade of realtors showed us dozens of narrow dark Victorians, we fell in love with the brick house. The night after I first walked through the house, it filled my dreams. I was in my eighth month of pregnancy, and my dreams had become colorful, baroque. I floated through each room, focusing on the wide-planked orange pine floors, the intricate, crumbling moldings.

We ran out of money shortly after J. was born. It was my fault. I was giddy, on a postnatal, hormonal high. I was a mother! I wanted everything to be just right for my little family. The parlor needed an armoire for Michael’s record collection. The baby’s nursery had navy-blue curtains hanging to the floor and a hand-loomed rag rug. We had thousands of books, so we found a carpenter to build in shelves. And as long as he was already there, we had him install library lights, extra electrical outlets. You never know when you’ll need them. I pored over “shelter magazines”: House & Garden, Metropolitan Home. I looked at photographs of other people’s shelters. A shelter with a small Mondrian above the mantel. A shelter with an eighteenth-century writing desk in a child’s room. We relined the fireplaces, built closets, installed an alarm system, and before I knew it, we were broke.

Eighteen steps lead from our front hall to the second floor, to J.’s nursery and our bedroom. They are steep and creaky. Along the curve of the wall, near the top of the staircase, there is an indentation in the wall shaped like a tablet, like half of the Ten Commandments. I am told it’s called a coffin.

Things don’t go wrong all at once. There are small things — invisible things — that constantly go wrong. Wires fray inside a wall. A van speeds through a yellow light. Someone leaves a Q- Tip in the baby’s crib. These small things almost always just scatter and disappear. Big wind comes along, and – poof! — they’re gone. But once in a while, they start sticking to each other. If this happens, you find yourself with a big thing on your hands.

Whenever we’re on an airplane taxiing down the runway, I ask Michael to explain this to me. He calls it Plane Crash Theory. I know he wonders why I need to hear it again and again. But I do. His theory is simple, scientific: in order for a commercial airliner to crash, many things have to go wrong in sequence. Many unlikely things. No single event causes an accident. It is the sheer coincidental accrual and velocity of these failures that sends two hundred people plummeting into the ocean. This makes Michael feel better. He finds comfort in these odds as he settles into his seat and cracks open a newspaper as the jet takes off. Me, I think it’s as likely as not that I’ll be on that particular plane.

Michael and I have always lived hand to mouth, though from the outside it doesn’t look that way. We occasionally get a big check, then go months-sometimes years-without any money to speak of coming in. We bought the house with the expectation that a big check was on its way from Hollywood. It was a done deal. What we didn’t realize was that done deal, in the language of Hollywood, does not, in fact, signify a deal that is done. The producers are on vacation in Hawaii. Larry (who’s Larry?) is on the golf course and can’t be reached.

Here are the things we didn’t do when we moved to Brooklyn, because the check didn’t come. I still have the list tacked to the refrigerator: fireplace screens, seed garden, repair roof hatch, basement beam. Last on the list was runner for staircase.

J.! He was perfect, with a burly little body. Late at night, while Brooklyn slept, he burrowed into my soft belly as he nursed, and I watched him with bewilderment and joy. Where had he come from? He seemed to have inherited a temperament that didn’t exist in either my husband’s family or my own. From a grumpy, depressed bunch of people comes this smiling boy. In the darkness of his nursery, I stared out the window at the glowing red face of a clock tower in the distance, and thought obsessive thoughts of all the things I had read about in the baby books. He could choke on a button, or the eye of a stuffed animal. He could suffocate in his own crib sheet. He could strangle himself with the cord of his purple elephant pull toy.

This is what I do with happiness. Kayn aynhoreh, my grandmother used to say, repeating this magical Yiddish phrase to ward off evil. Kayn aynhoreh. I need to think of the worst-case scenario. If I think about it hard enough, it won’t happen.

There is a cage in our basement. I’ve never gone down there. The stairs are dark and rickety; the third step from the top is loose. The cage is made of rotting wood poles and chicken wire. It was built earlier in the house’s history, a less affluent time. Maybe it was once a rooming house. When we moved in, Michael found an axe propped in a corner of the basement. He’s not in the least spooked by it. This is one of the reasons I married him. He’s been using the axe to tear the cage down. Sometimes, I hear the crash of metal, and he emerges, covered with dust.

We come from money, my husband and I. Not huge family fortunes, but from first- and second-generation Jewish parents who made good, who have more than one house and drive the cars they swore they would never drive (those Nazi-mobiles) and take first-class round-the-world trips. Parents who wish we had become doctors or lawyers instead of writers. I’m saying this because we could have put our pride aside and asked. We could have said, Mom, Dad, we’re short on cash. We need a couple of thousand. The staircase is slippery. We should do something about it. Put up a runner.

We settled into the new house over the long, hot summer. I rare left. I was captivated by J. and spent hours doing nothing but singing the Winnie-the-Pooh song to him. Saturdays, we had a routine: We walked with J. in his stroller to a farmer’s market at Grand Army Plaza; I circled the market buying goat cheese, banana muffin grape juice, while Michael and J. played in the shade. It was the first time in my adult life I had a full refrigerator. I kept the grapes in  a Provençal bowl we had brought back from our honeymoon.

One day during that summer, Michael and I were driving through the city, heading home after visiting friends who had just give birth to a premature baby. Michael turned right from 34th onto Broadway, and drove straight into a swarm of police officers. They had set up a trap and were pulling cars over for making an apparently illegal turn. Michael, usually a calm guy, lost his temper. He screeched to the curb, and got out of the car. Maybe it was sleep deprivation, or the heat, or visiting a three-and-a-half-pound baby in the neonatal intensive care unit. I saw him waving his hands at the traffic cop, who didn’t meet his eye, shrugged, and began to write a ticket. Michael opened the car door, grabbed a camera we happened to have handy, and began snapping photos. The corner of 34th with no sign. The traffic cop himself. He got back in the car. “I’m going to fight this,” he said. I wondered he’d bother, or just forget about it.

That coffin, that empty space, bothered me. Broke as we were, I decided that something belonged there. But what? Fresh flowers An empty vase? I gave it a lot of thought. Then, I bought an arrangement of dried sprigs of herbs, baby roses, big bulbous things that I didn’t know the name of that drooped from the edges of a cracked white urn. I placed it in the coffin, and it filled the space nicely, with some of the dried arrangement pushing out into the stairwell in a burst of color. A bit precarious, perhaps: but hell, it looked so good that way. I could picture it in one of those shelter magazines.

September. Back-to-school time for me. Leaving for my teaching job in the city was impossible. I would walk down the front steps of the house while Michael and J. waved bye-bye from the door. I could barely breathe, but I didn’t say anything. Just waved at them, blew kisses at J., and wondered if I would ever see them again.

On the subway, I would hang on to the pole and stare out the smudged window at the graffiti on the tunnel walls. I thought of J., of Michael, of anything safe and good, anything to pull me back, but thinking of them only made it worse. I was underground, with no way out. Moving farther away from them by the minute. Was this what having a family meant?

Of course, J. needed a babysitter. We interviewed fourteen women for the job. Who do you trust? We talked to cousins, sisters, best friends of babysitters of friends, and friends of friends. Finally we chose Marsha. She was young and pretty, with a Louise Brooks bob and big brown eyes. She was so gentle, so sweet, that her eyes seemed to be constantly brimming with tears. She had a little girl of her own. She pulled a photo from her wallet; I liked how proud she was of her child. Marsha would never be one of those babysitters I saw in the park, talking to her friends with her back turned to my baby.

One morning, when the train pulled into the station, I stood on the platform, paralyzed, watching as the doors opened, the rush-hour crowd pushed its way in, and the doors slid shut again. This had never happened to me before. I climbed back upstairs and stood on the street. I wondered if I should just walk the two blocks home. Call in sick. Give up for the rest of the semester. It was too hard. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. An off-duty cab was approaching, and, impulsively, I flagged it. The driver stopped for me. As we rolled down Flatbush, we got to talking. He said his name was Tony. He came from Nigeria. He lived nearby, and was on his way into the city to begin his shift. By the time he dropped me off at school, he had given me his number. I told him I’d call him the following week to pick me up on his way in. Maybe that would make it easier.

On her first morning working for us, Marsha put too much detergent in the wash while she was doing the baby’s laundry. The water flooded my office and dripped through the old floorboards to my bedroom closet below. As we frantically mopped up the mess, I tried to comfort her. I told her it was just an accident. Nothing was ruined. It could have happened to anybody.

That afternoon, Marsha and I pushed J. in his stroller to the park. I wanted to give her my guided tour of the neighborhood. The health food store, the pizza place, the Key Food. It was a warm day, just past Halloween, and the playground was full of moms and kids and babysitters. I lowered J. into the baby swing, and he laughed and laughed as I pushed him. He has the most unusual laugh I’ve ever heard in a baby. It’s like he cracks himself up. Everything was funny that day. The leaves falling off the trees were funny. The little girl with her orange plastic pumpkin was funny. Mommy making her silly faces was very, very funny. He was wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and a blue denim jacket. Already, at six months old, he wanted to go higher and higher.

On the morning of Marsha’s second day, we take a family nap together before she arrives. J. falls asleep between us, his little mouth open, his eyelashes blond and long. We hold hands across his sleeping body.

It is a teaching day. I dress in black cargo pants, a black turtleneck sweater, black boots. Tony will pick me up at nine o’clock. I feel pretty pleased with myself at this arrangement. Marsha arrives a few minutes late. Michael is going to catch a ride into the city with me; today is his court date to fight that traffic ticket, and he seems strangely energized by it. J. is in his high chair, being fed strained plums. I take the dog out for a quick walk, rounding the corner by the bodega. A truck honks. You look beautiful! the driver yells. I’m in such a good mood –I’ve figured out my life! — that I yell back, Thanks!

We cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and for once I feel at peace on my way to school. Michael is in the back of the taxi next to me. Tony is an excellent driver. And Marsha is at home with J., feeding him strained plums in his safe, ergonomically designed high chair. It’s a perfect day. The city is a jagged, sparkling cliff along the East River and I notice things I don’t notice on the D train when it crosses the bridge. The small boats, the abandoned Brooklyn Navy Yard, the faint outline of the Statue of Liberty off to the left in the distance. I feel, for a moment, lucky.

We drop Michael off somewhere near the courthouse. He gets out of the taxi, a manila envelope containing proof of his innocence-photos of the corner of 34th and Broadway-in his hand. He has graying hair and a mostly gray goatee, and he’s put on some weight since the baby was born. He’s wearing his usual blue jeans, black T-shirt, green army jacket. We pull away from the corner, and, as I always do, I turn and watch as he walks away. In our marriage, I am the one who turns around and watches. He is the one who walks deliberately, in the direction of wherever it is he’s going.

This is the first morning since J. was born that we have both been out of the house at the same time.

As I speed farther and farther away from my neat and well-appointed house (the bookshelves, the sheer white bathroom curtains, the ficus thriving in the south-facing window, the dried flowers bursting forth from the coffin in the stairwell), up the West Side Highway past terrain more familiar to me than my Brooklyn neighborhood, where even the silence and the birds chirping and the car alarms in the middle of the night still feel strange and new, I close my eyes.

When my cell phone rings, it surprises me. It rings from deep inside my briefcase, which is a bag I use only once a week, when I teach. I unsnap the briefcase and pull the phone out from its own special little pocket inside. I’m thinking, It’s Michael. He’s forgotten something. We are speeding towards the 79th Street boat basin. The traffic is light. I flip the phone open.

Even when I hear the screams on the other end of the phone, I don’t get it. Marsha is screaming, J. is screaming. There’s static on the line, I can barely hear anything but the screaming, and I’m thinking, We just left twenty minutes ago. Nothing terrible could happen in twenty minutes. Her voice is shaking so hard all I can hear is, I fell, and stairs, and He hit his head, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

I notice that Tony has wordlessly turned off the West Side Highway and is heading downtown, back towards Brooklyn, pedal to the floor. I tell Marsha to call 911. She’s crying so hard, hyperventilating, that I have to keep my voice gentle, ask, Can you do that? Can you do that for me? I tell her I will call her back in three minutes.

I try to think. The world shrinks around me. I call J.’s pediatrician. I can practically see her office from where I am right now, in the back of Tony’s car. We haven’t switched to a local pediatrician, believing irrationally in Manhattan doctors over Brooklyn doctors. While I’m on hold, I try to catch my breath, because I can’t think clearly, and my heart is going to explode, I’m going to have a heart attack right here in the back of a taxi, and that won’t do anybody any good, will it?

Kids hit their heads all the time, J.’s doctor tells me in a professional, soothing tone, like she’s talking someone off a ledge. Tell the babysitter to put some ice on it. Is he crying? Well, that’s a good thing. It’s when they’re not crying that you worry.

I call Michael’s cell phone. He’s at a diner, just about to go into the courthouse. And I say there’s been an accident, that it’s going to be okay, but that it appears that Marsha has slipped and fallen down the stairs while holding J., and EMS is coming, and I’m on my way home. Michael is halfway out the diner door before I’ve finished the first sentence, and is sprinting in his green army jacket to the subway. And I am somewhere on lower Broadway. Tony is weaving in and out of traffic.

The stairs. There are eighteen. Have I mentioned eighteen? Maybe she fell near the bottom. If she fell near the bottom, on the last few steps, and landed on the small rug in the foyer, that wouldn’t be so bad. What part of his head? Babies have soft spots. All I can think about as we pass the Tower Records building and make a few quick turns and speed down the Bowery is, Please, not the curve at the top of the stairs, the place where it would be most likely to fall, the place where the steps are narrow and the dried flowers make the passage even narrower, and it’s a long, long way down. Please, not that.

He was screaming. Screaming is good. Screaming is the best thing. That’s what you want to hear. Big, loud, shrieking sounds.

I call my home, and a stranger answers the phone. A strange man. A strange police sergeant man. He asks me who I am. I say I am the mother. How’s my baby? He says, Ma’am, your baby has quite a bump on his head. I melt for this man, I want to collapse into his big, blue chest. His voice is not shaking, he is calm, he is imparting information to me, information I need. Quite a bump. We can deal with quite a bump.

I call the school. I won’t be able to teach my class. Baby fell down stairs. Baby fell down stairs trumps all. Trumps viruses and flus and the dog ate my student’s homework. I call back the doctor. They’re taking him to the hospital, I tell her. She seems annoyed. After all, she’s certain that I’m a hysterical mother, that this is only a minor bump. And it occurs to me, not for the first time, that this doctor is younger than I am. When I was in second grade, she was in kindergarten. What is she doing, taking care of my son?

I grew up in a home where prayer was where you turned in moments like these. But I have never been in a moment like this, and I do not know how to pray.

I catch Tony’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and then notice for the first time a yellow plastic taxi, dangling there. It looks like it’s flying, floating against the pale blue sky. I keep staring at the cheerful taxi, imbuing it with supernatural powers. Nothing bad will happen if I just don’t take my eyes off the taxi and keep repeating Please God over and over again.

We pull up to the emergency room of a hospital somewhere in downtown Brooklyn. All I have in my wallet is a twenty, and the meter is much more than that, but I hand Tony the twenty with an apology, and he turns around and looks at me like the father of four children that he is. He says, I’m not leaving until you come out and tell me about the baby.

There were eight of us, friends and acquaintances, who were pregnant at the same time with our first babies. Something about the age thirty-six. Thirty-six means, Get serious. Thirty-six, at least in New York City, means that you’re still young enough to do it, with any luck, without fertility doctors and injections and in vitro and all the stuff of middle-aged motherhood. Thirty-six is still normal. And so I would think, sometimes, about my pregnant friends, and then I would think about statistics. Most of us would be fine: a little morning sickness, indigestion, varicose veins. Half of us would end up with C-sections. One or two would have some serious complications during pregnancy: gestational diabetes, preeclampsia. The sort of thing our mothers didn’t even know about but that we, with our shelves of pregnancy books, our middle-of-the-night online surfing, know only too well. I would think about the odds. Then, the woman whose due date was just before mine developed severely high blood pressure during her birth, and she very nearly died. I felt, in a completely unscientific way, that she had taken the fall for all of us.

J. is on a tiny bed in a tiny curtained-off area in a tiny ER, and he is not crying. He is not shrieking. His eyes are closed, and he is just lying there. Why isn’t anybody doing anything? Marsha is sitting on a plastic chair by the window, a tissue pressed to her nose. Her eyes are red, and she looks like her life is over. Two police officers are standing near the door. Sit down, Mommy, one of the nurses tells me.

I pick up my baby. He is unconscious. But he was screaming just a little while ago! Screaming is good. What happened? I don’t want to shake him. Shaking is bad, I know. I clutch him to my chest, feel his breath, whisper in his ear, “Mommy’s here. It’s going to be all right. Mommy’s here.” His eyes flutter open slightly, and he lets out a pathetic little whimper. “Look at me,” I command him, my six-month-old whose entire vocabulary consists of “Ga.”

Michael rushes in. His face is white, his eyes are huge. He hugs me and J. together, he turns to the doctor, a Pakistani named Noah, and asks what’s going on. “We’ve ordered a CT scan.” says the doctor. “Does your baby have any allergies?”

While J. is sedated and taken in for his CT scan, two men in suits approach me. They introduce themselves as police detectives. They are lumbering, uncomfortable. Ma’am? Can we just ask you a few questions? Your babysitter. How long has she worked for you? Two days, I say. They exchange a glance. Ma’am? You don’t think. . . well, you don’t think she did anything.

Our pediatrician calls the Brooklyn hospital. She wants J. transferred to the Upper East Side hospital where she works, the hospital with the best neonatal intensive care unit in the city. Suddenly, she is no longer calling this a minor bump. She is no longer sounding annoyed. She says she’s sending an ambulance, a team.

I don’t want to hurt Dr. Noah’s feelings. I don’t want him to think that we believe his hospital to be inferior to the Manhattan hospital where we are about to transfer our baby. Our pediatrician wants to see him, I shrug apologetically, marveling at my own ability, even in a moment like this, to be polite at all costs. It’s my nature. I have a nice surface. Dinner party, emergency room, it really makes no difference. Can I get you something to drink? You look tired. Here, put your feet up.

Marsha gets up from her plastic chair by the window where she has been interrogated by two detectives from the 77th Precinct and walks towards me. Her whole face has crumbled, and she looks like a completely different woman. Not young. Not pretty. Her arms are outstretched, and I realize that she wants me to hug her. And so I do. I wrap my arms around this trembling woman who fell down the stairs, who doesn’t know how it happened, who was wearing socks on the slippery, slippery wood. Who let go of my baby so that he tumbled by himself from the sixteenth or seventeenth step down who knows how many steps before she grabbed onto his arm and caught him. Are you okay? I ask her.

Tony waits outside. At least an hour has gone by, and he’s sitting there in his taxi, meter turned off.

This is how they transport a baby in the back of an ambulance: I lie on a stretcher, and they tie me down. Then they hand me J., bundled up in the pajamas he was wearing this morning. Blue pajamas the color of the sky, printed with clouds shaped like white sheep. I cradle him in my arms, his head resting against my breast. His hair is tangled, his upper lip is rubbed raw from crying. The bump is getting bigger. The team-a driver, a paramedic, a nurse, and a doctor-lifts us into the back of the ambulance. I watch through the window as we are driven away from the Brooklyn hospital, siren going, through the congested streets of downtown Brooklyn, over the bridge once more, and up the East River Drive. The doctor, a lanky, dark-haired woman with a big diamond on her finger, keeps checking J.’s vitals, while I keep myself sane by asking her where she went to medical school, how long she’s been out, what she wants to specialize in.

I don’t want to be a writer anymore. I want to be her.

Hellooooo! coos the pediatrician as she parts the curtain in the ICU. Her face is scrunched into her practiced, good-with-babies grin. Let’s see that bump. Oooh, that’s a nasty bump. J. is in a hospital crib, and I have lowered the rail and crawled in there with him. If I tuck myself into the fetal position, it’s not such a bad fit. The pediatrician opens her wallet and passes around a photo of her own six-month-old daughter. The nurses coo, then hand me the photo. She’s not a cute baby, not cute at all, and she’s sitting up against one of those department-store backdrops of lollipops and balloons. I keep looking at the doctor, J.’s doctor, wishing I were the kind of person who would say, Excuse me, but what the fuck are you thinking?

At night, friends bring bagels and lox. Chocolate bread. Cheeses, a cheese board, a knife. We have a party in J.’s room. He’s coming to, coming out of that gray place he went to. He gives everybody a weak little smile.

The phone rings. It’s Tony, checking on the baby.

The pediatric step-down ICU is festooned with photos of its long-term patients. Birthday parties, staged plays, tired-looking nurses wearing clowns hats. In some of the rooms there are special video monitors, so that parents and children can hook up to say goodnight. I sleep curled up with J., waking every hour as a nurse comes in to lift his lids, check his pupils, take his blood pressure and pulse. Michael wanders the corridors, talking to the children. An eleven-year-old who has lived in the hospital for nearly the past year, waiting for a heart and a liver, tells him about her seven-year-old friend down the hall, who she feels sorry for, because she’s only seven, and she hasn’t had a chance to live yet.

J. has had a normal CT scan, but they decide to do an MRI as well. That’s why we’re here, with the big guns, isn’t it? My husband goes in with J., into the noisy, noisy room where we get three-dimensional color pictures of his brain. My husband is instructed to remove all metal from his body: watch, coins, belt buckle, wedding band. I put his ring on my thumb, twirling it around and around as I wait.

The MRI shows a contusion on J.’s brain, just below the nasty, nasty bump. Wait a minute. Contusion is a fancy word for bruise, right? And bruises bleed. Bruise on his brain?

We’re talking fractions, here. I was never good at math. We’re talking an infinitesimal distance between healthy baby and dead baby. That’s what we’re talking.

Kayn aynhoreh.

In the morning, we check out of the hospital. We are wheeled, J. and I, down the long white corridor. I’ve pulled a striped knit cap over his misshapen head, and he’s grinning, flirting with the nurses who wave and call out, There he goes! There goes our boy! like he’s on a float and this is a parade. The two transplant girls wave goodbye, too, in their robes and slippers. The head nurse gives him a kiss. They are all so happy, so happy to see him go.

When we pull up to our house and bring the baby inside, I feel as though I’m walking into a crime scene. The police officer left his card on the kitchen table; under that jar of strained plums with a plastic spoon still stuck inside. The kitchen tap is dripping. Yesterday’s newspaper is open to the metro news. I carry J. upstairs. The steps are so old, so creaky and uneven. And the dried flowers look like tumors, like malignant growths on an x-ray, egg-shaped and prickly. I watch J.’s eyes for any flicker of fear, but he’s focused on the ceiling.

Marsha called that night to ask how J. was doing. Michael said he was fine. He didn’t want her to worry. Then he fired her. It wasn’t easy. We felt bad about it. When she asked why, her voice gentle and resigned, the only answer-you almost killed our baby seemed like more than could be said.

The socks, the stairs, the dried flowers, Michael’s traffic ticket, our empty bank account, the strained plums, my subway panic. It all adds up to something. Doesn’t it? It adds up to almost died.

Kayn aynhoreh.

The Hollywood check finally arrived. The first thing we did was buy a very nice runner for the staircase. It’s a pale brown the shelter magazines might call “sand” or “birch,” and there are pastel stripes running up the sides. I yanked out the brown, bulbous things that hung over the edge of the cracked white urn, and pulled out some of the roses until there was nothing pushing its way out of the coffin.

I stay pretty close to home these days. Downstairs, J. is laughing. Have I mentioned that he has the most unusual laugh? The sun is streaming through the tall parlor windows. It’s early afternoon, almost time for his nap. I can picture his sleepy eyes, the way he bangs on his plastic butterfly when he gets tired. I can’t write anyway, so I go downstairs to see him.

I rock my baby while he sucks down his bottle. The bump is gone. Sometimes, I think I can still see a bluish stain on his forehead. This is what I do, every single time I put him to sleep: I sing him three rounds of “Hush Little Baby,” four rounds of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Then I count backwards from fifty. When I get to one, I finish by saying, Thank you, God. Please keep this baby safe. Please watch over him and keep him safe. I repeat it over and over again while I rock. I can’t alter the routine, and if it’s interrupted, I have to start all over again. I imagine an invisible hand cupping my baby’s head, softening the blow by a fraction as he smashed into the corner of a stair. Whose hand? What grace?

The house is quiet. Outside, birds are chirping, pecking at the grass seeds we’ve scattered in the backyard. I’m not sure where Michael is. He’s around here somewhere. He’s always doing something practical around the house. Maybe he’s in the basement, taking down the last of the cage I have never seen.

Adult Ahoy! A Floating Prom

Talk of the Town

At seven on a recent Thursday evening, white stretch limos began arriving at a pier at Twenty-third Street and the F.D.R. Drive, where a rented yacht called Mystique was docked and waiting for the senior class of Landmark High School. It was prom night. The young men wore tuxedos in various pastel hues, and a few had on bowler hats. The young women, lithe as tulip stalks, were in long shiny dresses, backless and sideless save for a thin string running underneath their shoulder blades where a bra strap might be. The principal of the high school, Sylvia Rabiner, had come to see them off. “They’re so cute, and so half naked,” Rabiner said.

Landmark is a small, progressive public high school on West Fifty-eighth Street, with a graduating class of sixty, almost all of whom are going on to college. For the first time in the school’s seven-year history, the seniors were to be allowed to choose a prom king and queen. The tradition defies Landmark’s egalitarian philosophy, but a small group of girls had campaigned until the teachers relented—on one condition. The winner’s names would be pulled from a hat. Even with this compromise, Vivian Orlen, the school’s assistant principal, was nervous. “There’s one particular girl, Elizabeth. If she doesn’t get it, I swear she’ll jump off the boat,” she said.

Melissa, a round-faced, very pregnant senior in an ornate black-and-gray dress, sidled up to Orlen, who is very pregnant herself. Their bellies bumped as they kissed hello.

As Melissa walked away, Orlen shook her head. “It depresses me,” she said. “Because she’s brilliant. Why do they need to make their lives more complicated?”

A gaggle of girls were lined up on the pier, their hair piled high. One girl had meticulously pressed into her hairdo hundreds of tiny rhinestones of the sort usually glued onto fingernails. When she moved, it was like watching a human disco ball.

Elizabeth—the girl who was desperate to be prom queen—stood in the center of the lineup. Her dress—black, strapless, with a sheer mesh midriff—was not her first choice. She had worked all year at Balducci’s, saving her money for a five-hundred dollar custom-made dress, but it hadn’t turned out to her liking. In math class, the day before, Elizabeth had drawn a diagram of the failed dress on the blackboard.

As the Mystique pulled away from the dock, “mocktail hour” began, and a d.j. spun a Jennifer Lopez tune under a tent on the upper deck. The girls kicked off their heels and put on terry-cloth bedroom slippers that they had brought so they could dance more comfortably.

“Oh, my God, I want to be prom queen so bad,” Elizabeth said. Her face was sweet and stony at the same time. “I’ve worked so hard, spent so much money on my appearance—and now it’s a raffle.” Did she still care, then? “Oh,” she said. “Even more. Because now if I win it means I’m lucky.”

At eleven o’clock, after a buffet of pasta and salad, the seniors gathered on the upper deck for the coronation of the prom king and queen.

“And the king is—Greg!” a math teacher announced.

A cheer went up as an athletic young man in a pale-green satin dinner jacket loped to the front of the group and sheepishly accepted a plastic crown. Now the girls huddled together, hands on their hearts. Elizabeth stood at the back. Her eyes were fixed on the queen’s tiara, which a physics teacher was holding aloft.

“And the queen is—Melissa!”

Elizabeth blinked hard. Melissa looked stunned as she made her way through the crowd. The tiara was placed on her head, and a satin sash was draped over her pregnant belly. In blue glitter, it read “Prom Queen 2000.”

The king didn’t want to keep his crown on, and he certainly didn’t want to slow-dance with Melissa to “I Wanna Love You Forever.” But he had no choice. The d.j. cajoled the couple onto the dance floor. Greg’s girlfriend stood off to the side, looking peeved.

Elizabeth, in tears, had run down the steep stairs to the cabin below. Her classmates were philosophical about her defeat. “Nobody told her to act like that,” one girl said. “A lot of people show their true colors on prom night.”

Up on deck, the d.j. played the last song of the evening. He urged the students to link arms as Vitamin C sang “And as our lives change, come whatever, we will still be friends forever.” The Landmark Class of 2000 hugged and laughed and cried. Elizabeth stayed below, hiding out in the ladies’ room.

Be Mine Department

On patrol at Barney’s with a professional matchmaker. “Talk of the Town”

One recent Saturday afternoon on the main floor of Barneys, R., an attorney in his early thirties, huddled near the Chanel counter with an auburn-haired woman. She was too old to be his girlfriend but too young to be his mother. They spoke quietly, their eyes scanning the cosmetics department. Finally, R. focused on a young woman with wet dark hair and a black backpack. He pointed discreetly. “What about that one?”

Janis Spindel left R. and walked toward the girl, who was outlining her mouth in nude lip pencil. Spindel leaned into the counter, staring intently. The girl didn’t notice her. Spindel came back, shaking her head. “She could be awesome, except for the nose,” she said.

Spindel is a professional matchmaker who started her business seven years ago, when she realized that she had set up dozens of her friends for free. Each of her males clients pays her ten thousand dollars a year for a minimum of twelve dates.

She and R. moved on, gliding past parents with infants in Snuglis and middle-aged men in weekend leather. “There’s nobody here today,” Spindel said. “Maybe we should try Bloomingdale’s.” Then she spotted a small-boned, very young woman riffling through a basket of tortoiseshell hair ornaments. “What about that one?” she asked. R. shook his head. “She’s, like, fourteen,” he said.

“I beg to differ,” replied Spindel, who briskly walked over and struck up a conversation with the young woman. She returned, triumphant. “She’s twenty. Goes to B.U.,” she said. “Still too young for you. Adorable, though.”

They moved on, to the Stila counter, where an array of pretty women were squeezing lip gloss from industrial-looking aluminum tubes. An Amazonian blonde in orange spandex running pants stood out among them. “Check her out,” the five-foot-seven-inch attorney said. He looked up at her through rectangular wire-rimmed glasses and ran a hand through his hair.

In a flash, Spindel was by her side. “Excuse me,” Spindel interrupted. The blonde paused, two different shades of shimmering pink goo on the tips of two long fingers. “I know this is going to sound like an insane question, but are you married or single?” A flush spread across the woman’s healthy cheeks, and she smiled broadly. Lip gloss momentarily forgotten, she dug through her bag for a business card.

“She’s thirty-four. An agent for fashion-industry photographers,” Spindel reported back to her client, who had been watching from across the aisle by a glass case filled with chiffon scarves. Not for you.”

“N.M.O.T.?” R. queried.

“Certainly not,” Spindel answered, and then explained, “He needs to marry a Jewish girl. She was clearly Not a Member of the Tribe.”

Spindel and R. proceeded downstairs to Fred’s, the lower-level restaurant. They passed two thirtyish women who were eating soup and drinking cappuccino at the bar. They had salon-fresh hair tucked behind diamond-studded ears, and each had a small Fendi croissant bag on her lap. What was wrong with them?” Spindel asked. R. looked over at them. “They were chewing with their mouths open,” he said.

An elegant, angular woman in a fur-collared coat stood near the maitre d’s station, talking on a cell phone. Spindel homed in on her, eyes narrowing. While she went off to check out her target, R. took a deep breath. “You know, I’m just a friend of Janis’s. I’m not a client,” he said. “I’d never pay five dollars for a date. I don’t have to.”

Spindel came back, looking dejected. “Married. Mega-diamond on her finger.”

Not to be deterred, Spindel struck up a conversation with the two women at the bar, despite R.’s reservations about their table manners. After all, this is what her clients pay her to do. If these women aren’t right for R., they might be right for someone else.

Outside, on Madison, R. kissed Spindel goodbye. As he disappeared into the crowd of weekend shoppers, Spindel pulled out her cell phone and hailed a taxi. “He’s very neurotic about the whole matchmaking thing,” she said. “No one wants to admit to being a client. It breaks my heart.” In the back of the taxi, she checked her beeper. “Out of seventy weddings, I haven’t been invited to one.”

A Day in the Life

New York’s busiest mohel tells all. “Talk of the Town”

On a recent Friday morning, Cantor Philip L. Sherman found himself stuck in traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Sherman’s destination was Melville, Long Island, where he was to perform his third circumcision of the day. He had already been on Elizabeth Street at 8 A.M., then on the Upper West Side. A tall man in his early forties with a neatly trimmed black beard, he prides himself on spacing brises far enough apart that he can arrive at each on in a calm, Zen-like state of mind. But this was not a Zen moment for the mohel. He reached into the back seat for his beeper and peered at it. Six new calls. He pulled a pad of Post-its from his glove compartment and stuck a few on his steering wheel. He balanced a folder on his lap. Then he called his voice mail on his hands-free cell phone and listened to his messages over the speakerphone. The messages all amounted to pretty much the same thing: It’s a boy. When can we schedule a bris?

Sherman arrived at eleven-thirty, right on time, in front of a modern gray house with a bright-green lawn. He pulled a brush from his glove compartment and ran it through his thinning hair. Then he grabbed the Eddie Bauer computer bag filled with the tools of his trade, placed a sign on his dashboard—”Mazel Tov! Bris in progress. Please don’t ticket”—and walked to the front door.

About sixty people were gathered in the mauve-carpeted, platformed living room. Sherman shook the new father’s hand and took him aside.

“Let me tell you my secret, ” he whispered. “After it’s over, be sure to thank your wife for doing a great job and giving you such a perfect son.”

The new father, owner of the local Jeep dealership, nodded seriously as, behind him, a sixtyish woman with silver hair announced to no one in particular, “I was at a bris in Westchester and I heard, ‘Oh, he does all the brises in Westchester.’ And then I went to a bris in Great Neck, and someone said, ‘Oh, he does all the brises in Great Neck.'”

Sherman assembled his instruments—a thin metal probe, a small clamp, a scalpel—and covered them discreetly with a white cloth. His own thumbnails are sharpened into points, in case he needs to separate the mucosal layer beneath the foreskin. He stood in the center of the living room, in front of a mirrored bar, with a tallis draped over his shoulders. The great-grandfather held Kyle Chandler (Hebrew name: Yehoshua Chanan), who was wearing a tiny, baby-blue yarmulke. The procedure itself took well under a minute, and the infant let out barely a squeal.

After the ceremony was over, Sherman asked if there was anything anyone wanted to add. “Yes,” the new father announced. “I’d like to thank my wife for doing such a great job and giving me a perfect son.”

As the guests descended on a table piled high with bagels, lox and smoked meats, Sherman said his goodbyes and closed the front door behind him. Then he stopped for a moment in front of a bed of hot-pink azaleas. He pulled three tiny gauze-wrapped packages from his pants pocket. And then he dropped all three of that morning’s foreskins into the earth, and tamped them down with his heel.

During the course of his twenty-two year career, Sherman has performed about nine thousand brises. He has done brises in bars, restaurants, and an Internet café. He trained during his junior year in college with the chief mohel of Jerusalem, because he wanted to be a “full-service community professional.”

He pulled up in front of a modest house in East Rockaway at a few minutes before one o’clock. “As soon as I arrive, the anxiety level increases,” he told the crowd. “Wherever I set up, people move away. But your presence is crucial—this is a beautiful life-cycle event to be witnessed. Please stay. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

Less than a minute later, the new father was thanking his wife for doing such a great job and giving him a perfect son. As he was leaving, Sherman whispered in his ear, “To enhance your status further as an ever- thoughtful husband, bring your wife a glass of juice. And remember, it was your idea.”

A couple of brises later, at 5 P.M., Sherman arrived in front of a small house in Scarsdale. He splashed on some Polo cologne from a small green bottle, ran a brush over his scalp, and strode up the front walk, not for the last time that day. And to the closed front door of the house, where “It’s a Boy!” balloon sagged in the summer heat, his voice rang out, “Hello, it’s a boy. The mohel is here.

The Way Woman Laugh

My mother walks through the door of the waxing room at the precise moment the Rumanian lady rips a hot strip of wax from my bikini line. I have been staring alternately at the second hand on the blank face of a wall clock and a poster of a silky-skinned brunette in a puckered white maillot, one leg kicking high into the air.

“Hello, my darling daughter,” my mother says.

I stare at her wordlessly. It does not surprise me that she has found me in the bowels of a beauty salon on Central Park South, poking her head into Korean manicure parlors, marble basins of hairdressers, softly-lit massage rooms. My mother can find me anywhere.

The Rumanian lady dips a spatula into the vat of hot wax and spreads it over my inner thigh like honey. She presses a strip of cheesecloth against the heat and smooths it with professional fingers, pausing for a moment before yanking it toward her in a small, efficient motion.

“Youch!” I yell.

“Is it painful?” my mother asks. “I’ve never done that. The lower leg, yes. But never – ”

“If you’ve gone seventy years without, I wouldn’t start now,” I say. The Rumanian lady lifts my leg above her shoulder, resting it there as she continues painting me with the spatula, hot, sticky, like the ocean at the end of a long summer day.

“I can’t watch,” says my mother, watching.

In the mirror I see my legs splayed, a paper towel tucked between them like a diaper – not a dignified position. Certainly not a posture of strength. I have not spoken to my mother in forty-seven days this time and would prefer to be doing so vertically.

“If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, then the mountain will come to Mohammed,” she says brightly, moving to the foot of the table, standing directly in my line of vision. When she smiles at me, the rest of her face doesn’t move.

Mother has had her eyes done.

“Notice anything different?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“About me Anything strike you?”

“Hhhmm,” I appraise her.

She stands still, waiting.

“You look a little tired,” I say, “around the eyes.”

I watch her face fall, crumbling like a ridge of shifting sand. This is the bloody dance of mothers and daughters: we know how to wound each other, and that knowledge lurks within each of us like a loaded gun, precautionary, resting inside a dresser drawer where it will some day, despite the best of intentions, be cocked and triggered.

“Did you just visit Keiko?” I ask, invoking the name of her hairdresser, a blond man from North Carolina who changed his name when he began working at a Japanese salon on East Fifty-Sixth Street.

“Yes,” she says, gently patting the surface of her hair, which is lacquered as if a thin veneer were painted onto each strand, an outer shell of protection against city pollution, dripping air-conditioner vents, blasts of hot air pouring into open cab windows.

“It looks – nice – ” I murmur as the Rumanian lady powders my inner thighs, soothes them with lotion.

“I’ve always preferred a natural look myself,” says my mother. I look closely at her face in the florescent light of the waxing room and realize she’s done it again. She has made a department store make-up artist’s day. She is wearing three gradations of pink on her eyelids, blue-tinted mascara, and her lips are outlined, powdered, then filled in with a matte shade of violent coral. She smiles widely. There are flecks of lipstick on her teeth.

“How much, Mom?” I ask. I am lying on my back, weary.

“Lancome was having a special,” she says brightly. “A gift bag free with a fifty-dollar purchase!”

The linoleum floor of the waxing room is an ode to Fifty-Seventh Street. There is a brown-and-white striped shopping bag, a lavender hatbox, an array of pale ribbons poking from the tops like spilled confetti. When my mother buys herself presents, she has them gift-wrapped.

Here are the danger signs: I note them, one by one, the way as a child I counted the hundreds of lipstick samples that littered her bottom dresser drawer – make-over, lacquered hair, shopping bags, wide eyes, pupils darting back and forth almost imperceptibly, jiggling like the ripples of water in a placid lake just after a stone has skimmed the surface.

My mother in trouble. I sniff it like a dog who runs in dizzying circles, chasing its own tail.

I close my eyes.

“Tell me,” I whisper. “Give me the speech you’ve rehearsed all morning. Hit me with your best shot.”

Forty-seven days ago I stopped answering my phone.

Hi darling, it’s Mom.

Dear, this is your mother calling.

This is your only mother.

I turned down the sound on each telephone, so that all I heard when it rang was a click and beep of my answering machine, microspools purring around sprockets, filling the yawn of empty tape.

Call me, sweetheart.

I miss you, lambkin.

Return this call if you know what’s good for you.

I canceled my call waiting when I realized its effect on phone control.

“May I ask why?” asked the phone company woman.

“Because it’s driving me crazy!” I screamed into her ear.

“Thank-you for your honesty,” she said.

I distributed my mother’s photograph to all my doormen: a snapshot taken in front of St. Petersburg Cathedral in what used to be Leningrad. She is wearing a striped polo and flouncy skirt, sunglasses and camera dangling around her shoulders, lenses flashing like a tribeswoman’s necklace of desiccated piranha eyes. She is smiling, and somehow the spirals and domes of St. Petersburg look like Disneyland.

Armed and dangerous, I printed beneath the photograph. Not to be given access to apartment 23B. Wanted in twenty-two states.

The Rumanian lady does my lashes. This means I must close my eyes and keep them closed. She paints bluc-black dye on each individual lash, swabbing at my lids with a damp Q-Tip.

“What are you doing now?” my mother asks. I feel her standing over me, inspecting.

“Dying my eyelashes,” I say. Opening my mouth and closing my eyes simultaneously seems suddenly difficult, like walking and chewing gum. “Sort of like permanent mascara.”

“I’ve never tried that,” says my mother.

“Another habit not to get into at this late date,” I respond, lids fluttering, dye spilling, stinging the corners of my eyes.

“Qvviet,” says the Rumanian lady. “You are too tense.”

I tell my mother a joke so that she will crack up. I hear her laughing so hard I wish I could open my eyes and see for sure if she’s had plastic surgery. You can always tell by the way women laugh, as if they’re trying to hold back some essential part of themselves, as if mirth ages them.

The Rumanian lady leaves us. She turns off the lights in the waxing room and pipes in a relaxation tape of birds chirping and leaves rustling.

“Fifteen meenoots,” she whispers.

Fifteen meenoots? Alone in a room with my mother? With eyes closed and limbs bared?

“I had surgery,” says my mother. “They cut me with a knife.”

Darkness swirls beneath my closed eyes, and I see tiny amoeba-shaped doodles swimming through the dark red flesh of my eyelids like lost spermatozoa. My bikini line, as they so elegantly call it, is smarting to high heaven. I can just imagine my pink, angry thighs.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” asks my mother, her voice reedy with discontent.

“I can’t think of anything – ”

“Your mother, your only mother tells you she had major surgery and – ”

“It sounds to me like the elective kind,” I murmur.

“Elective is a matter of opinion,” says my mother.

“Whose opinion?”

“Dr. Maurice Richter, surgeon to the stars,” she announces gleefully. “A little nip here, a tuck there – ”

“And where exactly have you been nipped and tucked?”

“Only where I needed it, darling.”

“How much did all this set you back?” I ask her.”

“The insurance – ” she falters.

“For elective surgery?” I snap, forgetting for an instant about the goop on my lids and fluttering my eyes open.

“Ouch!” I yell.

“What’s wrong, cupcake?”

“It stings – ”

I hear her rise from her chair and grope through piles of ointment and cotton balls, then her fingertips are on my eyelids, and something cool presses down on me, moist and soothing.

“Thank you.”

“What’s a mother for?”

She swabs at my face with cotton, brushing over my cheeks, around my jaw.

“I had bones like this,” she says dreamily, “in the days before Dr. Maurice Richter was even born.”

“Ma – ”

“And I didn’t go for all this modern waxing and dying and tweezing, but we had our own ways of – ”

“Why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you – ”

“My hair was braided down to my waist. When I cut it all off, the hairdresser cried. Did I ever show you the braid? I kept it all these years, tucked in my – ”

“Sweater drawer, under the cashmeres,” I whisper, as if I had not opened that drawer every rainy day of my childhood, as if countless times I had not lifted the soft rainbow of wool and pulled the thick, dark brown braid from yellowed tissue and held it to my own head, or wrapped it around my waist once, twice; I wondered how many years a woman would have to live to grow her hair that long, what worldly sights the dead follicles had witnessed, whose hands had undone the braid, what prompted her to cut it into a chin-length bob, and how she felt as her own hair cascaded over her shoulders, down her back, falling around her, curling like a dead animal on the floor.

“Next we’re doing liposuction,” announces my mother.

“Pardon?”

“Vacuum the fat. They suck it right out of there.” I hear her slap what I imagine to be her thighs beneath elegant wool pants, courtesy of some Seventh Avenue designer showroom. Her legs look like drumsticks, prickly skin just barely covering bone.

“What fat?”

“As Wallis Simpson said: you can never be too rich or too – ”

“Who’s rich?”

“I’m wounded, darling. Your late father – ”

“Leave him out of it!”

Through the closed door of the waxing room I hear the low buzz of a facial machine. I remember it looks like a neon blue wand and makes an electronic sound like one of those mosquito zappers frying a bug. A tea kettle whistles in the distance, the clinking of plates. The Rumanian ladies are on their lunch break. Perhaps the waxing woman has forgotten about me. The blue-black goop is hardening around my eyes. I feel suddenly claustrophobic, and fight to open my eyes, but they are glued shut. My heart pounds. My palms sweat. This would be a way to go, wouldn’t it? Trapped in a waxing room with no panties on, a paper towel between my legs, vegetable dye streaking my eyelids, witnessed by my mother, who is sniffling audibly as if it is her own life ending, not her daughter’s.

“Crying can’t be good for your stitches,” I say, gripping the sides of the metal table as if it is a gurney and I am about to be wheeled into surgery myself.

“I don’t have stitches. Dr. Richter – Maurice – sewed me up with the dissolving kind.”

“They just disappear? Just like that?”

“Yes. They melt into the skin like – ”

“Like butter,” I finish for her, imagining pools of yellow fat sinking into the pale white flour of a roll.

A piercing sound permeates the room like the crescendo of an ambulance’s wail, and for a moment I think a smoke detector has been set off, or a facial machine has gone haywire, until I realize the high-pitched noise is coming directly from the corner of the room where my mother sits.

The screech builds and then softens like a siren fighting its way through a heavily trafficked street.

“You – ”

She spits the syllables across the room, tiny hand grenades, guided missiles.

“Don’t. Love. Your. Mother.”

“How can you say that?”

“Well it’s true, isn’t it?”

“I – ”

“Forty-seven days I haven’t heard from you.”

“I needed another break – ”

“A break! A girl who says she needs a break from her mother. Do you hear that?”

She swings open the door of the waxing room and the red beneath my closed eyes becomes brighter, softer, like blood.

“A daughter who can’t stand to be near her mother!” She calls into the inner sanctum of the salon, walls covered with hundreds of framed, signed photographs of celebrities and movie stars. “Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?”

A chorus of yeses resounds through the corridors. Or perhaps I am hallucinating.

She closes the door and again we are entombed together.

“I am going to die and you are going to feel very guilty,” she says, “not that I wish this for you.”

I hear her chair creak as she rocks back and forth like a peasant woman keening over an open grave.

“When a parent dies, according to Jewish law, they are mourned for a whole year,” she practically chants, “did you know that? Not for a husband, not for a wife, or a sibling, or a child – only for a parent do you mourn a year.”

“Should I start now?” I ask her.

She jumps out of her chair and hurls herself toward me; her hand across my face comes of out nowhere, with terrific force, as if the carved hand of a gargoyle had fallen off a ledge and crashed into my cheek. I see her through sharp streaks of blue-black across my corneas, and think, my mother has been x’d out. She pries my eyes open and stares me down in the dimness.”

“Shame,” she mutters, “shame.”

The Rumanian lady has finished her lunch. She bustles into the waxing room preceded by a cloud of boiled egg and garlic.

“Vat ees zees?” she asks. “Zee eyes, zey are all over zee place!”

She shakes her head at my mother, motions her to sit in the corner where she belongs, then, turning back to me, dabs at my face with cotton balls.

“Vat a mess,” she mutters.

I am crying. Black tears stream horizontally from the corners of my eyes into my hairline, dribbling onto the white paper that covers the waxing table.

“Not good,” frowns the waxing lady. “Not.”

Everyone is upset. My mother, the waxing lady – even the brunette poster girl seems to be furrowing her brow – and I have been horizontal for far too long, like an analysand on the couch who cannot imagine that her time is not up.

I leap off the table.

“Enough!” I shout at the Rumanian lady. “I have had enough!”

“But Meez – ”

“Don’t ‘But Meez’ me! You left me lying here too long.”

“But Meez, I thought you and Mommy vanted to – ”

I flip on the overhead lights and stare at myself in the mirror. Black lines stripe down my cheeks. I am naked from the waist down, my blouse wrinkled and bunched. My mother is huddled in her chair watching me; she dabs at her eyes, tissuing away the streaks where her mascara has run.

“Do you mind?” I ask, trying to retain some dignity.

“What?” responds my mother.

“Vat?” asks the waxing lady.

“Could I just get dressed in peace?”

Slowly they file out of the waxing room. The door creaks open, then closes behind them; I hear strains of a peppy, Muzak version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” piped through speakers in the waiting area where several women sit, feet soaking in green plastic tubs. Other Rumanian women kneel next to the tubs, wielding stainless steel instruments, smoothing and scraping calluses from the soles of manicured feet.

“What can I do?” I hear my mother wail to the waxing lady on the other side of the door.

“Vait.”

“Excuse me?”

“Vait. Have patience.”

“Patients?”

“Your girl, you are her mommy. She love you.”

I climb into my stockings, gathering the thin nylon around my ankles, sliding them up. I spill some cleanser onto a cotton ball, wipe gently, erasing the tic-tac-toe board that is my face. First I step into my skirt, then my high heels. I tuck my blouse into the waistline, smoothing wrinkles, cinching my belt tightly. Blusher, a little powder. I spray cologne into the air, step through the mist. I am almost ready. Outline my lips first in pale pencil, then more heavily with lipstick. I pull a tissue from a pink-and-white box, press it to my lips, once, twice. I aim for the wastebasket, but the tissue floats to the floor instead, phantom kisses a daughter leaves behind.