2. Not Writing a Personal Essay

At my mother’s hasty memorial, her fifth husband, a schizophrenic, told me that her favorite TV show was the CBS sitcom “Two Broke Girls.”

“The cats knew she was dead,” he told me, eyes limpid behind his glasses’ thick lenses. “Because it was Monday at 9, and the TV wasn’t showing ‘Two Broke Girls.’”

I’m always trying to shoehorn that detail into the story: the twenty-five cats assembled in the living room, checking their watches and murmuring, Her show’s not on. She must be dead.

The day after the memorial, a Monday, I watched “Two Broke Girls.” And my mother’s favorite show, as determined by her fifth husband, a schizophrenic, and her twenty-five cats, was wretched.

“Two Broke Girls” was a stagey, throwback, three-camera sitcom full of ethnic stereotypes, where the actors paused for canned laughs after every broad joke. Also, it was filthy.

Actual dialogue from the sitcom “Two Broke Girls”:

Broke Girl 1: The mailman came.

Broke Girl 2: Where am I looking? Face? Hair?

A come joke? I grasped for my clavicle. Mom! I’d never heard my mother make a come joke in my life. Polish jokes, sure; Jewish jokes, constantly—as the adopted daughter of Eastern European Jews, she felt entitled to tell those, and she did, along with a bunch of other cheap racist jokes. But dirty jokes weren’t her thing.

Notably, one of the broke girls in the show—Max, played by actress Kat Dennings—was a feisty, resourceful Brooklyn waitress who’d survived a tough childhood with her man-crazy mom. Max showed deep cleavage and wore dark red lipstick, the way I did from my teens to my mid-twenties. Her voice was an alto deadpan like mine.

That’s me. Unmistakably. Kat Dennings was prettier, of course, and my body had changed, along with my wardrobe, since I was a feisty, resourceful Brooklyn waitress who’d survived a tough childhood with my man-crazy mom. But the character I was watching on the show was indubitably Young Me.

Two Broke Girls: the title of an essay wherein I watch my mother’s favorite sitcom for the first time in the weeks after her death, and recognize, in one main character, an uncanny resurrection of me when I was 25, which is when my mother and I first began to stop speaking.

We were two girls who broke! Get it? We broke apart from each other, and we were both broken! Plus a nod to the “poverty” of our relationship (financially fine, but emotionally starving). And an acknowledgment that my mother and I were both still “girls,” i.e., stuck in an immature state at approximately the same emotional age.

In this essay, I find emotional healing in this resemblance between me and a TV character. I conclude that my mother watched this abysmal, meritless show every week because it gave her a chance to “spend time with” an avatar of me. Thus, my watching it with her in mind gave me a chance to “spend time with” an idea of her.

In this idea of my mother, she missed me. She mourned our relationship. Her profound mental illness prevented her from telling me directly, but here was the message, expressed in her terrible taste in television: I miss you, Jan. Watching “Two Broke Girls” confirmed that, no matter how far gone my mother was in her last years, she still loved me.

I continued to watch the show for the rest of the season. It continued to make jokes reinforcing racist stereotypes. I started to wonder if that wasn’t the real appeal for my mom. But I’ll leave that out of the essay, because it’s a boner killer.

“…As the episode ended, and the laugh track faded, I realized that I was now, in fact, One Whole Woman.”