13. The Mother of My Mother is Her Enemy

My mother stressed it repeatedly throughout my childhood. “I never want us to turn out like me and my mother. I couldn’t stand my mother, she was nothing but a burden to me, and I never want you to feel that way about me.”

“I know,” I’d said, twelve and wise. “We won’t.”

I didn’t see how that could ever happen. My mother was beautiful, brilliant, funny, and fun, whereas my grandmother was a neurotic, nagging old shrew.

Grandma wasn’t my mother’s real mom. Grandma adopted my newborn mother, knocking ten years off her age on the adoption application so nobody would know she was fifty. My mother’s real mother, her birth mother, was rumored to be an Italian teenager; this explained my mother’s fine, thin nose, her high forehead, her caramel skin. Nothing like my short, dumpy, Jewish grandma.

When I was five years old and my mom had just left my dad, we lived with Grandma in the Bronx for a few months. I slept in the spare bedroom, which had once been my mom’s, though you’d never know a child had lived there. Now it was shelves of Reader’s Digest condensed books, glass jars full of buttons, safety pins, rubber bands. A snowglobe that I turned constantly, feeling the cold of the winter scene in my hot hands, disappearing handprints of mist on the surface.

My mother worked late and avoided coming home. My grandmother and I watched Lawrence Welk and Wonderful World of Disney while I lay on the rug coloring in the color-by-numbers from the newspaper with waxy crayons. “Careful of the rug, dear; don’t rub so hard with the crayon.”

I had nothing against my grandmother, but my mom did, and that was enough for me. When we moved out, our goal became to visit Grandma as little as possible. She’d call, and my mother would roll her eyes, shake her head, do a full-on St. Vitus Dance of pantomimed frustration at which I’d smirk, sympathetic.

“What do you want from me,” she’d snap. “Well, I know you want to see Janice, but I can’t drag her all the way up there after work to see you. What? How many times have I said, She spends most weekends with her father! What do you want me to do? Well, I’m sorry I don’t call more, I’m busy. We’re fine, Mom. Yes! Everything’s fine! Jesus!”

Sometimes I’d be drafted into a short conversation, my mother putting her hand over the mouthpiece as she passed me the phone, hissing, “Don’t tell her we’re coming to see her. Don’t let her force you into any promises.”

And then that voice, half whine, half croak. “Janice, dalling, how are you? I miss you so much. Why won’t your mother let you come visit? We could go to the park, or to the museum. Wouldn’t you like to go to the museum with your Grandma? I don’t know how long I’m going to be around, Janice…”

My mother would jerk the phone back from me. “Mom, I told you, we are busy. We will come see you when we can. I’m not discussing this with you anymore! I will call you! All right, Mom. All right. I know. All right.”

Then she’d hang up, put her hand to her forehead, and say, Promise me, Janice. Promise me we’ll never wind up like me and my mom. And I promised, that would never happen. It was impossible. I would always love my mother; I would always want to be around her.

*

I was thirteen when my grandma died. My mother was thirty-six and married to her fourth husband. I’d say more about him but I’ve badmouthed her fourth husband enough by now.

I visited Grandma in the hospital shortly before she passed. She didn’t look any better or worse than usual. A few days later, my mother got a phone call; then she came into my bedroom and said, “Well, she’s dead.” Factual, brisk, unimpressed. That’s that.

If my mother was relieved, then I was relieved. I felt guilty for not being sadder, but my grandmother was legitimately difficult to be around. She was anxious, she dithered, she never shut up. She often had gross white saliva built up in the corners of her lips. I’d always wanted to love her, since she’d purported to love me so much, but it would have been disloyal to my mother not to dislike Grandma as much as she did.

Would there be a funeral? I asked. (Would I get to miss school?) “It’s not my problem,” my mother snapped. “Let her cousins take care of it. I’m not planning to go.”

I was impressed by her conviction. Skipping your mother’s funeral is a badass move. My mother’s shrink, should she ever have been able to stick with one, would not have had to berate her, as Judith berated me: Stop trying to make your mother love you! She was way ahead of me there.

I don’t know what happened on the morning of the funeral. She and her fourth husband were disagreeing about something, and I was staying clear. Then she popped her head into my room and said curtly, “We’re going. You stay here.”

It took me a second to understand where they were going. Her fourth husband must have urged her to go. I might have scrambled to get dressed and go with them, but they were leaving right then.

Instead I stayed home and did things like sort pennies into 50 cent rolls, masturbate, and smoke the cigarette butts my mother and her fourth husband left in various ashtrays. The usual.

I think she was glad she went, ultimately. Her fourth husband did a few things that I have to give him credit for.

My mother and I spent three weekends clearing out my grandmother’s apartment. She kept telling me, “I promise, when I die, I’m not going to leave you with a houseful of shit to deal with.”

Not only did I attend my mother’s memorial service, I organized it. I dealt with the funeral home, I ordered the flowers, and I made sure that the event did not devolve into a stream-of-consciousness monologue from her fifth husband, a newly bereaved schizophrenic.

I was relieved she was dead. But I didn’t hate her.