You got up. You’re reading the harsh world. Here’s some cake. It’s what I can give you.
This is a post about accidental encounters with things you find as you stroll through your life and the memories they stir.
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Toby
My mother was 89 when she had a stroke. Clogged arteries, and an emergency bypass, and boom. In her hospital room, we played a word game I just found in a tiny document on my computer.
Laurie: “Fat.”
Toby: “Elephant.”
Laurie: “Jewish Weekly.” (There must have been a copy by her bed.)
Toby: “Not for goyim.”
Laurie: “Scar.”
Toby: “Caesarian.” (She meant the way I was born that left a scar across her belly.)
Toby continuing: “Top lip—My brother threw a can at me because he thought I used his razor.”
We braided sentences we said after three prompts: It happened. It reminded me of. It made me feel.
Laurie: “I gave Liz a foot massage.”
Toby: “I peed on the side of the bed before I could get to the commode.”
Laurie: “It reminded me of being on the beach in my twenties and I slept on a dune.”
Toby: “It reminded me of diapering my children with their pee.”
Laurie: “It made me feel ageless.”
Toby: “It made me feel as wet as they were.”
Toby: “My mother brought me a big bowl of fruit before bed. I would come home at eleven or twelve. She said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, “Before sleep, who eats fruit?’ She liked to tempt me. She used to buy Charlotte Russes for me when I came home from school.”
Toby again: “Daddy’s father had a wagon and a horse and went around as a pedlar.”
Where? When? What did he sell? Everyone is dead now, and I will never find out.
I knew this grandfather. His name was Sam, actually Shmul. He came to live in a hotel in Long Beach that faced the thundering surf. He smoked cigars and already looked like a chimp in memories of my memories.
Toby before the stroke.
At 80, on her birthday, she looks good, with her Tartar cheekbones and deep-set eyes. For reasons neither my sister nor I can understand, she’s chosen a mediocre Italian restaurant on LaGuardia Place for us to meet at, the kind that serves breaded eggplant with a cape of white cheese, swimming in a sea of red sauce. Her smiles are unpredictable. She has kept something of her figure, with a little thickening at the waist. Her hair is blond, her skin smooth. The thought of taking a cab or buying something not on sale, you might as well chop off a limb.
A few years later, she’s recovering from pneumonia, and she’s back in her apartment after a few weeks in New Jersey with my sister. On the phone my sister says, ”The next time she’s sick, even if she’s near death, she’s not getting back into my house.” I shop for her and stand on her sand-colored carpet as she unpacks the bag. The room is dark, because she keeps turning off the lights.
She says, “How could you pick such big onions?” I say, “You can cut an onion in half, and put the other half in the refrigerator.” She says, “You can?” I say, “Yes.” She says, “These tomatoes are no good, and why did you buy such a large container of cottage cheese?” I say, “That’s a good question. How about we go for a walk?" She gathers her things, and we hit the streets. She’s washed and fluffed her hair, put on lipstick and rouge. She slips an arm though mine, and we head to Central Park. She says, “We don't get along because we're too much alike.”
These days, I’m thinking she was on to something. When she was alive, I didn’t think about her side of things in knowing me. Sometimes, a teacher of mine would give her credit for a talent or skill, and Toby would say, “It had nothing to do with me. She came out that way.” Some people, it’s easier to love when they’re dead.
We walk to the zoo. She says, “I hate seeing animals in cages.” I say, “Me too.” We sit on a bench, and a young woman walks by, pushing a stroller. Toby says, “I spent my whole life doing for others,” and I think it must have seemed that way to her. I say, “A woman does what she pleases, and she’s a selfish bitch. A woman lives to please others, and she wonders where her life has gone.” My mother says, “So true.” She runs her hand over her thighs and stomach and says, “I'm too thin. What do you say, we go get a tongue sandwich.” I say, “Mom, I like your vanity and your appetite.” She says, “I'm not vain, and to tell you the truth I'm never really hungry. I eat for the hell of it.” I say, “Then, I must have gotten those traits from Daddy.” She says, “Yes, on his side they were peacocks and gluttons.”
Gail
The birthday of a friend popped up on Facebook today, and it reminded me she is dead. I was happy to see her picture in the scroll. I remembered it's her date and how I had always remembered her date, no matter where we were and no matter if a long time had passed between conversations. Most of the time, we lived on opposite coasts.
We met when I was seventeen and she was sixteen. She would take me to the party where I would meet Bruce on New Year's Eve, 1964. That night, in the bed of her mother, a woman I loved as well as my friend—in fact I loved her whole family in the way you can fall in love with a family when you are looking for a way to get into the world, I had fallen in love with these cultivated Polish Jews who, in medical school, had had to stand in the back of the classroom and had been able to leave Europe and not be killed—that night, after meeting Bruce, I slept in the bed of her mother with a boy I was mad for and with whom I'd already broken up. He was a friend of Gail’s brother. We were all strays who found ourselves on these couches and in these beds.
Anyway, the next day, I left the bed and the boy and walked from the Upper West Side to the Museum of Modern Art to meet Bruce, and as I walked along, I saw myself in a dolly shot, and I heard a voiceover in my head, saying, “You are living some kind of life, you are on your way somewhere.”
Looking back, I don't wonder why sex or being with boys was part of my romantic imagination. I was born this kind of dog. Ask my mother. Gail, my friend who is dead and whom I loved and miss seems in my mind to have made things possible for me, and only in this moment am I wondering if I made anything possible for her. I'm guessing one thing, at least, the way I looked at her family—including her grandmother, who lived in an apartment upstairs from theirs and kept her husband’s medical instruments in a glass case, this beautiful old woman who, then, may not have been many years older than I am now, this grandmother, the mother of Gail’s father, who spoke to us when we came up to see her as if we were the most interesting people she’d even known—the way I looked at her family as if they were all lit from within. They still are.
"Toby again: 'Daddy’s father had a wagon and a horse and went around as a pedlar.'"/ Ah, the stirring of memories. My mother could have said that about her Daddy ... and probably so could half the European immigrants to America.
How darling your mother was. And girls are luckier than boys, I think, because, tho our mothers are gone, they take up residence in our heads -- which means they're never really gone. My instinct is that boys are different re this subject. I suppose I could ask one.
L
I love your vanity. I love your appetite for life.
I love being able to have a day waiting for my dr to appear and having you appear instead.
Your writing moves me . I am grateful .
Thankyou Laurie Stone for your irrespressible take on your life.
Blessings
Suzanne at 76