the habit of being

My mother is in town, a list:

1. The difference between a gin and tonic and a vodka tonic is that gin tastes like pine trees and vodka doesn’t.
2. A dirty martini just has olive juice. No vermouth.
3. The only letter my grandmother ever wrote her: “Dear Sharon, Here are some cigarettes. Don’t smoke them. Love, Mother.”
4. Shh..octail = shrimp cocktail (from the Ritz Carlton bar.. those shrimp are SO BIG)
5. Little Somethings: French Connection shirt to match the French Connection skirt I just bought, Laura Mercier foundation stick in “warm ivory,” Poppytop Biscotti, the new Kiehl’s lipbalm, chocolate mice and penquins from Dean and Deluca, tonic water delivered to our door, pistachios, mosquito bites and long and good conversations I mostly didn’t participate in.

It took Allegri’s Miserere to start the tears flowing. It was my horrible idea to play it, but I didn’t think, except that I loved it and she hadn’t heard it, and then she literally ran out of the room halfway through, saying later that she just couldn’t handle anything with emotional content — it was all she could do just to get through the day. There, the night before her plane left, out came all the misery, and how she thought when she got me back she’d get me back and all the most guilt-inducing and untrue-yet-true-somehow things. I was crying shortly after, and it was enough to get the whole story out of me, so now she knows about the abortion, though she said she already knew, she could just tell. (That’s what she said after I lost my virginity too.) And of course she’d be the last to judge me about it, which I already knew, and why didn’t I just call her, instead of walking those three months with morning sickness in the sun? And what could I say? I don’t know. I couldn’t. But not because of her, because of me, because of him and how we were sick together. She would’ve done anything, she said. I could’ve lived with him in her house. She would’ve fixed him breakfast. Anything would’ve been better than what I did. Anything would’ve been better than losing me. But maybe, but maybe. She thought it was all her fault I didn’t love her and I thought it was mine that she could think such a thing. On and on and around, heavy and real, that nauseated in-trouble feeling I hadn’t felt since James left crashed into me as I remembered all the other sadness that hadn’t left with him — my grandmother is dying, my mother is friendless and so alone, taking care of her like she were a little child, lost to her, as am I (and what would be the point of her making friends, because they would not make up for it, and were mostly too much trouble) — and we decided maybe it was like with writing papers… we just couldn’t talk until we’d cried, something opened up, some hormones got released. And all the shopping and wittiness and gin is nothing, superficial she said, but amazing to most of those who witness it, our own little world. In truth though, we are that loneliness spilling over in the dark, mother and daughter together in the clock-ticking and happy child’s room (the landlord’s adored and artifically inseminated son who would never set foot in a public school, who’d been to Italy so many times by age 7 - the opposite of us, in our fake-high-class outfits, Chanel sunglasses and Anges b bags, bawling like south Georgia dysfunction personified.) She said she was real sorry I had to go through all that, and I said me too, and asked if she thought it meant I’d have bad issues forever, and she said maybe, she didn’t know, but maybe it’d make me strong. I said the wrong things, mostly, and how I always felt like she was looking for evidense that I was fucked up.

We’d eventually wipe our eyes and go downstairs, make another drink. I’d go off to sleep, dream of James chasing me, angry and out for blood, and I was running and terrified with a girl from my high-school, and when he’d caught me and was ripping at my clothes, I wished he’d just fuck me, because it was so much easier. And that was how it was with us, except in the dream I scrambled away and kept on running.

Mom left the next day and Miriam came with her heavy suitcases, just a stop on the way to Japan, full of excitement. I got lots of free sushi at a JET program reception, and we lay around on the floor in David’s study, looked through his notebooks with envy (Spanish vocabulary words meticulously listed, and Yiddish and other languages I don’t know, and so many quotations, newspaper clippings, and a list of women’s names, 30 of them with dates and places, ending in his wife), took pictures of his house, took the crying Jennifer (officially the long-distance girlfriend of a medical student) to dinner at the Indian place Ellen and I had gone a few days before. By now, she’s still on the plane to Tokyo getting free drinks, and I never got that kiss.

Last night I dreamt I asked my boss for a raise and we got in a spiteful fight, she said I wasn’t worth even $3 an hour and I couldn’t even back to take yoga at the studio anymore (really I got the AC fixed, stopped the water falling from the sea studio out the sky studio ceiling onto the heads of unsuspecting yogis, and she’s taking me to see Tori Amos next month), and then the lover came back from Cambridge and I tried to give him a hug but he got mad at me for wrinkling his business suit and I woke up, the old falling-apart copy of The Unbearble Lightness of Being beside me, and it was after noon.

Jennifer and I are learning to play Christmas carols on the piano, but neither of us can read bass clef. We took the Mercedes to get bagels, sent a picture of us and the dog and the plant we can’t let die to the landlords with a funny note. There’s no one staying in the house now, and I’m trying to apologise to Ellen for my behavior during her stay (I’d just walk out of the room without telling her where I was going, she said. And I said it wasn’t her, it was me.), and I can’t really determine when it was that things got so hard again all of a sudden. I was weightless for a time, it seemed. I made an appointment with my hair stylist for almost a month from now (he’s booked) and bought a $27 “self-management system” at Staples — starting tomorrow, everything’s gonna be different.