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THIMBLE. Did my mom actually sew? No clothes, anyway, and though she taught me crocheting and kept the crochet needle until she died, I don't remember yarn. Did she darn socks for a while at least? I don't remember. ¶ I do remember threading needles for her. I remember her also looking down below her glasses to criticize the quality of workmanship of a Banana Republic skirt I bought. ¶She also had a beautiful Swiss sewing machine, an Elna Lotus. On the fridge I have her handwritten notes and illustrations that she used to remind herself how to operate it: "Bobbin. Bring thread thru here. To insert for sewing (which side up? does it matter?) Thread direction important!" ¶The thread was kept in a wooden container that somehow smelled pleasantly sweet. I now keep cotton balls in it. The needles she kept in a pink velvet pin cushion that I used to love. What was so marvelous to me was the exact degree of resistance that needles (and pins) met with upon insertion: there was a very nice friction and satisfying rustle as one entered: I can hear it and feel it now. ¶Those needles and thread were always around, kept on the highboy dresser near the front door. The pin cushion was shaped to resemble an upside-down strawberry with its green top at the bottom and a fleshy point at the top. ¶What I remember most is her hemming a skirt for me in 1996. It wasn't often my mom touched me after I was 13 or so. I was visiting from Dublin, where I was living. She let me have a skirt of hers, one she must have got in South America in the 1960s. It was black and maroon with bold white geometric shapes. I remember I couldn't believe she would give me a skirt of hers, let alone hem it, but there I was on the first step of the ladder, and she bending toward my legs, tugging a little every so often. Maybe she was wearing this thimble then.
SCALE. The second-to-uppermost left drawer of my mom's big desk was where she kept postage and note paper: rolls of American-flag stamps, cards by André Derain from the Met, others with children's drawings from causes like Unicef, and ones from Jewish charities as well (as long as their missions weren't explicitly Zionist). This scale was also in the drawer. ¶I also think – but do not remember – that my mom would have mailed things from home, from this desk and this drawer, that were to do with the nonprofit she founded, or others she was part of, from the Committee for Women in Non-Traditional Jobs (1970s and 80s) to Park River Independent Democrats (1990s until she died). (Her desk and workspace were in the living room. My father had the second bedroom as his office; I was given another small space to sleep and sit.) ¶The Committee for Women in Non-Traditional Jobs was a nonprofit my mom founded in 1977 (it stopped being active in the mid 1980s). The committee, which was made up of women who were mostly government officials, worked to get women into trades and jobs that were usually filled by men. (This overlapped somewhat with some of her jobs for city government in which, among other things, she investigated whether banks were complying with laws that required them to hire women.) For both her day job and her nonprofit work she was interviewed and written about in newspapers and radio. The NYU library in which her papers are archived describes her as "an activist for women employed in New York City government and particularly for those in non-traditional blue-collar jobs." ¶I imagine that some of what I saw her doing at this desk when I was a child was mailing, weighing, writing to political figures for support, organizing gatherings, as the one I have a videotape of (in which a dozen people in a conference room discuss how women workers might enter the then growing field of cable television). In her political life and her work life, my mom wanted justice for all people. ¶My contact with this drawer as with her whole desk was limited and by necessity stealthy until she died. I could be punished for being near it, or even for being in the room with it. ¶When my mom died, I remember moving her (huge, incredibly heavy) desk to another part of the living room. (In this period I had superhuman strength, despite not sleeping or eating much.) It was weeks before I got to cleaning out the drawers. I emptied each with great care, as with everything else, taking all the time it took and separating papers between what I knew I would never want and what I might want some day. I kept all her stamps. I've since used them, noticing each one before I licked it and gave it away. I extracted the cards, and later sent them. ¶I use the scale. Not as I once might have (but could not have, of course): to weigh letters from the UK and Ireland to them when I lived there in the 1990s – I probably sent a hundred – and each milligram mattered. But I do use it now and I enjoy its action – transforming when the right part of it is held the right way. I always assume it's a little off.
HAIR PICK. My mom's hair was always different than mine. It was almost black, naturally almost curly (people thought she had had a perm) and she almost always kept it short, or to her shoulders at an absolute maximum. She didn't pay much attention to it. She never even experimented with dye. ¶I remember that for many years she got haircuts from a woman named Evelyn at a place called Act II Haircutters on 79th and Lexington. I think she told me that Evelyn died of AIDS. ¶A year and a half before she died, chemotherapy was finally recommended to her (radiation and surgery had failed at last) and when she took it her thick, not yet all grey hair fell out. It soon grew back in the usual colors but her hair was much thinner after that. She asked me in November 2009, when her legs were severely swollen with edema, why people were treating her like she was delicate and old. That was the closest to a request for confirmation on her appearance I ever heard. I said, "Well, you're 69, and for once you look your age." She had just always looked 10 to 20 years younger than she was, without trying (as had my dad) and was always thin, energetic and animated, so she was treated like a woman of 50 until she was about 67 and a half. ¶I can picture her momentarily arranging her hair with this pick, looking at herself in the highboy dresser's mirror by the door. Maybe she then folded it up and took it with her to the office. ¶I never saw her much interested in her reflection one way or the other. I can't picture her hands touching her hair at all. I can't picture her combing her hair or brushing it. Just a few sharp movements with the pick into her bushy hair before she walks away.
EYEGLASSES In the online photographic archive I made, I include my mom and dad's driving licenses, which are always striking, always unflattering; always they have glasses on, usually with thick, wide, grey or brownish frames. ¶There were always many pairs of glasses around the house. Glasses, most of them my father's, lived in baskets on top of the bookshelf. Why there would have been more than two for each of them I don't know; they certainly were entirely for seeing with and not for any fashion purpose. ¶My father was always switching glasses. There were always one pair on his face and one in his breast pocket but sometimes another on the top of his head and two in his breast pocket. I remember the sound of him foraging for them. ¶These glasses were among the few things my mom had at the hospital with her when she died. There was also a Lorrie Moore book of short stories, her cell phone, a cardigan, some pills, a notebook, a pen, and a home-delivered copy of The New York Times from January 4, 2010, the day she went into the emergency room. (I kept this too.) ¶Her prescription was changing rapidly. Among the messages that were on her machine when she died were two from an ophthalmologist. (I suppose there are glasses of hers they still have. There may still be clothes of hers at a local cleaners. I forgot about that.) ¶These particular glasses must have been very expensive. I went with my mom once to the store where she got them, in a shop near Carnegie Hall. (There was a wave of purchases that started in 2008 [when she started to "lose the battle with cancer"] and January 2010, when she died, a wave that shocked me as I witnessed it because she had always told me she had no money to spare. She bought a collection of rugs from Design Within Reach, a Bang and Olufsen stereo, a Donna Karan cashmere sweater; she started getting her nails done and taking taxis – and got these glasses.) ¶I can see my mom looking down through the bifocal part of her glasses at something while her eyebrows go straight up. Her face was full of expression until the day before she died – a day I missed, though I was there on the last day, all day.
GYROSCOPE. This gyroscope was always on my father's desk. I know he showed it to me, made it spin with a string I don't have anymore. I know he, as a physicist, explained the forces at work to me, and I know he was calm and gentle when he did. ¶From March 2010 to October 2013, the gyroscope lived in a special part of my San Francisco apartment, which had amazing amounts of storage space. There was a 7-foot-high bookshelf that faced me when I entered the cellar. That's where I displayed many precious things like the gyroscope, as well as cigar boxes holding my mom's pastel crayons, the Cartier glasses case, the fax machine, the old phone, their "good" dishes. Other things were installed upstairs. Some things didn't make it to San Francisco at all. ¶Looking at the things I've kept gives me the feeling of going into one of the closets in the study, with its door that was hard to budge and that then went the rest of the way open too fast. The smell, sound and slide of the metal hangers; the possibility that there were old things of mine in there, and there were, it turns out. ¶And even if I had no reminders and no possessions and lived in a monastery, in my head I would pick up the compass or the Snoopy or the backgammon board or the fax machine and I would wonder just the same if anything could have been different. A gyroscope is a magical thing that spins and defies gravity because of special laws, and my father was once close to me, watching me to see that I understood that. ¶In Bigger Than Life, a 1956 movie, the father of a small family is psychotic. He's determined to make his little son learn everything he thinks the boy should in order to be part of his imagined perfect world of the future. At the same time, the only reason the father has decided to stay with his wife and child is to see the child raised according to his psychotic standards; he has already dismissed the wife and told her she is unbearably stupid. He has already accused them both of trying to hold him back and subvert his pure intentions. So in one scene, the father, played by James Mason, is forcing the child to do math exercises in isolation from the mother (who feebly objects, which my mother never did) – all night until the boy gets them right. He's not just holding back any praise, he's actually not letting the boy eat. At some point he leaves the room and the mother sneaks in and gives the boy a glass of milk, which he drinks down hungrily; then she steals away. (My mother would never do this.) We watch to see if he notices; he doesn't. They finish the exercise and the boy is allowed to eat. At dinner, the father sees the pitcher of milk from which the boy's glass was poured. He seizes on it as he observes that exactly one glass worth of milk has been removed from the total volume. “Did you really think that you were clever enough to outsmart me?” he says. ¶I had no idea that saying things like this and "Why are you always trying to undermine me?" – as my father did, as the Mason character does – is part of being psychotic until I saw that movie. ¶After the first ten years of marriage, my mother internalized all this. So her notebooks from that point on essentially say "Why am I always undermining Arthur?" She also came to feel around that time – as she also records at length – that everyone aside from my father was trying to undermine her, especially me, and including herself ("Why am I so stupid?"). Whatever had kept us all going until that point essentially stopped.
TELEPHONE CORD. Where did all the telephones go? I remember the kitchen wall phone and its cord that reached to the floor; the two lines in "the study" (my father's room); the two lines in my old bedroom set up after I was gone; the ringing that was neutral and uniform, not too loud. All those phones are gone. Gone too are the phones all over the world that rang for decades next to chairs that people used to sit in while they talked. As cords got longer, they could walk around, wash the dishes, clean rooms, flop around on a bed. It was a thing in your hand, and the base was a second thing to fiddle with. ¶Before 2004, when I found out by phone that my father was dying of cancer, ringing phones were interesting. Now, after cell phones brought me news of his death, of my boyfriend's sudden death, my mother's dire hospitalizations, her final urgent admission to the emergency room, and my grandmother's death, I get anxious at every call. ¶My mom never seemed to feel such anxiety, not about death, not about anything. She was always a good phone communicator. I took a picture of her in 2007 while she talked on the phone, vital and gesticulating as usual, as in the presence of the interlocutor – perhaps Norma Schlissel or Art Muccow or Ros March, dear friends of hers I met maybe once. When I gave her a print of it, she taped it, I later discovered, to a vinyl-covered blue notebook that bears the typed label "Groceries." I still have the notebook. ¶My father, on the other hand, was always jumpy, anxious about phones and everything else. He stuttered for most of his life so there was a lot of avoiding of talking, especially on the phone. (I remember his stutter. I remember he knew the names of famous stutterers, like James Earl Jones. I remember he'd turned to singing because you don't stutter when you sing. Maybe that's part of the reason he met my mother when he was singing.) Answering the phone was hard for him for a long time. He trained himself not to stutter, as he trained himself to do many things. When he did answer the phone he said, "Who is this, please?" I found this very embarrassing when it was for me. ¶As answering machines came on the market, my parents used them. I have several of their outgoing (and incoming) messages. And there was the automated voice of the portable phone set that filled the living room in the decade before they died: "Six. Four. Six. Three. Eight. Eight. ..." I shut it off when she died and I was alone in the apartment. ¶It was soon before my mom died that telephones in our household got the most use. My mom also used her new mobile phone. She had started to have difficulty getting around, mostly because of shortness of breath but also because of hip problems, around 2008, she started talking on the phone more. She talked to Dell computers, her lawyers, our relatives in France, for hours at a time. My father had died two years before and this meant both that she needed to talk to others and that his rules were now no longer in effect and she could safely, or somewhat safely, pursue relationships, including with me, including on the phone. ¶We came to talk every day. In this time we developed more than a détente, less than a mother–
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daughter relationship; we became friends. I haven't had a friend to talk to like her since she died. I still dream every week that I've got the facts wrong somehow and they're still alive; I wake up feeling sure that I can call them right now. ¶There was a time – when I was in Finland and right after I got back and Mom died and even actually a few months after that – that I could remember what it was like to talk to her 2008–2009 self. She was this almost-always reachable almost-always nice presence on the phone who always had more going on than I did (both social events and medical events), who remembered everything I told her and was almost always happy to hear from me.
COMPASS. I'm already forgetting the compass, which was my father's and was kept in his desk in the main drawer. When was it used? When did they or we go camping? When did he or she or I set out in the woods, or all of us together, and wonder how to find our way? If I did ever ask what it was, it would have been my father who would have told me the concept of north – magnetic north and the way of the earth and how it pulls. ¶I know that I did hold it and admire it before 2010 when she died and I could touch all the things in the house finally. I know it and recognize it from that other time. ¶But we did all go to the woods. And I do know that they both loved hiking and being in nature. (Neither of them, I now know, even wanted to live in New York City particularly.) When we had a car (before I was 10), we would drive to Greenbrook Nature Sanctuary in New Jersey. ¶I loved being in the car, and this happened rarely. My mother would drive, my father unable to drive but constantly belittling her for her driving. (My mother sometimes wrote in her journals about how it felt to be called stupid all the time but she never doubted he was right to call her that.) The blue Dodge Aspen must have made its way out of a parking space, up the west side, and over the George Washington Bridge, right near where I now sit writing. ¶I loved wandering around the sanctuary in the winter. I loved the manmade slabs of stone that extended a bit into the marsh so that you could walk closer to the river. I loved the little dam and the footbridge that crossed it. I loved the cup that collected measurable rainfall. (I loved that idea: over time, when no one is watching, on this one spot, something as crazy as rain is contained and then its volume recorded for a purpose I couldn't imagine.) I loved the naturalist hut and the sightings named by invisible others and posted on a little board. I loved the marks of paint indicating different trails, amazingly pre-painted by someone unknown, carefully planned, corresponding to a map they must have had but didn't save. And I loved walking. ¶But I didn't like anything else about being in the woods, especially when there was no snow, and least of all the bugs that squirmed in the trees or fell on me, especially in the time of the gypsy moth caterpillars. (Also, I was ignored or ridiculed when we were there.) Mostly, I remember being left to spend hours in the parking lot, waiting for them to return. And I remember wishing that she would buy food for the trip that I liked a little and not just provolone cheese and grapefruit juice, which were for my dad. I felt lost.
MUSIC STAND. I bought a box of reeds for my father on a trip to Paris, at his request. I was glad to be trusted with the assignment; he never opened the box. I don't know the last time he played clarinet – or piano, his first instrument. I do remember the sound of his playing and also his changed face with pursed lips, puffed-out cheeks and hugely raised eyebrows, a silly face that made beautiful sounds. ¶He was a talented player. He had perfect pitch. I have programs from the 1960s and 70s from concerts in which he played clarinet and more from concerts in which his compositions were played. I know from recordings that performances were frequently part of his life, that he had friends in the neighborhood and in the building and beyond with whom he practiced duets. With these friends he also did wild group improvisations involving many voices and instruments. The recordings I have – never heard until my parents died – are from about 1965 to 1975, when they were married until about when I was born. ¶My mother chose the flute at a young age. My father was started on the piano by his mother (where his perfect pitch became apparent) and later took up the clarinet too. Music was an integral part of who they both were as they grew up and a part of who they were together, when they were happy. They met singing in the Dessoff Choirs. I have recordings of them singing at home, both in the group improvisations and independently. ¶When I cleaned the apartment, I found a file cabinet filled with sheet music – this was in addition to what was in the piano bench and at the piano: music for flute, clarinet, piano. (My father's own compositions were kept, of course, but that accounted for 1% and was stored separately.) There was Darius Milhaud, Edmund Rubbra, Gunther Schuller – among many better-known others. (This is the part of the archive I can't read. In deafness I selected for what I could see – handwriting [my mother's, usually] saying "watch attacks" and "accel." and prettiness: the beautiful volumes published by companies like Alphonse Leduc and Durand. They had made me clear out all my papers, all evidence of the 16 years I lived at 5E, but they had kept every piece of music either one of them had ever looked at.) ¶I was pushed to perform voice and piano at a very young age and then was pulled out of the prestigious chorus to which I'd been admitted for some reason, probably because it was affecting my grades. They tried to teach me this language, which I think is the most important and beautiful one in the world, but I failed. I say it was because they taught me without love, without encouragement, with intimidation, holding up for me the accomplishments of other children. Maybe I was just lazy. I remember feeling frustrated and embarrassed all the time, that when I tried to learn the piano I was creating more things (unpleasant sounds) for them to hate me for. Maybe I was just impatient. Today I don't play an instrument and I can't read music. Both my father and mother could sight-read. ¶My father stopped playing with me or for me when I was 11 or 12 and put his hands over his ears when I sang and left the room telling my mom, "Judith, why can't she stay at her grandmother's?" He did this when I spoke sometimes too. I wouldn't sing a note for the next 25 years and still can really only do it alone.¶At some point, I suppose around the same time, my father also told my mother not to sing any more. I read this in her diary a few years ago. She had long since stopped playing her Powell flute (which she left to a cousin in her will) and guitar (which was stolen). ¶I carry this music in my genes but my genes will die with me. When I sang finally, starting at age 36, I was told I had a beautiful voice, that I sang with musicianship, and professionals said I had perfect pitch. "If only you started sooner."
BOOK END. There were a few books about New York sights on the highboy dresser in the alcove where we ate; this had come from my grandmother's house in Cleveland, though mostly it held other immediately useful objects like gum and quarters. At the threshold of the living room was the first of two barrister bookcases also from my grandmother's house. Through the glass on each shelf I could see fiction literature, much of which I now have here. It was alphabetized: Heinrich Böll and Joseph Brodsky near the beginning. Dickens, Primo Levi, IB Singer. ¶On the same wall but deeper into the room were two narrow bookshelves that reached almost to the ceiling. These held encyclopedias, eventually computer manuals, books like the Bible and the Koran, how-to books, dictionaries for a dozen languages, books in those languages, world mythology, star atlases. ¶By my mom's desk were two low bookcases set back to back. These held plays and poems – Tom Stoppard, Osip Mandelstam, Wallace Stevens, Bernard Shaw, Christopher Hampton – and books about movies and music. In my parents' bedroom, where two large queen beds floated, my mother kept a few books on high shelves that held other things below, books that I know had some special significance to her, including many art books, and especially photography – André Kertész's On Reading, a book about Josef Albers' color theories, Weegee's People, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a week-to-a-page illustrated 1972 calendar from the Met called Nudes – books on women's history and New York's. There was also a copy of the parody edition Not the New York Times, published one day in October 1979 by Times staff, and which I loved. (The opposite of collectors, they threw it away when it looked dirty to them.) ¶In my father's study was nearly a whole wall of books – all science and philosophy as well as a handful of old readers of mine, the Uptown Downtown books that surely not only led me to enjoy reading but formed my Weltanschauung. The science books were mostly physics, mathematics, medicine, computer science, artificial intelligence and linguistics, among them Willard Van Orman Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Buber and Bertrand Russell. ¶I don't always know if a book was my mom's or my dad's but usually I do. My dad liked Kafka and Beckett most of all, if quantity is an indication. He liked Proust too and Mark Twain. My mom was interested in books that won the Pulitzer prize or the Nobel (Saul Bellow, Orhan Pamuk, Annie Proulx, Kenzaburo Oe); she often read a single book by a prize-winning author. They were both interested in political history, including in the form of biography. My father liked Ionesco, foreign languages, Sherlock Holmes, WS Merwin, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. My mom liked Cynthia Ozick, Haruki Murakami, Eudora Welty. ¶My own books were given away, sent to me or thrown out as soon as I left the house at 17. ¶Reading, of course, can never be captured in a picture, even by Kertész. I don't know what they felt for the millions of moments each of them held a book in their hands and looked down at it. On how many hospital visits had books come with them in the years before they died? And before that, beaches and concerts and subway rides and flights and in bed? These books I now have went with them. ¶I wonder what it was like for her and for him to read each of their books I pick up and read. ¶I decided very carefully which of their books to keep when they died. With the help of friends, I gave away about 25 boxes of their books and kept the rest. Movers shipped them to me in San Francisco in 2010; movers shipped most of them with me when I moved to New York in 2013. Many of my parents' books replaced ones of mine – their copy of The Good Soldier I kept; my copy, from a 1990s literature class, I didn't. The reference books I added to my shelves. The rest I've been slowly reading. ¶One of my friends once said, "You should get your own books." Like almost everyone else, she thought it was incomprehensibly morbid to want to get to know one's dead parents. But no one knows except me and foster kids, maybe, what a haunting, unrequited thing it is, not knowing them. Anyway, books belong to everyone. ¶In my system I'm still allowed to fling away books I don't like – even Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, which won so many awards and which I remember my mom reading. Whereas William Kennedy's Legs and the short stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth's The Counterlife and The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer were more to my taste. Other books I know she loved, like Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, didn't grab me and others, many others, I still have to read. ¶I've read some of their Erica Jong (the copy of Fruits & Vegetables came with a letter to my father from Jong and a picture of her), Anne Sexton (whose poems inspired my series Equity) and now T.L., who was probably a big part of life-before-their-delusions-took-over (how do I call the time before they thought I was a criminal and treated me more or less as parents treat their kid?) ¶I found a dedication in their copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope. It's from him to her and it says, "To ourselves with hope, 1973."
TYPEWRITER BALL. The Remington Rand sat on the painted-metal typewriter table, later used for something else (probably storing medicine). When I picture my father sitting at it, his back upright, am I in fact imagining him at the piano? ¶He typed many things: poems, computer programs, scientific articles, scientific talks, grants, music compositions for traditional instruments (the aleatory ones were partially typed), letters to his mother (until he was married), a letter or two to me, electronic music compositions, ideas for inventions. Almost all of this I found out after they were both dead. ¶Because of my mother's competence – or because he was so bad at writing or because her servitude was an essential part of their dynamic (which I hated and hate), she often took dictation. There was no need for the Dictaphone – although I have many microcassettes of voice recordings to be typed there too – because my mother was his secretary when she got home from work, writing in a yellow legal pad with her swooping lefty hand everything he said, and later typing it. ¶(His handwriting was not usable. I was told that this is often the case, that after the psychotic break, schizophrenics can't focus on writing or somehow can't control their handwriting the same way. His was almost illegible. [It was only after reading some handwritten essays among his papers from the 1940s for several hours that I realized they were also by him, and that his handwriting at that point, before the break, was completely different.] He often wrote all in caps when someone else had to read it, though that didn't always make a difference. I became better at reading it after they died.) ¶I hear his voice dictating and I hear her voice get flat and dull as she received his corrections of her behavior even while being dictated to. He kept telling her she was stupid, weak-willed and clumsy, and she didn't argue. In her notebooks she only wonders how she became these things and she notes again and again her good luck that he trusted her, including to write his words down at all. She was only reverent. But thinking she was stupid made her sad. I used to scream with rage about these almost-daily scenes when I was a teenager, which only made things worse. ¶What were they writing? Mostly letters. Letters were sent to an outfit my father hoped to sue, or to a suspected plagiarizing scientist, or to the landlord about a humming noise from the boiler (there was a whole folder about the boiler's noise, kept for 30 years), to the tenants of my grandmother's old house or, most often, to a doctor, presenting him or her with some apparent inconsistency in his appraisal of my mother's cancer. ¶It was also a household of labels. (They used various labeling machines, each being thrown out when a more efficient model was found.) Their thousands of files had labels. In one of the cassettes my mom's voice may be heard reading off nouns – categories; clearly she is doubly recording the contents of a file cabinet by reading into a tape recorder the title of each folder in it; she was almost definitely told to do this by my father. The folders she names – "computer device literature," "video products" – are his. Also labeled were his precious film and audio canisters and boxes. ¶I don't know why he kept the ball. The machine it lived in, which I remember them hauling to the typewriter-repair shop two blocks away, and where they later (painfully to me) faithfully took their desktop and laptop computers for repair, is gone, as is the shop. ¶In the 1960s, my father had also worked with typing machines as interfaces, operating and programming room-sized computers through them. All that remained of this in 2010 was punch cards. It must have been horrible to have gone from chambers of higher education and think tanks like Bell Labs, inventing technology, to his study, well before he was 65. I know that some of the typed letters were to Stevens Institute of Technology, declaiming against them for underpaying him and then pushing him into retirement. ¶He was never not reading, and often typing, but I don't know of any papers published for a long time before he died. I never knew what he was working on and was ignored if I asked. ¶I hear the sound of the typewriter clearly. The ball locking into place, engaging and vibrating as the electricity switches on. I did not use this typewriter to type but I must have touched it; I can hear it and picture it and feel its shimmy and hum and I know the action of its keys.
TIARA My mom preserved her wedding dress deliberately in the years before she died. It's in a very efficiently designed box with cardboard and clear plastic, the bodice especially carefully kept. The tiara is stored separately, with the veil. ¶I assume she kept it to enshrine the day when she felt the most important thing happened. There's a possibility too that she wanted me to be able to wear it myself one day. If so, she never mentioned it. But nor did she leave it to someone else in her will, as she did so many intimate things she cherished. ¶They were married at 7 pm on April 18, 1964, at the Hotel St Moritz in New York (now the Ritz-Carlton). The announcement in the paper read "The bride-elect is a graduate of Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations ... and is on the staff of the Headquarters, US Army Command, Atlantic, as a personnel specialist. Mr Layzer ... is on the faculty of Stevens Institute of Technology ... and a research scientist at New York University ... and received master's and doctor's degrees from Columbia University." ¶I found the book of wedding pictures when I was very little, at my grandparents' house. I loved the way it was bound, with thick pages like those of books for little readers. Everyone looks so pretty and happy, my father so handsome. (My parents' looks remained.) My favorite is the one of my mother and my grandparents (her parents) laughing, the three of them alone in some hotel hallway and their laughter so natural and beautiful that it reminds me of the pleasure of watching my grandfather laugh (as he often did around me), of my grandmother laugh (as she did sometimes) and my mother laugh (as she did a lot until around 1980). She is slim and elegant and tall. Her wavy black hair, chic and cut very short, shines under the tiara.
PILL CUTTER My mom was diagnosed with cancer when I was born. During the surgeries and doctor visits that year, her friends and relatives took care of me. The doctors told her they got it all. Many years later, other doctors found it again, a very rare form of ovarian cancer that grows extremely slowly. It was in an advanced stage and the prognosis was not good. But in fact she lived for another 22 years. ¶In all, my mom had seven courses of radiation and seven surgeries. She kept going to work almost all through every one of them. I suppose some of the courses of radiation were worse than others. I remember going home on the 1 train a few
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times with her from Columbia-Presbyterian when I was 15 or so and her throwing up into a little paper bowl she'd brought with her for the purpose. (A taxi or bus ride would have been worse.) ¶Other courses were more directed and therefore more tolerable, as the one she went through with the best doctors in Sweden and at Loma Linda, California. She was never on vacation in these places and neither was my father, who sought them out and always accompanied her. She would have long stays in which radiation was administered a little at a time. ¶I write as if I was involved but I wasn't. Because of how they perceived me, they thought that I would exploit information about their frailty and vulnerability. Much as information about their incomes and the rent was kept from me (and even my father's age, until one day he left his passport out and I found it) so was all information about their health. ¶When they were forced to tell me how they were, it was almost always to ensure I would adhere to a contrived health measure. These included staying away from them (they wore masks around me and accused me of betrayal when I got a cold; they said my mom's immune system would not survive the attack) and keeping all information away from each of our relatives. (I was also interrogated after visiting any of them.) My mom's illness was invoked as a reason I should behave less like an "enemy": "Your mother is going to die – don't you care?" my father often asked. I was further discouraged from asking questions because, while a lack of questions was punished as evidence of cruelty, too many questions or apparent concern could also be punished, as it was when it came from our relatives at the wrong time, with the wrong degree of sympathy or some other perceived intent to hurt them or take advantage of them. ¶My father had a thing about medicine, was something of a hypochondriac. He was rarely sick but was always taking things for respiratory problems – Vick's nasal spray, Benedryl, Sudafed, and asthma medicine, though he didn't have asthma. When he was admitted to the preoperative department of Massachusetts General Hospital in 2004 (to which my boyfriend B. and I accompanied him, since my mother was herself in the hospital), he fought almost to the point of hysteria with the anesthesiologist, demanding to be allowed to continue to take Singulair, an asthma medicine. ¶This was the first time I was in the strange position of admitting to myself that my parents' odd rules were based on delusions (I hadn't yet met a psychologist to ask). A kind of comfort began there because everyone else, and especially doctors, reacted as I did. I felt suddenly sane: what I claimed all my life was real. And at the same time, I felt pain for my father who was about to have many hours of surgery, was in great discomfort, and who, even at that moment, alone with me and B. in Boston, couldn't tell me what he was having surgery for. ¶In her diaries, my mom recorded pill consumption. She took things that some studies have shown address a hormone that would have stimulated her tumors, causing them to grow. Many of these were vitamins and most were over-the-counter drugs, like antihistamines to reduce side effects. They included megestrol acetate, cetrorelix acetate, magnesium salicylate, omeprazole, and fexofenadine. She used this pill cutter all the time. ¶I inherited many pill cutters and have almost never used any of them. I take vitamins whole, the occasional ibuprofen, an allergy pill. Melatonin I break with my teeth.
FINIAL. It's like the house I want to live in with them is around every bend. Every room I see might be the right room. ¶January, February and March 2010: the last time I had energy – inexhaustible, stress-driven, sleep-free energy. I excavated an apartment for me within the apartment for them. I slept in their room but only after pushing hundreds of pounds of furniture around to make a bedroom all my own – moving mattresses day and night. "It's so sunny," people would say when they visited after. ¶I got rid of pairs of glasses and a Victorian vanity inherited from my father's mother and stained undershirts and a dilator and copies of Science and tacky lamps and woven runners and the John Adams miniseries I gave her. And I arranged one bed as mine with her body pillow and her Ahava hand cream by the side (with my other grandmother's lamp, modified to have no shade, next to it) and her copy of Around the World in 80 Days but my dog in the corner, sleeping on cushions taken from their sofa, which I have since had reupholstered. ¶I compare it to losing one's home planet. Like you're on board the Enterprise and you're watching from the deck with horror the main screen as your whole world explodes, shattered to bits right there. What does Kirk do? Put a hand on your shoulder maybe. To him it's just DX-32 or whatever. ¶The creepy, cluttered air. ¶There was a bell on the door so there would be no surprises. I hated that bell, metal balls along a frame in the shape of a sheep. ¶It was a household of paper: miles of folders packed into three- and five-high vertical files and smaller ones closer to the floor. ¶Sometimes I think, what if I forget his handwriting? Or hers? ¶A terrible mistake: her desk. I didn't take any pictures of it and I didn't keep it either. It's just gone. ¶I know where everything was and used to be and I know I was bad for even knowing because that was proof my sneakiness, the plans I had for them. But there were the envelopes and stamps and the little scale. Each thing had a story I hoped I would hear, I hoped I would now see. A Sharper Image noisemaker. A thermometer. Tennis racquets. An emerald ring. A screwdriver. A kitchen curtain and its rod. A porcelain lamp and its finial.
ICE SKATE. It was my grandmother's wish that all her daughters learn figure skating. My aunt tells me that her insistence on this was actually another example of my grandmother's unkindness and that it was painful and not fun at all, for my aunt, at least. But my mom seemed to love it. Because she saved her old pair of skates and a fine new pair the rest of her life, I have to say she loved it. (So I keep them too.) ¶Ice skating and, I think, physical activity in general meant a lot to my mom. At her 25th Cornell reunion, she wrote, "I remember exuberantly skating on Lake Cayuga, especially during a rare January week when I had no classes or finals and the lake surface was frozen smooth for waltz jumps and spins." ¶Pictures show how effortlessly beautiful she was for so long – confident-looking; thin with strong shoulders; lustrous, naturally wavy black hair, sometimes frizzy; full lips; tall with bright, dark eyes and thick eyebrows; olive skin. I'm imagining a particular picture of her in which she's about 20 and standing in skates on ice in the woods and someone, a boyfriend, maybe, has called her name and so her face is turned to the camera. ¶I also remember her teaching me to skate, holding my hands and moving backward in swishy movements, both of us looking at my feet. I remember strapping on the boots, tying the long laces, feeling my ankle so securely held, then releasing the blade from its wooden guard. I know we went to Sky Rink on 33rd Street many times, where my favorite parts were watching the Zamboni trucks do their magical job; looking out at the view; and the video game Shooting Gallery, which I was briefly allowed to play there. I also coveted the clothing but was never allowed to have much, I believe because they thought I wasn't serious enough about skating. (She had a beautiful simple black corduroy skating outfit from her college days. I have this too and, unlike the skates, it fits me.) ¶Skating for me was humiliating. I don't know if it was my impatient, perfectionist temperament or the absence of parental support but ice skating seemed a sport in which my clumsiness, ugliness, gracelessness – my unlovable-ness – was manifest not just in the lump of a dirty heavy thing I was but that same thing falling suddenly to a hard floor, almost constantly. My mom probably couldn't help laughing. The floor was also hard to get up from. ¶My mom's whole side of the family love to move. Her parents, my grandparents, danced until they were in their 90s. But my mom was shut down when she was about 47 and late-stage cancer was finally correctly diagnosed. She lived the next 22 years – but with limited movement. ¶Not ice skating, folk dancing, bike riding, hiking, or having sex (as I learned later) must have been terrible and unnatural for her, as for anyone. ¶There's a reason my father demanded she stop doing these things: Her many tumors were liable to hemorrhage. And they did. In 2004, she had to have nine units of blood transfused after a hemorrhage, for example. It was advised that she walk and exercise a bit less and carefully, not run into people. But my father turned this real risk into something "hyperrational" and she didn't question him. She believed fundamentally until the moment she died that he had saved her life.
SOUND REEL. In Iron Mountain I present some of the audio material that my father kept in his study. Most of that is in digital form now. Much of it was transferred by a cousin of mine, paid by my mom by the hour to work through whatever there was. ¶My cousin came to the apartment in the summer of 2008 and played all my father's reels, frequently listening in to understand what was what. (My father had scribbled information on the reels' boxes and on the reels themselves but my cousin didn't work from that since those notes were almost impossible to read.) That year he made a CD of eight of my dad's compositions for electronic and traditional instruments, along with their names ("Fanfare," "Morning Elevator," etc.). ¶In 2012 I asked him to also give me all the audio from the cutting-room floor. I listened to that (and made Iron Mountain then). I also looked at the actual reels, like this one, and got a bit more information about when things were recorded and for what purpose. (One box, for instance, has the words "music for a dance for Joyce." I guessed this meant my uncle's sister J.M., a dancer and choreographer. I emailed her and she told me my dad had indeed written a piece for a dance of hers; with that I learned something else about him.) ¶I spent months listening to all the audio and found out things I would never have otherwise heard: my father's mother's friend describing the town in Poland where my grandmother grew up; that grandmother practicing Russian; my screams as a toddler as I beg to be released from my room at bedtime; duets with my father on clarinet and piano and a neighbor on oboe; samples of electronic instruments my father invented – one like the chiming of a bell, another like the whoosh of a coming train; my mother on the radio discussing her work for the city; our family gathered and discussing Nixon when I'm very little (and we still had family gatherings at our apartment). ¶Before I moved back to New York in late 2013, I got rid of many things, including almost all the reels. Their textured metal containers, which I had photographed, sometimes more than once, their plastic spines, their smooth heads and tails – the exquisite colored boxes, mostly from Scotch ("It speaks for itself") – almost all were thrown away. This one is on display in my kitchen in its bright red and white box, which says, in my father's handwriting, "320 W. 87th" and "June 1965." ¶I never knew about most of my father's recordings. He never recorded me except when I was first learning to speak. He never recorded my mom. He never talked to me about his music, his films, or his job as a physicist. He never talked about the reels that lined his study walls. ¶I think of the many decades in which, when things were recorded, there was a physical object with visible or almost visible information baked into its fabric. Its size had a relationship to the length of its sound in time. Physical damage meant its sound was altered, or you couldn't hear it at all anymore. ¶My mother gave the reel-to-reel player to my cousin, who lost track of it.
COFFEE TIN. The kitchen was a dangerous place. My parents told me I'd injure myself and others if I touched a knife. (My father didn't touch knives; my mother's use was restricted.) When I later stumbled into situations where I had to use kitchen tools, I was awkward and, though I've now used knives for many years, of course, I never know if I'm cutting right. ¶They installed and then removed a stove and installed and removed another one. When we did have a stove (that wasn't perceived to be leaking gas), I wasn't allowed to touch it. Toasters were thrown away too. ¶So there was just the refrigerator and the microwave and cookbooks. And in the refrigerator, there was only food that was considered safe – recently purchased enough that it wasn't perceived to be spoiled: miniature opened plastic jars of apple sauce, the tiniest containers of cottage cheese, films covering tiny plates of melons cut open that morning and thrown away the next day. This started in the 1980s when I was about 10 and went on until my father died in 2006. ¶All milk bought more than a day before was also thought to be spoiled. Meat, even bologna slices, was similarly tainted. (Every day, the lunch I brought to PS 124 was a cheddar cheese sandwich. I used to try to trade every day but no one wanted Cracker Barrel, not every day. ¶But though there was almost nothing left with which to prepare food, and eating things raw was perceived to be perilous, my mom loved to make things in the kitchen. She always wanted us to eat together. One of the few times I can recall her challenging my father, and he giving in, rather in the way of a husband on television, was about this wish. When we didn't eat together, which was often, she was angry and he was apologetic and fawning. When we did, they talked easily at the table, usually about Middle East politics. I didn't talk; this was safest. I hated being at that table, the table that is now one of my prize possessions. ¶I remember her throwing 7-Up in my face when I was about 13 and laughing; my slipping on the folding chair when I was 10 or so and cracking my chin against the table as I shot downwards – the same table – and her laughing. I associate these little wounds with learning to keep quiet, as I did, about anything good that happened to me unless it was also something I was supposed to be doing: getting recognition from others for my curiosity, creativity or intelligence. ¶The kitchen came to look to me the ugliest room in the house: sealed pipes where the stove had been connected, the old microwave on the Job Lot kitchen island, dusty painted metal apparatuses for hanging things from, all wall surfaces peeling a little, and everything bathed in bright white fluorescent light. When she died, I turned the kitchen light off for good. ¶In her notebooks she writes about cooking. It was something she had been taught to do, at home and at school, but independent of that she loved it. She cut and saved recipes and displayed some of them on a bulletin board in the kitchen that I still have. (The recipe there now – it hangs in my kitchen – is from the New York Times in 2008 for "wintertime tomato soup.") From my father's mother, also saved, there was a box of recipes on index cards. She also notes successful dishes in her notebooks and my father's reaction to them. ¶It was when my father died that other implements started to appear, as equivalent things did in all the other rooms. She bought sharp knives, one of which I kept and still use. In lieu of a stove, she bought an electric broiler, an egg boiler, a rice steamer. She exhumed recipes and began making more things. When she died, I kept the Cuisinart kettle, a Braun mixer, a Moulinex grinder, a Melitta plastic coffee filter, this tin. There was no fanfare, no acknowledgment that it wasn't ever thus but, just as my bedroom started to be called "your bedroom" (they had called it "the back room" for decades and explained many times that I was only their guest and that they were doing me a favor by supporting me – but in the last year of my mom's life, the room was mine again and the bed was even made for me when I visited), so the kitchen started to be a kitchen again. ¶We almost never had anyone over to eat. I have almost as few visitors as they did; I try to ask but I don't know how.
PAPER WEIGHT. This was always on my mother's desk and now it's on mine. I know she thought it was pretty. It is brilliant blue and orange; it bubbles with magic-sand-like forms, suspended as if temporarily, as if in water. It's heavy. ¶I wish she had thought of me as the kind of person she could talk to about things she found pretty – about art, about clothing, flowers, makeup, what men she found handsome. I wish I could have been girlish with her. ¶I wish I could have known the girl she was. I can't remember what she would say when I asked about her youth – although there must have been a time when she did answer my questions. What I remember more is responses like "Why do you want to know?", "If you want to know family history, ask your grandmother!" and "That's none of your business!" I stopped asking, anyway. Maybe I should have persevered. I found out what I could when she died from her notebooks. From one, I learned the story of a man my mom found beautiful. ¶It was 1962 or so, immediately before she met my dad; she was 22. ¶I'd known there was a guy in Rome my mom had been in love with. I don't know why or when she told me this, but as long as I can remember I imagined what life would have been like if I were Italian, and then, when I understood genetics better, what life would have been like if my mom had been happy and living in Italy and there was no me in the world at all. One notebook is mostly about Nino. ¶When she died and I found the notebooks, I saw there were gaps – or maybe she wrote them only in certain years, but I don't think so. I think later in life she decided to keep this notebook and none of the ones for many years after that because she didn't approve as an older adult of the things she wrote between 1964 and 1970, the first six childless years of being married to my dad (or she wanted to make sure I never saw them) – but this notebook she did keep. It was in our apartment all my life. ¶In it, she is at Cornell,
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contemplating her feelings about the world. She goes on a summer trip to Italy with her friend K. She goes on a double date with K. and two Roman men. My mom hits it off with one of them; they see each other more; they fall in love. My mom goes back to New York and they write to each other. In the notebook my mom draws a cartoon of a telephone with one end of the receiver saying "Mi amore sei bene?" and the other "Si, cara, sono bene." She begins to imagine the best things for them hopefully. Then he stops writing and calling. She is devastated, insulted, bitter. ¶Also in the last few years, K. herself told me the story of Nino and so did L., my mom's college roommate at the time, so I knew the secret before I read the notebook. K. and L. spoke reluctantly, as if breaking a spell: my mom's parents had found out Nino's phone number from L. and contacted him without my mom's knowledge, telling him never to speak to her again. He was not Jewish; that was reason enough. L. still feels terrible for helping in this underhanded strategy, for being too young to stand up for her friend. ¶My mother assumed Nino had lost interest in her, of course. She records her sadness. She compares herself to her grandmother J., my great-grandmother: J. told her "of a frustrated love which she has harbored these many years." J. said her husband, my great-grandfather, also had "someone else" before the two of them resigned themselves to the marriage their families had arranged. In 2001, my grandmother (my mother's mother) told me, when I asked, that she had been in love with an Italian boy herself, Charlie, a "true love," but of course she was not allowed to be with him either. ¶K. felt horrible too. Nino, she tells me, was distraught. He continued to write – but since he couldn't write to my mom without disobeying my grandfather, he wrote to K., telling her how he loved and missed my mom and how upset he was. I picture K. in 2013, conflicted about telling me the story even then, and the look on her face as she tried to describe the letters to me. She said they were the most moving love letters she had ever read, and one in particular she saved for decades because it was so beautiful. She had only recently thrown it away. ¶My mom wrote a list of things she liked in 1963, less than a year before she would marry my father: steak, a good book, "feeling a work of art," sketching, "fatigue which follows physical exercise," "sitting by a hearth," smelling pine trees or coffee, "making the right decision," "vitality in people," getting a sunburn, "playing the piano with feeling," and "looking into Nino's eyes."
ERASER. I thought Houston was beautiful both times I was there. The first was 2006; I was there to be with my mom at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in the time right after my father died. ¶I loved the Menil Collection and its cool white spaces filled with Dada. I loved the Rothko Chapel with its calm darkness. I loved the Museum of Fine Arts, where my mom got this eraser. I remember the peace of standing in enormous indoor spaces filled with brisk conditioned air and amazing paintings. To me, Houston is a city of art and opera, incredible lushness, endless hospitals, and death. ¶A few months after my father died, my mom decided I was trustworthy enough to go with her as she went to get a course of radiation. She flew in from New York and I flew in from San Francisco the same day: she met me at the airport. Just as we arrived at the hotel suite, I had a phone call from a mutual friend of my boyfriend at the time. P. told me that B. had just died while running the marathon. ¶The phone just stayed in my hand, frozen. ¶"Why are you on the phone?" my mom asked. ¶"B. just died," I said. ¶"Oh," she said. "Well, help me unpack." ¶Four months later she said to me, "It must have been hard for you having B. and your father die at almost the same time." But between the phone call and that statement, she was just angry at me as usual for "betraying" her, and even more than usual, because I was betraying her when she needed support in the hospital. ¶I remember our cousin J., a Houstonian, called the next day to arrange a visit and asked brightly how I was. I told her my boyfriend had just died and she said, "Well, now is the time to take care of your mother." Maybe she said "aw" too. I remember the lamp in the corner of the hotel suite I happened to be looking at when she said that. ¶Anyway, I cried. My mom yelled at me for crying but I cried anyway, around J., at the hotel complex, on the shuttle bus to the hospital, in Kroeger's, in museums, in taxis, in the hospital cafeteria, going from one appointment to another, waiting in the area outside Radiation for my mom to come out. I don't know if I was partly crying for my father. If so, this was almost the only crying I did. I knew I was partly crying for the irony of the situation: B. had asked to spend more time with me just as my father died and I had freaked out, screaming and pleading with him: this was the time I needed to maybe get to know my mom, that I had to mourn my father with her, that maybe she would trust me now and we would become close, and that I could see him any old time. ¶"You didn't love him anyway," my mother said. ¶This is what I associate with this eraser and with Houston. When anyone asks, and they don't anymore, I give this example of how you can fight with your parents for reasons other than because you're spoiled or a rebellious teenager. ¶This was the first time in my life either of my parents had allowed me to attend an appointment with any of their doctors. My father would have been outraged – but he wasn't there anymore. I had only recently been trusted with medical information at all. (I processed all the rules, like the ones around privacy, as stone walls while they, I now see, as the rule-makers, thought of them as flexible things they could decide to remove at any moment.) I paid attention to Dr. K., and turned my mind to hormone-sensitive tumors and the molecular biology that my mom had already learned to understand them. ¶I had met Dr. K. before, when I was actually a teenager, in a waiting room in the New York hospital where she then worked. I was re-introduced now as an adult and as if nothing was wrong except, of course, the recent death of my father and the seriousness of my mom's condition. ¶When I met Dr. K. in New York I remember she asked me how I was doing, coping with the fact that my mom had cancer, whether I was okay – and before I could answer (I remember being shocked because no one else had asked me this) my mom jumped in and admonished her: "That's none of your business! What does she have to deal with?" ¶I don't blame her for not asking after me this time.
BLOWER BRUSH. My father made films by aiming a camera at a computer screen, the screen presenting his programmed content. They were word films, films that were on the forefront of the use of technology in art. He started working with computers in the 1960s. He had a huge custom-made desk at home – I picture it in Polaroids I have. It was here that he edited his films. From that period, I have this brush and I still have splicing tape. I remember the cool, textured metal of the splicing machine. ¶Or was this brush used for photographs? In addition to instant cameras, I know my parents had a Canon AE-1 and a Yashica-Mat 124 because I eventually cajoled them into lending them to me. But there must have been others; I have many other negatives from them. In one medium-format shot, my mother, her sister R. and I sit in one chair, and a long, thin line, a just-discernable shutter-release cord, stretches from my mom's hand down through the foreground to the floor where it must be depressing the shutter. ¶Other beautiful pictures I have of my mom were also taken by people other than my dad – or so it seems to me. And either no one took pictures of me after I was about 8 or no one kept them or I threw them away when I was a teenager or someone else did – or, I guess, I absolutely refused to be photographed. Anyway, there are very few negatives or positives of me until boyfriends begin to photograph me in my 20s. ¶I made an online archive of their photographs, and sent the link to the people who were interested in my mom (and in my dad too, though there were very few of those). Most were of people and some were landscapes – a house on a cliff, people standing on a pier. Two of my favorite pictures of theirs hang in the house now. One is a snapshot: a small badly exposed black-and-white square, a window ledge in an apartment (maybe at 224 Riverside Drive). A wrinkled white shade is pulled down most of the way. The shelf holds a radio (in the style of a "retro" one I have now), a plant, a pepper shaker, a jar of powdered Sanka with an apple resting on the top, a little jar of something else, a plastic cup in which an avocado pit is growing, and the gooseneck of a desk lamp that is so overexposed that its shade is entirely invisible, just white. (That lamp, which I know from its neck, is now at my bedside.) The photo is shot from below, as if while the photographer (my mom, I imagine) is lying in bed or sitting on the floor. I imagine love, the first apartment, hoping for a child after years of trying, the creativity of my father every day (it must be he who placed the apple on the Sanka jar), and a love of plants. ¶The other photograph I have up is a print I had made from a triple exposure (the only one I ever found; there was no print either): in it, my father is stepping across an enormous puddle that seems to be miles wide and very deep. He looks happy and playful and is in mid stride, enjoying the implied joke, that he walks on water. ¶When I started printing my own photographs in 2005, they gave me the Yashica. I remember asking my mom about her interest in photography then. "So did you guys ever have a darkroom?" I asked. "All of our rooms were dark," she said.
ROLADEX. When I was a kid, everyone had a Roladex; my parents had several. I can picture them using this one, which sat on my mom's desk in the living room. The ghost of one of my addresses is barely visible here. ¶It's a record of their concerns, the neighborhood and neighborhoods they spent time in, all recorded in their writing – from the early 1980s until my mom died in 2010: the Department of Air Resources; Amnesty International; 72nd Street Photo; airlines (from Pan Am to Eastern); Coliseum Books; Morris Brothers; the CDC; Pathmark; Gimbels; Fine & Shapiro; Movielab; Kodak; Greyhound; the Guggenheim; Toshiba; Eureka. Many cards stayed as the household changed, though in general my parents would pluck them out or write over them as soon as they noticed they were out of date. ¶These numbers were "public" while so many subjects were private. I was trained from the earliest days not to invade their privacy. Private things included biographical information about both of them and their many communications with doctors, including phone calls. During my father's life, my parents also barred me from their many doctor visits, with implicit and stated suspicion. ¶This made it awkward when I had to be the one to escort my father into surgery in September 9, 2004. My mother had gone into the emergency room on August 31st for what turned out to be a tumor hemorrhage (she lost so much blood she almost died). I came in from San Francisco and my boyfriend, B., insisted on coming too; we shuttled first between Columbia-Presbyterian, where my mom was, and the apartment, where my father, jaundiced but pretty strong, was preparing to travel to the hospital in Boston. (I was to encourage him to eat, though he had no appetite.) My mom was not happy about this arrangement but I was the most convenient person, so I had to do. ¶B. and I were then to go with my dad by train to admit him into Massachusetts General Hospital, though I was still not being told why he was having surgery. In Boston, my dad was pretty nice to us, lucid, even affectionate. We checked him in. I filled out the forms, which were elaborate, said good-bye and waited. I was glad B. was with me. ¶My dad made it through and did well. A few days later, my mom was well enough to travel and she joined us in Boston. B. went home. A day or so later, I did too, following my father's progress over the phone after that. Though I still had not been told that he had cancer of the common bile duct, I was now being addressed by my parents as if I knew. I also must know, therefore, that the key information was yet to come – the results of a biopsy taken at the time of the surgery: this would tell us how much of the cancer still remained. ¶About 10 days later, I was at my office in San Francisco at 6 pm when the phone on my desk rang. "Is this Varsy Layzer? Arthur Layzer's daughter?" ¶"Yes?" ¶"This is Dr. W. I have the results of your father's biopsy. He did well in the –" ¶"Wait! Why are you calling me? Please call my mother. She's been waiting for your call. Every day she tells me she hasn't heard from you. You should have the number but I can give it to you again. It's –" ¶"I have five minutes to make my phone calls for the day. I'm calling you. Do you want the results of your father's biopsy or not?" ¶If I hung up, I would be blamed for subverting my father's health and maybe trying to kill him. And my parents might have no other access to this information for days (or ever, it seemed to me in that moment). So I took out a pen and let the surgeon talk. (How it happened that he didn't call the "primary contact" number – in his own time zone – or my cell or my home phone number, I'll never know.) ¶I called my parents a moment later and everything I expected happened: a tirade, the usual accusations but with particular sharpness. The magazine staff heard my screams of self-defense: "I wasn't trying to betray you! I didn't ask him to call me! They told me I needed to put down four phone numbers! I told him he should call you! I'm not a liar!" ¶The surgery saved my father's life for a year and a half. But that episode was the beginning and end of my exposure to my father's doctors. ¶(Every day I look at my apartment, in which their old furniture and mine are arranged together harmoniously, and feel loss that it's still not a household. I use the same table and chairs but the table and chairs are somehow just for show. How different to have a room of cluttered, overused stuff on which cracked trivets permanently sit, and bashed salt and pepper shakers and opened vitamin bottles and loaves of sliced bread in plastic and a half-empty gallon jug of Poland Spring water. I hated that clutter but it was the sign of a household. On the other hand, my apartment is not a prison the way a household can be a prison, with very strict and arbitrary rules, enforcement, punishments.) Today, there are no more secrets. I can call any number and ask about anything. With copies of their death certificates, I can claim all the rights of a daughter.
THREE-HOLE PUNCH. Most of what I know about my parents comes from what they wrote, and since my father didn't write much, I know what I know from my mom. She kept about 50 notebooks, some of them datebooks and work notebooks, but most of them journals. I read them all. ¶Her journals were kept in cow-colored "composition" books in the study. Sometimes they're divided – started from both the front and the back – with the front part general thoughts and the back a diary of illness, the details of her experience of cancer. She includes a record of her injection sites – notes on where she administered to herself a hormone drug. (This medication may have saved her life for many years; she sued Medicare when it would not cover it, for which she was profiled in television, on the radio and in magazines. She won the case posthumously and I am writing this now partly because the reimbursement of the money she came up with to pay for the drug now permits me not to work full-time.) She also includes details of how her stomach is feeling at every moment. In book after book, she records this in her swooping cursive, along with headaches, itches, bruises, mood changes. ¶Also in the study was the medicine itself (air conditioners kept the room below 77 degrees, a maybe necessarily vigilant enforcement of the manufacturer's directives) and her X-rays, stored in a grey vinyl portfolio that was too heavy to lift. There were also many file cabinets with copies and originals of anything any of their doctors had ever written. All accessed articles were printed out. Most of the study was thus a museum of granulosa cell B ovarian cancer. ¶A suite of supplies like this three-hole punch was used to tame and groom the constant influx of paper. In most of February 2010, I could be found in that room on the floor with two garbage bags in front of me (one for recycling) and a folder in my hands. I scanned the contents for their handwriting or sensitive
5.
information, then sorted, filling bag after bag. Pages about their own medical histories I had sent with everything else to my apartment in San Francisco, boxes and boxes I went through one after another for weeks that turned into months over more than a year, reading and reading to try to understand what they thought about, what they needed to save, who they were on paper.
BELLA ABZUG BUTTON. ¶Both my parents were politically committed all their lives. ¶After my mom retired, she could be seen out manning a table in front of Fairway, collecting signatures for petitions and registering people to vote. And she was no old lady – she never came across as someone quaint but rather an energized, passionate woman who could and did convert people away from the Republican party. She was well known in our building for her indefatigability, her intelligent political arguments, her strong opinions. ¶My mom said that my father taught her everything – about politics and everything else. My father was a politically active person from a young age. They were both at the March on Washington. I wonder about their first conversations, in which my father "captured" my mom's "imagination," as she told me when I asked why she married him. I know he was a god to her, in all the ways she needed a god to be, I think. This included his intelligence as applied to political situations, and not just intelligence, but activism. Unself-conscious, unglamorous activism with no grandstanding, no fame-seeking – leadership even, but without charisma, charm or ego – that's how my father was about political ideas. ¶Being politically active for my mom involved a lot of button wearing. Buttons called for Ed Koch's impeachment and they celebrated New York as the Big Apple. She kept peace-symbol buttons, woodwind buttons and modern-art buttons. There came to be a Department of Transportation one too. ¶This one was probably for Bella Abzug's New York mayoral run in 1977. (Abzug was a New York–born liberal lawyer-turned-politician who believed in equal rights for women and fairness in government.) She said, "We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it." ¶My mom kept a few copies of Ms. Magazine all her life. It's hard for me to imagine how mainstream the women's movement was then, such that Ms. could flourish and household-name corporations and companies – like General Motors, Chrysler, Elizabeth Arden and Dewar's scotch – would want to buy space in them, having created ads featuring single, independent, accomplished women. The readers writing in weren't all radicals either but teenage girls who wanted to play sports in school, housewives who wanted basic freedoms. ¶One of the areas my mom worked for in those years was getting women the right to maternity leave, the possibility of day care centers, and other important things that would allow women to pursue careers and have families too. She felt passionately about this. The fact that she worked throughout her life was something I came to be proud of, and I loved my babysitters, especially D.L. and J.B. Today, I don't know. Today I feel that my mom went to work partly because she had to support us, partly because she was part of the Zeitgeist, partly because she loved her work and believed in working, and partly because she didn't like spending time with me. ¶I read in her diaries that she was disappointed she was not able to do great things politically in her life. (I don't think having children was ever part of her personal plan or, if it was, it was another disappointment because she felt, from what she wrote, that she didn't have any.) I know from her earliest jobs in government she was somewhat or greatly interested in changing the world. And with the cancer diagnosis, which came partly in 1971 and partly in 1987, she felt like she received a death sentence – yet never expressed joy that she seemed to have been reprieved for a very long time. ¶She was not bitter, I don't think, and didn't have a sense that she was unrecognized, the way my father was and did think about himself, but I do think she thought she could have continued moving up in city government at least. I don't know if it was having cancer that got in the way, or being essentially a single mother (my father was not able to do things around the house) or something else. I do think she believed in the prospect of some political power for herself and she did not get it. ¶In 1982, she was found to be too good at her job, director of the Office of Contract Compliance (she attacked many powerful city employers who practiced discrimination). Even New York
NAIL CLIPPER. When I was emptying the apartment I found several nail kits, to my surprise. I also learned that my mom got manicures somewhat regularly with her friends, at least in the years right before she died. (She and I did not do girlish or even female things together. She didn't talk to me about these experiences and I don't remember her asking me about anything like that either.) ¶Maybe cuticle care had become more important, medically. Or maybe it was just something she could do without walking too far. (Around the time that she started struggling to walk, countless nail salons sprouted up in the neighborhood where there had once been liquor stores, greasy spoons, and pizza parlors.) Or maybe it was human touch she needed – this had been forbidden by my father in his hypervigilance, and now that he was dead, she could break this rule too. ¶This reminds me of what the rest of their bathroom looked like at the end. It needed to be painted. It was too hot. There was a paper towel roll attached to the wall with a flimsy plastic device. The small window had some thick, opaque glass. There were white five-sided tiles on the floor. There was a fixture attached to the nozzle in the shower so that it might be held in the hand. There was a rubber mat on the bathtub floor. There was a red trash bin. There were Band-Aids, mouthwash, an electric toothbrush, a cuticle pusher, nail polish, nail polish remover, hydrogen peroxide. The radiator had a white metal cover. A handwritten sign on the outside of the door read "This bathroom is for Judith only." ¶I remember the jar of Tucks permanently on the windowsill in their bathroom and then in my old bathroom too, after I was gone. I remember the laundry bag from one of the Woolworth-type places on Broadway that said in Avant Garde lowercase letters "sac à linge." I remember the bathtub taps that were always leaking and the equally unrestored tub, ceiling and fixtures. From later years, I remember the riser perched on the toilet for my father, then for my mother, though each needed one for only a few months. And the sink, which used to be square with jacks-like taps and deep porcelain, was replaced by a 1990s builder's special. ¶Most of the other things they kept in the big bathroom are gone: I didn't keep them. This is where they kept the intimate tools that touch hands and feet but also skin and hair and even private parts. This is a room that changes little over the decades. Almost all bathrooms are as ours was. Like in the household I grew up in, I wash my hair with shampoo and my body with soap, I look in the mirror, I brush my teeth, I pluck out hairs, I cut my nails.
RECORD ALBUM. On my fridge I keep a Post-It note I found in my mom's desk. On it, she wrote, "How to Read a Person Like a Book." That's what I seem to be trying to do – read them as if they were books. But how can I see the truth? My father wrote, "Adults are stubborn in seeking truth, but truth itself is insubstantial: its presence is a surge in us." The truth is that she loved him completely and he loved her as much as he could. And there are many moments, if I care to think of them, when I know they loved me too. ¶I think of one of the visits I made in the spring of 2006. My father was just back from the hospital and was very weak and resting in bed. My mom had a bad cold and was exhausting herself taking care of him; she had also gone to rest in their bedroom. I had just come in from San Francisco and was not yet awash in the feelings of worthlessness that usually flooded me after I had been in the apartment a few hours. ¶I boldly asked if I could read them a story from Isaac Bashevis Singer's In My Father's Court, which I happened to be reading ("There are in this world some very strange individuals whose thoughts are even stranger than they are."); they said yes. Maybe my mom fell asleep; I remember my father thanked me. And I thought, maybe, if I were braver, truer in my love for them, less concerned about the ax about to fall, I could take more such chances, many more, and even finally win them over. ¶This week I dreamed that my mom touched me. I stand in the entryway to apartment 5E, the big mirror before me, and though I can't see her, I can feel a delicate touch on the top of my head and on my shoulders and my upper back and I know it's her. I look up into the mirror and I see myself but I am six years old, with the pageboy haircut I had then and still favor. To test the dream, I make facial expressions and see if kid me makes them too and, sure enough, she does: it is a real mirror. I pout and she pouts, I grin and she grins, I raise my eyebrows and she does too. I wake up resolving to get a bang trim and feeling like it wasn't so long ago that I was loved. ¶If it wasn't for my mother, I wouldn't be athletic, I wouldn't love hearing people's stories, I wouldn't be a real New Yorker, I wouldn't know that it's good to be outspoken about what you believe in, I wouldn't take pictures, I wouldn't get such a kick out of art, I wouldn't be so curious, I wouldn't be a fan of the city. If it wasn't for my father, I wouldn't hear languages and music the way I do, I wouldn't be so smart, I wouldn't be an artist. ¶Maybe ours was a household like any other. It started normally enough. ¶My knowledge of my father's life before marriage is limited to a few dozen letters he wrote to his parents in the 1950s and 1960s – around when this album was released. They are traditional lighthearted letters from a young physicist: he writes about his health, his occasions for playing music, his career, his brothers, how hot it gets in summer. He is cheerful and courteous, happy even when things don't go his way, always asking about neighbors back home, celebrating his brothers' marriages. He goes to concerts and the Museum of Modern Art. He moves from apartment to apartment as New Yorkers must. There's a gap in the letters when he meets my mom but then he refers to an already passed engagement party. (At the party, they perform music together in rooms with walls covered in abstract art. My mom wears a white shimmering knee-length dress and bright red lipstick with bright red nail polish. My father, 13 years older than her, appears to be the same age she is, 23.) ¶Once they are married, he writes for the first time, "I'm feeling very good and have never felt better. Judy is a marvelous girl." They go to the world's fair, ride bikes together, play tennis, go ice skating in Central Park. ¶Nobody seems crazy in these letters; nothing is wrong. There is no cruelty, no irrational behavior, no paranoia; there is not even spite, regret or gossip – though they are robbed by junkies more than once. For a long time, they try to have a baby. (I remember asking in despair many times why they had me. My mom shook her head at my lack of understanding of the situation: she said they desperately wanted a child.) When I am a year old, we move to a large apartment on the fifth floor of a building on West 75th Street. They stay there for the rest of their lives. ¶¶ The tunes on this album are written by Johnny Mercer, "Yip" Harburg, Cole Porter, and other greats. Ralph Freed: "I like New York in June; how about you? I like a Gershwin tune; how about you? I love a fireside when a storm is due. I like potato chips, moonlight, motor trips – how about you?" When I sing now, this is the kind of song I sing. I know most of Songs for Swingin' Lovers by heart. ¶There were very few records that went from my mom's tiny collection into mine when I was a teenager but this was one of them. Another was by Patachou, a Parisian singer of the 1950s. When my mom was near the end of her life and began to feel sick and lose weight, to get lymphedema, to be out of breath, she started to have problems with her voice too; a doctor she consulted recommended she try singing to strengthen her vocal cords. She asked me for the lyrics to several French songs sung by Patachou, ones I knew too. I found the words and emailed them to her and she thanked me. ¶"Sous les ponts de Paris, lorsque descend la nuit, comme il n'a pas de quoi se paier une chambrette, un couple heureux vient s'aimer en cachette." I used to think, what if, like the romantic lovers of these tunes, she had followed her heart, made a magical intimate space out of thin air with a secret love against the odds? But maybe that's what she did. I used to think she would have been much happier if she hadn't met my dad or if she had left him and taken me away with her. But I don't know anymore. ¶Another way to look at these records: as equipment from my mom's teenage years that I can still use (with tunes played in clubs in this city tonight). Another way: as a souvenir from an era that was simpler. Massacres, serial killers, blackouts, looting, presidential assassination attempts, transit strikes, widespread arson, police corruption, group suicide, and kidnappings are not associated with the 1950s – rather, they marked life in this country when I grew up. My parents survived 1970s New York City together and their love for me during this time makes me think of it forever as paradise. I didn't know my parents were different then; I didn't know about cancer; I was just another kid in corduroys on the Upper West Side with intellectual leftist folks who looked out for each other while trying to beat the high cost of living. ¶On his 70th birthday, my mother wrote to my father, "We take on the medical Himalayas without a Sherpa to guide us. And you never lose your footing because you are careful and you want me to stay in good shape." On another occasion she wrote to him, "You have given me the world." On Valentine's Day 1990, he gave her a card that said, "Just as the moon and the stars illuminate the heavens, we illumine each other's lives." ¶Together, my parents talked about ideas every day, and more often as they got older – New York's weather, Russian composers, noise and air pollution, Harold Pinter, Middle East events, radiation, statistics, crime, philosophy – and my mother believed she learned something in every conversation and she told him so and she rejoiced to herself too. ¶I tried to honor their connection when it was time for me to bury my mom. I made her gravestone match in every detail the one she carefully designed for him. Below the usual details and dates, engraved in barrie grey granite, his reads, "Cherished World Maker." Hers says "Cherished Game Changer." ¶They bought two plots together; I will be buried elsewhere.