Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss Read online

  “For God’s sake, hang it over a shower rod,” Leah instructed as she put her own coat on the rack by the door. “It’s dripping so much that if you hang it in here you’ll have a river running through your living room and you’ll absolutely ruin these hardwood floors.”

  That was all the encouragement I needed. I went to the nearest bathroom and tried not to wonder at my mother, who seemed to have gone into some kind of trance as she fixated on the darkened fireplace.

  When I came back, Mama had moved on to the bookcase. “Such nice books you have here,” she said as she fingered the various titles by Alice Walker, David Sedaris and Chaim Potok. “I always told him these shelves were too pretty for academia. Such a waste that would have been.”

  “You told who?” I asked, now standing only a few feet behind her. “Oscar? Did you know Oscar?”

  “Okay, that is it!” Leah slapped her hands on her hips and positioned herself between us. “I always knew you were the master of repression, but this is unseemly. As your sister I insist that you pull it together and deal with your multitudes of issues. I have Jack with the Slaters’ nanny. She’s twenty-two dollars an hour and I’ve only budgeted forty-four dollars toward the task of making you sane.”

  “Leah, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “You have to remember this house!” she said, her voice rising in both volume and pitch. “I mean, I don’t remember, but I was too young. Plus, I am not the one who decided to jump through a million hoops to buy this place!”

  “I told this story to your sister earlier today, and now I tell you.”

  “Leah, you’re not making sense. Of course I remember this house. I live here!”

  “So did we,” Mama said, her eyes twinkling now. “Surely this house was built from the wood of the tree of life, no? How else could it have made us all so vibrant?”

  “Again, I have no idea what either one of you are talking about.”

  She took a step forward and for the second time in three days I felt her wrinkled hands against my cheeks. “Sit down, mamaleh,” she said gently. “For once you’re going to let your mama do the talking.”

  On any other occasion I would have taken that as a cue to remind her that she always does the talking, but not this time. Instead I let her lead me through my various boxes to the sofa, and I let her hold me as she told me the story of a past that I had chosen to forget.

  The first part of the story was familiar. I knew about my mother’s first husband, Sheldon Kleinstein, although I never thought of him by that name. To me he would always be Mr. Decent. That was the only description of him I had ever really gotten. Her family liked Sheldon’s family and vice versa and they were all for the marriage, but what made up my mother’s mind for her was that she knew that Sheldon was the kind of guy you could count on. He made a decent living by running the family business in Brooklyn, and he would make a perfectly decent husband and eventually a perfectly decent father. All of that was true, except the latter. It wasn’t that Sheldon had some kind of deep-seated hatred of children, but no matter how hard they tried my mother couldn’t get pregnant. Every night before going to bed she would try to strike a deal with God. If only she could be schwanger (pregnant) she would start going to shul every week. She would keep kosher, light candles on Friday night, the works! But God was having none of it. So, eventually, my mother resigned herself to being a decent childless wife to a decent sterile husband, her only consolation being that she could still eat bacon and go to the movies on Friday night. Of course, my mother didn’t know decent Sheldon had a low sperm count. She thought the problem lay with her.

  All this decency came to an end when Sheldon was struck down by a drunk driver at the young age of thirty-nine. My mother, who had never been truly in love with Sheldon, still mourned him. He had become a dear friend and deserved so much better. She also mourned the loss of her own prospects. At thirty-eight and presumably barren, what were the chances of her ever finding another husband? After a little too much Manischewitz she decided that without children to be a role model for, or a husband to provide a home for, the only thing left to do was to stop being so decent and go have a little fun. So that night she told her landlord she was moving, and less than a month later she was in San Francisco, which, according to all reports, was where people went when they wanted to have some indecent fun.

  The men she dated in the city of love would never have met the approval of her friends back in Brooklyn, but that was just fine. Approval, shamoval, she was having a blast. And that’s when she met my dad. He wasn’t like her other San Francisco beaus; he wasn’t a Bohemian or an aged beatnik trying to fit in to the new hippy movement. This man was a smartie! A distinguished professor, at San Francisco State University no less! For a man of color to achieve such a position, surely he had to be a genius!

  They came from totally different worlds, but they were able to join those worlds together, not in a melting pot, but in the way you would put together two pieces of a puzzle. Two different and distinct shapes that managed to fit together perfectly to make a picture. They had only been dating a few months when she became pregnant with me. She knew that it was a miracle. God wanted her to make a family with this man, and she was only too happy to oblige.

  I knew that story. I tended to embellish the last part. In my version, she knew she was madly in love with my father before the pregnancy and he had already been shopping for a ring. But those details weren’t all that important, really. What mattered was that we all lived happily ever after until fate unjustly made my mother a widow for a second time.

  “But mamaleh,” my mother said, when I offered her my conclusion. “This is not how it was. Life is not so easy.”

  I pulled back from her slightly, slowly becoming aware of the flat-screen TV and energy-efficient lightbulbs that forced me out my revelry of the last century and into the new millennium. “What do you mean it wasn’t like that?” I said. “You and Dad made it. He embraced Judaism, changed his name from Christianson to Katz and you learned to love Otis Redding and soul food. It was a win-win for everybody and you two were totally and absolutely in love. What wasn’t easy?”

  “It’s like I said, we were puzzle pieces. You know what happens to puzzle pieces when they get old? When you take them out and expose them to the elements? I tell you what, they start to curl up in the corners. They lose their shape. All of a sudden they don’t fit together so easily and when they are together the picture they create has faded. It’s not so brilliant anymore.”

  “You and Dad were happy,” I said firmly. I looked over to Leah for support. She was standing by the window, looking out at the rain instead of at us.

  “We were happy,” Mama assured me, leaning down to stroke Mr. Katz as he nuzzled her ankles. “But there were times that were not so great. We had so much to learn about one another. My family was not so happy that I married a black man, and his family thought I was a demon—a witch who could turn a gentile into a Jew! All this we could have dealt with, but still, it takes some getting used to living with a man from a different world and I didn’t always make it so easy for him, either!”

  “Why are you telling me all this, Mama?” I asked, trying not to sound as uneasy as I felt. “What does that have to do with this house?”

  “Always in such a rush.” She tsked.

  “Well, seeing as this story is costing Leah twenty-two dollars an hour I thought a little rushing would be considerate,” I retorted, again, trying to catch Leah’s eye. She blushed slightly, though I only saw it in profile since she still wouldn’t look my way.

  “Twenty-two dollars an hour is small potatoes,” my mother insisted. “The wisdom of a mother is worth a million! Now, as for me and your father, we went through some turbulence during the year after Leah’s birth. It had been hard before that, and after one too many fights we decided to call it kaput.”

  “What!” I was on my feet now. “How could you have even considered leaving Dad? He was our center, he held o
ur family together!”

  “By the time you were in grade school, yes, he did. But when you were a preschooler? Not so much.”

  “So what happened?” I demanded. “How did he talk you out of it?”

  “Sophie,” Leah said, her voice sounding more tired than it had been in a long time, “she didn’t talk him out of it. He left.

  He left willingly.”

  “What are you talking about?” I have never considered myself a foot-stomper, but the moment seemed to call for it.

  They were attacking my childhood memories and it would take childlike behavior to defend them! I glared at Mama, my arms tightly folded across my chest. “Dad didn’t leave us. He wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Maybe not if I had asked him to stay,” Mama said quietly. “You were so angry, mamaleh. Barely four years old and you were filled with all this molereziche. All day long all I heard was ‘where’s my papa, when’s Papa coming home, give me Papa back.’ You visited him in his apartment all the time, but it wasn’t enough for you. Always the stubborn one you were. But that year you were also the scared one. You had been my brave little Sophie and all of a sudden you were afraid of the dark! It didn’t help that I got appendicitis on top of everything else.”

  “That’s when you got your appendix removed?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I didn’t tell your father anything about it. I was stubborn like you. But you, you were too young to see your mama in so much pain. You tried to be such a grown-up, making nice to your sister and feeding her spoonfuls of applesauce, but it wasn’t right. It was all too much for you, mamaleh.”

  “I don’t remember this,” I whispered. But flashes of memories were popping up. Shouting, a door closing, cries in the middle of the night, my cries, cries for someone who wasn’t there. From her seat my mother reached out and took my hand in hers. I knew my mother’s hands so well. Long before they had become puffy with arthritis I had watched as they expertly wove threads through my torn pant legs and applied extra lace to Leah’s dresses.

  But now I knew that those hands had also taken off the ring my father had given her. At one point they must have held the door open for him as he prepared to walk out of her life.

  “Thank God I was too young to know what was going on,” Leah said with a shudder. “It might have hampered my ability to be in a healthy relationship.”

  Both Mama and I stared at her. “Bubbala,” Mama said to her, “you know I love you, but your late husband was a number-one schmuck.”

  “Oh, him,” Leah said dismissively. “He doesn’t count.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “He was the father of your child, after all. I don’t think anyone would have granted you an annulment if he had lived.”

  “He wasn’t Jewish,” Leah said with a sniff. “According to Israeli law the marriage was never legal.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I was under the impression that you were an American citizen.”

  “Enough with the fighting already. Sophie, stop giving your sister a hard time. Leah, Bob’s religion wasn’t such an issue. A pig is a pig no matter what house he prays in. As for the problems between me and your father, well, they were exactly that. Problems between me and your father. It’s not my fault that you two don’t know a good man from a bohmer!”

  Leah wrinkled her nose. “Do I want to know what that means?”

  I gave her a meaningful shake of my head. I didn’t know exactly what it meant myself, but I could hazard a guess.

  “And your father and I, we worked it all out. He invited me to lunch one afternoon, and I was healthy by then, so off I went. Then there was another lunch and another and then one day he met me at the Cliff House with a dozen roses, if you can imagine! Lunches turned into dinners and then long walks on the beach and always we were talking. Until we were blue in the face we talked! That father of yours may have driven me crazy, and I may not have understood all of his ways, but his soul—that I knew. No matter how different our backgrounds our souls still fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. I cared for Sheldon, but your father? Him I loved.”

  I relaxed instantly, all my childhood assumptions reconfirmed. Sinking back down onto the couch I let out an audible sigh of relief as Mr. Katz jumped from his position at my mother’s feet onto my lap.

  “So we decided we’d start over. Right from the very top. Your father had an assistant, Andrea. Her and her husband, Oscar, were moving to their summer home in San Diego. Can you imagine? Having a different home for different seasons?”

  “Wait,” I said, some of the anxiety creeping back in. “Kane’s mom was my dad’s assistant?”

  “For a time,” my mother confirmed. “So here they are, all their furniture is moved or sold off, and Andrea, she says we should use the house to renew our vows.”

  “To start fresh,” I said.

  “Exactly! So we have a ceremony. You wanted to dress up like a grown-up, so your papa, he bought you Strawberry Shortcake strawberry lip gloss. Very fancy!”

  “Strawberry lip gloss?” I whispered.

  “You were smacking your lips through the whole ceremony!” Mama laughed. “All our friends were there and this time no one gave us any trouble. Everyone saw the love we shared. And there were flowers, and the food! You’ve never seen so much food! You know, Sophie, it wouldn’t kill you to take some cooking lessons like your sister—”

  “Mom, stay focused. What happened after the vows?”

  “Our family came back together, that’s what! It was in this house that you got your papa back, and all of a sudden you weren’t so scared anymore.”

  “I was safe,” I said. Leah stiffened and wiped her hands on her skirt. For all her bravado, I had always been her protector. She had come to my rescue on occasion, but we had both seen her efforts as an act of altruism or the expression of sisterly love. For me it was a job requirement, and while she frequently reveled in pointing out my imperfections, it was still disconcerting for her to hear me talk about my own need to feel safe.

  “And so your father,” Mama continued, “he decided that since this was the house in which our family came back together, this was the house we should make our home.”

  “Dad wanted to buy this place from Oscar and Andrea?” I asked.

  “Want to? It was practically all he talked about! And Andrea was all for it, telling us to move our things in whenever we like—”

  “Kane basically told me to do the same thing,” I murmured.

  My mother watched me silently for a moment, the creases in her forehead deepening in concern. “You watch out for that one. He could be a crazy like his mother.”

  “His mother was crazy?” I asked. Then I remembered the painting and realized what a stupid question that was.

  “She was one of those artists, always getting passionate about the wrong things. Unfortunately, that husband of hers was getting passionate about the wrong woman! Here we all were, your father and I already looking at paint chips and then, all of a sudden, Oscar snaps his fingers and says the deal’s off. He’s moving back in, without Andrea! Almost everything of hers she had sold while planning for her move. The houses had been Oscar’s since before the marriage. I tell you that man left her with nothing! Your father wanted to help, but what could he do? So Oscar moved back into this house and we had to make our home somewhere else. That would be the home you remember growing up in. It was a good home, with its yard and big fancy bathrooms, but your father, he never fell in love with it the way he fell in love with this house here.”

  “And now,” Leah chimed in, no longer so concerned with the rain or the ticking of the clock, “you’ve literally joined a group of poltergeist-loving lunatics and reacquainted yourself with your womanizing, irresponsible ex-husband all for the privilege of living in this house. We all know you’re good at denial, but this is taking it to a whole new level.”

  “Really, Leah?” I asked. “How many years were you married to Bob? And how many women was he sleeping with? Don’t talk to me about denial!”
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  “I’m the younger sister,” she seethed. “If I have problems it’s because I learned them from you.”

  “Right. Besides, your marriage didn’t count because you’re a wannabe-Israeli. Give. It. Up.”

  “What is this?” Mama asked, raising her hands in protest. “Jerry Springer? So Sophie didn’t know exactly why she liked this house so much. She had just turned five when Papa and I renewed our vows. What do you want from her? The important thing is you know now,” she said, patting my hand affectionately.

  “Tell her about Andrea,” Leah said curtly.

  “Ah, yes, a real harlot that one turned out to be. As soon as Oscar left her she turned to your father. Support, he could give her. They were friends, after all. But I could tell she wanted more. A woman can sense these things. Soon everybody could see it. She called the house at all hours of the night. She would try to sneak pictures of herself into his coat pockets. Dirty pictures! There she was with her tuchas hanging out right in front of the camera!”

  “It’s perverse,” Leah spat.

  “You’re telling me! And did she drink! Always with the drinking! Your father had to fire her, but did that stop her from following us around? Everywhere we turned there she was. We were able to protect you kinderlach from her crazy antics, but she had me worried.”

  “I’ll bet,” I breathed.

  “But then we found out that Oscar had been threatening to have Andrea locked up in the loony bin and have Kane taken away from her. So your father tells her that if she doesn’t stop bothering us he’ll help Oscar do it!”

  “Did it work?” Leah asked.

  My mother nodded. “It took some time, but eventually your father found the ammunition he needed to convince her. She wasn’t so worried about losing Kane, but being locked up in a hospital? That she couldn’t handle. She had a tough time of it, that one. I’m not sure what happened to her, but she did stop bothering us, and that’s the important part.”