MY MOTHER’S SADNESS
1. MY NAME IS ALMA SINGER
When I was born my mother named me after every girl in a book my father gave her called The History of Love. She named my brother Emanuel Chaim after the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who buried milk cans filled with testimony in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Jewish cellist Emanuel Feuermann, who was one of the great musical prodigies of the twentieth century, and also the Jewish writer of genius Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, and her uncle Chaim, who was a joker, a real clown, made everyone laugh like crazy, and who died by the Nazis. But my brother refused to answer to it. When people asked him his name, he made something up. He went through fifteen or twenty names. For a month he referred to himself in the third person as Mr. Fruit. On his sixth birthday he took a running leap out of a second-floor window and tried to fly. He broke his arm and got a permanent scar on his forehead, but from then on nobody ever called him anything but Bird.
2. WHAT I AM NOT
My brother and I used to play a game. I’d point to a chair. “THIS IS NOT A CHAIR,” I’d say. Bird would point to the table. “THIS IS NOT A TABLE.” “THIS IS NOT A WALL,” I’d say. “THAT IS NOT A CEILING.” We’d go on like that. “IT IS NOT RAINING OUT.” “MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!” Bird would yell. I’d point to my elbow. “THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE.” Bird would lift his knee. “THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!” “THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!” “NOT A CUP!” “NOT A SPOON!” “NOT DIRTY DISHES!” We denied whole rooms, years, weathers. Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: “I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!” “But you’re only seven,” I said.
3. MY BROTHER BELIEVES IN GOD
When he was nine and a half, he found a little red volume called The Book of Jewish Thoughts inscribed to our father, David Singer, on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah. In it, Jewish thoughts are gathered under subheadings such as “Every Israelite Holds the Honor of His Entire People in His Hands,” “Under the Romanoffs,” and “Immortality.” Soon after he found it, Bird started to wear a black velvet kippah around everywhere, not caring that it didn’t fit right and puffed up in the back giving him a dopey look. He also got in the habit of following Mr. Goldstein, the janitor at Hebrew School who mumbled in three languages, and whose hands left behind more dust than they cleaned away. There were rumors that Mr. Goldstein slept only an hour a night in the basement of the shul, that he had been in a labor camp in Siberia, that his heart was weak, that a loud noise could kill him, that snow made him cry. Bird was drawn to him. He followed him around after Hebrew School while Mr. Goldstein vacuumed between the rows of seats, cleaned the toilets, and rubbed curses off the blackboard. It was Mr. Goldstein’s job to take out of circulation the old siddurs that were torn or ripped, and one afternoon, with two crows as big as dogs watching from the trees, he pushed a wheelbarrow full of them out behind the synagogue, bumping over rocks and tree roots, dug a hole, said a prayer, and buried them. “Can’t just throw them away,” he told Bird. “Not if it has on it God’s name. Has to be buried properly.”
The next week Bird started to write the four Hebrew letters of the name no one is allowed to pronounce and no one is allowed to throw away on the pages of his homework. A few days later I opened the hamper and found it written in permanent marker on the label of his underwear. He wrote it in chalk across our front door, scribbled it across his class photograph, on the bathroom wall, and, before it came to an end, carved it with my Swiss Army knife as high as he could reach on the tree in front of our house.
Maybe it was because of that, or his habit of putting his arm over his face and picking his nose as if people couldn’t tell what he was doing, or the way he sometimes made strange noises like a video game, but that year the couple of friends he’d had stopped coming by to play.
Every morning he wakes early to daven outside, facing Jerusalem. When I watch him from the window, I regret having taught him to sound out the Hebrew letters when he was only five. It makes me sad, knowing it can’t last.
4. MY FATHER DIED WHEN I WAS SEVEN
What I remember, I remember in parts. His ears. The wrinkled skin on his elbows. The stories he used to tell me about his childhood in Israel. How he used to sit in his favorite chair listening to music, and liked to sing. He spoke to me in Hebrew, and I called him Abba. I’ve forgotten almost everything, but sometimes words will come back to me, kum-kum, shemesh, chol, yam, etz, neshika, motek, their meanings worn off like the faces of old coins. My mother, who is English, met him while she was working on a kibbutz not far from Ashdod, the summer before she started Oxford. He was ten years older than she was. He’d been in the army, and afterwards traveled through South America. Then he went back to school and became an engineer. He liked to camp outside, and always kept a sleeping bag and two gallons of water in his trunk, and could start a fire with a piece of flint if he had to. He picked my mother up on Friday nights while the other kibbutzniks lay on blankets under a giant movie screen on the grass, petting dogs and getting high. He drove her to the Dead Sea where they floated strangely.
5. THE DEAD SEA IS THE LOWEST PLACE ON EARTH
6. NO TWO PEOPLE LOOKED LESS ALIKE THAN MY MOTHER AND FATHER
When my mother’s body turned brown, and my father laughed and said she was getting to look more like him every day, it was a joke because where he was six-foot-three with bright green eyes and black hair, my mother is pale, and so small that even now, at forty-one, if you saw her from across the street you could mistake her for a girl. Bird is small and fair like her, and I am tall like my father. I am also black-haired, gap-toothed, skinny in a bad way, and fifteen.
7. THERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY MOTHER THAT NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN
In the fall, my mother went back to England to start university. Her pockets were full of sand from the lowest place on earth. She weighed 104 pounds. There’s a story she sometimes tells about the train ride from Paddington Station to Oxford when she met a photographer who was almost completely blind. He wore dark sunglasses, and said he’d damaged his retinas a decade ago on a trip to Antarctica. His suit was perfectly pressed, and he held his camera in his lap. He said he saw the world differently now, and it wasn’t necessarily bad. He asked if he could take a picture of her. When he raised up the lens and looked through it, my mother asked what he saw. “The same thing I always see,” he said. “Which is?” “A blur,” he said. “Then why do it?” she asked. “In case my eyes ever heal,” he said. “So I’ll know what I’ve been looking at.” In my mother’s lap there was a brown paper bag with a chopped liver sandwich my grandmother had made for her. She offered the sandwich to the almost completely blind photographer. “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked. She told him that she was, but that she’d never told her mother that she hated chopped liver, and eventually it became too late to tell her, having said nothing for years. The train pulled into Oxford Station, and my mother got off, leaving behind her a trail of sand. I know there is a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is.
8. MY MOTHER IS THE MOST STUBBORN PERSON I KNOW
After five minutes, she decided that she hated Oxford. The first week of term my mother did nothing but sit in her room in a drafty stone building, watching the rain fall on the cows in Christ Church Meadow, feeling sorry for herself. She had to heat up water for tea on a hot plate. To see her tutor, she had to climb fifty-six stone stairs and bang on the door until he woke up from the cot in his study where he slept under a pile of papers. She wrote to my father in Israel almost every day on expensive French stationery, and when she ran out of that she wrote to him on graph paper torn out of a notebook. In one of these letters (which I found hidden in an old Cadbury’s tin under the sofa in her study), she wrote: The book you gave me is sitting on my desk, and every day I learn to read it a little more. The reason she had to learn to read it was because it was written in Spanish. She watched her body turn pale again in the mirror. During the second week of term, she bought a used bicycle
and rode around tacking up posters that said WANTED: HEBREW TUTOR, because languages came easily to her, and she wanted to be able to understand my father. A few people applied, but only one didn’t back out when my mother explained that she couldn’t pay, a pimply boy named Nehemia from Haifa who was in his first year and as miserable as my mother, and who felt—according to a letter she wrote to my father—the company of a girl was reason enough to agree to meet twice a week at the King’s Arms for nothing more than the price of his beer. My mother was also teaching herself Spanish out of a book called Teach Yourself Spanish. She spent a lot of time in the Bodleian Library reading hundreds of books and not making any friends. She ordered up so many books that whenever the clerk who worked at the desk saw her coming, he tried to hide. At the end of the year, she got a First on her exams and, despite her parents’ objections, dropped out of university and went to live with my father in Tel Aviv.
9. WHAT FOLLOWED WERE THE HAPPIEST YEARS OF THEIR LIVES
They lived in a sunny house covered with bougainvillea in Ramat Gan. My father planted an olive tree and a lemon tree in the garden, and dug a little trench around each for water to collect. At night they listened to American music on his shortwave radio. When the windows were open, and the wind was blowing in the right direction, they could smell the sea. Eventually they got married on the beach in Tel Aviv, and for their honeymoon they spent two months traveling in South America. When they returned, my mother started translating books into English—first from Spanish, and later from Hebrew, too. Five years passed like that, and then my father got offered a job he couldn’t turn down, working for an American company in the aerospace industry.
10. THEY MOVED TO NEW YORK AND HAD ME
While my mother was pregnant with me she read three gazillion books on a wide variety of subjects. She didn’t like America, but she didn’t hate it, either. Two and a half years and eight gazillion books later, she had Bird. Then we moved to Brooklyn.
11. I WAS SIX WHEN MY FATHER WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PANCREATIC CANCER
That year my mother and I were driving together in the car. She asked me to pass her bag. “I don’t have it,” I said. “Maybe it’s in the back,” she said. But it wasn’t in the back. She pulled over and searched the car, but the bag was nowhere to be found. She put her head in her hands and tried to remember where she’d left her bag. She was always losing things. “One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to lose my head.” I tried to picture what would happen if she lost her head. In the end, though, it was my father who lost everything: weight, his hair, various internal organs.
12. HE LIKED TO COOK AND LAUGH AND SING, COULD START A FIRE WITH HIS HANDS, FIX THINGS THAT WERE BROKEN, AND EXPLAIN HOW TO LAUNCH THINGS INTO SPACE, BUT HE DIED WITHIN NINE MONTHS
13. MY FATHER WAS NOT A FAMOUS RUSSIAN WRITER
At first my mother kept everything exactly as he left it. According to Misha Shklovsky, that’s what they do with famous writers’ houses in Russia. But my father wasn’t a famous writer. He wasn’t even Russian. Then one day I came home from school and every obvious sign of him was gone. The closets were cleared of his clothes, his shoes were gone from by the door, and out in the street, next to a pile of garbage bags, stood his old chair. I went up to my bedroom and watched it through the window. The wind sent leaves cartwheeling past it on the sidewalk. An old man passed by and sat in it. I went out and fished his sweater out of the trash bin.
14. AT THE END OF THE WORLD
After my father died, Uncle Julian, my mother’s brother, who is an art historian and lives in London, sent me a Swiss Army knife that he said had belonged to Dad. It had three different blades, a corkscrew, a little scissors, a pair of tweezers, and a toothpick. In the letter Uncle Julian sent with it, he said Dad had once lent it to him when he’d gone camping in the Pyrenees, and that he’d forgotten about it completely until now, and thought I might want it. You have to be careful, he wrote, because the blades are sharp. It’s made to help you survive in the wilderness. I wouldn’t know because Aunt Frances and I checked into a hotel after it rained on us the first night and we turned into prunes. Your dad was a much better outdoorsman than I. Once, in the Negev, I saw him collect water with a funnel and a tarp. He also knew the name of every plant and if it was edible. I know it isn’t much consolation, but if you come to London I will tell you the names of all of the curry places in Northwest London and if they are edible. Love, Uncle Julian. PS. Don’t tell your mum that I gave this to you, because she’d probably get angry at me and say you’re too young. I examined the different parts, picking each one out with my thumbnail, and testing the blades against my finger.
I decided I would learn to survive in the wild like my father. It would be good to know in case anything happened to Mom, leaving Bird and me to fend for ourselves. I didn’t tell her about the knife because Uncle Julian had meant for it to be a secret, and besides, why would my mother let me camp alone in the woods if she hardly even let me go halfway down the block?
15. WHENEVER I WENT OUT TO PLAY, MY MOTHER WANTED TO KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I WAS GOING TO BE
When I’d come in, she’d call me into her bedroom, take me in her arms, and cover me with kisses. She’d stroke my hair and say, “I love you so much,” and when I sneezed she’d say, “Bless you, you know how much I love you, don’t you?” and when I got up for a tissue she’d say, “Let me get it for you I love you so much,” and when I looked for a pen to do my homework she’d say, “Use mine, anything for you,” and when I had an itch on my leg she’d say, “Is this the spot, let me hug you,” and when I said I was going up to my room she’d call after me, “What can I do for you I love you so much,” and I always wanted to say, but never said: Love me less.
16. EVERYTHING IS REMADE AS REASON
One day my mother got up from the bed she had been lying in for almost a year. It seemed like the first time we had seen her not through all the water glasses that had collected around her bed, and which, in his boredom, Bird would sometimes try to make sing with a wet finger around the rims. She made macaroni and cheese, one of the few things she knows how to cook. We pretended it was the best thing we’d ever eaten. One afternoon she took me aside. “From now on,” she said, “I’m going to treat you like an adult.” I’m only eight, I wanted to say, but didn’t. She started to work again. She roamed the house in a kimono printed with red flowers, and wherever she went a trail of crumpled pages followed. Before Dad died, she used to be neater. But now if you wanted to find her all you had to do was follow the pages of crossed-out words, and at the end of the trail she’d be there, looking out the window or into a glass of water as if there were a fish in it that only she could see.
17. CARROTS
With my allowance I bought a book called Edible Plants and Flowers in North America. I learned that you could leach the bitterness out of acorns by boiling them in water, that wild roses are edible, and that you should avoid anything that smells of almond, has a three-leaved growth pattern, or has milky sap. I tried to identify as many plants as I could in Prospect Park. Because I knew it would be a long time before I’d be able to recognize every plant, and because there was always the chance that I’d have to survive in someplace other than North America, I also memorized the Universal Edibility Test. It’s a good idea to know, since some poisonous plants, like hemlock, can look similar to some edible plants, like wild carrots and parsnips. To do the test, you have to first not eat for eight hours. Then you separate the plant into its different parts—root, leaf, stem, bud, and flower—and test a small piece of one on the inside of your wrist. If nothing happens, touch it to the inside of your lip for three minutes, and if nothing happens after that, hold it on your tongue for fifteen minutes. If nothing still happens, you can chew it without swallowing, and hold that in your mouth for fifteen minutes, and if nothing happens after that, swallow and wait eight hours, and if nothing happens after that, eat a quarter of a cup’s worth, and if nothing happens after that: it’s edible.
I kept Edible Plants and Flowers in North America under my bed in a backpack that also had my father’s Swiss Army knife, a flashlight, a plastic tarp, a compass, a box of granola bars, two bags of peanut M&M’s, three cans of tuna, a can opener, Band-Aids, a snakebite kit, a change of underwear, and a New York City subway map. It really should have also had a piece of flint, but when I tried to buy one at the hardware store they wouldn’t sell it to me, either because I was too young or because they thought I was a pyromaniac. In an emergency, you can also strike a spark using a hunting knife and a piece of jasper, agate, or jade, but I didn’t know where to find jasper, agate, or jade. Instead, I took some matches from the 2nd Street Café and put them in a zip-lock bag to protect them from the rain.
For Chanukah I asked for a sleeping bag. The one my mother got me had pink hearts on it, was made of flannel, and would keep me alive for about five seconds in subzero temperatures before I died of hypothermia. I asked her if we could take it back and get a heavyweight down bag instead. “Where are you planning to sleep, the Arctic Circle?” she asked. I thought, There or maybe the Peruvian Andes, since that’s where Dad once camped. To change the subject, I told her about hemlock, wild carrots, and parsnip, but that turned out to be a bad idea because her eyes got teary and when I asked her what was wrong she said nothing, it just reminded her of the carrots Dad used to grow in the garden in Ramat Gan. I wanted to ask her what else he used to grow aside from an olive tree, a lemon tree, and carrots, but I didn’t want to make her even sadder.