Chapter Two
Mom Longs for Home
“Take me back to Flatbush!” Mom, in her mid-80s, pleaded. “I’ve got to go home! Dad and Stella are expecting me!”
Several places from Mom’s past took on mythical proportions for me. One was Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she lived with her father and stepmother during her teens. It has special resonance for me because I was born there when we lived with my grandfather before my father returned from the war—my very first home.
Now, Mom tottered around the house, snatching jackets out of closets, gathering odd combinations of things—slippers, an old plastic purse, a mixing bowl—and stuffing them into a large paper bag. She was polite but agitated, exhausted with the effort of preparing for the journey, frustrated by our lack of cooperation, our apparent indifference to her filial obligations. Our hospitality has been lovely, she’d say, but can’t we understand that she’s behind schedule? Dad and Stella, her beloved stepmother, will be worried. If we’re going to delay her any longer, she’ll have to call them. What, Dad and Stella dead? That’s funny, she didn’t know that. In any case, she must call them immediately. What, we don’t have their phone number?
When I’d tell her her parents weren’t expecting her, she’d insist they were. When I’d point out her bed and her closet full of her very own clothes she’d say she feels unwelcome, how nice of Daddy and me to urge her to stay, but she simply must leave. When I’d explain that she lives here now, she’d say no, of course she doesn’t, you’re mistaken. When I’d tell her Flatbush is too far away, she’d shrill, “If you refuse to take me there, I’ll have to find someone who will!” She’d demand the telephone, she’d say, “I’ll call what’s-her-name immediately, what’s-her-name will take me,” and she’d ask for what’s-her-name’s phone number. But she no longer knew how to use a telephone. She’d sink onto the couch, her hair askew, her face pale and creased with worry and fatigue, her eyelids heavy, her lipstick worn off, and sigh repeatedly—loud, deep inhalations and exhalations of profound despair.
By then, both Dad and I were as exhausted as she was, our nerves jangled. And yet the cycle would begin again. It seemed that every single anxiety she’d ever had in her entire life had been distilled down to this one urgent conviction: that her father and stepmother were waiting. That all would be lost if she couldn’t get to Flatbush.
Flatbush in Brooklyn has always felt special to me, because I once lived there, too, in the very same apartment in a big brick building at 200 East 18th Street. It was my first home. Mom was living there with her father when I was born, while my father was overseas. Brooklyn to me then was towering brick buildings; hot, crowded sidewalks that trembled when the subway thundered beneath; a particularly spooky alley full of garbage cans that I could see from our kitchen window. After we moved to Queens, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I paid regular visits to East 18th Street to visit Grandpa and his third and last wife, “Aunt” Blanche, in that same apartment.
I’d always loved those visits. Grandpa pinched my cheek, said “Leibenoff dein keppela” -- blessings on your little head -- and gave me yellow and white packets of Chiclets and little rolls of Charms, which were like Lifesavers but square and without the hole and somehow so much more delicious. Grandpa had a television, which our family did not, and I sat before it, mesmerized, as the peacock spread its wings and a bell chimed “NBC.” I was allowed to roll Grandpa’s big glass ball on the rug. The furniture was covered with clear plastic that stuck to the back of my legs in summer. I could sit at the Formica kitchen table and eat Sugar Pops and, magically, look out the window directly into the kitchen of the neighbors in an adjacent wing of the very same building! The pink-tiled bathroom had a funny, pungent smell, and down the hall of the building was a big, scary incinerator -- could I really see the hellish orange flames below, or do I imagine that? -- where Grandpa dumped the trash.
In those days, young Jewish mothers strolled up and down the block pushing baby carriages, headed toward shady Prospect Park, just as my mother had done with me, and older women in sleeveless housedresses wheeled upright shopping carts. It was a short walk to the Church Avenue subway station, past rows of apartment buildings identical to Grandpa’s. Later, after our family moved to California, I visited Grandpa a few times on my own. He’d wait for me outside the subway station, in front of Whelan’s drugstore, a short man with twinkly blue eyes and a W.C. Fields nose, smoking a cigar.
Mom’s first five years in Flatbush, when she was an only child with two loving parents, were the only secure years of her childhood. But when her young and restless mother divorced her heartbroken father, everything changed. During the divorce proceedings, the five-year-old was required to choose the parent she wanted to live with. She looked at her chic mother in her cartwheel hat, gloves and hennaed hair. She regarded the sad father who was to be left behind. She chose Dad.
But her father worked and couldn’t take care of her, so Mom was shuttled from aunt to aunt and, once, to a foster home in the country, Highland Mills in the Hudson Valley. There, a cruel foster mother, with designs on Mom’s bachelor father, forced meals upon her. When Mom’s tiny stomach rebelled and she threw up, Mrs. L made her eat her own vomit. When Mom’s father came from the city for his weekend visits, a flirtatious Mrs. L charmed him. Mom never told her father how she was mistreated there. She never told her mother, either—a mother whose occasional and much-anticipated visits were to become less and less frequent. Finally, when Mom was 12, her father married Stella, and Mom returned to Flatbush.
“I need to go back to Flatbush,” Mom kept moaning, and nothing could calm her. So on a trip to New York, I decided to visit the old neighborhood and take a picture of myself in front of 200 East 18th Street. I’d show it to Mom, explain that I’d visited her old home and it’s still there—but that she doesn’t live there anymore, nor do Dad or Stella. Now, other people do. I knew the demographics of middle-class Flatbush had changed over time, and that everything would seem older, and smaller, and grimier, as things always do. But maybe a snapshot, a concrete image, would soothe Mom, and give us all some peace.
The subway is different these days, with sleek, chrome-plated cars instead of the menacing, roaring monoliths of my past. We got off the train—my husband, a friend and I—at Church Avenue. I was at first surprised to see that everyone on the platform was African-American, so indelible were the images I’d been carrying in my head for 50 years of white, Jewish women carrying shopping bags, pushing strollers. We went upstairs to the main subway entrance, which was buzzing with activity—no Whelan’s in sight--and started down East 18th Street, past clusters of young black men hanging out everywhere I looked in that monotonous landscape of identical brick apartment buildings, their windows festooned with air conditioners. I remembered exactly where Grandpa’s building was—you walk straight for two blocks, and it’s on the right in the middle of the block. Mom might have run down this street toward the subway station dozens of times, late for school. I must have been pushed in a baby carriage along these blocks. On a hot August day when I was 19, Grandpa and I trod this very concrete together, heading for the subway and the Port of New York where I, queasy with excitement, was about to set sail for my junior year in France.
But now it felt like one of the longest walks of my life. We arrived at number 200, an apartment building just like all the others on the block, slightly smaller than I remembered, with the numerals in bold fresh white paint over the door. I had anticipated stepping into the lobby, seeing the familiar dusty, ornate furniture that no one ever sat in, inhaling that pervasive boiled cabbage smell. The building would have been fairly new back then, yet it had always seemed old to me. But how absurd of me -- there was a “No Trespassing” sign, and of course the front door would be locked. I stood there on the street, transfixed.
A woman struggling to maintain her balance in front of the building looked at us quizzically—three middle-aged, middle-class white people standing in a row gazing raptly up at a dreary and perfectly ordinary apartment building. “I used to live there!” I blurted, pointing. “This was the first place I ever lived, a long, long time ago!”
Her jaw dropped. “Whaaaa? Here?”
“Yes, yes, decades ago, I don’t remember what floor we were on!” I was pleased with how amazed she looked. I wanted others to share my own sense of disbelief at that most natural and yet mysterious of events—the inexorable passage of time.
My husband pointed the camera. “Stand in front of the door so I can get the address in,” he said. Reluctantly, self-consciously, I sidled up, posed with a frozen grin. The woman gazed in wonderment. My husband snapped the picture, and we scuttled back to the subway station.
“Take me back to Flatbush,” Mom was still begging when I got home, and continued to beg for months. Finally she lost the power of speech and, it seemed, was released from the tyranny of memory -- that indifferent, powerful and unpredictable force that can both comfort us and disturb us.
For me, the Flatbush that I saw on that last visit -- the woman in front of the apartment building, the knots of men idling in the subway station and on the street corners--is a palimpsest. Ghosts haunt the place: old men in yarmulkes hurrying to synagogue, women in hairnets on their way to Flatbush Avenue to buy fresh fish. My own young mother at the window, her baby in her arms, yearning for her new husband to return from war…
And now, a lifetime later and on the other side of the country, this gnarled woman who was once my mother, sitting anxious and exhausted on the sofa clutching a bulging paper bag with a frying pan handle sticking out. I never did show Mom the photo. She wouldn’t have recognized the building, or the middle-aged woman standing in front of it with a stiff smile, the one whom everybody says looks just like her.
