My mother was a housewife, as were most of her friends. A few helped out in their husbands’ businesses, but that meant not being home to make dinner, which would have been unimaginable. She wasn’t beautiful, but I believe she might have been described as handsome had she not been short and a little portly. I always thought she looked nice, and that skinny women such as Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn were more to be pitied than admired. I remember her on her knees a lot, scrubbing floors, and I remember that she often smelled of onions, or at least her apron did. I wasn’t much of an eater until I was five or six, and so my mother spoke often about the starving children of Europe and how grateful they would be for the food I refused. I always thought of them as Nazis and didn’t care.
Most of all, my mother was upright. That was vital to American Jews of her peer group, because they were the last generation of Jews to be intimidated by an ironfisted lesson of history: Jews never got away with much, and even when they weren’t trying to get away with anything, somebody powerful thought they were. She went to synagogue, put coins in the pushke, made her son wear itchy wool suits on the High Holidays, stayed on a first-name basis with butchers, and cleaned 2 6
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the house before the housecleaner arrived to make certain no inappropriate impressions were formed. We may have been colorless, but we played it straight. I don’t remember missing much that other kids had, except for the Taylor Pork Roll sandwich.
My parents weren’t formal people, but I don’t recall them slouch-ing. My father’s posture was perfect when he watched baseball on our black-and-white TV. I wasn’t privy to my parents’ thoughts, because they discussed nothing in front of my sister and me. Whenever my wife accuses me of not having an “inner life,” I know where I didn’t get it from. My parents were never rumpled. Even today, when we go out to eat, I tell them how nice they look compared to me. This is not flattery; it’s a fact. I do not know of divorce or incest or cruelty or illegitimacy in our family tree. Perhaps ugly truths about my relatives are hidden in an attic in some otherwise placid New Jersey town, but I would be shocked to learn of them. When it comes to exemplary behavior, I would put my parents and their sisters and brothers up against the Mennon-ites or the Quakers any day.
My mother is sweeter than ever. She’s lost weight, which looks good on her. She’s stopped dying her hair, so now she appears angelic, surrounded by a halo of white. She holds my father’s hand and kisses him often. If she did that in the old days, I wasn’t around to see it.
Whenever something is done for her, she’s grateful, which isn’t the mother I knew. These days she complains so infrequently my father says he longs for the days when she was difficult. “I miss her disappointments,” he says. She communicates mostly by touching, in a way that says more than she did back when she talked a lot. Because she says so little and forgets so much, I tend to underrate her mentality. She recently lost track of how many children she had, and I said to her,
“Maybe you should have had more.” She replied, impeccably, “Not at my age.” And when I confronted her on the ham-steak issue, demanding to know if those Wednesday pork nights reflected a rebellious streak we didn’t know she had, she replied, “Don’t tell everybody.” F O R K I T O V E R
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When I travel down to Florida these days, I always spend time visiting nursing homes, reassuring my father that it’s not for now but for emergencies. My father is opposed to a nursing home for my mother because he believes it means permanent separation and it will hasten her death. He is correct on both counts. The nursing homes I’ve seen have lots of services that none of the patients are in any shape to appreciate. I can’t say how many times I’ve gone into a cheerfully painted room to find the wheelchairs lined up in a semicircle and the occupants sitting motionless, heads lolling to the side, while activity directors jump up and down clapping their hands.
When I see a piano in a nursing-home dining room, I wonder how frequently anybody is hired to play. When I see a nicely furnished private room designed for family dining, I wonder how often families come to eat.
My mother talks about death all the time. She might not understand actuarial tables, but she knows how long she has lived and how long she has left. The last time I asked her what she thinks about, she replied,
“Dying,” so I dropped the subject. I asked her if she had learned anything about life after so many years, and she said, “It was fast.” I’m ready for the day I’ll have to set off on the mission I’ve dreaded for so long, the day the fragile life-support system my sister and I put in place becomes inadequate and my mother will be wheeled into a nursing home. I won’t feel guilty, because we’ve done everything possible to postpone it, but I believe that someday history will judge this country harshly for placing our elderly in such facilities, no matter how nicely decorated they are. I hate thinking of my mother in a nursing home, her head lolling, but even worse is that once she’s in such a place, nobody will ask her for a recipe or for advice on how to cook.
She will never step into a kitchen again.
GQ, december 2001
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