On Mending

I don’t remember when they began to loosen, the seams that joined me to my mother. As I was growing up, the stitches stayed tight, she and I constantly attached to one another. So how did I withstand the eventual pull of separation from her? How did I become such a patchwork thing: homesick though it was my decision to move far away from her; excited to spend time together when I visited; threaded with ambivalence in relation to her expectations of me, yet hoping to please her. It’s true that she grew supportive of my life as an artist and a poet, but still, there was never a time she didn’t want me to be a voyle, Yiddish for a good and obedient person. This meant that I should be a dutiful daughter and wife who had children, someone who never stood out, somehow who “stayed in the middle,” as my mother liked to say. There was never a day, after I divorced my husband, when she didn’t warn me, “It’s not good to be alone,” and never a moment she didn’t wish I’d become a high school teacher. My mother—a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust because of her skills as a seamstress—reeled from the snipping sound death made inside her. Yet she remained a strong woman. Shouldn’t I, then, have learned from her how to live? Frightened that my own fire would burn me, I was plagued by my failed loyalty to my poetry and art almost my entire life. When I finally became conscious of my strength, I pictured the way my mother leaned on herself.

She protected her own mother and youngest sister in Europe during World War II, and, again, in Stalin’s Siberian Gulags—his forced labor camps—where my mom used her gift with a needle and thread to sew clothes for the camp’s physician. And she protected me too. Despite her concern over the ways in which I lived, she eventually supported my ambitions, ironically helping me break free of her own expectations, those of my father, and the community of Holocaust survivors in which I was raised. She let the seams that attached us weaken, hoping I would not live an existence steeped in regret, as she had. “Live and live,” she urged as she was dying. This mother who piloted me to our local library weekly because she honored well-educated women, although she herself was unable to go beyond the seventh grade. No matter how often I dodged the safe life she believed would leave me unscathed, my mother and I stayed present in each other until she died.

I see her in her sewing room, hunched over her Singer. Her back is toward me, her outline glowing in a rectangle of afternoon sun. It’s 1978, and I’m twenty-three. I’ve just graduated from college in Montreal, where I’ve majored in visual art. This marks the first time in my life I left my parents’ Toronto home for so many years. Part of this time I lived with my friend Irene, another art major and an “out” lesbian. My mother, unaware of Irene’s sexuality, was comforted by her being Jewish, and, therefore, unthreatening.

My years in college burgeoned into an exploration of what it meant to be alive on its most primordial levels. I squeezed life’s hand, not only to grasp what art signified to me, but what love and passion and sex meant—how they could coexist ideally. Even Irene was never conscious of my relationship with Claudette, which I kept painfully secret. Maybe the carnal colors and wild brushstrokes in my paintings revealed the delirium love caused in me. And our relationship must also have been agonizing for Claudette, who planned to be a nun, but never took her final vows: agonizing and sinful and sinister, yet natural and inevitable. I was eighteen when I felt tentacles spreading in my belly. And when I caressed Claudette’s arm, the touch of those tentacles made me shiver. My mother disapproved of Claudette because of her devout Catholicism. But maybe my mom intuited that our friendship would turn into something else.

Despite her animosity toward Claudette, my mother was in favor of my attending school in Montreal. That the unconscious can be devious and confusing comes as no surprise, but I will never understand the depth of my mother’s devotion to me, even at the expense of her beliefs and fears. I picture her sewing the complex lace of our relationship daily. She stitches two pieces together that will be a collar around the neck of a dress that kindles fantasies in her about my life and its direction, about her ambivalent conviction that I should be like “the majority.” When her fantasies fade, she doesn’t really resist who I want to be, no more than she resists herself: one side rising up against the other, the obedient mother and wife rebelling against her desire for independence. But in terms of how she lives her own life, her past presses her hard, crushing her broad-mindedness to reinforce the conventional individual who’d grown up in a shtetl in Poland. I can almost see her standing over a pot of thin soup in her religious home where women’s lives were circumscribed.

Yet even in her youth, she had dreams. She moved to Kraków from her small town to study clothing design before the war broke out. And her love of beauty never dissipated. During one of our earliest visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I watched her gaze at Monet’s triptych, Water Lilies. She bathed her face in the painting’s greens, lavenders, and blues, searching its shimmer for a place where she could free herself from the routine life she was taught to live. Many years later, mastering her fear of the Christian world that had betrayed her, and momentarily conquering her panic over the possibly of my being lured into it, she let her eyes dance as she sat on a library chair reading my first published poem. It was about the painting “The Penitent Magdalen” by the seventeen-century French artist Georges de La Tour. I worried my poem’s empathetic portrayal of a figure central to Christianity would anger my mother, but her happiness over my success dissolved her disapproval. Her face was radiant with a light that burned more brightly than her anxieties.

That afternoon in 1978 when I watch her back curve over her Singer, my mother is attaching a sleeve to a blouse she’s making for me as if connecting part of herself to my body. Her hands carefully feed the material to the machine’s gnawing needle. From the doorway, I gaze at her as I steady a camera over my face, trying to capture something I can’t articulate with words. Photography makes me feel consequential and free. It vitalizes me much as sewing energizes my mother, both reconnecting her to her past, but also, shielding her from it. Taking pictures shields me too from feeling my own awkward presence, a presence arousing guilt in me and the sense that I’m immoral. I’m not a voyle, not following a conventional path. But I’m also alive in a time and place where women have opportunities. It is a prosperous and modern place that exists in opposition to the world in which my mother was raised with a stepfather who beat her with his belt, and in opposition to the genocidal world she survived. But at what price? Every day of her life, she inflicts memory on herself: the minutes during the war when she gives her two older sisters money so they can return to their fiancées in Kraków. She places the cash in their hands and gently closes their fingers. Later, she will never forgive herself for providing her sisters with the means by which they traveled to their deaths by the Nazis in the Kraków ghetto.

I summon up a day in the distant past when my mother and I kept each other steady: a manageable day I witness something other than her inner turmoil that makes my stomach churn. I’m in kindergarten, unprepared to let my refugee mother go for long. I run away from my school’s playground to return to her. It’s a rare afternoon, one when she doesn’t rock her body in a kitchen chair and pinch her cheeks to hurt herself because—I understand this only when I’m older—she has survived the Holocaust although her two older sisters have died. But I’m not watching my mother sew. Instead, I study her as she nurses a crow with a broken wing, its feathers iridescent as spilled oil. She gently places it inside a cardboard box which becomes a kind of crib on our back porch. My mom, whose name was Pearl, Peyrul in Yiddish, feeds the bird breadcrumbs, and leaves it water in the lid of a jar. The anxious energy she would punish herself with almost daily, she uses, that day, to heal a wounded bird.

I don’t know how long it took for the crow’s wing to heal, but once it was sound, my mother carefully scooped up the bird with her hands, then let it break free. I can see it flying past the flickering leaves of the apple tree in our backyard, into the streaked Toronto sky—cobalt, vermillion, pink—that reminded me so much of the marbles I played with. Maybe the crow first poked its head up from my mom’s cupped fingers, testing the atmosphere before taking off to become a dab of paint on air, then a speck that still sails the sky in my mind. She released the crow into its liberty among the elements—into sun, wind, rain, ice and snow—just as, much later, she freed me from her home to shed my nervous self, the one she thought—I thought—we both knew. Often nauseous over the bathroom sink, I felt heavy-hearted breathing the air in my parents’ house, air that said, “Save us.”

When I turn twenty-four I feel the pull away from my mother especially forcefully, its uncomfortable power to which I’m prey. Limp in separation’s grip, I leave my parents’ home and community for the second time, to study art in New York City. Every morning, I walk to my Harlem painting studio housed inside an industrial building where Columbia has provided space for its MFA students to work. The building’s name is Prentis Hall; during the Manhattan Project, it contained a research facility, which performed tests to determine the temperature at which a nuclear reactor would melt down. I make my way up Broadway toward 125th Street, wakened by the Hudson River air buffeting the ornate facades of old apartments, folding itself into wind that carries the smells drifting outdoors from bodegas and bakeries. I turn the corner at an empty lot that is a wide grove of trash and rats, and remember a friend who had recently visited me from our insular Toronto suburb, someone I’ve known since we were in the seventh grade. She is shocked by the neighborhood in which I live and work now, and comments, “This is a long way from where we grew up.” Her eyes are open as if they’ve traveled the miles from our tidy childhood neighborhood to Harlem’s riveting bustle and grit.

I recall, as well, the June day in 1979 when my mother came with me to inspect my Prentis Hall studio. A couple of second-year MFA students greeted us, then asked if I wanted them to knock down the walls between the two rooms I’d been assigned to paint in. Without permission, they went at the wall, breaking it down so that I could work in one glorious north-facing space, its windows looking out on “The Cotton Club.” Although I have no way of knowing, this must have been a moment when my mom’s own ambitions for herself insisted upon overcoming her hopes of my “staying in the middle.” I wonder, now, was I fulfilling her dreams, or betraying her?

My mother bends over her Singer to repair my clothes even the day before the seams between us split in a way I dread, no matter how much she mends them. The next morning she is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and the doctor tells us she is going to die. In the hospital corridor—my mom lying on a gurney—I repeat to myself, “God, I’m not ready.” The surgeon explains her illness, dispassionately drawing on her belly to indicate where the cancer lives and reproduces, my mind batting like a moth about to be scorched against the flames of his words.

Sewing even the evening she turns yellow from jaundice, the itch unbearable, my mother rises from her workbench to take a walk with me along the pristine suburban streets. They’re yellow too, the July lawns covered with sunflowers and golden touch-me-nots. She leans over a small bursting sun, and smells it. As always, conversation is the kernel of our lives together and apart. We talk. I’m aware of my powerless empathy for her, my wish to die with her, of my helplessness that spans the Canadian sky.

The day of my mother’s diagnosis, I remember a blue jay crashing against my parents’ dining-room window. My mother, father, and I had just returned from the hospital; walking through the foyer, we heard a thud. My mom quickly opened the sliding glass doors facing the backyard; outside, there was a feathered lump on the deck adjoining the room. She rushed to the kitchen sink, turned on the faucet, filled a soup bowl with water, then ran to sprinkle the jay. Motionless for a few more seconds, it opened an eye, then flew into the humid sky.

As she was dying, my mom, whose life was saturated with death, scrambled, again, to save a bird. In many ways, this was indicative of her eighty years, during which loss lined the fabric of her daily world. Detailed catalogs of grief hovered in front of her eyes. Yet she spent her days helping others cope and survive, even if this meant confronting what she did not want to know about people, even if this meant facing the monstrousness with which a person can be propelled to act. She seemed to me beyond a voyle herself, as if to achieve a universal good, something broad-based and interdenominational. With her strict adherence to Judaism, her near “Christian” spirituality might have shocked her.

In the late 1990s, I recorded interviews with my mother and father about their early lives, and their experiences during the war. My mother, clearing the table after lunch, let her voice soar and plummet in her accented, melodic English. Listening to my recordings now, I feel as if she is freed from a block of stone. I feel our seams sewn back together again.

“If the war wouldn’t catch me, I would go to school for designing,” she said, delighting in what was her youthful goal of self-transformation.

“I planned to go to school in Kraków, but the war catched me. I didn’t know what it’s mean, a war. When someone told us, we used to laugh!”

“Poland was not a place for us. We struggled financially, but we enjoyed life in our way. We had better fun than now-teenagers. Did I understand what anti-Semitism was? We used to go out Saturday nights to a farm on a sleigh with boys. We ate apples and we drank buttermilk. The winter in Poland was nice.”

I asked her how she knew what to do during the war to stay alive. She answered, “You gotta go where the majority goes, and that was the end.”

With all her darkness, my mother’s sense of humor made it seem like she never aged. One June morning, she watched robins pluck cherries from the branches of her neighbor’s tree, then spit out the pits. With a triumphant smile, my mother stared amused by what she considered the robins’ pilfering of goods from Ruchella’s, her neighbor’s, backyard as if this were a fitting penalty for some prickly affront Ruchella had meted out to humiliate my mother. In Yiddish, the language they spoke to one another, even a minor insult could stab, impale flesh to the core, much like the birds’ goring the cherries. Often, my mother agonized over the ways in which her friends wounded her. So that June day she relished the robins’ trespass, their vandalism, and their spoiling the tree’s beauty. Maybe she imagined herself partaking of the feast, flapping gray wings, and singing a long liquid song: cheer up, cheer up...

It was not as if my mother didn’t always love beauty, or that she begrudged Ruchella an allotment of paradise in miniature as a suburban Toronto backyard. I believe she longed to press her ear to Ruchella’s chest and hear her sisters’ hearts. Without close relatives, she tried to stitch together a family from her friends, as many Holocaust survivors did. At the same time, she tore threads of disillusionment about those friends from the cloth she created.

The day of my mother’s cancer diagnosis, it seemed to me everything for her was brought into focus; everything became essence. The world was like a small basin of tidal water packed with sea life: snails, barnacles, mussels, urchins, sea stars. But for me everything became amplified: the eddy of light spinning on top of an ambulance. On that day, life became catastrophic. Yet, my mom, I remember, once declared, as I drove her to one of her countless medical appointments, “I’m like a dummy.” Meaning, she was in shock, benumbed, like the surface of a lake that is rigid, stretched tight from shore to shore. And I was sinking through that water to the lake’s bottom. That is how connected with my mother’s suffering I felt, as if I were her partner in it. That is how intricately the seams between us had been mended over and over again.

When I think of my mother’s final months, I sink in that lake again. I might be writing at my desk. Clouds drift in a gray sky; it is 2:00 PM. My mind churns its darkness, a sticky blue-black: the gluey dark of memory. My mother is still lying in a special hospital bed delivered to our house to make her comfortable. Her stare is anchored to the ceiling: a screen on which she says she watches her past unfurl. “She’s always such a lady,” a friend of hers comments, observing the calm with which my mom handles her pain. I steady myself as the weight of the lake’s water pushes me down. I remember, now, my mother’s soul seeping out of this world. It’s a memory so adhesive it appears to be a tale that began before I was born, one I am always coming home to.

The year I watched my mother nurse the crow, I ran home from my schoolyard, one afternoon, panicked, tugging myself on the lifeline of the brisk November air. I’d been skipping rope, when a large dog began to chase me. I rushed down streets I knew well, but that turned strange, unrolling an inhospitable bleakness before me. If I could make it back home, I would be okay. I felt the dog leap behind me; I remember it biting off the pom-pom that swung from a piece of wool attached to my cap. When I reached our front door, I pushed it hard, and followed my mother’s reassuring humming down the hallway to the kitchen where she was listening to the radio.

When I picture our house now, I see its white clapboard and emerald trim, its front porch, where I’d blow soap bubbles through a plastic wand. It is said that this act of blowing bubbles forces people to stop what they’re doing and focus on their breathing, that this helps lower anxiety. I was an anxious child, and wonder if the breaths I puffed into the wand calmed me, or was it the vision I tucked away inside myself of my mother at her Singer, sewing? Her back is arched over her machine. She is singing. I have read the most beautiful birdsong in the world is that of the Slate-colored Solitaire. But I would argue that the most ravishing birdsong in the world was the sound of my mother’s lachrymal voice.

I remember crows submarining through a gray membrane of sky a few days before my mother died. They landed, as if omens, on my parents’ front lawn, surrounding the spruce tree, its roots like nerves in the body of snow. Only brick and glass separated my mother from these small, dark turbines that seemed to generate death. But laboriously, slowly, my mother was still connecting something to something else: a strand of cotton through the eye of a needle; an old world to a new one; her life to mine, our lives—mended seams.