She stands up then. Pushes in her chair. I lift my coffee to mylips. Let her go, get back upstairs. She has no more need for me, anyway.
“I’m going to stay down here,” I say. “Tell Dad. Or don’t.”
She is standing behind her chair. She looks at me, and I feel my face mirrored in hers. I never thought I looked much like my mother—no one did. I was squarely Dave Novak’s child. But sitting here now I feel her expressions running through me like marionette strings.
“I’m not going upstairs,” she says.
I cross my arms; I just keep staring at her. I feel my petulance losing its footing. A dusty hillside.
“Stand up,” she tells me. “You’re coming with me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
My story does not begin here, but if this is the time allotted, I’ll take it.Begin as you mean to go on, they say, but I’ve always felt thatgo on as you beganis the more helpful idiom. None of us need help at the beginning. And the end is going to come no matter whose hands are there. Where we might require aid is the middle, where the meat is.
But I digress. After all, this is not my story.
This is not my middle, either. This is, by all accounts, my end. When you are in your nineties, the facts speak for themselves. There is only so long one can stay at the fair, so to speak. Eventually, the rides stop, the vendors close up shop. We get the time we get and no more.
I am nearing the final bend, rounding the penultimate corner. There cannot possibly be that much time left, and yet—time is a funny thing. At this point I feel confident in saying our measuring device is incomplete. We don’t take it all into consideration.
My daughter once told me that no time is promised. When she said it I was in my seventies and it felt like the end then, too, I suppose. Who could have seen these twenty years coming. But my daughter was wrong. Time is promised. But not to us. Time ispromised to the earth. We are merely its inhabitants. We are not owed anything.
In the eighties, on a trip to Morocco, a woman I met in our riad said the following to me:Being alive is everything. Anything beyond that is pure gravy.We were on mushrooms, but the point stands.
At this stage all I’ve got is words. There are no more tits, no waist. I’d put on makeup if I could still locate my eyelids. Getting old it not for the faint of heart, and anyone who tells you differently is thirty-fucking-five.
I was raised in New York, in a town outside the city called Scarsdale. My mother, Irina, came to the US when she was just eight years old, with nothing but a small trunk and her mother. Her father was a cobbler—well, you know that already—and sad to say he never made it to the shores. When they docked in the city it was just her and her mother, who wasn’t much of a help at all. Her father had run the show, and now that he was gone, my mother was in charge. Irina moved in with family. Her mother’s sister had come before and was sharing an apartment in Brooklyn. Irina and her mother slept in the living room.
Everyone in the building went to work. And everyone in the building had shoes. And soon Irina had started a nice little business. She’d mend and make whatever the needs of the building were for half of what any shop would charge. Word spread, and soon everyone in the neighborhood came to her. She had more work than she could handle—the apartment was filled with shoes—and so she opened her own shop. It was a small place on the corner of Flatbush and Avenue D, and soon Irina and her mother moved into the apartment above. All day and all night Irina did what her father taught her. And with her own two hands, she built a new life.
My father was a customer. They’d known each other since theywere children. He’d bring in the family’s shoes, and she’d work on them. Sometimes he’d bring her a nickel sandwich from Juniors or a small pot of kasha and bow ties from his mother’s kitchen. Morris brought his family’s shoes in to be shined more than was sensible, Irina knew that, but as they turned from children to teens she looked forward to his visits with a different kind of enthusiasm.
Like all the young men in the neighborhood, Morris left to serve in the war, and when he came back he asked Irina to marry him. They spent twenty-eight years married, and he died at fifty-two after a short battle with liver cancer.
I never asked my mother if she regretted her choice—saving her father, only to have him leave them so soon after. Whether she longed for the decades she spent alone after her husband’s death to be different. I never asked, because I knew it was the wrong question. To long for things to be different is to fundamentally miss the lesson of life. My mother taught me that, and while we were not close, I had a lot of respect for her. Her practicality, her tenacity, the way she built a life here on her own skill and back. I never forgot it, and when I think of her, even now—so very often, it is always with reverence.
To put it pleasantly, life is a bit of a game. A sport. It’s hard, and you can make it harder, easy for no one, and the only way out is through. I’m an old lady, so if this rambles, please blame my age. Not my hesitation, never. I’m still trying to figure out how to tell you.
You want to know what became of my ticket. Or rather, how I used it. You have to understand that I had it since I was born—ninety-one years. I knew about it for at least eighty-five. That’s a lot of time. I have made so many mistakes. We all have, but I’ve made more than my fair share. I left my baby in the care of mymother to live in Finland with a rock star. I ruined a marriage. Well, three of them, and none of them mine. Richard, Cash, and John. I loved them all. I was engaged four times, and married none. I regretted things, of course. I lost my patience with my daughter. I was erratic with strangers. Once, I slapped a man on the street for touching a woman’s ass who happened to be his wife.
I was arrested twice, both for disturbing the peace. I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and protested the war and, despite living at the ocean, never really learned how to swim. Or taught my daughter.
I broke my leg after I was thrown from my horse, Penny, and never got back on. I once told a woman in the ladies’ room of Musso & Frank that her husband was running around on her. I had the wrong guy. I lit Shabbat candles every Friday the first year of my daughter’s life and then never again.
I don’t have many friends, but I’ve met almost everyone.
Do you see where this is going, my dear?
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
She takes her daughter out of the hospital doors and down the long corridor, toward the elevators that lead to the parking structure.
She remembers then the wild ride to the hospital, thirty-seven years ago, the way Dave kept white-knuckling the steering wheel, screaming at the top of his lungs:Hold on!She laughed between contractions, told him to calm down. But he couldn’t calm down—this was it; their baby was coming. She would be born five short hours later, after only fifteen minutes of pushing, rocketing into the world ahead of schedule. Marcella had been warned that first children normally come late, but Lauren had been a whole three days early. She was ready to be here.
Marcella remembers the wild screech into the valet area—complete with sound effects—and the way Dave hollered at the parking attendant that his wife was in labor.
“Parking Structure A,” the woman said, unfazed. Hadn’t been her first overly excited husband.
