Sylvia looked at my mother with a mix of pity and what I thought might have been regret. It looked like maybe she was going to hug her, or at the very least set a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t.
I felt my heart rate quicken. I had no idea what they meant, but also, strangely, I did. I knew in the way you know when things are true.
Truth is easy to understand, even when it is unbelievable.
“That’s why you’ve been depressed,” I said.
My mother looked to my grandmother, who nodded.
“Anything that happens, that you want to undo, you get to,” Sylvia said. “One time.”
I could think of plenty of things to undo. I had forgotten to use deodorant during track practice last week. I’d brought an egg salad sandwich to school—big mistake. I’d told Carlie that Phil wanted to go out—that one backfired.
But I understood that was not what they meant, that was not what I was being told. My mother had just saved my father’s life.
I looked at Marcella. She started to cry. I felt her grief move out of her and into me like a kind of virus, infecting everything in spit distance. I understood her grief and pain and terror—because somehow it was mine, too. I could see that it connected us andwouldconnect us from now on.
When I look back and think about the moment I became an adult, it was not the following year, when I lost my virginity, or going to college, or my first job or paycheck or any of the markers people use to denote the passage of time. It was this.
What is adulthood if not the recognition of responsibility?
We left that bedroom three women, tethered, however reluctantly, by our one, singular fate.
My mother recovered, slowly, but she was never quite the same. And I held on to that, what it meant, what she was, without words, telling me. Everything awful is on the other side of that ticket. Because on the other side of that ticket you had no more cards to play. On the other side of that ticket was just the relentless, mercilessness of life.
From that point on we were different, but we were also united in this dance around my father, this drive to protect him.
Dad and I finish our oatmeal, and he does the dishes, stacking them neatly on the drying rack before smacking his hands together.
“OK, babycakes, I’m out of here. Going to see about some waves.”
I make a face, somewhere between joy and concern, and my father rolls his eyes. “I’m always careful,” he says. “You don’t even have to say it.”
But I do anyway. This is my story.
CHAPTER FIVE
Her story starts further back, but not that much further, in the grand scheme of things. Marcella Steiner never changed her name, not that it matters. Everyone still calls her Marcella Novak, or honey, or, more to the point,Mom. But this is not a story about a woman put upon by motherhood—at least, no more so than any story about a mother is about a woman who is put upon by motherhood. Marcella likes having a house that is her own and a family that is her own. It gives her a sense of peace and purpose in a disjointed and surprisingly barbaric world.
She got married when she was twenty-four, an age her mother thought ridiculous but society deemed accomplished. It was the eighties. She was bathed in attention and warmth and praise. How wonderful to have met a lawyer! How wonderful to be living in her childhood home as a young bride! Marcella reveled in this rightness. Finally, finally, she felt she was where she belonged.
She got married not at the beach but inside Sinai on Wilshire, the same temple to which she has belonged the entirety of her marriage, even though her husband and daughter do not find conservative Judaism as rewarding as she does (once they called it “conformist,” she stopped asking them to come to services with her). This bothersher more than she’d admit, but her rabbi tells her that faith cannot be forced, and for the most part, she agrees.
She wore a cream, not white (a more flattering hue, Sylvia told her) dress to her ankles and a veil that covered her face. Afterward there was a reception in the banquet hall with sparkling wine and bagels and lox. The wedding was called for 11:00 a.m. By 2:00 p.m. they had consummated the marriage and her husband was out on the water, where he has remained for many of the past thirty-nine years.
She loves her husband. David is a good man and a kind father and a great partner, and she knows how rare it is to find all three. He calls to ask if there’s anything she needs him to pick up on his way home from work, and he puts his shoes away from the door, and he makes sure sex is fulfilling. She does not mean to make their marriage seem robotic, convenient, or even equitable; it is none of those things. Dave never remembers to close doors or put away socks or make doctor’s appointments. He’d never prepared a meal for himself, not even toast. Marcella’s marriage is remarkable and unfair, as many marriages are.
Today Marcella is in an argument with Sylvia—the same one she has had countless times before. Marcella does not know why Sylvia insists on leaving the gate open at night, or forgetting to lock it, as the case may be. Her mother is nearing ninety-two, but that is no excuse, because her memory fails her nowhere else but this one, singular thing. Their safety.
“You’re so uptight,” Sylvia tells her, a familiar refrain. It frustrates Marcella—that she has been cast as the tightly wound coil to Sylvia’s free-flowing silk. It isn’t fair that women are chastised for freedom while young and condemned for order later.
“I just want to make sure no criminals come up off the beachand into our home while we are sleeping,” Marcella says. “Is that really too much to ask?”
“When has that happened even once in the decades we’ve lived here?” Sylvia says.
It only takes one, Marcella thinks, and she knows her mother can sense the words, even if she doesn’t say them out loud.
Sometimes Marcella wonders how she would have turned out if she had had a mother who loved rules. Would she have been a free spirit? Worn long dresses? Traded her name into Sanskrit? If she hadn’t had to keep the rails on, might her daughter see her differently? Might she see her as someone sparkly, too? Someone who she’d want to drink wine at night with and tell her secrets to? Lauren has always been closer to Sylvia than she is to Marcella.
