Soon, when our mother told us the story, she was no longer looking at us, her purported audience, but gazing upward with confusion and wonder just as her great-grandfather and her little-boy grandfather had done all those years ago. Perhaps she was addressing the faces that we, too, could see in the swirls of ceiling plaster when we softened our vision. Perhaps she was talking to someone only she could discern. Maybe it was the ghost of one of her gone-by relatives: her mother Karin, her father Richard, her great-uncle Rudi. Or maybe it was Lenz, who she’d known briefly when she was a very young girl, her grandfather Lenz who told her some of these bedtime stories before Hitler came and the family fled. Or maybe she thought she was talking to Der Alter, that is, to the God she’d always told us did not exist.
“What does it mean?” our mother asked the ceiling or the ghost or God. “If my great-grandfather owned heaven and my grandfather inherited it from him, what does that mean for me now? Shouldn’t it be mine? Isn’t that the law?”
At first we tried to persuade ourselves that she was clowning, trying to amuse us. She wasn’t, though. Wasn’t clowning. Wasn’t amusing.
Sometimes it seemed as if the ceiling was responding to her. For us it was like listening to one side of a phone call. “Yes,” she’d say, and then a long pause. “Well, yes,” and another silence. Finally, “I understand your argument, but I think some of your basic premises are incorrect.”
Sometimes she remembered that we were sitting there, and she frowned as if we’d interrupted or voiced disapproval when we hadn’t said anything at all. “Don’t worry,” she’d say with exhaustion. “When I die, it will all pass to you. No one’s going to deny you your potage.”
She never said this with passion or conviction or joy. She said it as if she were recalling one more tiresome chore on her life’s to-do list. She managed the jewelry and cosmetics department at Woolworth’s, and if we never were well off, we always had rent money and food and a substantial supply of lipsticks and plastic clip-on earrings. She took care of us as best she could. If she said she’d get us our potage, we believed her. Of course, we thought potage meant porridge, and we wanted no part of it. We made faces. She chafed at our lack of gratitude. “Don’t look so stricken,” she’d say. “This is the good news. It’s the only good news anyone unlucky enough to be part of this family’s going to get.”
Other times she said nothing, just smiled wearily. This was worse than her conversations with the ceiling. We dreaded her smiles. They were time machines that carried her away, transported her to the distant past or the faraway future, left us with only her body, a hand with a cigarette dangling off her bed, hot ashes wafting down to the carpet fibers like snowflakes in Breslau, like cherry blossoms in a Japanese park. One night she came back from one of those trips and said, “If God owns heaven and I own heaven and there’s only one owner of heaven, what does that force you to conclude?”
It took us a moment to realize she was talking to us.
“That you’re God?” Vee said.
Our mother nodded as she considered that answer—hers had been a genuine, not a rhetorical, question—but Vee, upon reflection, glowered. “I thought we were atheists,” she said.
“I thought we were humans,” Delph said.
“We are atheists,” Lady said. “Which means, if (a) there’s no God and (b) Mom’s God, then (c) Mom’s nothing. That’s called the transitive property.”
Our mother looked at us as if we were all very wise, and being wise was a terrible burden she wished she could have spared us. Her eyes filled with tears. She drew on her cigarette, blew the smoke up toward the faces in the ceiling. She tried to be careful about us and her smoke.
“They’re right,” she said to the ceiling, tears dribbling down her face. “I’m God and I’m just some old bag of bones and I’m nothing, all three at once.”
God, bones, and nothing. Lady calls this the Alter version of the holy trinity. Delph says it’s the best definition of mortal man she’s ever heard. We are, at all times, all three.
Vee thinks that from God to bones to nothing is also a pretty good description of life. It’s sad, she thinks. It’s the opposite of the way she wishes life worked. From nothing to bones to God—that’s what she longs for, that’s what she wishes for—the fantasy, the fairy tale, the capacity for faith. But Vee can’t go there. None of us can.
When she got home from Riverdale, Lady dropped the blue screwdriver on the kitchen counter—because, as bad as she felt about everything, she hadn’t relinquished it, she’d held on to it, clutching it the whole train ride home as if it were a wand or scepter; she has it even now, today, in a drawer in her bedroom—and not bothering with the switch plate, she headed straight to the bathroom for a drink. For many drinks. She sat on the tiled floor and she pulled her T-shirt up over her head, and she thought about how unhappy she was and how unloved and unlovable and how strange and, now, how violent, and she drank from the bottle, one glug, then two, and she called it drinking from the bottle. From time to time the phone rang, and she had another drink or she turned on the faucet to drown out the sound. She stared up at the peeling paint of the ceiling. And when the ringing stopped, she had another drink.
She toyed with the idea of a note. The fact that none of our family suicides had left one had always struck her as a dereliction of duty, or, if that was too strong, at least a missed opportunity.
She had always imagined that when the time came, she would leave an explanation behind. Just a few years before, an actor had killed himself (pills) and left a courteous note she’d admired: “Dear World,” he’d written, “I am leaving because I’m bored.” Ever since, Lady’d imagined leaving behind an equally pithy and frank declaration, a sentence unassailable and plucky and concise enough to fit inside a Hallmark card. But now, as she thought about it, she realized that if she were being honest, her note would have to say, “Dear World, I am leaving because Shine’s Hardware at B’Way and 242nd refused to honor its returns policy,” and so by the time she passed out, banging her head on the side of the tub in the process, doing more visible damage to herself than she’d done to that sad entrepreneur in Riverdale, she’d already ditched the note concept.
She woke up several hours later, headachy and parched. She chewed a handful of aspirins and drank the taste away with several glasses of fuzzy tap water. She washed her face.
In the tradition of Jews in the hours before the Cossacks arrive, she spent the rest of the day cleaning her apartment and packing her things. She filled a cardboard box with volumes of literature from her truncated college career, Reader, I married him crammed next to I can’t go on; I’ll go on. She put the box out by the staircase. Her hope was that one of the building’s families, immigrants all of them, would take the books for their children and perhaps think well of her.
The day latened, and she stopped to take in the sunset, that purple, magenta, and orange offspring of innocent nature and despoiling industry. It was beautiful, the sunset, in the way poisons sometimes are—the berries of the belladonna plant, shiny black as patent leather; the apple of the wicked stepmother, blood red and irresistible. An unnatural natural phenomenon, those dangerous and gorgeous colors, and she looked at them longer than she meant to. She had to shake her head, turn away from the window, before she could continue with her chores: fetching, bending, placing material things in boxes. It was as active as she’d been in weeks. The muscles along her spine, shocked at what was suddenly asked of them, twinged and chided.
She dragged a second box out into the hall, this one filled with cartons of Irish oatmeal and bags of brown rice and a dozen or so dented mini cans of soup. FREE TO A GOOD HOME, she’d printed on its side.
Her dented Campbell’s Soup for One Chicken with Stars. Her dented Campbell’s