My Mother Never Liked Me

I’m pretty sure of that. This was recently apparent when she refused to let me see my cousin Beth, whom I’m in love with, when we were staying in Toronto.

“Mom—she’s in town.”

“You are such a bitch!” Mom yelled. I had bitten her hand. I meant to gnaw, but the Labradoodle in me took over.

Mother wanted to see Beth and her mom Rhoda alone; I was to remain in the hotel with my brother Oscar, who was incredibly hostile.

Oscar, who had recently turned black, announced, “We think your relationship with Beth is Whitmanesque.” He sat confidently, not noticing his new pigmentation was now similar to our Hebrew brethren in Ethiopia.

*

My family is either on vacation in Brussels (where there’s nothing to do but view the repetitious nature of the landscape), or at a holiday spot in Toronto, where we stay in our rooms.

*

Mother keeps me in a cave, like in Plato’s Republic—a beast must always ensure the level between her head and ceiling is an inch.

*

Though he is now black, Oscar insists I am inferior.

When Mommy was dying, he got maddeningly impatient, and as I glanced over his shoulder, he screamed, “Get the fuck out of here!”

“Have you noticed that you are darker?” I mused. He was giving Mom a morphine shot.

“Look slut, I’m going to crush you!” He echoed the feelings of other family members. I am what some might consider obnoxious, and put ice down my grandmother’s back. This procedure was not ignoble, because I did it after she had taken her heart medication.

Mom interceded on his behalf, “He’s really a nice person.”  Her smile was fading in the cancer, and she wanted us to be happy.

*

On the way to work today, as it is Valentine’s Day, I recall that my ex-girlfriend Liza declared I have Asperger’s.

“I saw this documentary on Channel 13 and you sound like it,” she said. Liza had also written a paper about Asperger’s syndrome at St. Germaine University and was convinced I was her cousin—the dude in Jerusalem who memorized polygamist texts from the bible.

Liza is/was hot, so of course I told everyone, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who quit talking with me, that I had Asperger’s syndrome.  Liza, so sultry and persuasive, could have convinced a Koch brothers-funded think tank that it was a gasoline station.

I had known of Liza for 45 years but we had only spoken recently. She was a cheerleader in high school, whereas I was a protagonist in one of William Burroughs’ heroin runs.

*

My current psychiatrist, who is also a therapist, once studied autism in drosophilae. “You are definitely not autistic,” he proclaimed. He had worked with fruit flies at the Albert Einstein Medical School, and “your personality is not comparable to them.”

*

Mother is overly anxious about me not suffocating Beth.

Her husband, my dad, was a writer, and she knew what it was like to find herself unexpectedly in a novel.

“Maybe a screenplay, Mom?”

“Leave her alone!” she insists.

Mom also refuses to offend Beth’s side of our family, the Kardashians, who vacation in California and pledge fraternities. We, the former paper girls and boys of Jersey, who delivered the Asbury Park Press, are forbidden to look at Beth. But she is so gorgeous.

*

When I first saw Beth, or noticed her, it was at her twin brothers’ bar mitzvahs, which was like a wedding—three days of bounteous foods and fruits where Mother and her sister, Aunt Idie, made me feel as if I had caused the world to collapse.

“You are quite an ass,” Aunt Idie, who sat at the head table, declared. Aunt Idie once rode on a horse, at 16, and claimed she was better than my mother. She eventually married Uncle Michael, a one-armed owner of Hank’s Chocolate & Cigarette Shop, which burned down in 1978.

Aunt Idie, sitting from her perch, rolled her eyes.  “You must stop making our lives miserable!” She retreated to her fruit cup.

They were upset because I had asked their matronly aunt (under the pretext that I was completing a history project in human sexuality) about oral sex in the late 1890s.

Mother, also fearful I’d consume too many deviled eggs, reminded me, “You’re gaining weight. Quit eating.”

*

Cousin Beth was the smartest child in her family, said Uncle Michael, who died before he could carry on a conversation with her about “Ezra Pound receiving free room and board at St. Elizabeths Hospital,” which, in 1855, had been established as the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC. Uncle Michael’s favorite book had been Ezra Pound by Hugh Kenner, and he was equally addicted to listening to tapes of Pound on Mussolini’s official radio station.

“She’s the more intelligent one, the light bulb,” acknowledged Uncle Michael, Aunt Idie’s husband, who was not popular at family functions because he screamed at this wife.

*

Beth read a poem at Aunt Idie’s—her grandmother’s—funeral.

“My Bubbie was there/when the water ceased/the sun didn’t come/you were our heart…”
We gathered around the headstone, which was being unveiled.

“You weren’t very nice to her, were you?” Beth inquired. That was the third time we had ever spoken.

“Sheila broke her toilet seat,” My brother Harold, who is gay but has a crush on Beth, interjected. He figured he’d inherit Aunt Idie’s money because they both had curly hair, but then Beth and the twins came along.

Aunt Idie had nearly eviscerated me for smashing her porcelain toilet seat. She was equally incensed when I hitchhiked in Montreal. But the day of reckoning came when she slapped me because I blew air in her face.

“We didn’t get on well,” I told Beth.

“Certainly not,” she replied.

*

I am on the couch near Beth’s mother, Rhoda, who is into art deco. She went from working in a china shop to owning art deco. I spent many hours in my youth with Rhoda, who dated men while I read comic books. Her dad, Uncle Michael, referred to her as “Maydelah,” which, in Yiddish, means, “girl.”

“Come here, Girl!” he’d yell. Perhaps Rhoda felt that her Girl Friday status would be ameliorated if she married that flirty entrepreneurial dude who tripped over his shoe lace in the china shop.

Beth smirks and sits between me and Rhoda. A being with black hair, she is a combination of her mother’s brains and her father’s looks. We had never seen each other in adult form. I last saw her when she blew out candles and read Aunt Idie’s death poem. But to observe how alluring and intuitive she had become you’d never know it was that baby with green eyes with whom Uncle Michael wanted to carry on a conversation about modernist literature.

*

“You are just like Beth,” her mother says.

“I’m getting a hysterectomy,” I reply.

“Only Beth can shock me.”

*

Beth came to my mother’s house when things were falling apart. She was to attend grad school in New York and hang out at Mom’s in Jersey. She didn’t realize, through the bed covers, we’d face an exploding pancreas.

*

I instructed Beth to get off the bus in Lakewood. She said I told her Freehold.

“Lakewood,” I remarked.

“You said Freehold,” she giggled.

The Kardashian side of my family looks disdainfully at those who lead them to obscure New Jersey bus stops where Mexicans congregate for work. Not a place for social workers who may someday get a trust find while observing famines in impoverished areas. If the trust funder/social worker has thoroughly embraced her burgeoning career, this will suffice until a man, skinnier than the Buddha, opens his Levis. Indeed, Beth has always wanted to get married, like Rhoda, but lately has been rebelling toward independence.

*

Beth tried poontang with a woman who could have, should have been, Divine the drag queen/performer’s understudy. Divine II’s Facebook profile was a mere triangle, and when I met her in real life, I was astonished by her corpulence.

“She’s big,” I told Beth.

“I love her mind.” Gorgeous women, and occasionally, very occasionally, gorgeous men like the brains of elephantine chicks. I have liked fat chicks, though never myself when I reach large proportions.

Heftiness did not compensate for her inability to be kind to Beth, and despite the profundity of their text messages, Divine II had sex with an alcoholic friend in Beth’s grad school dorm room.

I went to persuade Beth to evict them to a hotel, but she didn’t want to be coldhearted.

“Your cousin Sheila is so cool,” Divine II told Beth, and then I didn’t want to intervene.

Thereafter Beth would say, in moments of anger, “you’re like the pope during the Nazi invasion.”

*

Like me, Beth has stalked. She had a boyfriend who ignored her, even when they saw each other four years later at a hip bar.

“Want to buy me a drink?” she asked him.

He took his martini and left the stool. She cried until a canned peach manufacturer offered to get her a Tequila Sunrise. This did not offset Beth’s pain, because like me, we pursue malevolent ghosts.

Beth’s boyfriend Charles is less innocuous than Liza, my ex, who calls me every six months and hangs up if she believes I’m over her. Then I begin anew: six more months of calling until I stop. It’s been seven months since I received a hang up, and I wonder if she’s lost interest in my potential to lose interest in her crucifixion techniques.

*

Before my mother died, I wanted to kiss her on the lips, even though I know she hates this. It sends a message loud and triumphant through the house that dyke Sheila wants to have sex with her mother. No, not true. I love my mom. Her voice in a saved voicemail makes me cry. I wanted to get her mad, have her evocative and provocative attitude shame me in front of my siblings, so we’d at least know she was alive. When she allowed me to kiss her on the lips, it was quite clear she was dying.

*

My mother is not a vampire, but they think I am, for kissing a near dead woman.
“You are horrible,” my neighbor across the street said. She’s now a yoga instructor but occasionally reverts to self-righteousness.

*

When I call Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, “The Ejaculation Proclamation,” everyone thinks I’m obsessed with sex.

*

If you have serious critical ambitions, you shouldn’t juxtapose “solipsism” and “semen,” particularly if you are female and grew up in New Jersey (which is more censorial and sexist than the South).

*

I trust gun-toting Baptists from North Carolina more than intellectual Jew boys on the Pt. Pleasant boardwalk.

*

Philip Roth may use semen in metaphors—call women “cunts” without even a euphemism to decry his vulgarity; but as I’m female and not a former valedictorian who has read all the works of Primo Levi, it is imperative that I fit properly in a square.

*

Beth is a Jew girl who Philip Roth would date, at least for five minutes, before seeing her as some vigilant attempt to remain with Jews. To him she is just pussy. Vagina. Ex-box licker.

*

To me Beth is an illusion of some girl I might date, like my ex.

Beth snickers on the phone.

She beleaguers my ex with insidious verbiage.

“Liza is a sick bitch who wants to get you started,” Beth insists.

*

My Mom agrees with my brothers in keeping me under quarantine, particularly around the young relatives.

*

Mom and Aunt Idie were Beth’s secret service. Now that they’re dead, it is just her mom Rhoda who does the guard work.

Rhoda perches herself outside Beth’s room when I call.

“She can’t come to the phone, she’s sick,” Rhoda says, though I know Beth’s been working at the mall for five hours.

Rhoda isn’t as censorial as the elder ladies were—she’s just omnipresent, or wants to be, like Zeus.

*

My mother had a crush on my brother Harold.

My cousin Rhoda has a crush on my cousin Jason.

My cousin Kurt, one of the twins, has a crush on Rhoda.

I have a crush on Beth, which they all seem to know.

My brother Harold, whom my mother had a crush on, asks Beth, “Would you date Sheila?”  Harold, who I also have a crush on, wants me to have a girlfriend.

*

“You and Sheila should become lovers,” Harold proposes to Beth as he drives her to my mother’s funeral.

“That’s disgusting,” she replies, unable to get out of the car because Harold has the child lock on.

*

On the death bed Beth gives my mom the shots.

“No,” she yells at me, “stop that,” as I lean against my mother’s pillow. My mom is frail and sinking.

Beth ushers in the morphine, methodically, whereas I can barely get it from the refrigerator to the bedroom.

We gather around her bed. She discusses recipes. Making pies with her mother.

“This is how people die,” says Oscar, who read up on death in hospice literature.

To me it makes perfect sense. When Dad was deteriorating, he could only discuss the Mets, not Karl Marx or the rise of Stalinism.

We sit and watch. A few breaths. Fewer. Impending silence.

The Colombian nurse touches her pulse and tells us it’s over. She covers my mom with a sheet.

*

The day my mom dies we celebrate Beth’s birthday. I get her a cheesecake, though her mother insists on paying for it.

We buy the cheesecake before Mom dies.

Beth has brown hair and green eyes and protruding lips. Her hands are quite tender. She can blow out a candle without effort.

*

At night I sleep on the couch. My brother Oscar, who is six feet two and has a hard time sleeping on the couch, sleeps on my bed. Beth takes the chair next to me.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask her.

“What?”

“Sleeping next to me…”

“Because I love you.”

I don’t know what to say and she closes the curtain just like my mom did so the neighbors can’t look in.