Things Every Woman Should Know About Love

1. Birth

I was born under a sky that poured.  My mother’s water wasn’t the only thing that ran that day; it was raining so hard the ceiling caved in and the windows almost broke.  The streets were flooded and a trip to the hospital was out of the question.  It was up to my mother’s boyfriend, Ezra, to deliver me, and he spread the bed they shared with black garbage bags and chucks pads; he tossed the lavender, wadded-up sheets into a corner of the room.  He held my mother’s hand and kissed his favorite spot on her face, right above her left ear.  The only part of her that hadn’t gone beet red and contorted, that still smelled like the orange rose water she bathed in every morning and night, poured from a tiny glass bottle that needed constant replenishing.  Her first vanity.  Not her last.

I took twelve hours to come out.  By the time I finally did, by the time Ezra cut the umbilical cord with a pair of my mother’s Estee Lauder scissors, both my mother and Ezra were slimy with sweat.  My mother was crying- or so she tells me- but Ezra was so exhausted all he could do was curl up in the corner with the bed sheets.  And so, my mother likes to say, I knew he didn’t have the stamina to raise a little girl.  If he couldn’t even hold one after a few hours of labor.

I’m smart enough not to ask if Ezra is my father.  I already know the answer- that she doesn’t know.

2. The Letter

On the morning of my thirteenth birthday, I wake up to find a piece of stationary paper next to me on the table; like everything else, it’s scented with rose water, and the first thing I notice is my mother’s taken care in writing this.  The letters are painstakingly curved, like a valentine.  The ink is jet black and the paper pink, and across the top line my mother has written, with meaningful underline, Things Every Woman Should Know About Love.  Then, directly under: it doesn’t exist.

I go to the kitchen barefoot, still in my pajamas.  She’s drinking wine out of a coffee mug and shivering; it’s November and the fabric of her flowered robe is much too thin.  “What’s this?” I ask, holding the paper out for her to see.  Wind grabs it and it flutters.  She turns to look at me.  Her thick dark hair is stuffed into a giant clip and her nose is pink from cold.

“Gorda,” she says, pounding on the name she knows I hate, “I wrote this list the day I turned sixteen. I didn’t believe it, and I think you should.”

I don’t read any further.  I take the letter and roll it like I’ve seen my mother rolling cigarettes, pressing the paper tighter than a curling iron.  I fold the roll in half, then in quarters, squashing it in my fist and pressing it into the corner of my dresser drawer.

On the way to school I look at boys.  The entire species of them, all denim jackets and skateboards and bloody elbows they shove like trophies in my face.  They sing happy birthday- Aaron Lebowitz and Danny O’Malley and Carl Martin- voices cracking in uneven crescendos.  In homeroom they sing it again and we eat stale donuts and Carl plants a slimy kiss on my cheek and everyone cheers.

At night my friends and I go to the Hayden Planetarium, where the show is just for us.  We stand in the middle of a big black bowl, stars shooting above us, dropping into invisibility like small silvery ice picks.  We hold each others hands like we did when we turned eight or nine or ten.  My mother, scared of false light, waits in the Museum lobby.  She wears a tiara on her head, golden and sparkly and flashing “Happy Birthday,” letters painted on in sequined red.  She takes us to EJ’s, where the waiters have muscular arms like in the movies, where the milkshakes are thick and served in big aluminum cups, not dainty pointed glasses.  The ice cream clumps at the bottom and that’s what my mother sticks a candle in.  I have to lean over, into the almost-empty cup, to blow it out.  My wish, which I will not whisper to my friends when we curl up in our sleeping bags tonight, is for my mother to take the letter out of my dresser drawer and burn it.  To replace it with one confirming the existence.  Or, at least, telling me to find out for myself.

We follow her down Broadway like ducklings or like lemmings, looking in the windows of the stores we can’t afford.  She chooses a boutique, where the dresses in the window are delicate and lacy and feel much rougher than they look.  The price tags are tiny and paper, and my mother doesn’t let us turn them right side up.  The man at the counter is so bald his head shines, and he watches us squeeze our way into shimmery silk dresses meant for girls who haven’t even gone through adolescence.  We have breasts now, all of us, even Alice, who eats only raw oats and goat milk yogurt her mother buys at Fairway.  None of us fit, and we model for each other with the zippers only halfway closed.  The curtain is pushed back and out my mother comes, in a black silk dress with red flowers that look oriental.  The bald man kisses her hand and she kisses his back and we leave the store, just like that.  It’s windy and she walks quickly, coatless, shivering, modeling her new dress for the streetlamps and the taxi cabs.

3. Things Every Women Should Know about Love

I am twenty three and have fallen in love twice, first with a teacher who tried to kiss me; that was when I realized I didn’t like her that way.  Her name was Iris and she taught English and Painting at Huddie, a boarding school my mother sent me to the fall I was fifteen.  Iris was the opposite of my mother – homely, you could say, or maybe handsome.  Eyes green the color of cactus trees, hair long and a cross between curly and frizzy, body rail thin and covered with the loosest of fabrics.  She tried to kiss me after graduation.  We were listening to music on her porch, folk singers singing about freedom of love and freedom of religion.  Iris’ head fell on my shoulder, what I thought was a maternal gesture.  It wasn’t.  I ran back to my dorm room, mud up to my ankles.  It had rained that night.

The second person I fell in love with was a boy.  His name was Sawyer, after the Mark Twain character, and I had a vague notion his birth name was Tom – not that I would have said anything, not that I would have asked.  Sawyer was eighteen and addicted to sugar cubes.  He threw them at me when we fought, and when we weren’t fighting they melted on our tongues.  I was twenty, working in a coffee shop in Northampton.  I had just mastered the cappuccino machine when he waltzed in with his group of friends and his high metabolism, ordering foot high slices of dark chocolate cake, grabbing handfuls of brown sugar packets and shiny white sugar cubes from the bar that the manager eventually moved behind the counter.  He flirted with me to get free drinks, but only for himself.  His friends had to pay, two dollars for a cocoa, three dollars for a soda, four dollars for a pastry.  Northampton is wealthy and expensive and the clothes Sawyer wore were all designer.  For me it was a summer of torn jeans and thrift store tank tops, and the heat of the air and the steam from the coffee drove me outside, to the cool grass behind the bank.  Sawyer followed.  We watched cherry blossoms wither and fall, smelling acidic the way that once-sweet things do.  Alice came to visit and told me he was bad news, those exact words, authoritative like my mother.  She was proud of her breasts now; she wore halter tops and high heels.  When Sawyer saw her he forgot me.

4. The Letter, Part Two

I find the letter ten years after I left it. Curled in that careful way of mine – a thing of the past.  Now I fling clothes on the floor, leave dishes soaking for days in the sink, vacuum only when I can’t see past the crumbs.

The Manhattan apartment has been sold and my mother’s books are packed in tall refrigerator boxes, her clothes have been sent to the Salvation Army.  I sweep the floor and dust the ceiling, and I can hear mice above me, scratching, waiting for me to leave so they can finish fishing crumbs from crevices in the carpet and cracks in the kitchen tiles.  They are smart creatures, mice, instinctively running when I see one from the corner of my eye.  The apartment clean and the boxes sealed, I take one last breath on the balcony and leave the key with the tall black doorman who nods with fake respect, flashing a broad smile of pink lips and white teeth.

The falling snow and early hour have kept 5th avenue almost tourist-free.  A small crowd has begun to gather outside of the Whitney, and I sidestep them, buying coffee and drinking it black, the way my mother always did.  I pass stores I’ve never seen before and stores I only half remember – New Age pottery now chic, diners replaced by Cosis and toy stores replaced by Starbucks.  I buy flowers in a Green Grocer that looks familiar – same wooden racks of fruit outside, same wilting roses and tough-to-the-touch lupines.

The elevator in the hospital holds twelve, comfortably, and twenty four, uncomfortably. Thirty or so of us stand sardine-like as the floors change.  My ears have always popped more on elevators than on airplanes.  When I step off I smell sanitation, which has a stink that is stronger than the sleeping syrup I’ve been sipping on a nightly basis.  The check-in desk is fire-engine red.  The woman behind it is plump and harried, and I mutter my name, “Gorda Levin,” and am directed down a hallway coated in linoleum, to a four bed room with cheerful flowered curtains separating patients.  My mother’s pillow is printed with pictures of Daffy Duck.  I lie the flowers next to her arm, bare and freckled and all bones, skin stretched and sagging like that of an old woman.  Her voice has turned low, grumbling, a car trying to start but emptied of gas.  One day cars will run on sheer will but the laws of physics are in motion here.  Her fingers grip my wrist.

“Gorda.”

“Mom, hey.”

“You look sick, my darling.” In all our years together my mother has never called me darling.  Not in our apartment on the Upper East Side and not when she visited me at boarding school.

“I didn’t really sleep.”

She rolls over on her side.  Her hair has thinned to dark peach fuzz, her cheeks are gaunt the way she’s always wanted them.

“You got that from me,” she says.

I leave her sleeping with the flowers on her pillow.  Outside snow is thinning but it feels more like hail.  I turn right and walk to the café where Alice will meet me – down sixtieth and Broadway, across the street from the Hayden Planetarium and past the store where my mother bought the red dress the night I turned thirteen.  It is a Kids Gap now.  Bright yellow knits adorn the windows, denim skirts and sophisticated versions of OshKoshB’gosh.  A mother and her son are leaving.  She carries his knapsack, and he does handstands in the snow.