Monday, February 22, 2016

Cold Snap

Cold Snap

Susie Kaufman

I remember a soundtrack of children with gravel-impacted wounded knees crying for their mothers in Riverside Park, games played with pink rubber balls against a counterpoint of sing-song chanting. In upper Manhattan, I could hear the cars honking and backfiring, the sirens screaming, hanging out of our living room window fourteen floors above Broadway. Workmen on scaffolding leaned over precariously the better to catcall at women in high heels wiggling by. Music punctuated the ambient noise. Girl groups, big brass sections, the wall of sound. The air was dense with radio waves, the pavements imprinted with a thousand feet trying to execute the Locomotion. In my memory, it was always hot, loud and crowded. On the IRT, our breath mingled, our bodies suffered indiscriminate intimacies. Even in winter, the hiss and percussion of the radiators made a racket and it was always sweltering inside. I did not come of age in cold and quiet.

You will understand then that when the mercury fell below zero last weekend in Stockbridge, descending to -17 Saturday night, I vowed not to leave the house, fearing for my lungs and my brittle bones. It seemed an opportune time to do some writing, to leave the overworked past and the flickering glimpses of a possible future behind and sink like a stone into the present. The trouble with trying to write about the Now on a bleak, cold day is that your blood has already gone gelid in your veins, so the words don't come to mind at their usual chirpy pace. Your thoughts are stuck on an icy road and don't have the traction to get up the hill of your brain and out onto the screen. I survived Saturday whipping up a boeuf bourguignon and baking chocolate chip cookies, reasoning correctly that the heat from the oven and the homey, nostalgic aromas would promote a feeling of wellbeing, however illusory. I also talked to myself gravely about the health benefits of consuming a lot of fat in a very cold climate like native peoples in the North eating whale blubber.

By Sunday, the novelty of camping out in the living room had worn off and the demons began to occupy. Newspapers and netflix did not furnish an adequate defense. There was too much empty space begging to be filled with regrets and anxieties. I tried to access my inner Rumi, treating each incursion from the jungle interior as if it were an unexpected visitor. "The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in," suggested the Sufi poet. I did not feel hospitable. Leave me alone! I implored. An enormous blank canvas like an overtired two year old demanded my attention. All day long, columns of recriminations advanced, gaining ground, closing off possible avenues of escape. Past moments of cruelty, insufficiencies of the heart and future imaginings of catastrophe lay in wait.

So here's the dirty little secret. I'm keen on contemplative space, emptiness, silence, when I'm in charge, when I set the parameters, when it's easy. But when I feel imprisoned by it, called to surrender to circumstances beyond my control, I'm about as contemplative as a bargain hunter on Black Friday. I want out. I want more and when I'm held against my will, I kick and scream. I'm going to need to get better at this because whether I like it or not, the space I inhabit will shrink as I age. Opportunities in the physical world, in the realm of flesh and bone, will diminish. Already, I don't drive after dark. I know who my friends are and when I allow myself to stare at reality without blinking, I understand that there will be fewer of them, not more of them, as time goes on. I can't see what's coming, but whatever it is, it will be quieter and less densely populated than the clamorous street scene of my early life. My last piece of pie may be concocted out of long years of slowing down, losing ground, or short days of living absent an awareness that life might end on any ordinary Monday morning. I listen for that song, but it's faint, in the background. When I do hear it clearly, it is strangely comforting. It settles my stomach and caresses my restlessness. It warms me whatever the weather.







Monday, February 1, 2016

Living Arrangements

Living Arrangements

Susie Kaufman

You have no interest in my mother. Why should you? She was not a headliner. She was not noteworthy outside of the family and our immediate neighborhood on the Upper West Side. There, she induced a certain energy field like minor royalty, a second cousin of a third tier baroness. Her generation long gone, there are only a handful of people left who remember her powdered face, chalk white with pink circles of rouge on her cheeks and cerulean smudges on her eyelids, the seams on her stockings almost straight. How remarkable, then, that DNA dictates that her ghost has now moved its furnishings into my body. It's an almost perfect fit, my osteoporotic spine bending to accommodate hers, my thighs expanding to make room for her ample shape. I keep my used kleenex in the waistband of my pants as she did and have recently elected to wear my hair parted on the left with a jaunty wave over my right eye. Caroline, expertly wielding the comb and scissors, comments that it has a '20s look and, sure enough, there is my mother's marcelled cut from long before I was born coming into focus in the salon mirror.

Once, about five years before she died in 2006, I broke down in tears in Great Barrington when she suffered an excruciating compression fracture far away in California. Feeling helpless and anguished, it suddenly became clear to me that she had been my first home....that there was a time in 1945 when I lived inside of her in a warm, dark, wet tenement that she carried around with her when she squeezed the melons at the fruit stand and picked out a seeded rye at the bakery on upper Broadway. Of course, being well into my fifties, I knew all about gestation. But somehow I had always given more thought to my own pregnancy, my own motherhood. This moment of recognition near the turning of the millennium was a first encounter with my deep origins in the pungent folds of my mother's flesh.

The image is like a bellows, expanding and contracting, inflaming memory. Sometimes, the fire is reduced to embers. The long years of adolescence and early adulthood when I didn't want any part of her. The bitter winter in my garden where her ashes are now resting, for the most part unattended. I thought when I buried them there that she and I would chat regularly about the anemones, about the grandchildren, about the unrelenting passage of time. But words don't seem to be the medium of our exchange. She speaks to me through my short legs and misshapen feet, my pale blue lashless eyes. She inhabits me as I inhabited her seventy years ago. And she keeps me company. She is there in every gesture. When I throw back my head to wash down a pill. When I drink my coffee out of a thin porcelain cup, never a ceramic mug. I have grown up and drink it black now, not light and sweet with non-dairy creamer and saccharine as she did. But I am still married to the aristocratic pinkie lift that I must have learned at her linen-covered dining room table.

My father was morbidly sentimental. You couldn't go to a matinee with him without the crumpled handkerchief coming out of his pants pocket to dry the tears that fell at every cinematic loss or betrayal. But my mother was ensconced in her corset and devoted to decorum. When she was hurt or angry, she would take to her bed. When she felt the need to cry, she would leave the room. She couldn't bear the exposure of open grieving or gratitude. Retreating to the kitchen while my sister's husband, only sixty, lay dying. Hiding in a dark corner of a back room while her circle of friends and family celebrated her birthday with rounds of rye and ginger. Now, traveling as she is inside of my life, wandering through my days along the highway of hyperawareness, on the far side of several personal and historical upheavals, she cries openly all the time. It is my gift to her.