Witness

Witness

Susie Kaufman

It's like a seven layer cake, this family. When you dig in with the side of a three-tined silver fork, you get a dark glaze of ganache, a dry floury sheet, then sticky raspberry and apricot. No layer of the family story can be skipped over if the cake in its entirety is to be savored deeply. Its origins in the Balkans. Its shopkeeper livelihood uptown in the big city. The two daughters, a half generation apart. The older daughter's three children, grown to adulthood in the East Bay. One quiet, cautious. One radiant, diffuse. One wounded, craving.

"I want to talk about the family," the older sister asks the younger, visiting from back East.

"OK. Sure. Who do you want to talk about?"

"I want to know how they all died....Aunt Julie, Aunt Honey, Uncle Jerry, all of them," she demands with some urgency. She's doing research, collecting data about the end-times of relatives, none of them all that interesting when they were alive.

My big sister is celebrating her 81st birthday, not very old for most people these days, but she got old young. Vascular dementia, I think, though she doesn't seem to have a diagnosis. She naps on the couch when she's not eating and shuffles, right hand on her cane, left hand gripping the piano, the sink, when she moves around her cramped apartment in the basement of the house where she raised her children. Accumulations of twenty year old issues of The Nation and sheet music from the '40s, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, pile up on the floor, making navigation treacherous. Every year, it diminishes the tempo of her living, the square footage she is willing to move through. She will not go out to commune with the nasturtium in the sun-drenched North Berkeley back yard. She prefers the moldy, dark, familiar confines of her apartment. It suits her.

"You didn't tell me how mother died. Why didn't anyone tell me?"

As it happens, she was there when our mother took her last breath in a nursing home at the age of 99, but she doesn't remember and if you press her to respond to a question that she doesn't know the answer to, she becomes irritable.

"Do we have to talk about that now?" she grouches.

Still, I'm patting myself on the back, overflowing with self-congratulation. The kind that comes from the perception of devotion, openness and generosity to a loved one in trouble. I think...I'm the only one she can ask about family members long gone. I'm her link to the past. Without me, she can't really heal the wounds that are still festering. Me me me.

She wants to talk about her longstanding hostile feelings towards our mother. I have heard this song before, all my life, but I never really learned the lyrics. She was ten when I was born, so I missed the tone of her childhood, the key of our mother's limited interest in children. I ask her if there was anyone else she felt close to when she was young.

"Aunt Julie was always friendly," she says. "But then one day, I can remember it exactly, we were sitting on the gold brocade sofa in the living room and I was telling her how mean mother was, but she betrayed me. Aunt Julie betrayed me. She acted like she cared, but then she didn't take my side. She went and told on me. After that, mother didn't talk to me for days. She put on that Empress of All the Russias face, you know the one I mean, and just waltzed right by me playing jacks on the kitchen linoleum."

I cherish the story I've invented that my mother and sister resolved their differences at the end. I mean, I really need to believe that. Even if it's not true. Even though I know whatever my sister wants to hang on to is hers to keep, like an old shirt, stained but comfy. The heaviness of carrying that illusion around starts to interfere with my good intentions, reduces my caregiving to the lowest level of nursiness. I pick up after her. I watch her, eagle-eyed, to make sure she doesn't fall. I demand that she takes her pills when I want her to take them. 

"Yes, mother," she responds to maximum effect.

At her birthday party, we watch vintage slides on a rented carousel projector. My sister is luminous. There she is in the fall of 1958, pregnant with her first baby. She's wearing a raspberry tinted sweater, almost the identical color to the one she's wearing at the party. In the background, Ella Fitzgerald is singing "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." 

We lean our heads together and sing "I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering whimpering child again" and we eat cake, lots of cake.