Mother of My Mother by Hope Edelman

Author:Hope Edelman [Edelman, Hope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56982-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1999-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

* Patricia in the preceding anecdote acted in a similar manner when she threatened her mother with her grandmother’s punishment. She sensed her mother occupied the same rung as she on the family power ladder, and used that knowledge to her advantage.

12

Six Weeks Before Thanksgiving: 1987

“We’re going to The Club for Thanksgiving,” my grandmother says. I’m sitting on the floor of my little house in Tennessee. She’s sitting somewhere in her big house in Mount Vernon. Fiber optics are as successful as they’ve promised us they’ll be; it sounds like she’s right next door. I can hear her breathing softly, waiting for a response. “We’re going to The Club for Thanksgiving,” she says again, softer this time.

We’re. That means her and her sisters, Goldie and Bea. Her two surviving daughters, my aunts. One uncle, two cousins, and possibly my great-uncle Isaac. My father, my sister, and my brother. In other words, we means everyone, except (so far) me.

Going. That means driving, in big, heavy American cars. Everyone, again, except for me, who’ll have to fly. I live six hundred miles away. That’s by choice. No one is happy about this. Except me.

To The Club. That’s the country club my grandparents joined nearly thirty years ago, back when Jews were still systematically denied entry to other upper-middle-class social clubs. It’s a meticulously landscaped place with a stately white clubhouse, a continuously emerald golf course, and an eerily quiet pool area. It’s not a club to which my family has truly ever belonged, not to those tight circles of tanned, aging golfers or antenna-thin Westchester women with their black designer pantsuits and gold. But my grandmother automatically pays her dues every June. It guarantees her a place to hold Thanksgiving dinner, when her family assembles in the clubhouse dining room around a circular table whose diameter shrinks a little bit more each year.

For Thanksgiving. A day of family unity and gratitude, and thanks to God for keeping us healthy and happy this past year. Well, healthy, at least. I’m still working on happy. Earlier this year, I finally started acknowledging that my mother is dead. Which means never coming back. Which means I’m now either a few years ahead of whoever’s sitting next to me at the Thanksgiving table or a few years behind. Either way, we’re not all in sync. And we haven’t been, for years.

The subtext of We’re going to The Club for Thanksgiving, I know, is that I’ve skipped the past three Thanksgivings in a row. My father was the one who called me with those invitations, and it was easy to say no to him. Mmm, I’ve just got too much work right now, or You know, this year I’m thinking about coining for New Year’s instead. He doesn’t argue with me. He knows the real reason I don’t go is that I don’t want to, and he doesn’t want to have to hear it. We have an understanding there. It’s not so easy for me to refuse my grandmother.

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