The Draw by Lee Siegel

Author:Lee Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

5

SHOWDOWN

Certain things that people said to me have stuck in my mind with the power of literature.

About twenty-five years later, in New York, after my divorce from my first wife, a much younger woman I was seeing told me a story. It was Thanksgiving night and we were on the phone. Her name was Charlotte. She had gone home to her mother’s house somewhere in suburban New Jersey. I had spent the night alone, preferring to buy a takeout dinner at a delicatessen earlier in the day, which I heated up that evening, than to sit, embarrassed about having nowhere to go, in a diner or a Chinese restaurant. She had given me her number, assuming that I wouldn’t call, and I took it, intending not to. In the end, I called her anyway. She was glad to have someone to relieve her boredom and to pull her away from her antagonism with her mother. I was grateful to have someone to talk to.

Her parents were divorced and she was out of touch with her father. Her mother had very little money. She lived in an affluent town in the well-appointed house the court had awarded her. Charlotte hated leaving her shared apartment in New York, where she was a graduate student at New York University, to return to her mother’s house for the holiday, but she had no choice. Her mother hectored her into coming back, and threatened to stop sending her the small but vital checks she put in the mail every month if she didn’t. For all that, once she arrived home, her mother, Charlotte complained, could not stop criticizing her. Infuriated by her mother, feeling trapped and infantilized, she spoke more and more rapidly, more and more half to herself and half to me, until her own voice and her critique of her mother calmed her down.

In the course of this conversation, Charlotte related to me the following story. Across the street from her mother’s house, where Charlotte had grown up, there lived a couple who had once worked together in the CIA. They were married for thirty years. They raised two children who, a few years earlier, had left home to go off to college. One day, shortly before Thanksgiving, the husband got up from the kitchen table where he and his wife had eaten breakfast together every morning. He walked over to his wife and punched her in the face. He kept punching her until her face was a bloody pulp. Then, without taking anything with him, he walked out of the house and disappeared. No one had seen or heard from him since then.

Out of nowhere, my mother erupted into another person. She developed another self the way a lobster will grow another claw to replace the one that has been bitten off. I could see that these weird modes of behavior were slowly becoming normal in her eyes. She tested them at first, cautiously, the way you run your tongue over and over the hole in your mouth left by a tooth that has just been pulled.

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