Do You Remember Me? by Judith Levine

Author:Judith Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Decompensation

I RETURN TWO WEEKS LATER to a New York stunned and gentled. But the citywide truce has not substantially changed relations chez Levine. I take the subway to Twenty-fourth Street for dinner, Mom opens the door, I take off my jacket and sit on the sofa. The first thing she says is, “You never ask me about my life.” Meaning, I don’t ask about Sid.

“How’s Sid?” I ask, unconvincingly, and she fills me in with equal enthusiasm. I don’t have to ask about Dad. She has told me he is worse, and I can see what she means. “Bring your chair in here, Dad,” I say when we are ready to eat. Blank stare. “Do you want some water?” “What?”

A week later, on a walk with him, I try to get a battery for his strange new wristwatch (which turns out to be a portion of a personal alarm system Mom has gotten from some agency). I drag him from hardware store to drugstore to supermarket, encountering the bewilderment of every clerk. Dad keeps feeling his wrist where I’ve removed the band. I tell him he’ll have it back in a minute; I’m fixing it. He seems skeptical, then resigned to the incomprehensible trials everyone regularly puts him through. Then he stops on the sidewalk and refuses to move. “So where are you going now? Where is it?” It’s as if he’s decided that I can’t fix the thing, or anything. Or simply that things are not fixable.

Things feel unfixable between Mom and me.

Jill Rosenberg, the Goldsteins’ daughter, mentions that her mother is going to Mom’s birthday party.

“I heard you’re having a birthday party,” I say to Mom the next time we talk.

“Yes,” she says brightly. “Sid is inviting everyone to a little Italian place in Chelsea.” She ticks off the guest list: Gloria, the Millers, the Jacobsons, Sid’s daughter Elinor …

“And Paul and I aren’t invited?”

“I assumed you wouldn’t want to come.”

“Why did you assume that?”

“Well, you don’t seem to be interested in my life.”

“You mean Sid.”

“You’ve told me, Judy, that you don’t want to have a relationship with him.”

“Number one, I have never told you that. Number two, whether or not I have a relationship with Sid, I have a relationship with you. You’re my mother, remember? Why would you think I don’t want to come to your birthday party? Didn’t you think it might hurt my feelings if you invited everyone else except me?”

“Okay, okay, I didn’t mean anything by it. Come to the party.”

Progress is being made, though, in stitching together a life for Dad so Mom can get on with hers. She has hired a caregiver, a warm, smart, experienced Argentine woman named Nilda Palombo. At sixty-eight, Nilda is plump but compact and energetic. She wears a pressed housecoat in the apartment and, though she was a hippie in her younger days, running a tea house in a northern Argentine beach town, she now dons a cashmere sweater, skirt, makeup, and jewelry whenever she goes out, even to the supermarket.

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