Yossarian Slept Here by Erica Heller

Author:Erica Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

LIMOS AND LYNX

My mother, alas, had not served in World War II, nor had she learned as expertly as her husband how to vanquish an enemy. Up until then, her own survival skills had never been seriously tested. She had an open face, and, as Barbara Gelb wrote of her in the New York Times Magazine in 1979, Mom was “. . . the only person I’ve ever known who can laugh and cry at the same time, and is, therefore, the perfect Heller heroine.” Something she couldn’t do was lie convincingly. Her mother, my grandma Dottie, tended to make up life as she went along, but my mother was a bit more pragmatic.

The one notable exception to this occurred in 1979. It was lunchtime and I was out on Fifth Avenue a few blocks from my office when I spied her coming out of what was then the Coca-Cola Building on the opposite side of the avenue. She got into a limo, bedecked in jewelry and wearing her lynx coat, a gift from my father that she loved dearly but almost never wore, as if she felt she had to protect it by keeping it at home in the closet. That day my curiosity was sparked, to say the least. A limo? The lynx? Shirley also almost never took a taxi. She once tripped climbing onto a bus, fracturing her ankle, and then rode the bus to the nearest emergency room.

When I called her that night to find out where she’d been coming from, she told me flatly that I was mistaken; that it hadn’t been her. I kept at her about it for days, but she just kept denying it. The next time I saw her and looked into that ingenuous face and questioned her about what she’d been doing that day, she looked down and finally conceded to me, very quietly, that yes, I had seen her, and that the truth was she had been to see a plastic surgeon about a possible face-lift and had simply been too embarrassed to discuss it.

I never brought that day up again, but she did, twenty years later, inadvertently, when she happened to let it slip that, in fact, it hadn’t been a doctor she’d gone to see that day at all. It had actually been a divorce lawyer. By then it was becoming clear that the glue keeping much of this family together was secrets, and that many or perhaps most of them were about to become seriously unstuck.

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