***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
Copyright © 2016 Sue Margolis
Chapter 1
“Gran’ma, did you know that a shrimp’s heart is in its head?”
“I did not know that,” I say, noting that my grandson’s upside-down face has turned a worrying shade of red. He’s doing a headstand on the sofa, his body leaning against the back cushions.
“It’s true. I read it in my Amazing Facts book. And butterflies taste things with their feet.”
“They don’t. That’s stupid,” Rosie pipes up. “Now shut up. I’m trying to watch the movie.”
“Yes, they do. And you shut up.” Sam pokes his tongue out at his sister.
“Sam, don’t do that. Rosie’s right. You’re spoiling the film. And I wish you’d get down off your head. Your face looks like a tomato. It can’t be good for you.”
“Gran’ma. Now you’re talking, too,” Rosie pleads. “I can’t hear.”
I whisper an apology.
“I like standing on my head,” Sam says. “And Mum and Dad say it’s OK.”
His parents are both doctors, so—assuming he’s telling the truth—who am I to argue?
“Well, I think you look stupid,” says Rosie.
“You look stupid.”
Rosie has had enough. She reaches onto the coffee table, picks up the remote and hits the off button. “There.” She’s sitting with her arms folded, her face defiant and cross.
“Hey, that’s not fair,” Sam says. “I was watching that.”
“No, you weren’t. You were talking and standing on your head.”
“I can multitask.” He sounds just like his father.
“And Gran’ma was talking, too.”
“You’re right,” I say to Rosie. “We were both being rude.” I shoot Sam a stern look, which I’m not sure he can see from his upside-down position. “We’ll be quiet from now on . . . won’t we, Sam?”
He offers a reluctant OK and then tells his sister to put the movie back on.
“No. You’ve both ruined it.”
I’ve apologized. I’m not about to beg forgiveness from an uppity five-year-old.
We’ve been attempting to watch Wallace and Gromit—the kids on one sofa, me stretched out on the other. Rosie had been campaigning to watch Frozen. Sam, who understandably loathes girlie princess films, was pretty vocal about not wanting to watch it. He was campaigning for Spider-Man. I was with Sam on this. Not only has Rosie forced me to watch Frozen so many times that I every time I set the table I find myself singing “who knew we owned eight thousand salad plates?”—I also happen to think it’s sexist twaddle. But I let it go. I’ve refrained from telling her that if she makes me watch it again, I will be forced to eat my own head. I have also resisted the urge—as has her mother—to spoil the magic by telling her that there’s more to life than being in possession of a hand-span waist, strange steroidal eyes and a handsome prince.
Since Rosie refused to watch Spider-Man, I suggested a few gender-neutral films and in the end we agreed on Wallace and Gromit—“A Matter of Loaf and Death.”
“OK,” Rosie says, partially emerging from her funk. “You can put the movie back on. But you both have to promise to be quiet.”
“Duh. We already did.” Her brother is rolling his eyes. Since he’s still standing on his head, this looks particularly amusing.
I pick up the remote and hit “play”—only it doesn’t. The film starts speeding back.
“Grandma, what on erf are you doing?” Rosie cries. “Quick, press ‘pause.’”
“I am pressing ‘pause,’ but it won’t stop.”
Rosie leaps off the sofa. “Look. You’re pressing Select. My granddaughter can barely read, but she recognizes every word on the TV remote. She grabs it, hits “stop” and “fast forward” and in a few seconds we’re where we’re meant to be. She pats me on the head. “It’s all right, Gran’ma. It’s complicated for old peoples.”
“Er, excuse me,” I say, grabbing the remote again and with complete accuracy hitting “pause.” “I’m not quite in my dotage. I only pressed the wrong button because I’m not wearing my glasses.”
“What’s ‘dotage’?” Rosie says.
I explain.
“Nana Frieda’s really old. So is she in her dotage?”
I want to say that my mother has been predicting her imminent decline and demise ever since I’ve known her. So you could argue that she’s been in her dotage for the last fifty-seven years. But this isn’t the time for a discussion about how my mum has spent her entire adult life enjoying bad health. So instead I go for a more diplomatic response.
“Well, Nana’s in her eighties, so technically speaking, I guess she is in her dotage. But I wouldn’t say that when she’s around. Plus she’s pretty strong and still gets about so maybe she isn’t quite there yet.”
“Then why does she say she’s ill all the time and that her kit-kas will be the end of her?” I’m laughing to myself. Hearing my grandchildren struggle to speak Yiddish always amuses me.
“And what are kit-kas?”
“It’s pronounced Kish-kas. And it means guts.”
“Yuck.”
“Nana Frieda says things like that when she gets a bit tired. Don’t take any notice. She’s fine, honestly.”
In fact, right now—despite her numerous ailments—my mother is shopping in the West End. She’s gone with her best friend, Estelle Silverfish, to look at spring coats. I offered to drive them into town. But they said—quite rightly—that even on a Saturday the traffic would be murder. So they schlepped on the tube.
As the film gets under way for the third time, the washing machine beeps from across the hall to tell me the laundry’s done. If I don’t transfer it to the dryer right away, I’ll forget. Then everything will end up smelling of mildew and I’ll need to put it through again. I tell the kids to carry on watching without me. Then I head into the downstairs loo-cum-laundry-room.
I try to ignore the bulging refuse sack sitting on top of the dryer. It’s been there for months, stuffed with Brian’s clothes. Not the decent stuff: the suits, jackets and lamb’s wool sweaters. I haven’t got the heart to bag them up—let alone get rid of them. This is just old jeans, shirts, boxers and the like. Every time I go to the supermarket, I mean to take the bag with me and drop it in the textiles recycling bin in the car park. But somehow it hasn’t happened.
I transfer the laundry to the dryer, set the timer and hit “start.” The whirring of the drum sets up a vibration. A thick navy sock with a yellow toe end falls out of the black sack, onto the floor. It’s one of Brian’s GoldToe socks. He used to say they were the most comfortable socks on the planet. He was evangelical about them. “GoldToe . . . Now, there’s a proper sock,” he’d say to any male companion prepared to have his ear chewed. “It’s like walking on a cushion. The bugger of it is you can’t get them over here, or even on Amazon. I order them from Macy’s in New York. Even with the import duty, it’s worth it.”
He even gave Sam and Rosie’s dad, Tom, a pair to try. Our son-in-law—who shops in American Apparel, wears edgy thick-rimmed glasses and has one of those short-back-and-sides, heavy-on-top hipster haircuts—accepted the seriously uncool socks with admirable good grace.
A few days later Brian wanted to know how he was getting on with them.
“Yeah. Great. Very comfortable.”
Rosie, who was sitting on my lap, whispered in my ear: “Daddy’s fibbing. Mummy won’t let him wear them ’cos she says they’re for old mens. But let’s not tell Granddad ’cos he’ll get upset.”
I gave her a squeeze and said that might be for the best. Not that Brian would have been remotely offended if Tom or Abby had handed back the socks. Brian was many things, but thin-skinned wasn’t one of them.
I pick up the sock and hold it to my cheek. Pretty soon I’m blubbing. It’s been eighteen months since I last saw him. Touched him. Heard his voice. I’m still raw. Memories still lacerate.
For months, Abby has been nagging me to get rid of the sack of clothes. Last weekend when she stopped by for a cup of tea, she was on me again.
“Mum, why is all that stuff still in the loo?”
“Come on. You have to admit I’ve made progress. The bag’s been in my bedroom for months. At least now I’ve moved it downstairs.”
“You have . . . into another holding area,” she said, leaning against the kitchen worktop and taking another sip of tea. “How long do you intend to keep it there?”
“I don’t know. Until I’m ready to part with it, I guess.”
“But it’s just old underpants and socks.”
“I know, but your dad’s clothes help me stay connected to him. Imagine if they were Tom’s.”
She took the point but she didn’t back off. “Why don’t you let me deal with it? There are recycling bins at the end of my street.”
“Darling, I know you’re trying to help, but you have to stop putting pressure on me. I’ll know when the time is right.”
“Somebody has to put pressure on you. It’s been well over a year since Dad died and you still haven’t cleared out his things. How many times have I’ve offered to come and help? You need to do this.”
“Why?”
“To move on.”
“Why does the whole world want me to move on? Suppose I don’t want to?”
“So instead of getting on with your life, you’re going to stay like this . . . in some weird limbo. I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t,” I said, aware that my words sounded sharper than I had intended. “Because you’ve never had your husband of nearly forty years die on you.”
“I know, but . . .”
“You have no idea what I’m going through. How much I’m still grieving. Every day I decide that this will be the day I’ll get rid of the bag and then I find an excuse not to do it. I procrastinate because it feels like I would be abandoning him, casting him adrift.”
Abby put an arm around my shoulders. “Oh, Mum . . . That’s daft. You wouldn’t be abandoning him. It’s your memories that are important. Nothing could destroy those—certainly not getting rid of a few clothes.”
“You’re right. I know I’m being ridiculous. . . .”
“And you know that Dad would have wanted you to get on with your life. It’s time to start. It really is.”
“And I will, soon. I just need a bit more time.”
Abby sighed but didn’t push it any further. We stood there, not saying anything for a few moments. Then, by way of lightening the atmosphere, she asked after her grandmother. “So, which bit of her body is Nana Frieda complaining about now?”
“Her kishkes seem to have gone quiet for the time being. Right now it’s her legs and her back.”
“I honestly don’t know how you cope. I love Nana to bits, but she’s so bloody needy.”
When she was a young woman, my mother’s ailments were imaginary. In her old age they are real, although—much to her disappointment—not particularly serious. These days my mother doesn’t so much suffer from hypochondria as from hyperbole. The touch of arthritis, acid reflux and slightly raised blood pressure are real. The problem is the drama. Mum never has a bit of an ache or a pain. She is always in agony. When she catches a cold it’s “an acute chest infection.” A headache is a migraine. A stomach pain is gastric flu. You can bet your life that if my mother ever gets pneumonia, it won’t be double—it’ll be triple.
Her GP, the endlessly tolerant Dr. Moore, whom she’s been seeing for a decade or more, might send her for the occasional test. Mum gets straight on the phone to her friends from her seniors’ day center: “The doctors”—note the plural—“have no idea what’s wrong, so they’re sending me for a battery of tests.”
My mother uses illness to get love.
Time and again when I was a kid, I would come home from school to find her reclining on the sofa, forearm draped over her brow. “Judy . . . darlink . . . my back is in two.” Only she pronounced “back” as “bek.” She’d been in this country since she was seven years old and she’d never lost her German accent. “And maybe you could make me a hot water bottle.” Or she would have one of her “migraines” and be in bed with the curtains drawn. In the summer her ankles would swell up so I would be the one schlepping bowls of cold water into the lounge so that she could soak her feet. “You’re a goot girl,” she would say. “Come here for a kiss.” She would make room for me on the couch and cuddle me in her bony arms. Then she would start singing—softly, wearily as if she weren’t long for this world: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. . . .”
I knew that people didn’t die of backache or swollen ankles, but even so I worried about my mother. It didn’t help that she was so tiny and bird like. Even without her symptoms, she gave off an air of vulnerability. I remember taking my fears to my father. I don’t know how old I was—six or seven maybe.
“Daddy, is Mummy going to die?”
He started laughing. “Not unless she gets run over by a bus. I know there’s not much of her and she doesn’t look very strong, but your mother manages to cart huge bags of groceries back from the store every day. She cooks. She keeps the house spotless. Take it from me, the woman is as strong as an ox. Stop worrying.”
“But she’s ill all the time and I get scared.”
“She’s not ill exactly. She gets a bit under the weather sometimes. And then she needs to lie down. That’s all it is. So just be kind.”
“I am kind.”
“I know you are, sweetheart,” he said, cupping my chin. “It’s hard for both of us. But we have to remember what she went through.”
Those words have been the sound track to my life.
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