On Sunday, in the late morning, my mother arrived and we went to speak alone together in the solarium at the end of the corridor. I wanted to show her how steady I was on my feet and how far I could walk and how well I felt altogether. I was thrilled to see her here, away from New Jersey, in a part of the country unknown to her — nothing like that had ever happened before — but knew that when Olivia came I would have to introduce the two of them and that my mother, who missed nothing, would see the scar on Olivia’s wrist and ask me what I was doing with a girl who had tried to commit suicide, a question whose answer I didn’t yet know. Rarely an hour went by when I didn’t ask it of myself.
I thought at first to tell Olivia not to visit on the day that my mother was coming. But I’d already hurt her enough by stupidly alluding to her blowing Cottler and then again when I’d asked in all innocence for her to tell me about being a doctor’s daughter. I didn’t want to hurt her again, and so did nothing to keep her slashed wrist out of the range of my hawk-eyed mother. I did nothing — which is to say, I did exactly the wrong thing. Again.
My mother was exhausted from her overnight train journey — followed by an hourlong bus ride — and though it was only a couple of months since I’d seen her at home, she struck me as a much older, more haggard mother than the one I’d left behind. A harried look I was unaccustomed to seeing deepened her wrinkles and pervaded her features and seemed ingrained in her very skin. Though I kept reassuring her about me — and trying to reassure myself about her — and though I lied about how happy I was with everything at Winesburg, she emanated a sadness so uncharacteristic of her that finally I had to ask, “Ma, is there something wrong that I don’t know?”
“Something’s wrong that you do know. Your father,” she said and startled me further by beginning to cry. “Something is very wrong with your father, and I don’t know what it is.”
“Is he sick? Does he have something?”
“Markie, I think he’s losing his mind. I don’t know what else to call it. You know how he was with you on the phone about the operation? That’s how he is now about everything. Your father, who could confront any hardship in the family, survive any ordeal with the store, be pleasant to the worst of the customers — even after we were robbed that time and the thieves locked him in the refrigerator and emptied the register, you remember how he said, ‘The money we can replace. Thank God nothing happened to any of us.’ The same man who could say that, and believe that, now he can’t do anything without a million worries. This is the man who when Abe got killed in the war held Uncle Muzzy and Aunt Hilda together, who when Dave got killed in the war held Uncle Shecky and Aunt Gertie together, who to this day has held together the whole Messner family, with all of their tragedies — and now you should see what happens when all he’s doing is driving the truck. He’s been driving around Essex County all his life and now suddenly he’s delivering orders as though everyone on the road is a maniac except him. ‘Look at the guy — look what he did. Did you see that woman — is she crazy? Why must people cross with the yellow light? Do they want to get run down, do they not want to live to see their grandchildren grow up and go to school and get married?’ I serve him his dinner and he sniffs at his food as if I’m trying to poison him. This is true. ‘Is this fresh?’ he says. ‘Smell this.’ Food prepared by me in my own spotless kitchen and he won’t eat it for fear that it’s spoiled and will poison him. We’re at the table, just the two of us, and I’m eating and he’s not. It’s horrible. He sits there not taking a bite and waiting to see if I keel over.”
“And is he like that at the store?”
“Yes. Fearful all the time. ‘We’re losing customers. The supermarket is ruining our business. They’re selling choice for prime, don’t think I don’t know it. They don’t give customers an honest weight, they’re charging them seventeen cents a pound for chicken, and then they turn around and get it up to twenty on the scale. I know how they work it, I know for a fact that they’re cheating the customer—’ On it goes, darling, night and day. It is true that our business is off, but everybody’s business is off in Newark. People are moving to the suburbs and the businesses are following behind. The neighborhood is undergoing a revolution. Newark’s not the same as it was during the war. Many people in the city are hurting suddenly, but still, it isn’t as though we’re starving to death. We have expenses to meet, but who doesn’t? Do I complain about working again? No. Never. Yet that’s how he acts. I prepare and wrap an order the same way I’ve been preparing and wrapping orders for twenty-five years, and he tells me, ‘Not like that — the customers don’t like it like that! You’re in such a hurry to go home, look how you wrap it!’ He even complains how I take orders on the phone. The customers always love to talk to me, to give the orders to me, because I show some concern. Now I talk too much to the customers. He has no patience anymore for me to be nice to our customers! I’m on the phone taking an order, and I say, ‘Oh, so your grandchildren are going to be coming. That’s nice. How do they like school?’ And your father will pick up the other phone and tell the customer, ‘You want to talk to my wife, you call at night, not during business hours,’ and he hangs up. If this goes on, if he keeps this up, if I have to keep watching him push the peas around the plate with his fork, looking like a crazy man for the cyanide pill … Darling, is this what they call a personality change or has something terrible happened to him? Is it something new — is that possible? Out of nowhere? At fifty? Or is it something long buried that has come to the surface? Have I been living all these years with a time bomb? All I know is that something has made my husband into a different person. My own dear husband, and now I am completely confused about whether he is one man or two!”
She ended there, in tears again, the mother who never cried, never faltered, a well-spoken American-born girl who picked up Yiddish from him so as to speak it to the elderly customers, a South Side High graduate who’d taken the commercial course there and could have easily worked as a bookkeeper at a desk in an office but who learned to butcher and prepare meat from him in order to work beside him in the store instead, whose bedrock dependability, whose sensible words and coherent thoughts, had filled me with confidence throughout a childhood that was unembattled. And she became a bookkeeper in the end anyway — a bookkeeper also, I should say, who after coming home from working all day at the store kept the accounts at night and spent the last day of each month sending out the bills on our own lined “Messner Kosher Meat” billing stationery with the little drawing of a cow on the upper left side and the drawing of a chicken on the upper right. When I was a child, what could buoy me up more than the sight of those drawings at the top of our billing stationery and the fortitude of the two of them? Once upon a time an admirable, well-organized, hardworking family, emanating unity, and now he was frightened of everything and she was out of her mind with grief over what she wasn’t entirely sure whether or not to label a “personality change”—and I had as good as run away from home.
“Maybe you should have told me,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me it was so extensive?”
“I didn’t want to bother you at school. You had your studies.”
“But when do you think this began?”
“The first night he locked you out of the house, that’s when. That night changed everything. You don’t know how I fought with him before you got home that night. I never told you. I didn’t want to embarrass him further. ‘What are you accomplishing by double-locking the door?’ I asked him. ‘Do you really want your son not to come into the house, is that why you’re double-locking it? You think you’re teaching him a lesson,’ I told him. ‘What will you do if he teaches you a lesson and goes somewhere else to sleep? Because that’s what a person with any sense does when he finds himself locked out — he doesn’t stand around in the cold, waiting to get pneumonia. He gets up and he goes where it’s warm and he’s welcome. He’ll go to a friend, you’ll see. He’ll go to Stanley’s house. He’ll go to Alan’s house. And their parents will let him in. He won’t take this sitting down, not Markie.’ But your father refused to budge. ‘How do I know where he is at this hour? How do I know he’s not in some whorehouse?’ We’re lying in bed and that’s what he’s hollering — about whether my son is in a whorehouse or not. ‘How do I know,’ he asks me, ‘that he’s not out at this hour ruining his life?’ I couldn’t control him, and this is the result.”