Your Duck Is My Duck Read online

  A hazy, swimming rectangle, filled like a battlefield with a distant clangor, inflates between me and my mother, though her large, staring face floats right in front of my eyes. Sweat begins to film my upper lip and under my arms, and I squeeze my clammy hands together as I hear my mother saying, “Boys know that girls who are not pretty are desperate for attention, and they congratulate themselves on the fact that those girls will do anything at all for what they can pretend to themselves is affection. So when a boy tells a girl who is not pretty that she is pretty or that he cares about her, she can make a fool of herself or not, as she chooses, but she believes him at her peril.” And I am just about to be dissolved when I feel my aunts, with their strange, aliens’ faces, which mine has come to resemble, marshal all their strength to cluster in the air behind me, a little phalanx facing my mother too, and I take a deep breath.

  “What do you mean?” I say.

  “That’s what I mean,” she says.

  “What?”

  “That. What I said.” She gets up and goes into her room, closing the door loudly behind her.

  * * *

  “You must have wanted to get caught going through her things,” Jake said to me many years later, when, in our early elation over the miracle that all the elements of the universe—a web of happenstance beyond calculation—had brought us together, we were tremulously passing back and forth to each other our biographies, containing all their apparently random data, as if they were precious archeological trophies that would sooner or later yield up, from some overlooked fold or crevice, a credible explanation, a key.

  Maybe I did want to get caught—you could certainly make an argument for that, of the shallow psychological sort that generally contains some shred of accuracy—or maybe I did not. But in any event, I did get caught in her room going through a drawer, and by the time I did and the inevitable annihilating explosion occurred, I was sixteen and just out of high school and had grown far removed from Mary Margaret and God and any desire for salvation, and the money I had filched from my mother over the years and hoarded was enough, supplemented by hitchhiking, to take me nearly a thousand miles away, though no distance at all could be put between me and the unmistakable signifier of my weakness and cowardice, my pitiful, leechlike dependency on the lifeblood of others, my congenital inadequacy: “I should have known that you were one of them,” my mother said, “as soon as I saw that you were getting their nose.”

  * * *

  It was owing to Jake that I eventually got work illustrating medical texts and that I studied enough biology and anatomy to be able to do so at all. When we met, I was taking a graduate degree in graphic art and working in bars and restaurants of various types. Since I’d arrived in New York I’d been a fry cook and a line cook and a waitress and a prep chef, and at the end of my shifts my overtaxed feet would swell with venom, which I would sometimes try to soak out.

  But the night I met Jake I was tending bar at a place popular with young, stoned, Wall Street high rollers. It was a good and lucrative job, the best I’d ever had. The person who turned out to be Jake was sitting at the end of the bar under a feeble light, trying to read. He put a fifty down in front of him, and I poured him a draft and forgot all about him. My attention was on one of the regulars, whom I thought of, with loathing, as Mr. Perfect.

  Mr. Perfect was the idol of our manager, Nelson, and he almost never came in without a shockingly gorgeous girl, rarely the same one twice. They would sit down at the bar, Mr. Perfect and the girl, and the predictable theatrics would start right up, so the moment he appeared I’d resign myself to a night of watching a wallet flirt with a price tag.

  Mr. Perfect always ordered their drinks and awaited them and then criticized them a bit with a warm, genial manner as he suavely basked in the sunshine of his own power and his date’s gorgeousness, a demonstration, obviously, intended for an audience. When the smugness index could go no higher, Mr. Perfect and his date would slip off their barstools and slide toward the door, merging as they went, leaving the rest of us adrift in their gamey hormonal wake to face our empty lives.

  It was not Jake’s presence in particular on that night that unmuzzled me, though it pleased him to think so, of course. But had there been no witness to my degradation, no personable man reading at the end of the bar, I might have made it through the shift without opening my mouth.

  In any case, I happened to be mixing a martini for Mr. Perfect’s date as, right in front of me, Mr. Perfect was gazing into her eyes and scrounging under her sweater. “I’m sorry,” he was saying, “but she leaves my mail in a mess to show that she’s been working on it, she can’t make a decent cup of coffee, she bites her nails disgustingly, she’s awkward on the phone with clients, and this morning she actually put a call through while I was in a meeting with Rutherford.” “You’re such a perfectionist!” the date said. “I hate being a perfectionist,” he said. “It’s a character flaw, but I am a perfectionist so I had to fire her.”

  “Well, but maybe you didn’t have to fire her because you’re a perfectionist,” I suggested. “Maybe you had to fire her because you’re an asshole.”

  The warm and genial expression emptied from Mr. Perfect’s face. It was the first time he had ever actually looked at me. “And you’re fired, too,” he said.

  “You can’t fire me,” I said.

  “I can fire you,” said Nelson, unfolding out of some dimness. “You’re fired, will you get out of here?”

  “Gladly,” I said, tossing my bar rag down as I extracted myself from behind the bar.

  The guy at the end of the bar had looked up from his book and was staring in my direction with a lovestruck expression. I glanced over my shoulder, but no one was standing behind me. I glanced back at him. “You,” he said. “You, will you go somewhere else and have a drink with me?”

  “I’m filthy,” I said. “Are you kidding? I’m disgusting. I’m covered with grease and brine. I’m sweating.”

  “So, will you go have a drink with me?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m filthy.”

  “So will you go take a bath with me?” he said.

  Over the years, it has dawned on me that people who have an immediate and deep response to each other also have an immediate and deep inkling of the dangers in store, and express significant warnings to each other that they then instantly forget for a very long time. “Look, I don’t enjoy being an out-of-control furious maniac,” I said. “If you think this is fun, that’s a problem!”

  “You won’t be an out-of-control furious maniac if you hang out with me,” he said. “I’ll make you happy!”

  “That’s sort of an enraging thing to say,” I said.

  “Will you please get out of here!” Nelson said.

  “Right away, boss,” I said.

  “Wait,” Jake said. He grabbed the fifty he had put on the bar and produced a pen from his pocket. “Give me your number!”

  In my confusion I hurriedly wrote my number on the fifty, then tried to snatch it away from him. “Hey, you’re just going to spend that, and every ax murderer in town will be calling me.”

  Jake tore the bill in two and handed me the half without my number. “I’m broke,” he said. “I’m a grad student. Have pity. I’ll tape it up when we see each other, and we’ll go spend it on a movie!”

  “Will you get the fuck out of here now!” Nelson said.

  “You don’t have to ask me twice!” I said, and slammed out the door.

  * * *

  Really, I believed that I had put my mother mostly out of my head during those years. But late one night, a little tipsy and with great trepidation, I called my childhood phone number. To my shock, the voice that answered was my mother’s, and I realized that I had been waiting all that time to assemble a file of unimpeachable credentials before I contacted her. So pathetic. I might as well have been bringing a mauled mouse to my owner’s door.

  “You might have thought about me,” she said. “You might have thou
ght about the worry. I was sick with worry about you. I didn’t even know if you were alive until Morrie told me he had heard from you, a year or two ago. It nearly killed me.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I said evenly—though so intense was the flood of vengeful triumph engulfing me that later I couldn’t remember how I came to find myself on the floor after I hung up the phone, though a few bruises suggested that I had simply lost consciousness for a moment and clonked myself against a table on the way down—“but you did say that you despised me, that I was a worthless waste of your life, that I was personally repulsive, whatever you meant by that—”

  “Now, how could I ever have said anything like—”

  “—that you knew the minute I was born that you should have given me to some poor stooge for adoption, that I smelled, that you never wanted to see me again, that you would have traded me for Morrie and a bag of compost any day—that sort of thing.”

  “I was disappointed in you,” she said. “I said things I didn’t necessarily mean.”

  “Ah, well then,” I said.

  “After all, you were no picnic. Are you in trouble?”

  “Do you mean am I pregnant?”

  “Well?” she said.

  I was not pregnant, I told her. Nor was I in trouble of any kind. I had only called to tell her that, on the contrary, I was very well. I did not mention, of course, that I had graduated merely cum laude, but I did let it be understood that I had done well enough at a respected college (not one she respected, as it turned out) and had gone on to acquire a graduate degree, and that I was with a person she could hardly sniff at, someone who did work with deadly pathogens.

  “‘With’?” she said. “A person?” I heard her sit down abruptly.

  Not to worry, as it happened the person I was with was a man, a very nice, flawlessly presentable man. A man who had stood by me, a man who had a high opinion of my abilities and character, a man who, in fact, actually liked—

  “And is this paragon a doctor?”

  I hesitated. “A researcher.”

  “I see. A researcher. And how long have you been with this researcher?”

  “How long have we been living together?” I said. “A few years.”

  “‘Living together’!” she said. “Is that how I brought you up?”

  Most of my intimate involvements had lasted from about midnight to about 2 A.M., as my mother might have expected of someone not on a pedestal, but the span of this particular liaison, with which I had intended to impress her, had obviously had the opposite effect, and after all this time I was still not equipped to endure her opprobrium. “Well,” I said cheerfully, “‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure.”

  She started to chortle but collected herself.

  * * *

  After that call, we spoke from time to time, cautiously. And then one afternoon she called to say that Aunt Bernice had died and as she’d expended so much effort on me she probably would have liked to know that I’d at least be willing to take a day off from all my important business to fly out and attend her funeral.

  Jake insisted on coming with me, and as we entered the funeral home, I noticed that my grip on his arm was probably painful. Several shabby-looking old people were huddled together as if it were sleeting. Slowly it came to me that they were Aunt Adela, Aunt Charna, Uncle Benny, and my mother.

  My shrunken and frail mother detached herself from the group and was walking toward me with great difficulty. “It’s all right to cry,” Jake said, putting his arm around me. “Go ahead and cry.” “Fuck you,” I yelped, and wiped my eyes and nose on my sleeve. My mother and I sort of made as if to hug but slipped off each other. “Mother, Jake,” I was trying to say.

  “Jake,” she said, holding out her hands to him and radiating dewily like a young and beautiful woman, “thank you for taking such good care of my poor little girl.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, but they were embracing.

  “Where’s Morrie?” I asked.

  “Tokyo,” my mother said. “A concert, according to Adela. ‘Impossible to cancel’ if you please.”

  My mother had become quite hard of hearing. “This one’s a mumbler, too,” she said with distaste as the rabbi started the eulogy. “What’s he saying?”

  “That she was an exemplary person whom we all loved and looked up to very much.”

  “By God,” my mother said loudly, “they’re burying the wrong woman!”

  * * *

  Some years earlier I had tracked down Morrie’s address—he was already famous—and I wrote him a letter. He organized it into questions, to which he responded with a numbered list:

  According to records, our common grandmother 4 siblings, all stayed in Europe: 1 Auschwitz, 1 infant diphtheria, 2 Treblinka. Our common grandfather 7 siblings, all stayed in Europe: 1 Majdanek, 1 Chelmo, 1 unknown, 4 Auschwitz. My mother and your father 13 cousins: 2 Treblinka, 3 Auschwitz, 4 unknown, 4 Sobibor. You and I at least 5 cousins, all b. 1930–1944, all (known) Auschwitz. No known family survivors except our common grandparents. All four of our grandparents’ parents, Auschwitz.

  Grandfather probably Belarus or Lithuania. Grandmother Romania or the Ukraine. Nationalities depend on year in question, as borders fluctuated rapidly 19th and early 20th centuries. Primary language in any case Yiddish, which, no nationality.

  Your father (my Uncle Joseph) went missing the month before your birth. Attempts to trace him unsuccessful.

  Morrie went on to say that it was very good to hear from me, that his mother and her sisters always spoke of me with affection and hope, and that he had fond memories of playing cards with me when I was a child and once taking me to a movie about extraterrestrials that seemed to make a big impression on me.

  * * *

  After the funeral service there was a little reception at my aunts’ house. My mother was sitting alone at one of the little marble-top tables, sipping something. She was staring straight ahead, her face devoid of expression, as if she were dreaming the house and everyone in it, the subdued hubbub around her, her life. It struck me that I myself would be old before too long. I hesitated but remained standing and then went over to say a few words to Aunt Charna and Uncle Benny.

  “I expected something immense,” Jake said, gazing around the parlor. “It’s not really all that big.”

  Was it possible that he was actually a bit dim? “I was smaller back then,” I said with fastidious patience.

  It looked miniaturized to me, too, of course, and only seconds from shuddering into splinters. But it had almost finished serving its purpose, anyhow. In the following few years, Charna died, and then Adela and then my mother. And now that Morrie is not around to remember them, my aunts may finally be released from the house—the elegiac murmuring of the carpets and chairs and billiards table and clocks, the unquiet sleep hovering over it, bringing dreams of the planet my grandparents came from, with its bloodstained ghetto walls, the pistol butts beating at the doors, its rhapsodic festivals of murder. Will I finally miss them, my aunts? I sit up on the couch, a bit drunkenly, to take note. Yes, off they go, my old allies, sailing right through the harsh, radiant shield at the edge of the universe, blending into darkness.

  * * *

  My mother invited us to stay with her the night after Bernice’s funeral. Out of the question, of course, but Jake gallantly escorted her to her house, and when he got back to the hotel where we’d booked a room, he hugged me as if he’d just had an invigorating adventure. “Whatever else, your mother certainly has a lot of charm,” he said.

  “Charm?” I said. “What did she say to you? That she was grateful to you? For getting me on my feet? For improving my character? For staying with me despite—”

  “Look, I know this is painful. I know that it’s easier just to give over to resentment and to simplify the past by demonizing your mother rather than leaving yourself open to the stress of complex and ambiguous emotions. But you’re an adult now. Your life is your own. Why not accept what a difficult li
fe she had, and leave that all behind. Because even though it was necessary for you at one time, and gratifying, by now this resentment is obsolete, and it’s just stunting you.”

  I got myself a separate room for the night, and after I called my mother in the morning to say good-bye, I met up with Jake for breakfast and I couldn’t help mentioning to him that she had wished me better luck with him at least than she’d had with my father and said that he seemed like a decent man though a bit self-important, overly susceptible to flattery, and maybe not all that bright.

  He took a quick breath in, and of course I was very, very ashamed of myself. “Your mother is as mean as a mace,” he said.

  “She’s had a difficult life,” I was evidently not too ashamed of myself to say.

  * * *

  When we finally got back home that night after being snowed in at the airport for hours, dealing with a ruptured carry-on bag, and sitting next to a sick baby in the lap of a sick mother who wore earphones that leaked tinny squawking during the whole flight, we had a long quarrel about the properties of vancomycin-resistant enterococci, which was something, frankly, Jake knew a lot more about than I did. By the time we’d used that up, we were completely exhausted, and we decided to take a couple of weeks off from our jobs to relax and get away from winter and just be together on our own.

  And it was pure bliss, that holiday. One day, sitting in a nimbus of jasmine and orange blossoms in the gardens of an ancient palace while jaded-looking peacocks sauntered by, we considered the centuries of the kings and queens who had lived there and what it must have cost them to maintain so voluptuous and serene a refuge—the tyranny, oppression, and carnage entailed. But whatever the wars and lootings, they were long over, remembered by most of us, if at all, as a great number of names and dates that were easy to mix up. And real as all those events had been, all that remained were the palace with its reflecting pools and galleries and gardens and peacocks, the carefree tourists like us, and of course the invisible consequences that would keep spooling out through eternity. I tilted my face up to receive the sun.