My Mother, the Saint

MY MOTHER, THE SAINT Judith Cohen Margolis What is it about mothers and daughters? Every woman I know has some story to tell about the remark that cuts to a place of extreme sensitivity, whose location only that mother knows. Here's one. It is near the end of my mother's life. She is not well but valiantly keeps surviving the assaults on her health. It is her birthday. Mindful of the extravagant cakes and party favors she'd provided for my birthdays, I have arranged a party for her. Getting into the spirit, I assemble my outfit the way you would lay out a palette: a flowered skirt of orange and turquoise, whose intense hues provide a perfect counterpoint for the terrific plum-colored satiny thrift-shop bed jacket I've just dyed. The outfit delights me. I arrive at her home bearing gifts, a home-baked pie and my teenaged children, whom she adores. We party and fuss over her, and she opens the gifts and eats the pie. As we are leaving she takes me aside and says, "I want to speak to you." Thinking my efforts to please were a success, I am moving toward her when she asks, in an aggrieved tone, "Couldn't you have at least gotten dressed up?" I'm an artist. My mother didn't like the art I made. At an exhibition, she would peer into the large, sexually graphic, political paintings that were my most realized professional accomplishment and say, as if for the first time, "Couldn't you do a nice floral, or a scenic?" It wasn't just my art that my mother didn't understand or like. She didn't like me. "I love you," she would say, "but I don't like you." We had "nothing in common," my mother and I. She was a conventional suburban Jewish matron (favorite song: "I Enjoy Being a Girl"), while I was a beatnik (favorite song: anything sad by Joan Baez). When I was in high school she pushed me to wear makeup, get my hair styled, go to Nashim:A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and GenderIssues, no. 3. ©2000191 Judith Cohen Margolis "Mindful of the extravagant cakes and party favors she'd provided for my birthdays ..." 192 My Mother, the Saint school dances; she bought me underwire bras, waist cinchers, metal hair curlers. "It hurts to be beautiful," she answered my complaints. So I wore my hair long and dressed in jeans and loose ethnic skirts - no girdles for me. I cut school, took the bus to Manhattan and wandered through museums, thrilled by abstract expressionism ("But a monkey could have painted that," said Mom). While I read Camus and puzzled over the Theater of the Absurd, she talked about the characters on soap operas as if they were friends and urged me to go to college, not to learn art or anything else, but to get my "M.R.S." Much later, when I reconnected myself seriously to Jewish life, I thought this would have pleased her. But she experienced the inconveniences of kashrut and Shabbat as yet more provocation. There were - or should have been - glimpses for me of my mother's artistic nature. For among my earliest experience of aesthetic endeavor is the food my mother prepared and set on festive tables throughout my childhood: penguins made of hardboiled eggs and black olives, with little carrot beaks and feet; "finger sandwiches" made of crustless squares of blue and pink bread (she injected food dye into loaves of Wonderbread to turn them pastel), garnished with fancy toothpicks and maraschino cherries. She was a virtuoso at tuna swans and checkerboard cakes, as well as the traditional kreplach, Pesach rolls and blintzes. For weeks before a holiday or family celebration, the house smelled of sugar and oil, and each new creation seemed a kind of miracle. Yet most of the time we shared together on earth, we were, it seemed, allergic to each other. We endured, at best, a kind of what Natalie Angier calls "blistering love," bound deeply to one another but not really able to enjoy each other. It was the artist in...