Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou

10 Coming of Age in Baton Rouge

126 10 Coming of Age in Baton Rouge Years ago, when we were still living in Washington and my mother gave every appearance of being on the brink of the grave, I spent more than a year and almost ten thousand dollars in therapy trying to get a handle on what my therapist—a lovely man who wore his hair hippiestyle , in a little ponytail, and whose consulting room was a comforting jumble of tribal rugs, modernist prints, monographs, and books—said was the most unyielding case of denial that he’d ever seen. My mother was in and out of hospital rooms the way movie stars are in and out of rehab, first with one chemotherapy-induced infection, and then with another, and so on, until eventually I got to know my way around oncology wards all over town. After each visit I had to my mother’s bedside, I brought back some new, unfunny quip. Her skin was the color of moldy newspaper, and I’d tell my therapist that she desperately needed to go to Elizabeth Arden for a facial. She was so skinny that she looked like she’d just been liberated from a concentration camp, and I’d say, “I guess she finally found a diet that works.” She had no hair, and lay under blankets, shivering, her throat constricted , her mouth dry. “For the first time ever, I can get a word in edgewise ,” I’d say. All around me, sunshine-drenched dust motes danced. “It’s better to face the truth now than later,” my therapist would say, adding: “Later is too late.” Made sense. But my heart, it seemed, was made of stone. Both my sisters would call me up on occasion, talk about Mom, and cry, but I felt nothing. And so I talked, and talked and talked and talked, about my complicated, tangled, frustrating relationship with my mother, starting back from the time when I was three and my mother threw out my beloved stuffed bunny rabbit, Bum Bum, and replaced her with a brand-new rabbit whose ears, enhanced by interior wires, stuck straight up (who did she think she was kidding?); and then moving up through my grade school ulcer; and then summer camp, where I was the camp loser, only Mom herself had gone to that same summer camp and therefore didn’t understand that I couldn’t hit a field-hockey ball if it were the size of Jupiter, and as for catching a softball, you may as well have asked me to grow wings and fly to Paris. I talked about not being sufficiently like my mother and her side of the family and about not being sufficiently like my father and his side of the family, either. I talked about camp again: all those athletic girls from rich old German Jewish families, all of whom, it seemed, had their periods at some reasonable time, whereas mine came late; and why had my mother sent me there in the first place? And what about my father? Why hadn’t he rescued me? For that matter, how come neither one of them noticed that I was sliding into a depression so deep and so wide and so viscous that I felt like I belonged nowhere and to no one? And on and on I went, describing in detail every last misunderstanding, misalignment, and misjudgment that I’d endured in the course of what was in fact an extraordinarily privileged upbringing, wherein I was raised by a kind and good father who did his best, and a mother who, despite occasional lapses, loved me so desperately that, more often than not, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect or sustaining love, or life without its author. “And now your mother is dying,” my therapist would say. “How do you feel about that?” How did I feel about that? I felt lousy. Life without Mom? That would be bad. And how about the prospect of dealing with my father without Mom in her rightful place by his side, acting as a buffer zone? The very idea sent waves of panic fanning out along my collar bone. And what if Dad remarried? Yuck. On the other hand, I had other things to worry about, such as the fact that, at the time, I had one-year-old twins, a hyperactive four-year-old, and a career that seemed to be nothing more than a grandiose fantasy. Not...