The Late Bloomer's Revolution Read online

  “Why, of course,” my mother said.

  I watched as he lifted the heavy, pear-shaped bulb in the center of her chest. “Fantastic,” he said, staring not at the necklace but deep into my mother’s eyes, the way I imagined he had looked at me when I offered him the tissue at the cemetery, the brief moment I’d been replaying in my head all day. This was before I began imagining how he would spend his next vacation visiting me in Los Angeles.

  I pictured us spending the entire time holed up in my dark, slightly depressing apartment. When we could manage to tear ourselves away from each other, I’d take him to one of those parties that feel so quintessentially L.A., the kind where you’re waiting for the keg and realize John Stamos and Dave Grohl are standing behind you. Then, at the end of the evening, I’d wave good-bye to my friends, all successful screenwriters, and think that, despite my being a total failure with a career in the crapper, at least I had a hot Argentinean boyfriend who might one day love me.

  When the waiter came, Miguel was still holding on to my mother’s necklace as if it were glued to his fingers. “Joyce. It’s clear you have a very stylish eye,” Miguel said.

  The waiter, a thin man with a bold black mustache that carpeted his lip, stood at the table holding two bottles of wine, waiting for my mother to notice him. I kicked my mother’s foot under the table, trying to tell her that the waiter had been standing there, but Miguel looked at me and frowned. “That’s my foot,” he said, releasing her necklace.

  “Mom, that one looks good,” I said, pointing to the more expensive of the two.

  Taking my suggestion, my mother looked up at the waiter. “We’ll take that one.”

  “Excellent choice, Joyce,” Miguel said. “Clearly, you know wine.”

  “I know I like it,” my mother said. “But I’d hardly call myself an expert. I’ve been an expat, when I lived in England after the war, but never an expert.”

  Miguel laughed. An expansive, rollicking belly laugh. I wasn’t even convinced he understood what she’d said. “Joyce, you’re very funny,” he said. Then he turned to me. “Does everyone tell her how funny she is?”

  “Not really,” I said. I downed my glass of wine and filled another one.

  “Lying will get you everywhere,” my mother said. “But Amy’s the funny one. Miguel, guess what Amy does. Actually, sweetheart, you tell him. It’s very exciting.”

  “Mom, no, really.” I waved my hand back and forth along my throat, pantomiming for her to cut what she was saying.

  Miguel kept his eyes fixed on my mother as he reluctantly turned toward me. “What do you do?” he asked.

  “I just graduated from film school,” I said. “I wrote a screenplay, which didn’t get bought. End of story.”

  I stared at my empty glass, waiting for Miguel to pour me another one, as he was doing for my mother.

  “Oh, come on now,” my mother said. “It was much more exciting than that. Tell him what the film was about.”

  “It’s about a woman who goes back in time to meet herself as a teenager,” I said, as if my words were on a forced death march. “She’s very unhappy as an adult, so she tries to prevent herself from growing up to be such an unhappy person. Etc. Etc.”

  He didn’t say anything at first; it seemed as if he were ruminating about the cleverness of my script. But then he looked not at me, but somewhere off in the distance. “Why have Hollywood movies become so mindless?” he asked. “I don’t mean yours,” he finally added, which made it absolutely clear that he did. “Are people so desperate for money?”

  “Well, it is Hollywood,” I said, feeling rather desperate myself. I reached across the table for the bottle of wine that was now in front of him. “I just wanted to make people laugh. This was my first script.”

  “And is that a reason to do it?” he said. “The world needs The Deer Hunter and The Battle of Algiers. Not another mindless comedy.”

  Before I could defend myself and mention that I was a huge fan of both of those movies, having seen each several times, Miguel turned to my mother. “Joyce, what do you do?”

  She sat up very straight, and I knew what was coming. “I’m a career volunteer,” she said. “Which means that—”

  “I understand,” he interrupted. “You work for a charity. How excellent. Tell me all about that. I’m terribly interested because I was thinking for a time that I wanted to go into the Peace Corps. To devote my life to public service. And my parents approved. My father spent a short time working in Africa with Dr. Schweitzer.”

  “But they had to settle for a doctor?” my mother said, proud of her joke.

  He laughed keenly. “Yes, sad, isn’t it? No, no, I thought, and my father agreed, with a medical degree I’d be more help in an AIDS ward.” He smiled perfunctorily at me, as if to say, “See, not everybody is so desperate to make money.” Then he turned back to my mother. “I just see so many people doing such self-indulgent things with their lives.”

  My glass was empty now and so was the bottle. I had no choice but to steal my mother’s wine.

  “Miguel, when Amy was in high school she raised money for Oxfam,” my mother said. “She was always very involved.”

  Miguel pointed dramatically in her direction. “That’s because you’re such a wonderful mother. You’ve impressed upon your children how important it is to think of others.” Then he turned to me. “Do you volunteer now? You probably want to get away from yourself sometimes.”

  This was about the time I finished eating my pork neck in dill sauce and began eating the rest of my mother’s goulash.

  “Last month I painted Christmas decorations at a home for juvenile delinquents,” I said, spearing several cubes of slick meat and shoving them into my mouth. “I painted snowflakes with a kid who robbed a Seven-Eleven.”

  “Well, that’s something,” he said. “Joyce, does everyone tell you that you look very young? It’s amazing.”

  “I think you were out in the sun too long,” she said. “But that’s lovely of you to say.”

  “Are you two done?” I said.

  Miguel looked at me, and I pointed to the waiter standing to my left.

  “He wants to take our plates,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” my mother said.

  “Thank you,” Miguel added.

  “Miguel, I’ve been so good all day,” my mother said. “But I just can’t contain myself. Do you have a girlfriend?”

  Miguel became very bashful and stared at his lap, and as he did, I mouthed to my mother, “Cut it out.” She batted her hand at me, as if to say, “Oh, shush.” This reminded me of the time I told my mother I’d met a witty, mildly famous Hollywood producer at a party and immediately developed an insatiable crush on him, and she said, “Call him up and ask him out for a Coke!” Just that feeling of “Mom, what planet are you on?” The Argentinean Jewish doctor didn’t like me. Better to forfeit the fight and go home with as little blood as possible.

  “Joyce, I’m very available,” he said, smiling at her. “Tell me, where is your husband? Are you married?”

  “My father had to stay in New York and work,” I said. “We called him before we came to dinner. He said he misses us. A lot. He really misses us. He’s insanely jealous.”

  “Well, he’s a very lucky man, Joyce,” Miguel said. “You have a very special quality. In addition to being very beautiful, you seem like someone I’ve known a very long time. I imagine you’ve led a very interesting life.”

  As my mother told him about her years in postwar England, when she met Anna Freud and ate lentil soup with Alec Guinness, I ate her entire portion of apple strudel and then the generous platter of crepes drizzled in heavy chocolate and cream that was meant to serve three. And then I ordered a plate of fluffy peach dumplings.

  “Tomorrow we’re going to visit the Kafka sights,” my mother said. “I’m salivating. I love Kafka.”

  Miguel got a dreamy look on his face. “He’s my favorite writer,” he said. “What are your favorite works?”

  I interrupted. “Which is the Kafka story that describes the torturing and killing of prisoners?” I looked at Miguel. “The one that’s very brutal with the instrument they called the ‘apparatus’?”

  “‘In the Penal Colony’!” my mother said, brightly. “Oh, I love that story too. But I still think ‘Metamorphosis’ is my favorite.”

  “Me too,” Miguel said. “Excellent taste, Joyce.”

  My mother blushed and then looked over at me. “Oh, sweetheart, you look like you’re about to plotz. Let’s get you to sleep.”

  And there it was. There would be no midnight walk. No kissing under any arches, just wrecking balls at six A.M.

  As we left the restaurant, Miguel said, “I hope to see you tomorrow,” adding clumsily, “both of you.”

  My mother smiled as she waved good-bye.

  “He’s in love with you,” I said.

  “Oh, please. That’s ridiculous. That’s just the wine talking.”

  “Yours or mine?” I said. “And I’m not spending the day with him tomorrow.”

  “Fine. We’ll leave the hotel before he calls. Besides, you know those Latins. They’re like Italians. They’re all crazy about their mothers, and I’m sure he just wanted me to fill in. It’s actually very insulting if you ask me.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, on our way up to the Prague Castle, we walked along Golden Lane, a row of tiny, colorful cottages built into the castle wall in the sixteenth century to house the castle guard. I was wearing my apron dress again, a painful reminder of our dinner the night before, while my mother was wearing a cheerful plaid blouse, a twill skirt, and coarse, ropy espadrilles that made her heels turn a painful shade of pink.

  It was a warm, windless spring day, and we stopped to stand outside of a squat, light blue building where Franz Kafka had lived briefly with his sister.

  “I hope you have a kosher wedding,” my mother said, reaching deep into her public television tote bag and patting around for her camera. “With Kafka, I just keep wondering what influenced his work. Did he see a cockroach in the kitchen and imagine ‘The Metamorphosis’? I know he had TB, and I think he was starving to death when he wrote ‘A Hunger Artist.’” She regarded the small building, looking up at the second-story window. “Was he in love when he lived here? Was he depressed?” She smiled. “It’s fun to imagine, isn’t it?”

  I looked at her, not exactly sure how to react.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “My wedding? I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

  “I know,” she said, framing a shot of the house, careful to include the heavy shingled roof. “I’m just saying when. When you have your wedding, I hope it’s kosher. I wouldn’t want my kosher friends to have to eat from paper plates.”

  Why I chose to argue about this, I still don’t know.

  “How many kosher friends do you have?” I asked.

  She began to count.

  “Well, there’s Rabbi Hershkowitz and his wife, Tsipora—that’s two. And Sam and Audrey Bloom—so four. I’d like to invite the Yarones from Israel, which makes six, but I doubt they’d come.”

  I’ve read that nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but I think a close second might be the rate at which I went from age twenty-seven to thirteen.

  “No, I don’t want a kosher wedding,” I said, my arms now tightly crossed. “What if I want to serve shrimp?”

  “You don’t love shrimp,” my mother said. “Why do you need shrimp?”

  “Because maybe my guests will want it. Or my fiancé.”

  “You could have mock shrimp,” she said.

  “I’m not having mock shrimp. If we’re having mock shrimp, we might as well have mock ham. Or why don’t we just have a mock wedding?”

  “You really feel that strongly?” she said.

  “I’m thinking very seriously of eloping.”

  “Why not make it completely vegetarian?” she said, a reference to the ten years I’d gone without meat. “When I took that class on the history of Judaism, we learned that the basis of kashrut is, in fact, vegetarianism, which seems right up your alley. We could have an Indian theme with curries and papadams. There are still Jews in India.”

  “I—” I started to say something, but instead exhaled, thickly.

  “You what?” she said. “You what? Tell me, sweetheart.”

  “I don’t want to have this conversation,” I said. “This is crazy.”

  “Well, I hope you change your mind,” she said.

  I could tell she was upset by the hasty way she began marching up the hill.

  “Are you coming?” she called.

  I didn’t answer.

  She started back. “I asked if you were coming.” She got closer to me. “Sweetheart, are you crying?”

  I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and when I finally spoke, I took long gasps every few words.

  “I just feel like men don’t like me. Or they like me for a little while and then I screw it up.”

  “What are you talking about? Everyone loves you.”

  “No, they don’t. Mom. They don’t. Not even close.”

  “Oh, rubbish. Yes, they do.”

  “I didn’t tell you, but before I left, I started seeing this really cute screenwriter who I’d had a crush on for a long time and who just broke up with his girlfriend, and I’m such an idiot, because he just broke up with her, and it was a recipe for masochism, but we fooled around a lot, we didn’t sleep together but”—I stopped long enough to catch my breath—“but we saw each other a lot and then I offered to make him dinner. That fettucine recipe that I made you—”

  “Which I loved,” she said. “It’s your best dish.”

  That was so my mother. To say it was my best dish, when I only had one. “And I spent over fifty dollars. And I also baked him a Duncan Hines cake, like an idiot, and—”

  My mother put her arm around me. “And he broke up with you.”

  “No! Worse. He never showed up. I called him like five times that night and left these pathetic messages, like ‘Oh, hey, did you forget?’ Like a fucking loser. If I had any self-respect, I would have called and said, ‘Fuck you! You lying piece of shit! Go to hell!’ But I didn’t. Instead I ate the entire cake, and then he didn’t call me back for over a week. When he did finally call, he said he’d forgotten about dinner and that he had gone to Wisconsin for a week, and I knew he was lying, and I didn’t even let him have it then. I said, ‘That’s okay, I understand,’ because I’m a sheep. I just felt like such a stupid, stupid piece of stupid shit because I should have known. Which is how I feel a lot these days, Mom. Like shit. I do.”

  She was silent.

  I had often said I felt like a house men were happy to rent, but when it came time to buy, they balked. Several boyfriends had told me that being in a relationship with me required work. A lot of extensive work. I was not the brand-new house with central air and freshly polished hardwood floors, the one that was ready to move into immediately. I was the fixer-upper with plenty of room for improvement, one the real estate agent says “could be a gem if you’re willing to do an enormous, exhausting amount of work.” I was the house in desperate need of renovation. And if I kept eating the way I was on this trip, I’d be the biggest house on the block.

  “Let me tell you something,” my mother said. “You are the furthest thing from shit. You are beautiful and wonderful and so creative, and by the way, that’s my daughter you’re talking about and I might have to punch you in the nose if you say you’re shit again.”

  “Mom, I’m serious.”

  “After I got divorced, I got knocked around myself all the time before I met your father,” she said.

  My mother had married a psychiatrist at twenty-one, who, she said, loved baseball, Freud, Groucho Marx, and her—in that order.

  “I was a divorcée in the days when it was still considered shocking, and I think maybe that’s why I had low self-esteem and chose such terrible men. I went out with an alcoholic who worked for the Associated Press, when he wasn’t having blackouts and canceling dates with me, and then that Broadway producer I told you about, the one who knew Esther Williams and Jimmy Durante, who I know was scheduling our dinners between hopping into bed with showgirls. I got dumped all the time. Constantly. And then I met your father. And he was sweet and honest, and I was ready for a good man because I’d had such first-class shits before him. I married the wrong man the first time, and I almost made the same mistake again, until I realized what was really important to me. And it was all very roundabout the way it happened. Do you get my drift?”

  “Uh huh,” I said, wiping my nose.

  “If you want to know the truth,” she said, “I wasn’t so impressed with our friend Miguel. He was a little unctuous, if you ask me. Kissing my hand good night? I was half expecting him to click his heels. It was too much. You need someone more original. And I, for one, am really looking forward to meeting him.”

  “Yeah, well, you and me both,” I said.

  BUT THAT WOULD never happen. When I was thirty, we found out my mother had an inoperable brain tumor and that she’d be lucky to live a year. She ended up living nineteen months. We were told that her brain would deteriorate rapidly, that each week she’d lose a little more—the ability to spell or even to recognize people she knew well. She accepted that anything she wanted to tell me would have to be soon. So she attempted to put our house in order before she was gone.

  “I want you to know that I want Daddy to meet someone,” she said. “I do. I want that very, very much and I want you to welcome her.”

  “Mom, I can’t—” I couldn’t even finish my sentence.

  We were sitting in the den of my parents’ apartment. The room was painted in a deep scarlet with two chubby, blue floral sofas stacked with needlepoint pillows. In the corner stood a sculpture my mother loved, an interactive piece where you placed your face in a plastic mask and saw your creepy reflection multiplied. “It’s a conversation piece,” she announced when she brought it home. “It’s like confronting your multiple personalities. I think it’s fun.”