SNAPSHOTS: 20th Century Mother Daughter Fiction is an anthology I edited with the extraordinary Joyce Carol Oates. It was a joyous experience and, for those who might be interested, it remains in print. Here’s the story I wrote for the book:
“Everything Old is New Again
by Janet Berliner
“Thank you for coming.
“Yes, brunch was a good idea, wasn’t it? Thank you for coming.
“We’ll get together soon.”
“Thank you for—”
—Leaving. Thank you for leaving. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Jenny shut the door, leaned against it, and stared at the label on the last of her birthday gifts, the one still wrapped, the one she’d steadfastly pushed to the end of the line, like the pumpkin people inevitably insisted upon piling onto her Thanksgiving dinner plate.
The parcel was from her mother. At eighty, her handwriting remained clean and firm. Old Doll it said next to Contents. Value: Zero.
Like me, Jenny thought. Value: Zero. Contents: Old.
“Everything Old is New Again,” Peter Allen sang at her from her stereo set. She removed one fashionable black high-heeled shoe and hurled it at the CD player, uncaring of the damage she might do, though of course she’d care later. She always cared later.
“Everything old is old and getting older, you sonofabitch,” she said. Old or dead. Like Peter Allen who was dead, who had written the song as a tribute to Judy Garland, who was dead, too. Her face lived on in reruns, her voice in recordings. But she was dead just the same.
“Everything old is new again.”
Jenny didn’t sing along or think kindly of her friend Harlan whom she generally loved and who, seemingly a hundred years ago, had introduced her to the song. Instead, she drank the rest of her birthday champagne straight from the bottle, using it to swallow her last available dose of St. John’s Wort, which was supposed to cure her depression but so far hadn’t done a thing for her except make her itch. Then she curled up on the sofa with the leather bound special edition of Anna Karenina several of her friends had clubbed together to buy her because they knew it was her favorite book and because she was a writer. Or used to be.
One shoe off and one shoe on, she fell asleep. The phone woke her. She thought about letting it ring, but the residual hope that it might be her daughter changed her mind. It was the same hope that had sent her to the mailbox all week to retrieve cards from old friends with old lives, an ad for plastic surgery, a coupon for pizza, obligatory greetings from her doctor and her dentist.
Her hand hovered over the receiver. Maybe this year, this special year marked by her half century, her daughter would remember. Maybe, like a chrysalis, she had emerged from her Yuppie cocoon and become a caring, mature adult. Right. And maybe Jenny would fly to Vegas and win the Megabucks, or her publisher would offer her a million dollars to move to New York and become the darling of the Literati, scribbling away at the story of her miserable little life.
Which, she reminded herself, hadn’t really been all that miserable. At least not all of the time.
She could probably even persuade herself that her present life was acceptable if they could only all forgive each other — her daughter for Jenny’s treachery in insisting upon being a person, and she for her mother’s — what? She’d hated her mother forever, and she couldn’t remember why.
“Happy birthday, Mrs. Tobias. And how are you today?”
Disappointed, angered by a series of political calls, sales calls, “We’re doing a quick survey” calls, Jenny Tobias felt less than generous toward this one. “If you’re trying to sell me something, save your breath,” she said.
“This is something you need, something everyone needs, but most especially you now that you’ve entered your golden years.”
“My golden years? You must have the wrong Jennifer Tobias.”
“You’re fifty, Mrs. Tobias.”
This was a new wrinkle, maybe not one that showed on her face, but a new wrinkle nonetheless.
“Here in California we care about our senior citizens. We can provide you with a plot…”
“There’s something my editor would appreciate,” Jenny said. She disconnected the voice and laughed at the state of her universe. She hadn’t been able to write in a year and she’d finally been offered a plot. Only it was the wrong kind of plot. It was true what they said. Be careful about what you wish for and never fail to be specific.
On the other hand, maybe she had become a dinosaur. Maybe it was time to think about taking the big dirt nap?
She was a storyteller, born of the Diaspora into a long line of bards, but if she didn’t find a plot soon — the writing kind — she might as well be dead.
She wasn’t sure of much, but she did know that she did not love the new disposable society in which she lived; she did not love arthritis, or the fact that she was growing old. What she did love was Ibsen and Tolstoy, the look and feel of new yellow pads, the smell of newly sharpened pencils. Nor did she want much, just someone to give her back the wasted hours, for in regretting them, she had gained nothing and wasted more of the precious moments of her life.
She’d already lived for half a century and so what? She hadn’t written the Great American Novel, she was neither rich nor famous. Jimmy Buffett had cashed in with Pirate Looks At Fifty; Jong had turned facing fifty into a raging success.
All she was doing was getting older. She needed rejuvenation, a young lover, adventure, perhaps a return trip to Jerusalem and another camel ride.
She’d pack a single suitcase and leave all material things behind. After a lattè, a couple of cookies, and a quick trip to the drugstore for more Wort. After she’d called her daughter to say she’d forgiven her.
After she’d opened the parcel from her mother.
Which she might as well do now. Now was good. Now was fine. There’d never be another now, at least not exactly like this one.
She sat down and, balancing the gift on her lap, tore at the brown paper wrapping and lifted the lid of an old shoebox.
Happy birthday, Puppele, the note inside read.
Jenny flinched. She’d always hated being called Puppele, little doll, though why it distressed her so she had no idea.
I found this in an old suitcase and crocheted a new outfit for her, the note went on. I would have sent it to a doll’s hospital for repair, but there aren’t any around anymore. Perhaps if I’d had it repaired for you years ago, right after I retrieved it, things might have been different between us. Truth is, I put it away and life intruded and I forgot that I had it. Now you are decades older than I was when it all happened.…
The doll lay wrapped in a small, pink, satin-bound woolen blanket. Jenny removed it gently from its cardboard coffin. She opened the blanket and, operating through her fingertips like a blind person, caressed the porcelain. The doll’s hands and feet were chipped. Cold. Frostbitten. A few tiny sprouts of hair grew around the fringes of a jagged hole which exposed an empty, hollow head.
The face was a Dorian Gray wreckage. Shattered. A baby’s face, ravaged by layers of fine spider-web cracks
Crying, Jenny cradled the doll. Then she pillowed its head upon Anna Karenina. Seeing the juxtaposition, she picked up the brown paper wrapping and began to write…
Cape Town station. Winter cold and draughty on a June day in 1943. A child, her curly head lowered, her green eyes closed, sits on a bench marked “Whites Only.” She is hugging a porcelain doll with short, curly brown hair. The doll is her best friend.
“Won’t be long, Puppele,” her mother calls out.
The child looks up. I am the child. “My name’s Jenny,” I whisper. I stare at the words on the bench, distracting myself by sounding them out. I’m a precocious child. At almost four, I can sound out the words, but I don’t begin to comprehend their meaning any more than I understand what is happening on this strange day. My mother has abandoned the uniform of the South African reserves that she wears each day to her bookkeeping post at the Castle. She looks so pretty as she paces the platform, stopping every now and then to call me “Puppele” and hug me. Too hard. Too desperately. “He’s been in North Africa fighting the Nazis,” she says to me in German. “He’s been up there making it with some shiksa,” she will say later, when my eyes are closed and she thinks I’m asleep.
We are waiting for a stranger called Daddy. Waiting to take him home to a table laden with homemade kuchen. I am waiting to find out who he is. I’ve never seen him before but he must be important because Oma, Grandma, crocheted a new dress for me to wear, a pale blue dress with a string threaded through the waist. I roll the end of it around and around my finger until the tip is cold and white and has no feeling — like the rest of me.
I am supposed to be feeling something, aren’t I?
Something.
“Can you hear it? It’s coming. The train. Come over here. No, stay there.”
Mutti is shouting, primping, crying, laughing.
The train pulls into the station. Leaning out of the window waving a doll as big as I — with long blonde hair and an organdy dress and bonnet — is a big man. Smiling, he climbs off the train.
I struggle to find the concrete that’s there somewhere below my white button-down shoes. The man is with me before I reach the ground.
“You must be Jenny.”
He crouches down, takes away my old doll, the one I love, and places the big new doll in my arms.
I start to cry. The new doll is a stranger, like he is. I want my old dolly back but I don’t know how to tell him. The new doll is shiny and cold as my mother’s face. The man speaks and she listens.
“How are you, Greta? Well, I hope.”
He has not kissed me or my mother. He has not hugged us, touched us.
“No, I’m not coming home,” he says. “Not now. Maybe not ever. I have an — arrangement. A nurse. We met in North Africa.”
Jenny wanted to stop remembering. She got up, showered, made coffee to which she added a dash of brandy, but there was no escaping the story; it was like a physical presence, demanding her attention. Giving in to its urgency, she lit a candle against the waning day and sat down to watch the rest of it play out in her memory. United with the child she had long since buried, Jenny reexperienced her own pain. The pain that had caused her to hate her mother. The ache that had told her that her mother would have liked to throw her away so the stranger would stay and love her.…
“So it’s out with the old and in with the new,” her mother screamed. “You think you can do that? Abandon me? Or is it the responsibility of having a child. Do you want me to throw her away like an old doll? Like this?”
In a fury, she ripped Jenny’s best friend from the man’s arms and tossed it away. It flew through the air toward the train, which was slowly moving out of the station, smashed against it, disappeared.
If only she’d known that her mother had gone back to the station and retrieved the doll, Jenny thought. If only she’d been given the chance then to forgive her, to love her.
Crying softly over the lost years, Jenny picked up the doll. Cradling it in one arm, she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number. “I love you, Mutti,” she said.
“I love you, too, Puppele,” her mother responded.
“I know you do,” Jenny said. “I’ll call you soon. I promise.”
She replaced the receiver in its cradle and started to walk away. Darkness had settled on the world outside and the candle she’d lit was fluttering and almost burned out, but there was enough light to dial her daughter’s phone number.
“Forgive me,” she said, when her daughter picked up the phone.
“For what?” Her daughter’s voice was tense with negative expectations.
“For whatever it is you think I’ve done,” Jenny said lightly. “I do love you, you know.”
“I love you, too.” The voice was tentative, but it was a start. “Happy birthday, Mom. I have news for you. I’m going to have a baby. A boy.”
“Congratulations,” Jenny said. Ask his forgiveness early, she thought. But she didn’t say a word except goodbye. Then she flooded the room with light, reset the CD player, and sang along with Peter Allen, because even if he was dead, she wasn’t.
As a matter of fact, she was very much alive and everything old was new again. Maybe she wouldn’t ride any more camels, but she wasn’t ready for that big dirt nap yet, not while there was living and writing left undone.
Hell, if she played it right, she might even have time to inadvertently do more things for which she could ask forgiveness.
—
Early happy Mother’s Day to all, and my warmest wishes to Frank and his family. -Janet
