The Presence of Her Absence

Photo by Cristian Iohan Ştefănescu/Flicker

By Liane Kupferberg Carter

“Is there hidden treasure up here?”

My eleven-year-old son Jonathan followed me up the creaking wooden stairs to the unfinished third floor attic of my father’s house one Saturday summer afternoon. What was he imagining? A secret stash of Spanish gold coins? Purloined jewels? But I knew what he meant. As a child, this Moorish-style house built in the late 1920s had always exuded mystery to me too.

“Let’s hope,” I said.

My eighty-three-year-old father had decided it was time to move. My mother had died two years earlier, a week short of her seventy-second birthday, after a drawn-out wasting illness. We’d grown so accustomed to the hiss of her oxygen tank that after her death, the silence was jarring. My father had removed the chair lift, the bed pans, the medications, and medical equipment. He’d taken to wandering through rooms in search of things to straighten and fix.

My husband Marc, our sons, and I were moving soon too. I had the unenviable task of emptying two houses at the same time and finding homes for all the soon-to-be-discarded books, house wares, tools, and toys. But I was grateful for the distraction. It kept me from focusing too much on the pain of closing up the only childhood home I had ever known.

“Let’s start here,” I said and opened the door to the attic bedroom. It was painted Pepto Bismol pink, a color my parents had chosen to welcome my teenage cousin Carole. She’d come to live with us after her mother Frances died. One unshaded light bulb still hung from the ceiling. Jonathan and I sat on opposite sides of the full size bed. But the old mattress was so soft and deep that we sank and rolled against each other, clonking heads. Giggling, we hauled each other out.

I seated myself at a built-in plywood desk tucked under the dormer, dragged open a warped drawer and dug in. Not the hidden treasure Jonathan hoped for, but treasure to me: a stationer’s box of faded invitations for my parents’ 1951 wedding at a long-gone New York hotel. Birth announcements for each of my fifteen first cousins. An envelope with a return address that said only, “War Bonds.” Braille manuals. A round-tipped Braille stylus, oak tag, a masonite board, and a hinged metal slate I remembered playing with. My mother had made books for the visually impaired; in later years, she recorded audio books for The Lighthouse. Reading was her lifelong refuge. Even as a child of ten, in the midst of the Depression, she’d told me, she’d sit on the floor and read three-week-old newspapers as avidly as if they were the latest screen magazines. At ten she read books by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Woolf. “I didn’t understand most of it,” she once told me, “I just read whatever I could get my hands on.” Was that why she’d dedicated so much time to producing those Braille books? To share that love of reading she’d also imparted to me? I closed my eyes and ran my fingers over the indecipherable bumps.

Then I unearthed a landmine.

I stared at a pair of similar printed cards. The same date. The same time. The same cemetery. I’d been barely two that terrible day in August. Grandma Anna and Aunt Frances died within twenty-four hours of each other. Mother and daughter. Frances, from mysterious symptoms that might have been lupus; Grandma, of complications from diabetes. I hadn’t known there had been one funeral to bury them both.

I had only the dimmest visual memories of Grandma Anna, my dad’s mother: a kind, billowing woman in a wheelchair, an afghan concealing her lap. I was not allowed to climb on that lap. Only years later did I learn why: her leg had just been amputated. “But even on just one leg,” my mother marveled, “she balanced herself on crutches because she said she had to bake. It was Purim, she had hundreds of hamantashen to make.” Her absence was a phantom limb presence in my childhood. I had ached for the grandmother I didn’t get to know.

I looked at Jonathan. He was reading one of my old book reports. “This is pathetic, Mom,” he said. “How old were you when you wrote it?”

“Those were simpler times,” I said. “You must be bored if you’re reading that. Why don’t you go see if Grandpa will play Connect Four with you?”

My mother had adored her mother-in-law. Anna had filled some of the void her own mother’s early death from cancer had left. My mother’s mother Liane died long before I was born. I’d been named for her. I knew Grandma Liane only through my mother’s stories. A woman so kind and beloved in their Yonkers community that five hundred people had come to her funeral. The only picture I’d ever seen of my grandmother was printed on the back of a small round mirror that fit in my mother’s purse. It was a faded photo of a woman kneeling in a polka dot dress, embracing a small blonde child who grew up to be my brown-haired mother.

“Why don’t you have more pictures?” I’d asked. She never answered. It had frightened me to hear my mother’s sad voice, to see the shrouded look in her eyes, so I stopped asking. Years later, I learned that a year after my mother’s mother died, her father remarried a widow named Helen. Helen resented my mother’s presence in the house. She tried repeatedly to drive her out. One day, my mother returned home from work to find that Helen had taken my grandmother’s photo albums and her set of the Harvard Classic Books series. She’d dumped it all in a metal trash bin in the back yard. She’d incinerated it all and erased my mother’s childhood.

Because I was named for my grandmother, I’d grown up feeling that I was the repository of all my mother’s fantasies, hopes, and longings. I’d also believed that names and words had a dark magic presence. To name a fear was to breathe life into it, so I learned early on not to ask about the things that scared me most. My mother had been only seventeen when she lost her mother. I worried my mother would leave me too. Because I bore my grandmother’s name, I also feared I might die young the way she had. I remember lying in bed at night, searching my seven-year-old body for cancer lumps. It was a typical fear for any child, but I worried more than most. I knew firsthand that mothers could and often did die before their children were done needing them. I am now past sixty. My mother has been gone twenty years, I am still not done needing her.

I continued to search. Cleaning out, but hunting too. I found a metal box full of index cards, scribbled over in my mother’s backward slanting hand. I began to read. “Patrick Mulcahy: August 23, 1949: black skirt, Ohrbach’s; white ribbon blouse; movie: ‘On the Town’; dinner, Caffe Reggio.” Each card contained the name of a man she was dating, with relevant details about what she’d worn and where they’d gone. There were scores of cards. She’d once told me, “Back then I only had two skirts and three nice blouses. I washed and ironed all the time so I wouldn’t repeat an outfit from one date to the next.” She’d been a poor young woman, sleeping on her brother and sister-in-law’s sofa bed in a Stuyvesant Town apartment. She worked at an advertising agency high up in the Empire State Building. She’d been popular. My dad once told me, “I had to fight off half the male population of Manhattan to get her.”

“I encouraged that fantasy,” she said and laughed. I like to imagine her looking like Rosalind Russell in His Gal Friday, delivering snappy lines of dialogue and wearing great hats.

I marveled at the volume of what she had stashed away in the attic. The file cabinets were crammed. My grade school loose-leaf notebooks, still bulging with yellowing compositions. Forty years’ worth of cancelled checks. A clever musical parody she wrote of The Mikado. Large, rolled-up photos in cardboard tubes. I unfurled them, and studied the panoramas of dinner dance crowds, women in taffeta gowns and rhinestone studded eyeglasses, balding men proud and portly in their tuxes. I recognized many faces, people who had once looked so old to me. I was now the same age, probably even older, than they had been when those photographs were taken.

I slid open the warped closet door and found her emerald green strapless satin evening gown. I’d loved to dress up in it. I swam in it then. What would it feel like to try it on now? But the gown sagged under the weight of its own whale boning. The glamour was gone.

Instead, I stepped into the long closet, slid the door shut, and stared at the pinpricks of light at the far end. One day Peter O’Leary, the imaginative older boy of five who lived next door, locked us into the closet together, pointed out the holes of light in the far wall, and said, “Those are witch’s eyes! She’s going to get us!” I remembered my terror when I couldn’t open the door. How I’d screamed and screamed until my mother found us and comforted me.

Slowly I began to fill large black plastic trash bags. In went the piles of torn pink bedding thick with dust; files full of raffles and receipts from the temple bazaars my mother used to run; rotting suitcases, the seams infested with tiny, larval debris that made me shudder.

“I wish I could be as sure of other things in this world as the fact that the housework will still be here long after I’m gone,” she often said.

I thought about the essential unknowability of my mother. The mysteries of our parents’ inner lives. Did she mean to leave me this tantalizing trail? More likely, she’d assumed she still had time left to sift and to sort the half-written stories, the faded photos, the letters from long-gone lovers. Why had she kept the boyfriend index cards? The snippets of lace and cloth? The feathered bits of millinery? The Braille books? Why had she valued these items above others? What had these totems meant to her?

I will never know for sure.

Her stepmother had destroyed the talismans of her own childhood. Had she preserved finite, fragile clues, bits of an adult life she’d cherished, to give me what she hadn’t had? Wanted me to know her in ways she’d been denied knowing her own mother? Reassembling these shards from my mother’s life was an emotional archaeology.

And then, finally, I found what all along I must have been seeking without even knowing. It was in a stationery box filled with unsent greeting cards. A note written to my husband Marc from my mother, on the eve of our wedding. I had seen it when she’d given him an antique silver Kiddush cup. Marc must have dropped the note during the excitement of that evening. I’d forgotten it. My mother had saved it.

The note said simply, “May Liane give you as much joy as she has given us.”

Did she know that I would find it one day? How much comfort I would draw from it? Could she have known that note would be what I’d treasure most? I’d like to think so.

Joy. I’d given her that.

And in return, she anchored me. The home she created was tender and safe. It is a lifetime since I lost her, but I still bask in the warmth of her sustaining love.

•••

LIANE KUPFERBERG CARTER is a nationally known writer and advocate for the autism community. Her memoir, Ketchup Is My Favorite Vegetable: A Family Grows Up With Autism, is a winner of the 2017 American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award. Her articles and essays have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Brain Child, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station, and Brevity. www.lianekcarter.com

Face Value

papers — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Randy Osborne

“I don’t expect you to remember me,” she says. The Atlanta bar is loud around us. She’s maybe late thirties, with dark hair and eyes, apple cheeks, a certain kind of defiance about the lips. She tells me her name. “We were pen pals almost twenty years ago,” Jessica says.

I stare hard at her and ransack the mental files. Nothing. Later I will learn that Jessica heard my name from what turned out to be a mutual friend, who knew I’d be in the bar on this night for a special event. It’s over and the crowd is shuffling out.

Jessica goes on, apparently untroubled by my blank stare. “You worked at Creative Loafing.” Dimly I recall that job at the weekly alternative newspaper, but Jessica not at all. “I was a college student at Oglethorpe. I read one of your columns—something about family, I think—and sent you my poems. You wrote back.”

She lowers her eyes. “I still have those letters. I just wanted you to know how much they meant to me.” She was ready to quit writing in those days and I encouraged her, she says.

“Do you want to see them?”

•••

In the past couple of years, I’ve started collecting old handwritten diaries and letters. The hobby arose as if out of nowhere, intense and mysterious. When asked to explain it, I tell people about my father.

Tom prowled yard sales for antiques he could mark up and resell. At his bank-teller job, he sorted bags of coins, plucking the rare finds and replacing them with his own pocket change, worth only face value. One of the first to own a metal detector in the 1960s, he haunted public parks on weekends, waving his wand like a dowsing rod. He unearthed tiny balls of tinfoil and flip-tops from soda cans, an occasional brooch pin or bauble.

One day, as a toddler, I stood at his side when he dumped onto the table his latest pile of flea-market junk. A hardcover book fell to the floor. When I opened it, the spine crackled. Spidery script in ancient ink lined the crumbly yellow pages. Wedged between them was a lock of hair, snipped and preserved more than a century before. I exhaled and the filaments trembled as if alive.

My spare bedroom is piled with crates full of folders and padded envelopes, the scribbled records of the pasts of strangers. Not that I plan to profit by passing them on. These I am keeping.

•••

The scans arrive by email from Jessica. My letters, dated between June and November 1996, are not handwritten as I hoped but generated by an old-style dot-matrix printer, probably in Creative Loafing’s office. Most striking about them is how little my “correspondent” voice has changed, given all that history. Brisk, jaunty, self-deprecating. Is there an essential me? An immutable set of qualities that add up to an entity, myself, never to be mistaken for another?

As part of my day job—I’m a biotechnology journalist, handling the daily news of DNA and disease—I was assigned a few months ago to write about a saliva-based genetic test that purports to find predisposition to disease. I spat in the test tube.

“You have really good genes,” the consultant tells me after checking the results. Except for one hitch: one copy of the APOE3 gene, which confers an average risk for Alzheimer’s disease, and one copy of the APOE4 gene, which means high risk. About 22 percent of the population bears this genotype, and it doubles my odds of Alzheimer’s.

When I am held down screaming in some filthy public hospital (so I envision it) as the nurse finds a vein, what of that essential me will exist?

In one of the letters to Jessica, I mentioned that although she has referred to prose as a blind corridor, she did not go so far as to call it a brick wall. “Even those who pretend we know what we’re doing are really groping along,” I wrote to her. I described my father’s recent accident, which rendered him a paraplegic, and my fumbling attempts to handle his affairs.

Maybe this is what prompted Jessica to send me an essay next. “I like the way you folded into the second version of the truck-stop story how your father is aging,” went my reply. At the end, I wrote, “Maybe I will get to meet you someday! That would be good. I have things to ask you about fiction vs. non-fiction, and the difficulties of each.” How non-fiction can become fiction so easily, as recollections fail.

November 1996. In another year, the newspaper job would end. In two years, my wife would leave me a letter—also dot-matrix, in a business-sized envelope—on the pillow of the guest room where I had been sleeping for a while. And then I was divorced.

•••

They tow my car from the parking deck of our apartment complex. Having misplaced the title to the decrepit Subaru, I avoided the hassle of getting new tags after I moved here from California. The truth is, I pretty much neglected the car altogether. Probably because of the flat tire, someone reported it as abandoned. I don’t bother visiting the impound garage to harangue some bored clerk in his cage. What’s a car anyway but the means of transport? Like the body hauls the soul around, until the soul alone is transported … somewhere. No doubt the Subaru will be auctioned or flattened for scrap, so I let my driver’s license expire, too. My watch quits working and I throw it away. All of this I recognize as the wordless language of relinquishment.

I’ve waited a long time to get old. After high school, I knew that I needed more life in order to have anything worth saying to a blank page. I wanted to claw the calendar pages off in bunches and accumulate a past. I wanted to let time etch lines in my face and scorch my soul. It happened, but I don’t know much more today than before, though I feel friendlier with the questions, more patient. Less patient, too, almost violently so, as the death clock ticks on. I’m pushing sixty. It’s not pushing back.

Still left to quit is my job. I phone a financial advisor to ask about retirement prospects. He wants a list of assets and I almost laugh. As he will, when he gets the “list.” It’s on the night after this conversation when shy Jessica sidles up to remind me about the letters.

“You did a good thing,” she says.

I guess Jessica’s age is about the same as mine when our letter exchange began. Such women look away from me in the street, sick of goons inspecting them. Then, too, it’s instinct, simple biology, and nothing personal. Their DNA makes them not return my gaze for the same reason my DNA makes me hope (absurdly, because what’s next?) they will. Our respective strands of chromosomes, our stranded chromosomes, want only to replicate with the optimal candidate. For mine, they are it. For theirs, I am not.

Yet another, larger part of me feels a wash of relief at not caring. The soul separates from the body, hardly a big deal. Can it be starting already? What’s astounding, so lucky, is that they came together in the first place, for however “long” or “short” a time.

“A few years ago, I ended a relationship that was murdering the joy out of me,” Jessica writes in a follow-up email to the letter scans. Quickly she apologizes for the “melodrama.” She’s “re-entering the world” and trying poetry again, she says. I tell her I’m glad. Her father has just turned eighty-three, she adds. “My parents had kids late, which makes them the age of my friends’ grandparents, which gives me an odd perspective sometimes.” She mentions his “creeping Alzheimer’s. At least he’s still around, which I know isn’t ever guaranteed, and everybody expected him to be gone by now.”

•••

One of my letters to Jessica closed with, “I want to help and am running out of time.” Another scrap of unintended melodrama, true in one way during the moment of composition—I was headed out the door, late for a flight—and more broadly true in another way now.

If I see her again, I’ll tell her, since it’s possible she will understand, about my stockpile of handwritten letters and diaries. About the form of treasure that they make up for me in the language of those who’ve relinquished everything, happily or not. About how the once-blank pages are filled with insistent claims, clamoring to be heard, silently bursting with what we’re expected to remember.

•••

RANDY OSBORNE writes in Atlanta, where he teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at Emory University. Represented by the Brandt & Hochman Agency in New York, he is finishing a collection of personal essays.