How Brassiere
Straps Bind
An old family story says that my Aunt
Libby, whose birthday is today—she would have been 104—and my mother, Freda, who died more than two
decades ago on this day, were once so drunk after a family party that they
ended up lying down in bed together, that they passed out and that they woke
with the back hooks of their brassieres linked inside one another, back to
back, connected.
The jokester who did this to them,
whoever that may have been, was wise.
Because so it was with them—hooked inside
each other’s lives.
My mother went to Libby and Milton’s
apartment every day —my mother and her brother Milton had been deeply
affectionate siblings; Freda, the youngest of the eight children, and Milton,
the next to oldest—she went to help relieve Libby, the registered nurse, from
the tedium of caring for Milton after he’d come home from the hospital to die
of the cancer in his colon, his liver. That was the way he wanted it, or so I
like to think, and, while he starved toward death, getting frailer, thinner
every day, Libby and Freda tended him and one another.
I remember standing at the window of our
apartment—by then we like them had moved away from the houses where the parties
were held, where the young women who never drank got drunk—I remember watching
my mother outside the house in her car with her head against the steering
wheel. I could see my mother’s arms wrapped around the wheel, could see the
sadness in her back, knew that she was weeping. But my mother didn’t talk about
her grief. She was like Libby in this way. She simply bore it, composing
herself before she came inside to fix our dinner.
Goodness in the face of death, Milton’s,
the deaths of all my mother’s brothers and sisters. Libby, the in-law deeply
entwined in all their lives, binds me to their generation, the link to them
all—the one who was there, saw it all, knows the secrets.
My Aunt Libby and I and her son, Milton’s
son, my cousin Mark have a secret that she
never told. But it’s mine so I figure I get to tell.
When I was five and Mark was ten, I had
loved him. When I was ten and he, fifteen, when I was sixteen, seventeen,
eighteen, when I was nineteen and he was twenty-four, I had loved him. It was a
childish love, a crush. But when I was twenty, when he buried his father, when
he kissed me on the mouth in the apartment building’s back stairwell during
Shiva, told me that he loved me too, I thought he had waited for me, the way no
one else would ever do again. The impropriety of the kiss, its urgency, its
passion mixed with mourning, made it seem profound. He asked me to marry him. I
said, Yes.
The cousin I almost married. We were
briefly—over almost before it began—engaged. Libby, the mother-in-law I almost
had.
Libby was relieved when it didn’t happen.
She told Mark, “Don’t marry Mary. She cries all the time.” And, indeed, I still
do. My father, who loved Mark, took him to Colt games in Baltimore before the
Colts absconded in the middle of the night one day to Florida. My mother would
look at Mark and remember her brother. Mark had Milton’s dark exotic color, and
I, when I was young, had my mother’s ivory white skin. She could imagine the
grandchildren. But I suppose my parents were relieved, too. Afterwards, we just
went on. Never talking about it. Cousins marrying! We put it away like a dirty
little secret.
Many years after I’d married and so had
he, he came to see me alone. He was short, shorter even than I remembered. He
was fifty-five, with graying curly hair. He’d let his hair grow longer than
when I’d loved him, when he’d kept it cut close to his scalp to hide the kinky
curls that now framed his wizened, yellow face. He’d always looked old to me.
Perhaps it was the olive tone of his skin like the grave dark faces of the
characters in Lawrence Durrell’s novels of betrayal, characters who uttered
wise things ordinary people never said. I remembered a line from one of those
novels I’d read when I was in my twenties and still young enough to be
mesmerized by the lush philosophical prose: Truth
is what most contradicts itself.
He’d saved all the love letters I’d
written him after the Shiva, while we were ever so briefly engaged, when he
went back to Alaska, a captain in the Airforce, a dentist. The letters, in blue
air mail onion skin envelopes with their thin red borders, in his hands. The
letters were tied with a piece of string. He laid them on a side table and
began to talk. He recalled the time he’d taken me sailing in his tiny Sunfish
on the Maggothy River. I was eighteen, a freshman at the University of
Maryland. He was in the U. of M.’s dental school. While he talked, my mind
drifted to the images from that time before he’d kissed me, before his father
died. I remembered how our hands brushed when he pulled the sail to turn about,
how with my head bent, I looked up into his face. I thought of all the years
I’d done that, when I was smaller than he. I remembered how tongue-tied I’d
been the whole trip, how I always feared speaking to him, how my shyness, the
shyness that had plagued me since I was little, worsened in his presence.
In the letters I didn’t speak of grief,
but we were both in mourning: He, for his father; I, for the uncle I adored. My
uncle—he was the one who gave me the first stamps for my album. I said to Mark
when he visited that day, “Do you remember how he used to save them up until my
mother and father brought me over for a visit? And when he was dying, when he
lay there in the den on the old couch, and I would come? It was so hard to look
at him—he was so thin. He was all teeth. And he would smile at me.”
In the letters, I wrote about Thoreau and
E.M. Forster, about being awake to life, about the things that won’t forsake
us. About connecting, paying attention to the details, thinking of life as one
critical hour.
One critical hour. One critical hour. A
lifetime. I am bound, engaged in that metaphorical hour like my mother and
Libby, bound in brassiere straps, in laughter and losses, in secrets kept and
revealed.
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| Libby |
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| Freda and Gerson |
