My Mother Sleeps with Rabbit Angstrom by Liz Ziemska

The last time I saw my mother alive, Dancing with the Stars was on the television bolted to the ceiling, providing a grotesquely jaunty backdrop to the proceedings. I sat at her bedside watching her breath fog the plastic shield covering her mouth. A tube snaked down her nose providing nutrients. She hadn’t eaten solid food in weeks because of the water in her lungs. In her large white bed, she appeared tiny, gape-mouthed, quivering, like a fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. Could I keep her alive with a dropper and mashed flies?

“Don’t try to talk,” I said, “save your strength. Do you want a pencil and paper?”

She nodded. I handed her the journal I had taken to keeping in my purse since reading The Artist’s Way. She looked at me again, her once-brown eyes turned faded blue. Then, in a spidery script, my mother wrote love you(uuuuuuu), the “u” dribbling off the page like saliva.

“I love you too,” I said, the sob I choked down catching me by surprise. You must get better, I wrote in blocky letters, though I could have just said it. She had pneumonia, she couldn’t speak, but she could still hear. That’s when I knew I was beginning to weave a new narrative to immortalize our relationship, sampling voices, sketching out plotlines, interviewing protagonists. Fabulism is the first stage of grief.

My husband of five years, who had been standing behind me silently, now made his presence known to the mother-in-law he had heard of but never met.

“You used to take your daughter to ballet class,” he said, gesturing to the TV and the dancing stars.

My mother rolled her dusty blue marbles his way.

“This is my husband,” I said.

She rolled them back to me, and then to him again, taking in his shaggy hair, his rumpled flannel shirt, trying to match us up as a couple. I married a WASP, I told her telepathically. They dress poorly but they’re good in a crisis because in America, they’re considered royalty. Or at least that’s how they carry themselves.

My mother’s hand plucked at the coverlet, reached for the pencil once again. With great effort she scratched out love you(uuuuu)…

That’s when I should have known she was dying. She wouldn’t have written it once, my arctic mother, let alone twice, had she not been on the border between this world and the next. Such a blatant deathbed declaration would have been considered poshlost, that pitiless Russian word expressing disdain for all things that are common, tawdry, cheaply sentimental.

Visiting hours were over. I kissed my mother goodnight on the sweaty dome of her forehead, promising to return in the morning. Her eyes followed me out of the room.

 ~

Early the next day, I pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway to take a call from an unfamiliar number. My mother had just died, the nurse informed me with a slight edge to her voice. Was she blaming me for not spending the night in the hospital, like a dutiful daughter?

The winter sun stabbed me through the windshield. Why hadn’t my mother waited for me? Why the fuck hadn’t I left the house earlier? Why now, when we were finally breaking through twenty-five years of hostile silence, did she choose to die? My mother must have been satisfied with our last encounter. And to be completely honest, so was I. Now there would be no chance of a revision to the “love you” document.

Swinging back into traffic, I turned on the radio and learned that on the opposite side of the country, John Updike had passed away. Just that morning.

How ironic. Updike had been my mother’s least favorite author. She had made me read all the Russians (despite being Ukrainian), most of the French, a few Germans, but never Updike. When I read Rabbit, Run in high school, and told her how great it was that Updike could make me care for even his most despicable characters, my mother was not impressed. To her, Updike would forever be inferior to Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and her beloved Nabokov. (My mother never read female authors, not one. I never asked her why.)

Given that she’d died, suddenly, not suddenly, on the same day as John Updike, on January, 27, 2009 (before The Invasion, back when “Kyiv” was spelled “Kiev”), could she have been secretly in love with his work all along? Had they planned their escape from this world together, or was it a coincidence?

Eastern Europeans don’t generally believe in coincidence. There are signs and portents everywhere, Nabokov had said; all you must do is pay attention.

 ~

My mother had the good sense to die on a Friday, which meant that despite Judaic law requiring that the body be interred within twenty-four hours of death, she could not be buried on the Sabbath, so the earliest we could have the funeral would be Sunday. Until then, according to the sages, her soul was free to wander.

Nevertheless, they want my mother’s room. They want to take her downstairs, to the morgue, put her in a refrigerated drawer. Let them try. All my adult life I had run from her, but now I’m staying.  This is the final time we would be together, give or take an afterlife, and I’m not sure we’ll wind up in the same place. If I was unable to get an explanation from my mother in her lifetime, I would attempt to extract it from the waxed effigy lying under the stiff hospital sheet. It was far less scary than the living woman used to be.

~

The first time my mother and I were separated, I was four years old and had been sent to live with my grandparents in Kiev while she prepared for her medical school exams. In retaliation for my abandonment, I liberated my grandmother’s beloved parakeets from their cage on the balcony. I watched as they fluttered onto the leafy branches of the cottonwood tree across the street, jealous of their ability to go anyplace they liked.

Not long after that, my mother and I fled the Soviet Union for New York City. (A genuine coincidence, though for longer than I care to admit I thought it was punishment for my release of the parakeets). My father, not Jewish, had to stay behind. The State had paid for his degree in Chemical Engineering. They weren’t going to let their investment in human capitol benefit the decadent West. But the Jews nobody wanted, not even the ones with medical degrees.

 Saturdays in Manhattan my mother and I would take the A train from Washington Heights to Columbus Circle. At the Vaganova School of Classical Ballet on 57th and 7th, I stood at the bar in pink tights and black leotard, one foot in the hands of a man who looked like a Borzoi in a leotard (“Don’t sickle your arch!”). An older woman who looked a lot like Madame Blavatsky pounded Chopin etudes on the baby Steinway. My mother sat by the door in her avocado-green double-knit pantsuit, reading medical journals.

After class we would walk along Fifth Avenue admiring the window displays. In the tearoom of Bergdorf Goodman, my mother would order black coffee for herself but insisted that I have the chicken salad sandwich. Money was tight, but she liked to pretend that we had made it. That we belonged. After lunch we’d catch the early show at the Paris Cinema (half-price). In the empty darkened theater, I watched my mother watching Catherine Deneuve lose her mind beside the rotting carcass of a skinned rabbit in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, and felt a dull throb of premonition.

 ~

The man who comes to take my mother’s body is young and slim with a smooth face and freshly shaved head. He is dressed in a well-tailored navy suit and narrow black loafers. In his left ear, he wears a wireless headset. Nothing about him suggests funeral home. He looks like an FBI agent, or a bellhop from a boutique hotel. My mother would have flirted with him had she not been dead. I watch him search the room for the missing toe tag—in vain. The tag is in my purse, and I won’t give it up. It’s the only thing I have from her except for a bag labeled “Personal Effects,” which contains a spangled sweatshirt and leopard stretch pants. My mother had been lying on the floor of her apartment for three days before the super found her. There had been no next of kin on the lease, so she went directly to the nursing home, where they must have dressed her in the contents of the lost and found bin. My mother would never have chosen these clothes for herself.

The man pulls a blank tag from his breast pocket and inscribes my mother’s information by hand. It’s not the name she was born with, nor her married name. It’s a name she had chosen when she had decided to erase her past. The man turns his back to me to attach the tag to the toe (such delicacy—was it standard practice in the mortuary arts?) and then zipped my mother’s body into a white plastic bag.

“I am taking your mother now,” he says with great solemnity. He’s taller and out-weighs me by at least fifty pounds. He is poised, deferential, but it’s clear he’s ready for any funny business from the bereaved.

I step aside so he can wheel her away, but before he can push the gurney all the way through the door, my mother unzips the body bag and hops off. The door closes behind him.

She pulls off her hospital gown and fifty-five years of regrets. Underneath she is lovely a girl just on the brink of adulthood wearing a one-piece black bathing suit. Our eyes meet for the briefest of moments.

“See you Sunday,” I say, not expecting a hug.

My mother turns away and climbs out of the hospital window. Shimmying down the banana tree growing beside the building, she dodges four lanes of traffic, pulls open a heavy glass door, and steps into the chilled air of a supermarket.

On the other side of the country, John Updike sheds his death weeds and a similar number of decades. He changes into a clean white shirt and black pants, ties on a red apron. He takes his place behind the busiest check-out stand and begins ringing up groceries. Before too long, he notices the commotion my mother is causing by walking through the aisles in search of pickled herring dressed only in a bathing suit.

 ~

Things were great between us, we were pals, until the year I turned fourteen and accompanied my mother to a medical conference in Oahu. We had just seen Eyes of Laura Mars and my mother aspired to Faye Dunaway’s fashion photographer wardrobe: sheer blouses tucked into pinstriped pencil skirts; stiletto heels secured with skinny ankle straps. Sunshine and fresh air are what my mother claimed she wanted for me in Hawaii. What she wanted for herself was a new husband, one who could indulge her cinematically acquired taste for luxury, romance, danger, and intellectual conversation (the Soviets were right, the decadent West had corrupted her). A doctor would be ideal. Perhaps one of the conference attendees could be persuaded to shed his wife after seeing those ankle straps, those gauzy blouses.

I was now tall enough to wear her cast-offs, so my mother dressed me as her wingman in black wool culottes, plunging V-neck sweater, and patent-leather spectator pumps. This was August in the tropics, but there was air-conditioning. She had accounted for that. But what she hadn’t counted on was that all eyes followed me, not her. It might have been due to the novelty of seeing a pre-pubescent girl dressed like the mistress of a wealthy older man. Or it might have been what I know now that I’m older than my mother was then: Youth trumps everything--education, status, money, power, intellect, even couture.

That was the beginning of the end of our friendship.

 ~

My mother reaches the checkout stand with her little jar of herring. Updike admires her wavy black hair, how it hovers above her perfect oval face, how her eyebrows resemble the flying crows in that famous van Gogh painting, and how the straps of her bathing suit have fallen down around the curved tops of her arms.

The store manager comes over. “Lady, this isn’t the beach,” he says.

“I just came in from my deathbed to pick up herring snacks,” she says.

It’s the voice that impresses Updike, flat but tony, like Marlene Dietrich, had she been Russian instead of German. He slides down that voice into a living room where her father and his friends are standing on the Oriental carpet in sheepskin slippers, sipping warm vodka from lavender-tinted, cut crystal glasses.  Her mother picks herring pieces with a little silver fork, placing them on thin slices of black bread. Parakeets chirp in the jasmine-scented Kievan dusk.

“Next time you come into my store, you must be properly dressed,” says the manager.

My mother doesn’t blush. In fact, I have never seen her blush. She is clinically incapable of blushing. Or apologizing. She pays for the herring with a five-dollar bill she pulls from the top of her bathing suit. Then she walks out the door without waiting for her change.

Updike removes his apron, hands it to the store manager.

“You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” the manager says.

“It’s better than feeling nothing at all,” says Updike.

He leaves the supermarket and finds the parking lot empty. He walks down the main street of this town that tumbles toward the sea. The day is gathering itself in. On the wide promenade, boys play basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. He does not stop, though he once played the game real well. He waves to the boys—they do not see him—and steps onto the beach.

 ~

The hospital where my mother died is situated at the base of a triangular block. At the apex of the triangle is a liquor store. To get to the liquor store you must drive two blocks east, one block south, then two blocks west. There is no other way to get there with all the one-way streets, as if the city planners had intentionally made the liquor store tantalizingly close but very difficult to get to by car. Nobody walks in LA.

The trash bin outside the store seems the perfect place to deposit the bag of my mother’s PERSONAL EFFECTS. Inside the store, I purchase a Diet Coke, a pack of Marlboro Lights, and a bottle of Pravda vodka. The old Armenian man behind the counter has the right kind of face to work at a liquor store adjacent to a hospital—the kind of face I wanted the man from the funeral home to have: a cliff of a furrowed brow hanging over brown lachrymose eyes, a fleshy mouth set in doleful sympathy, errant eyebrows tuned like antennae to adjectives of bad tidings.

I pay for my purchases, get back into the car, and drive north, lighting a fresh cigarette, ineptly, at nearly every light. I turn east, and before too long, I find myself across the street from the building where my mother’s office used to be.

 ~

When I was sixteen, my pediatrician mother (who was coming closer and closer to re-enacting Deneuve’s role in Repulsion, though I only saw it coming in retrospect) decided to fire both her nurse and her receptionist—they were stealing from her, she claimed. All summer long, while my friends scooped ice cream for minimum wage, took the bus to the beach, loitered at the local mall, I filed insurance claim forms and held babies for their vaccinations--each one an enraged peach writhing under my hands, threatening to roll off the examining table and crack open its head on the linoleum. I closed my ears to the screams and gripped harder as my mother stuck in the needle. To the new mother standing beside us, weeping silently into her handkerchief, we must have looked like a pair of cannibals preparing our feast.

 ~

The evening sky blooms thistle-blue above the flat gray slab of ocean. My mother leans back on her elbows close to the shoreline, the fading light emphasizing the spectral whiteness of her shoulders against the dark bathing suit and shiny flip of black hair. Updike folds his lanky body onto the sand beside her. She passes him the half-eaten jar of herring. He plucks out a briny gray hunk and takes a bite. Revolting. She finishes them off and wipes her fingers on his trouser leg.

“Did you think it would be like this?” he asks her.

“I didn’t think it would be like anything,” she says, evasive.

“You don’t believe in an afterlife?”

“You are born, you live, you die. Time is an arrow.”

Updike shakes his head. “Time is a sphere without exits.”

For the crime of misquoting Nabokov, my mother gives Updike the gift of her Soviet erudition. “Your poetry got better at the end,” she tells him. “After you ditched those tired onion domes and that grieving St. Vladimir. But I still prefer your novels, such as they are.”

Updike thinks a moment and recites from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: “On the seashore, with storm impending, how envious was I of the waves, each in tumultuous turn descending, to lie down at her feet like slaves!”

“Pushkin was a born poet,” my mother agrees, ignored the compliment told slant. “Tatiana and Onegin made him immortal. You might have done the same with Rabbit Angstrom. At least that’s what my daughter thinks.”

“Rabbit may be immortal,” Updike ducks his head, “but as you can see, I am not.”

“Nonsense,” my mother says, “who is Rabbit if not you?”

Updike laughs. “Rabbit Angstrom isn’t me, he’s closer to Beatrix Potter’s rabbit, a rebellious creature that can’t seem to stay out of the vegetable patch. A creature who wanted more than he had. And got in trouble for it. Did you ever want more than you had?”

My mother brushes his silly allusions aside. “What is creation without its creator? And I wish you had not written those sequels. Who wants to see Rabbit at rest, living off the proceeds of his multiple car dealerships?”

What sins have condemned him to spend the first extraordinary moments of his death with this fadingly glamorous, smart-mouthed Soviet Jew, Updike wonders. “People who want to be reminded that redemption is possible,” he says.

“There is no redemption,” mother snaps, “There is only the freedom to turn away from poshlost. Besides,” she continues, “everything that’s special about your writing you got from the Russians: the subtle word play, the pitiless examination of human nature. Even the humor, what little of it there is in your work.”

“What do you know about writing?” says Updike.

My mother shrinks back, hesitant, for once. “I wrote something, once.”

 ~       

It had been one of the heaviest winter storms on record. Snowdrifts piled high against the plate glass windows. Flights were cancelled, hotels overbooked, ground transportation halted. For three hallucinatory days, I performed endless laps inside the Saarinen fishbowl of the TWA terminal, trying to figure out what had happened to my mother, why she’d pulled me out of college so suddenly, at the start of the second semester of my freshman year. We’d spoken on the phone just the previous week. She’d sounded the same, and yet she’d suddenly decided to stop paying tuition, which was odd because she had been sending me checks every week (“Spend, spend, I don’t want you to eat that cafeteria food”).

When I called her to asked about the money, it was like a scene from The Exorcist, in which a demon had transformed my mother’s voice into the aural equivalent of a sharpened claw: “You think you can get away with this?”

“With what, Mom, what are you talking about?”

“You’re nothing without me. Nothing at all.”

She hung up on me. And I had no choice but to pack up my dorm room and use the rest of my money to fly home. But then I spent the next three days and nights at JFK, sleeping on my pile of mismatched luggage, subsisting on coffee and candy bars. I should have taken this interlude for the luscious purgatory that it was.

When the storm finally subsided, I flew home. Back in the land of blazing sunshine, my head unsteady from exhaustion-induced delirium, I found my mother at the white curb in a filthy nightgown and carpet slippers, her eyes rimmed pink with insanity.

“You will never leave me again,” she said through cracked lips as she popped the trunk for my luggage.

Back at the condo I found that all my mother’s carefully tended houseplants had died. The dishes in the sink were covered in green mold. Every piece of clothing had been taken out of the closets and turned inside out as if each had been searched for bugs. The Soviet kind. The beige leather couch, on which I had previously been forbidden to sit, was now a nest of tangled sheets and sweat-dampened pillows.

“You have to call him and tell him about what’s happening to me,” my mother said holding out a piece of paper. There was a phone number on it, and a man’s name. I did not recognize it.

“Who is this?”

“Your English is better than mine,” she said. “You have to talk to him and convince him to take me back.”

 ~

“What did you write?” asks Updike.

“I wrote a note,” my mother says proudly.

“What did it say?”

“It said love you.”

“Love you? That’s it? No personal pronoun?”

My mother gives Updike one of her haughtiest looks. “In Russian ‘I’ is ‘Я,’ which is the last letter of the alphabet. ‘I’ goes last, if at all. She knew what I meant.”

Updike purses his lips in Yankee disapproval. “Elusive to the end,” he says. “And by the way, I’m not a Yankee—I’m from Pennsylvania.”

My mother waves him off. “To a Jew, you’re a Yankee.”

“But to a Yankee, I’m a Jew,” says Updike.

She laughs, like a handful of coins thrown down.

“You’re no Tatiana,” says Updike, “you’re not even Queenie. You can’t return to the years before you had a daughter. Before your daughter grew up and began to replace you.”

“You have no right to speak to me this way.” She raises her hand to slap him, but Updike catches her wrist and squeezes, hard.

“Let me go,” she commands, but there is no real fear in her eyes. Unlike that day when we both discovered I had grown stronger than her and that she could no longer threaten me with anything, because I had decided to want nothing. Not an education, not a home, not a family. Because wanting things means that they could be taken away.

Updike drops her wrist.  “We don’t own our creations. They already existed before we came on the scene. Our job is only to guide them into the world. And then step aside. The creator and the created are not the same.”

“Most religions and several schools of literary criticism disagree with you. I made her, she is me,” my mother says before she realizes she’s been led into a trap.

 ~       

Jews don’t embalm, but they don’t shy away from makeup either. My mother in her casket looks like a Madame Alexander doll, new and still in her box. My husband is strong and silent at my elbow. He will round out the crew of rented pallbearers. (Note to self: If you alienate everyone, strangers will carry you to your grave.)

 There’s a picture of my mother on an easel next to the casket. It’s a glamour shot, her face professionally posed and made up. She had it done right after I went away to college. When I came home that first Christmas, I found my mother’s huge and haughty doppelgänger hanging on the living room wall above the electric fireplace. Today it looks embarrassed to find itself in such humble surroundings, like a woman coming to the realization that she has overdressed for a party. I trace my mother’s line of sight. There, at the edge of the thin aluminum frame, a glimmer of the madness that would soon engulf her.

 “You look just like her,” says the female rabbi.

My husband squeezes my hand.

 ~

“You pulled her out of school, sold her car, cleaned out her bank account,” Updike leans in closer, “what was all that about?”

“She refused to do something for me,” my mother says.

“What?”

“A small thing, a telephone call. She wouldn’t do it.”

“And then what did you do?” says Updike. “Did you also tell her that you thought she was poisoning you? Did you give her the weekend to pack up and leave, threaten to call the police? Did you wait for the day she turned nineteen to push her out, so she couldn’t call the police on you? What movie did you learn that from?”

 My mother turns away.

  ~       

About a year after my mother threw me out of the house, I caught a chest cold that wouldn’t go away. My mother had always been my doctor; I had no other, so I decided to call that number. His office was not far from where my mother had once practiced. I gave the receptionist my real name. This wasn’t a stealth operation. I wanted him to know exactly who I was. In the waiting room I wiped the sweat from my palms and went through the fantasies I’d had about what I would find in this office—some gorgeous, brilliant justification for everything that went wrong. I get it, Mom, I too would have lost my head over this man.

Instead, what came out to greet me was nothing special: short, soft, oozing with self-regard. A jelly donut of a man. I felt sick with disappointment, for now the world made no sense at all. In the examining room I held out my arm for the blood pressure cuff, stuck out my tongue, let him shine a light inside my ears. The doctor kept looking at me, but not asking, what do you want? I wanted to call him out for breaking her heart, for being the cause of her subsequent decline, for the premature death of my childhood, but I was too undone by his indifference to speak. Plus, it wasn’t really his fault. Blame it on the Soviets; genetics; generational trauma; my father, who could have tried harder. This little jelly donut of a man couldn’t have known he was fucking a time bomb.

He pushed aside my blouse and placed the cold disk of the stethoscope over my heart. Bent his head to listen. I stared at his bald spot. Then I noticed a photograph on the wall. It was a picture of his family: wife, kids, dog. They looked so generic they might have been the stock photograph that came with the frame when he bought it.

 ~      

We carry her to the open grave. It’s nice plot by a low stone wall, over which we can see gentiles being buried in the adjacent cemetery. They place her box on straps. The winch goes down. They take the straps away. The rabbi says a prayer, sings a song. We in the burial party—my husband and I, a couple of aides from the nursing home, my mother’s accountant—take turns throwing dirt onto her coffin. You can really tell who gardens and who doesn’t by the way they handle the shovel.

Everyone leaves. I sit back in the chair and wait. Hispanic gardeners of the dead, straw cowboy hats pulled down in respect for the bereaved, stand beside their backhoe.

I make them wait.

 ~ 

Updike wades in the shallows. My mother admires the way the froth swirls around his girlish ankles.

He walks back up the beach and settles down beside her once again. “Redemption may or may not be possible,” he says, “but love never ends.”

My mother doesn’t really believe what he says, but night is coming, and she has grown tired of fighting him. “Love never ends,” she murmurs, the words cradled softly on her tongue.

They lie back to soak up the last bit of heat from the sun-warmed sand. Their hands are clasped, but their heads are turned away in private leave-taking. The moon ascends, pulls the tide in like a blanket, and they are swept away.

The winter sun melts into the gentiles. I get up from my chair and walk to the edge of the grave. El nah refa nah-la, I say in Hebrew: “Oh Lord, please make her well.” Then I throw in the toe tag, step away, and dip my chin to let the men know they can fill in the hole.

Artist’s Statement

I’ve been searching for my writer’s voice ever since I started writing, quite late, at 40. At the Bennington Writing Seminars one teacher assured me that I was not a satirist, but a magic realist. Lately, I’ve been told that such a term can only be used by South American writers, spiritual descendants of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to which I want to reply, have you ever read “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol, a nineteenth-century Ukrainian writer? But I’m not here to encroach on territories. Some of my stories have been published under the category of Fantasy, others, Science Fiction. In either category, I’m a feathered fish. Recently, at a regional bookseller conference, I met Claire Oshetsky, whose marvelous novel “Chouette,” about a woman who gives birth to an owlet, left me so deeply moved and disturbed. She too had been searching for self-definition until one reviewer suggested that she’s not a magic realist, nor a fabulist, but a surrealist. And I said, Claire, if you don’t mind, I’m also going to take that category. Let me take as my spiritual godparents Leonora Carrington and Franz Kafka.

Liz Ziemska is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Interfictions: 2, Strange Horizons, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Pushcart Prize XLI, and has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She is the author of Mandelbrot the Magnificent and lives in Los Angeles. (This story appeared in Psychological Perspectives, A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought in a earlier form.)