Parachutes and Kisses (26 page)

But Bertha-Belle's most endearing trait was her ability to communicate with the Lord as if by walkie-talkie. She knew what God was thinking at any given moment. She knew His will. She knew what He wanted her to earn, what days off He had ordained for her, what sort of car He meant for her to drive (a white Cadillac), what sort of coat He meant for her to wear (white mink), what sort of seats He intended her to have in airplanes (first class). God was her auto mechanic, too; when the car stalled on the road, Bertha-Belle prayed it back to health. She could also heal headaches (by sending the pain “back to the pit where it come from”), and occasionally read minds. She was undeniably psychic—though often in a most self-serving manner.

Next to her, Alva Libbey was a bore. (Next to Bertha-Belle,
everyone
was a bore.) Bertha was a black queen and Alva was white trash. She pronounced tomatoes “tomatehs.” She walked like a puppet held up by a string at the small of her back. Her face was long and thin and her nose was hooked. Despite her obvious unattractiveness, she primped and preened before the mirror like a starlet about to make her debut on the “Tonight” show. She was also mad about perfumes like Evening in Paris, which on her smelled like Night in Norwalk.

Nurse Librium mixed up the names of Isadora's boyfriends—which, admittedly, wasn't hard to do—and when she didn't mix them up, she neglected to give messages at all. Weeks later, she would say, when queried, “Oh,
that's
right, I
do
remember someone calling that night—but what
ever
was his name?”

Alva's habits in the kitchen were also bizarre. She bought foods in odd quantities: three juice oranges, one grapefruit, two dozen chicken legs. She filled the freezer with tiny beef patties she spelled “hambergers,” and every night of the week she made one for herself and one for Amanda till the child would
eat
nothing but hamberger. (Isadora even ventured the thought that she'd only eat it if it was
spelled
that way.)

Alva's idea of vegetables was sweet potato and white potato, or peas and sweet potato. Isadora could never get it across to her that two starches did not make for a nutritionally balanced meal. But what did it really
matter
what Alva cooked? She cooked it for so many hours that no nourishment whatever remained anyway. Sometimes she'd put suppers on the stove at two P.M. and serve them at 5:30. She covered all her own food with A1 sauce, Tabasco, ketchup, and chutney; Isadora would have done the same if she'd had to eat Alva's cooking.

Isadora was traumatized enough by all these nannies, but what about Amanda? People kept disappearing from her life. She'd no sooner build an attachment than some catastrophe would intervene—whether true love or Scientology—and she and her mother would be alone again. The hot-and-cold-running nannies had been bad enough when Josh was there, but now that he wasn‘t, poor Amanda was making do as best she could. She held on to her rituals: the bath, the Muppets, the bedtime recital of the day's activities. She was a happy child—full of bounce and joy—but she was also angry about all these changes in her life and she expressed her anger by bossing people around—as if that way she could control an increasingly uncontrollable world. Isadora knew damn well that she and her friends rationalized to themselves about divorce and what it was doing or not doing to their kids. Outwardly the kids got used to the alternate weekends, never seeing Daddy and Mommy together unless they were fighting, and negotiating the treacherous shoals of boyfriends and girlfriends appearing on weekends to woo them with undeserved toys. But there was no denying that these precious children of divorce received a notion of themselves that was inappropriate to their tender years. Alternately fought over and treated like burdens, how could they not feel somehow self-accusatory, and self-doubting?

From time to time Isadora would call Josh and plead with him about what the separation was doing to Amanda.

“Can't we try again—for her sake?” she'd say.

“For your sake, you mean.”

“I don't know why we have to put Amanda through this,” she'd say.

“Because we have to.”

“But do we?”

“I care about Amanda just as much as you do. I love her as much as you do and
I
have to do this,” Josh would say.

“Why?” Isadora would say.

“Because,” Josh would say, “I don't have to account to you anymore.”

“You're a selfish goddamned bastard!” Isadora would scream as the whole conversation degenerated into a shouting match. He'd hang up. Then she'd call him back. She'd scream and hang up. Then he'd call her back. He'd apologize. She'd apologize. And they'd both hobble away clutching their vitals.

Isadora couldn't understand why they were doing this. They both
did
love Amanda. They had made Amanda as a bond of flesh between them. Amanda knew this intuitively as children somehow always do, and she lost no opportunity in reminding them.

When Daddy came to the house, she tried to get them to hug each other as they had when she was a baby.

“Hug Mommy, hug Mommy,” Amanda would say.

And, sheepishly, Josh would hug his two ladies, then quickly draw away. It was excruciating. Sometimes Isadora had the sense that Josh had to reject her, the way an adolescent has to reject a parent. It was an exercise, a phase he had to go through—but when he emerged from it, would he be sorry? Isadora didn't know. She supposed a time would come when Josh would understand all that he had thrown away and be sorry, but when that time came, would she still want him back? Probably not. The orbits would have shifted, some suns would have waned and died, and the whole galaxy would appear quite different. Relationships between men and women seemed, if left to themselves, to go through metamorphoses rather like cosmic creations. They flamed at birth, then cooled, then began the long trek toward entropy. That was why families could not be built upon the vagaries of passion alone. Passion was too unpredictable a force. Passion was too unreliable.

Isadora didn't know what she thought about passion anymore. She was
for
it—clearly it was the pulse of the universe—but how could you indulge your passions and also raise children? Sometimes she thought that the reason her generation was forever committed to alternate weekends was that only
that
emolument of divorce returned romantic passion to domestic life.

Had they not been prepared for children—any of them? Having waited so long to have kids and having grown up in such small families themselves (with no little brothers or sisters to raise), had the demands of child-rearing hit them squarely between the eyes and made them blame each other—rather than Mother Nature, whose “fault” it all was?

And yet what gave life more joy, more meaning, more pleasure, than children?

Putting Amanda to bed each night, Isadora reviewed the day with her.

“Let's talk about my birthday, Mommy,” Amanda would say. And then they would make elaborate plans involving animals and presents, balloons and cakes, musical accompaniments, clowns, costumes, and flowers.

Sometimes these bedtime conversations turned eschatological, and Amanda would ask whether God was a boy or a girl, whether dead people could still see us, and whether Grandpa Stoloff was in heaven.

Isadora opted for God as a woman, but she told Amanda, in all fairness, that not everyone believed God to be a woman. Amanda claimed to remember the time before she was born, which Isadora, as a good Wordsworthian Romantic, thoroughly understood.

“Before I was born, Mommy, I was up on the cloud with all the other babies. Then I got born. You were on that cloud before you were born, too, Mommy.”

“Did we know each other on that cloud?”

“Sure. God wouldn't have had us born as mother and daughter if we didn't know each other on that cloud.”

What had the little redhead done to deserve two parents who battled and split before she could even get her feet off that cloud and onto the ground? She was still trailing clouds of glory. Sometimes it seemed that Isadora's generation had babies as a
prelude
to splitting. Seized by the biological imperative in their early or mid-thirties, they grabbed a suitable partner and reproduced; then, when the troubles came, they went their separate ways, resuming their truncated adolescent lives, but now, with the impediments of children, nannies, school bills, houses. Were they perennially adolescents—Josh's generation, those flower children of the sixties, and Isadora‘s, those baby-boomers? What would
their
children think of them? Amanda's college class, the class of 2000, the alternate-weekend kids, the children of nuclear fear—what on earth would they think of their parents (assuming, as you really
couldn't
anymore, that the world and all its apparatus—college graduations, etc.—would still be there for them in twenty years or so)? These little children had been forced to grow up too early—just as their parents had been kept in adolescence too long. Would they get ulcers at twenty, or revert to some philosphy that would make John Calvin seem liberal? They were wise little souls, Amanda's contemporaries. They talked about divorces the way Isadora's generation had talked about Howdy Doody. But underneath all that precocity, they were just little kids. They adjusted to the alternate weekends, to the divorces, to the girlfriends and boyfriends, but when all was said and done, they were being given a curious preparation for life.

One day, Isadora wandered out of her study and down to the kitchen (to get yet another cup of coffee) and she overheard Mandy and Ishmael playing in the guest room downstairs.

Ishmael was a tough little tank of a kid, rough-and-tumble, and the son of the lady friend of Josh's who had caused Isadora such grief in the first days of their separation. He and Mandy had become friends because his mother was Josh's lover, but nonetheless the kids had hit it off terrifically. (This was another of the vagaries of divorce—do the kids get along? In adolescence you only had to worry about your
own
feelings; in second adolescence, you also had to worry about your kid's.)

“Now, you be the daddy,” Mandy said, “and let's pretend we're getting divorced. I'll be the mommy. I'll cry on the telephone.”

Mandy picked up an imaginary telephone.

“Boo-hoo, boo-hoo,” she cried into it. “Now you cry, too,” she instructed Ishmael.

“Boo-hoo,” he cried, obligingly.

“Now, you call your lawyer,” Amanda said.

“What's a lawyer?” asked Ishmael.

“Someone that puts bad guys in jail, like a policeman,” Amanda said.

“Oh,” said Ishmael.

Isadora passed the guest room without appearing to eavesdrop. Tears were in her eyes. She brushed them away. Mandy often brought tears to her eyes. She had cried nursing her, had cried when she bought her the first pair of white Bonnie-Doon ankle socks, had cried when she bought her her first English Chesterfield coat with black velvet collar.

Mandy looked so much like Isadora, had such similar verbal abilities, such similar precocity and energy, that it was dangerous how much Isadora identified with her.

“Boo-hoo, boo-hoo-boo-hoo,” she heard again. Apparently Ishmael had fallen in love with his own boo-hooing and had resumed it in very loud tones, almost as if he were imitating a police siren.

“You can stop crying now,” she heard Mandy ordering. “Only cry when I tell you to cry. That's how it will be a
real
pretend divorce.”

“Oh well, Isadora thought, climbing the stairs to her study, maybe Mandy is better prepared for life than I thought.

Mandy had no trouble ordering little boys around. She was absolutely clear on the fact that
her
needs came first. Isadora, on the other hand,
still
had trouble with this. To her own detriment, she tended to put everyone's needs ahead of her own: Josh's when they had lived together, Mandy‘s—now that Mandy was here—not to mention the needs of her various crazy boyfriends.

Suddenly, walking upstairs to her studio, she thought again of her grandfather and the novel she had wanted to write about him. She thought of the three generations of Russian-Jewish-Americans: Mandy, playing Divorce in Fairfield County, Connecticut; Isadora and her sisters playing Running Away from the Nazis on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; and Grandpa Stoloff as a child in Odessa, dreaming of America and escape as he stuffed a dried pea into the spigot of the family samovar.

He was only three and a half or so—Mandy's age—when, in the story he had so loved to tell over and over, he took a dried split pea (one that had somehow eluded the soup) and worked it up in that aimless way children have, into the spigot of the samovar. His elder sisters all arrived for tea—and lo and behold, the samovar did not work. His mother tried. His father tried. His sisters tried. But the samovar was mysteriously dry. Little Schmuel shuffled around in the corner, wearing his worn high-button shoes, and a guilty look on his baby face.

What could have happened? the grown-ups all wondered. What on earth could have happened?

“Maybe a pea got in,” Schmuel averred. Whereupon the adults rained blows upon his poor bewildered child's shoulders.

“How the devil did they know it was me?” he always asked, mischievously, when he told this story. “How the devil did they know?”

 

What would Amanda remember for
her
grandchildren—assuming that she (and the planet) got past graduation in 2000 and continued well into the twenty-first century—to 2040, say—by which time her progeny would have their own progeny. She wouldn't have the memories her mother had—the giant balloons being blown up on Seventy-seventh Street on the eve of Thanksgiving, the game of eluding the Nazis which Isadora and her sisters played in the linen closet—but she would have her own set of haunting images.