Faraway Echoes of Laughter
Ours was not an immediate nor an easy friendship, but rather one 56 years, 5 months, 11 days in the making. It took time to slow cook into something solid and enduring, transcendent now that she is gone. We used to laugh out loud (often in the face of darkness or at the absurdity of our lives), casually weave in lines from movies we loved just to be goofy, take road trip to marathons, bake and cook together, raise some cats, do hard things.
Mom and I are watching My Cousin Vinny and the two “yutes” have left the Sac-O-Suds with their inadvertent stolen can of tuna. Marisa Tomei’s biological clock is ticking and she is stomping on the porch. We are hysterical, even though we’ve seen this movie a hundred times. We’re watching Moonstruck and Cher’s mother slaps her. “Snap out of it,” she says, “put some make up on that hickey…your life’s going down the toilet.” Jean and Lionel are hiding from the villagers in As Time Goes By. Joey has asked Phoebe to teach him French on Friends. We could watch those films and sitcoms over and over, and still crack up in our seats, tears streaming down.
We’re at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, having a snack in between visiting museum exhibits with my young nephews. The family has come east for the week of Passover. Will is maybe 4 and Ben is 7. My brother gets pizza for the boys and splits it in half for them to share. Will is having none of that “sharing” nonsense. He is screaming, “I want my own round pizza. I want my own round pizza!” The entire cafeteria sees this tantrum and knows this kid won’t share. It’s hard not to laugh, but Mom and I just stare into space and nudge at each other under the table. “Shut up, don’t you flinch!” we say to each other with our feet.
We are layering on blizzard gear. I’ve got Mom dressed in a pair of my old ski pants, a couple of sweaters, waterproof outerwear, boots, a hat, and gloves. I’m dressed in as much miserable weather wear as she is. We head out to the backyard patio, through the porch door, because it’s the quickest route through the snow to the generator. It’s the middle of the night, and we need to fill it with gas so it can continue powering the sump pump in the basement (so the rising ground water won’t flood the room), the refrigerator upstairs, and the power strip I’ve set up to charge our phones and give us electricity for lights. The power’s been out for several days already, and won’t come back on anytime soon. The gas cans are in the shed nearby. I’m petrified of pouring gas, and one of us needs to hold a funnel to pour from the gas can into the well of the generator so it doesn’t spill everywhere. The snow is bouncing off our hats, and pelting at our eyes, nearly blinding us as we fill it up. I pull the recoil cord, push the start switch, and the thing roars and then settles to a purr. I plug in the three 100-foot extension cords I’ve pre-set, running them through the downstairs back door, into the basement, and up the stairs to the first floor. We grin when the damn machine starts properly. We are fucking mechanics! Rosie the Riveter would be proud.
We’re on Amtrak on a Saturday morning, rumbling up to Boston for the marathon – my second time qualifying – and it is pouring. We watch the rain come down, pounding on the train, double-blurring the scenery zooming by. There’s a nor’easter coming in fast, and the weather prediction for the race on Monday looks awful, possibly even snow – in April – in New England. She doesn’t say anything as she sees me staring out the window, tracing water droplets with my fingers. She knows how much I hate the rain, but she also knows how hard it is to get an entry for the Boston Marathon, and that I will still run it, despite the weather.
The night before the race, we’re at a California Pizza Kitchen inside the Prudential Center that’s connected to the Sheraton by a walkway (so we don’t have to go outside). We’re by a wall of windows, still watching the rain. I keep checking my phone for any news of race cancellation, but so far, it is still a go. The next morning, I’m up early going through my pre-race rituals and preparation before heading out at 6:00 a.m. to the buses that will deliver us to the start area (26.2 miles west of Boston). The weather service is reporting 100 mph winds in the area, and heavy rain on a day that will be considered the worst weather in the race’s 111-year history. I’m dressed head to toe in rain garb that I will shed at the last possible moment. The idea is to stay dry until the gun goes off at the starting line. I wake her up to tell her I’m leaving. I’m a vision in plastic. She snaps a photo with my camera, and all we can do is laugh. "Have a good race," she says. She'll try to watch the end of the race from the spot we've picked out near the hotel – if it's not a raging snowstorm by then, she'll get out there. She did. I crossed the finish line with another Boston qualifying time, and caught up with her back at the hotel, soaked, but brandishing the prized blue and gold finisher’s medal. "I guess we're coming back next year!” she says.
The summer I graduated from college, I wanted to travel in Europe prior to starting to look for work in New York. I was 21 years old. My parents gave me a plane ticket and a Eurail Pass as a graduation present, and I flew to London to stay with my aunt and uncle for a few days, before setting off on my loosely planned itinerary. Aunt Kate (my father’s sister) was incredulous. How could he let his daughter travel alone? I was starting my journey in Greece, and I’d bought a one-way flight from London to Athens. My father told her it was fine, and that they had approved my travel plans. My mother reassured her sister-in-law that she was ok with it, too. I don’t think my aunt was convinced, but she let me go.
Mom had taken her own European walk-about after she finished her master’s degree program in education and French language at Teacher’s College at Columbia in New York City. She would be teaching high school French in the fall, and she wanted to improve her fluency. She flew to Paris by herself, and immersed herself in a summer of all things French – food, language, sightseeing, architecture, art, and amour. Her parents let her take the trip. So, decades later, allowing me to travel alone was not surprising.
If Mom could have shared her Parisian escapades with me in French, it would have added another layer of ambiance, but alas, I was not the exceptional French student she was. English would have to suffice. She was 23 or 24 when she arrived in Paris in the mid-1950s. My mother looked like a movie star – a glamorous and chic Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (except in Paris). With her close-cropped dark brown hair, red lipstick, oh-so-cool shades, a crisp blouse and skirt, and smart kitten heels, she had that je ne sais quoi the French exude without an effort. She sat at cafes on the Champs Elysees and ate buttery croissants and sipped espresso, had a romance with a photographer who was there to catalog a celebrity's visit, took in arte at the Louvre, and came home with a satchel full of stories and embroidered elbow length white kid gloves. Her high school French students loved her. Years later, she would randomly bump into a former student who had remained in the area, and they would greet her with, "Bonjour, Madame."
It could not have been easy for my mother growing up in that situation, but she was already a resilient young woman. Maybe due to her family life with a special needs sister, or maybe simply due to her innate sensitivity and kindness, Mom made deep friendships and kept them throughout her life, sharing stories of marriages, children, grandchildren, happy times and sad ones.
Mom met her three closest and longest friends in high school. Pearl and her family lived next door to Mom on Sherwood Place. The houses were built at the same time with floor layouts that were opposite, so the two girls’ bedroom windows faced each other. Mom and Pearl became fast friends and neighbors, chatting and giggling across their open windows. Phyllis’s parents, Ben and Sam Yoskalka, were my grandparents’ friends, and Phyllis and Mom clicked as playmates. Mom, Pearl and Phyllis met another girl, Marcia, at West Orange High School, and the four young women became inseparable, connecting as part of the small Jewish population in the community that drew them and their families together in kinship. They were a quartet of forever friends, and as close as sisters.
Mom loved to tell me stories of her childhood, so I would know how she grew up, who her friends were, and the places she loved. When I met these women over the years with Mom, who would arrange get-togethers with them individually, I felt I knew them too. Mom told hilarious tales of her other high school classmates who I never met. Pudgie Levenguth was the class “tomboy” who wore scandalous “pants” to school. Antsy Hertz wore the same polyester blouse every single day for a year to test out the new fabric’s durability. She washed it until it turned gray. These two could have been the basis for a movie comedy. I loved these characters as part of my mother’s life story.
Mom met my dad on a blind date set up by mutual friends. My father, Freddy, was born in Czechoslovakia and had emigrated to the United States as a young man at the start of World War II. He was a bit of a mysterious and exotic European guy, who appealed to my mother’s adventurous spirit. They married in July, 1960, and I was born the next year in November, 1961. My brother, David, came along in August, 1964.
While my brother and I were young, Mom tutored homebound kids, and got involved with our synagogue in South Orange, becoming the first female president of the congregation, and then its first administrator. She ran things. She set an example by taking charge of big tasks and projects and I could not help but admire her and emulate the strong female role model she presented. She taught me to be honest, to speak my mind, to do what’s right and good, to be kind to people.
I’m grateful that my mother gave me the genes that made me smart and strong and opinionated. She’s the one who taught me that you have to be smart to be funny. All of that has come in handy throughout my life. We were both headstrong women. When I was a rebellious teen, and then a smart-ass college student, we often butted heads – testing each other’s boundaries with predictable mother-daughter clashes. Of course, I didn’t realize until much later how alike we were in our thinking.
My mother was close to her mother, my grandmother Bess, who had been a widow since my grandfather Jake died when I was 13. Growing up, I often felt closer to my grandma than I did to my mother. If Mom and I argued about something, I’d call up my grandmother for comfort, because I felt she understood me better than my mother did. When I got my driver’s license at 17, I’d take my grandmother places because she didn’t drive. We’d spend the day together running errands, shopping, having lunch, and I’d stay overnight at her house. (When Mom was a college student, my grandparents moved to a new house they designed and had built for them, also in West Orange.)
But that learning curve was cut short and our lives were put on hold when Dad became terminally ill. The focus shifted to his healthcare, then hospice care, which was in our home. Watching my father fade away and knowing there was nothing anyone could do, was painful for my mother, for my brother, and for me, each in our own way, as we experienced anticipatory grief before he actually passed away. The house was staffed with round-the-clock caregivers: day shifts and night shifts with strange, rather cold women sent by an agency. Having them live with us in the house felt intrusive and claustrophobic. My brother had already moved out of the house, and was living in an apartment in Morristown. Mom and I lived through that nightmare time of chaos together, and felt the heavy impact it left on our lives.
The phone rang at my desk at work on a Thursday morning on July 26, 1990, when I was arranging interviews with reporters who covered the oil business. I had been hyper-focused on the calls. It was Mom. "Daddy's gone," she said. I took a long pause. "I'm coming home," I said, "I'll be there as soon as I can." I stumbled through the hallway outside my office and stood in the doorway of my boss's corner office, numb and not sure if I could speak: "My father died, I have to get home." My boss called a car service to take me out of New York and back to New Jersey.
The relationship with my mother shifted with a line of demarcation: before and after losing my father. It was a tumultuous time. My grandmother had died only the year before and we were grieving her loss. My mother was 56 when her mother died and 57 when we lost my father just over year later. (Eerie math: 27 years from then, when my mother died, I was also 56 years old.)
Suddenly with two deaths in a row, my mother and I had terrible grief and pain in common; we leaned on each other for support. It felt like the rest of the world ignored us, and everyone we knew abandoned us. No one really understands how to handle grief, nor talking about serious illness, unless they’ve been there too, so we were in it together navigating sorrow. I did not want my mother to be alone in grief, or alone in the house, or alone in her life. All I could do to ease her sadness was to be there for her. I stayed; I stood by her.
Mom’s high school pals, some friends she met at the synagogue, a few longtime family friends, and a sprinkling of my local friends, would reach out to see how we were doing.
We both threw ourselves into our work; it was a welcome distraction. Mom had changed locations and was commuting to the Fort Lee Jewish Center, and I was still commuting to New York. We moved about in our own little bubbles, surfacing in the evenings and weekends.
By the end of the 90s, I needed a change. I was in a deep depression, and could not deal with the stress of working in New York. I couldn’t manage the commute any longer, or the high pressure corporate setting I was in. I found relief in athletic pursuits – literally running away from the pain by training for marathon distance running events. Mom returned to academia, overseeing a fund-raising department for graduate education students at Seton Hall University in South Orange.
I was getting ready to go for a marathon training run at 8:46 a.m. that Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, when Mom called from her Seton Hall University office in South Orange. I had evening dinner plans to meet a friend and her new fiancé at a restaurant in lower Manhattan. "Don't go into New York today," Mom said, "there's been a plane crash." I flipped on the TV a few minutes later, just as the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
I'm hosting a large group of my New Jersey running club friends for a post-run gathering at our house. The Essex Running Club members take turns mapping out a Sunday morning run route, and prepare some food for everyone to enjoy afterwards. I've taken the opportunity (maybe over ambitiously) to cook some of my favorite brunch dishes and entertain the group in our home. The numbers of those attending has grown, and I'm anticipating 20-30 people. Mom is my sous chef. We've prepped most of the dishes a few days in advance and this morning will just need to cook off last minute casserole dishes, specialty pizzas, and popovers, and heat up frittatas, bagels, and banana bread before the runners return. Mom has baked two blueberry pies – her specialty. She loves chatting with runners and can hold her own with talk of marathons and pacing and finish times that would bore the pants off most non-runners. But she reads my Runner's World, and has been to enough marathons to become versed in the lingo. Plus, she loves serving her fresh, warm pie and seeing the grins on everyone's faces as they taste it.
Annually, in the fall, we traveled to California for Thanksgiving, and sometimes in the summer, we took a second trip west. We shared holiday meals with the local friends-who-became-family since ours was across the country.
Mom dazzled everyone with her delicious desserts, and we were side-by-side in the kitchen. I wanted to absorb all of her innate skills, most of which she’d picked up from her mother. I started documenting her pie-making prowess. For years, I merely watched her mix flour and eggs and yeast, roll out the dough, and add layers of butter. I'd help out where I could, while trying to stay out of her way. But it occurred to me that I should take photos and film her in the kitchen – a master baker at work.
She is in the kitchen making a batch of my grandma's "Schnecken" pastries. These are delectable, flakey, yeasty rolled up desserts that are filled with meringue, cinnamon, nuts, and other secret ingredients. The process is elaborate and painstaking. I am videoing the procedure step by step to capture it for posterity. She narrates what she’s doing, but mostly she concentrates on perfecting each movement. I've observed her baking these signature desserts hundreds of times, and can follow her carefully written recipe (complete with diagrams for how to cut the dough) to recreate them myself, but I want to record her legacy of baking that populated my earliest memories back to childhood.
My 3-year-old brother and I are sitting at the small round kitchen table, still in pajamas early on a Saturday morning. Each of is holding a metal beater from the kitchen mixer that Mom has just used to make shiny chocolate icing for birthday cupcakes. We have been delightedly licking at the chocolate, our faces smeared in sweetness, as we smile at Dad clicking a photo.
Through all the ups and downs, Mom stayed in touch with the people in her life. She’d send greeting cards to mark everyone’s special occasions. She’d call all our relatives to check in with them. She’d call her friends often, just to catch up with news. She would talk to Marcia who had moved to Florida with her second husband Dick. Then she would talk to Phyllis, now widowed, and we’d visit her in her one-bedroom apartment in Franklin Lakes. A few times, Marcia and Dick came to New Jersey to visit Marcia’s sister and brother-in-law, and we’d all meet at a restaurant and have lunch. Pearl and her husband Marvin settled in our town of Livingston, and we’d see them at their house. Mom would update Pearl on her talks and visits with Marcia and Phyllis.
About a year and half before Mom died, we sold our house in Livingston – the house we’d lived in for more than 50 years – and we moved to a townhouse in West Orange. I had never lived anywhere else. Mom had only moved a couple of times many years earlier: when her family moved out of the house on Sherwood Place to the new house my grandparents had built; and then to a garden apartment with my father when they got married, before they bought the house on Scotland Drive. Now Mom and I were living in a development off of Eagle Rock Avenue minutes away from her girlhood home. Her life was coming back full circle to those days when she and Pearl shared whispered gossip across their windows. A quick drive from the townhouse was Mark & Julie’s Ice Cream shop, where Mom and I had discovered some nearly perfect homemade coffee ice cream – her favorite. We’d wind up there on hot summer nights, sit at the café tables and savor each spoonful of ice cream and see who we might bump into. It became a favorite local spot.
“I’ve been hospitalized for about a week trying to find out why I haven’t been feeling well lately – anemia and all of its side effects and aches and pains. I’ve been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma for the third time in the last 15 years. It’s a somewhat depressing diagnosis but I know what’s ahead of me and will be able to handle the treatment once more. Better to know what you’re fighting rather than try to guess.”
In early March, she was in the hospital again, being treated for the anemia and undergoing chemo for her cancer. I was spending most of my days by her bedside, advocating for her medical care and navigating the daily interactions with her large medical team.
All during Mom’s illness, her three life-long friends would call me to check in and see how she was doing. Not good, I’d have to tell them. She’s not doing well at all.
I was responsible for her health care. I had her medical power of attorney – her medical directive to make the decisions for her according to her wishes, and she was relying on me to take care of her. Many years earlier, when my grandmother had to go a nursing home because she was ill with dementia and ovarian cancer, Mom made me promise I’d never do that to her. I did my best to honor her wishes. But now, the hospital social worker asked me to review a list of rehab facilities where Mom would have to go for physical therapy to regain her strength. The hospital wanted to discharge her. I visited a dozen facilities – each one terrible and disheartening. I knew Mom would be miserable at any of them, and I was breaking my promise. I felt a heavy guilt, even going to look at them. I had to choose one, and let the hospital know so they could make arrangements to send her there. Ultimately, I picked one that I thought she’d be OK with, and maybe she wouldn’t hate me for my choice. However, before she ever got there, her health took another turn, and she could not leave the hospital after all.
She was sitting in the armchair by the window, absently holding a container of yogurt in one hand and the spoon in the other, the spoon poised between the cup and her mouth – frozen in time. She wasn’t eating; it was merely a prop in the tableau. The TV in the room was tuned to an episode of Friends, the sound on low, but she wasn’t watching it. She was staring at the window, blankly looking at the parking lot, maybe seeing her reflection, or probably just staring into the void. It was the moment I knew she had already left this world even though it would be another month before her physical body would shut down for good.
That day, the physical therapy team had come in with a hoist to lift her from the bed and move her to the arm chair, so she could spend part of the day sitting up, and practice the PT strengthening exercises they taught her. This activity had gone on for a few days. It tired her out, and she did not even try to squeeze the rubber ball in each hand as they had instructed. She no longer cared. She was done with ball-squeezing, eating, conversing, making eye contact, breathing, living. Impending death has a peculiar sense of humor. They wanted her to go to rehab. But she was saying clearly: “no, no, no!” She was finished and had already left the building. Mom was checking out.
Phyllis was the first to arrive. She came alone. We hugged and chatted and then I noticed Phyllis took a seat on a couch in the reception area while other attendees arrived. There was Marcia, her beautiful silver hair visible as she walked in the room with her daughter, Meryl, who drove them to New Jersey from Pennsylvania, where Marcia had recently relocated when she moved up from Florida. Dick was now in need of assisted living and Marcia moved to the same facility, but in a separate independent room. There was Pearl, with her daughter, Alecia, who I remembered from my high school class.
I looked over at Phyllis and mouthed to her, “Do you know who this is?” She stood up, not sure. I walked over to her, taking her arm, and gently guided her across the room to where Pearl and Marcia were already standing together.
“Phyllis, this is Pearl. And here’s Marcia,” I said. The women looked at each other in disbelief. Here, at Marilyn’s funeral, these life-long friends had their West Orange High School, Class of 1951 reunion. Minus the one friend who brought them all together. The Friend’s reunion in abstentia.
I know my mother was there, too.
I had to see the old Friend’s episode again. I pulled it up on YouTube. It's "The One Where Joey Speaks French." His resume says he's fluent; he is not. Phoebe is trying to teach him, helping him cram for his audition. "Ecoutez," she says, “repeat after me. Je m'appelle Claude." "Je de coup Clow," Joey tries. Another attempt: "Je depli mblue." Again and again. "Je te flouppe fli." "Oh, mon Dieu!" says Phoebe.
Mom would be in tears laughing at this. She loved that episode.
