My Mother's Diary, Part One

I spent hours yesterday reading my mom’s diary from 1940 and it was like taking the wheel of a Time Machine and eavesdropping on my 17-year-old mother. It was meeting someone who I did not know existed. Not like that.

She was stunningly happy, full of life with a close-knit group of friends who sat on stoops and childhood beds, gossiping and dreaming about love. She went to the movies on Brooklyn’s Kings Highway every other day, seeing a double feature which she would review in a descriptive word or two.

She shopped for slips and girdles and the occasional pink agora mittens in Macy’s and often took my Grandmother out for “chinks” (Vernacular of the day) and ice cream sundaes.

She ironed often. Tidied up. Fretted about passing history and all the other regents' exams. (She always passed with flying colors).

She fell in love over and over again with different boys like Stanley, Irving, and Murray.

She danced at parties, “heard” the radio, loving Bob Hope, Kay Kaiser and other star filled shows.

She wrote about FDR being elected to a third term. She ran gossip through the truth meter and tried to figure out who started rumors and why.

She went to the beach in the summers in mustard-colored swimsuits and would float about the band shell listening to bands.

She wrote every single day.. Sharing stories of having the grippe on cruel winter days, of sleeping late on weekends and always visiting nearby relatives on a daily basis. She loved her baby cousin Jay-Jay and often had dinners at the homes of Uncles and Aunts.

She wrote about a friend’s trip to Hollywood and was shocked to hear that everyone out there was Jewish.

She shared secrets. Criticized a friend for having intercourse more than once with “Bob.”

There were high school games and unexpected run-ins with boys and friends all the time.

She had her core group. Her best friend was Marion Shonkoff, who I remember as being a joyful as a twenties flapper, beautiful and full of light.

I also found out that my Great-Grandpa lived with them and they would sometimes take “the new belt highway” to the cemetery to visit his wife.

For her surprise birthday, she got a lot of hankies, slips, a dollar from Grandpa, five dollars from daddy.

Her every day was a blend of school, homework and socializing, drifting from one friend planet to another.

I don’t think any of the boys returned her affections, but 17-year-old Ina Weinstein never seemed to mind. In fact, she was sometimes relieved when she wasn’t lovestruck as it freed her to be a free always on the move spirit.

I also found out that my grandpa had his own room where they would have family council meetings.

Her older brother was a not often mentioned “louse,” which was pretty consistent with the adult version that I knew. He was a petty thief in the end who used to steal albums from stores like Korvettes in hidden kangaroo pants. I remember the come bail me out phone calls in the middle of the night.

Her daddy also traveled to the south which I have no idea why. In August he came home and suffered a massive heart attack and had to stay in the hospital for three months. While there is contracted pneumonia and it was touch and go for weeks. Mom visited him every day, as did all the relatives. It was a tribal rite to take care of your own.

Evidently, during that period my Grandma’s brother Nat refused to give them money.

Come October my mom came home and to her utter delight daddy was home! It was a grand moment.

And that is when the pages went blank.

She went from annotating and collecting every single life moment to suddenly being struck silent which is the slap in your face insult version of falling in love.

I know that her dad died then, leaving the family staggered and broke. The family had long before lost a four-year-old boy, who fell to his death from his bedroom window. The window was bricked up on the day of his funeral, which in the Jewish faith is the day immediately following the death.

My grandma howled away her sanity in the blood-soaked driveway that night and it never came back.

She was a haunted ghost from that day forward. When her husband died she ran illegal card games in her attic, drawing the old lady penny and nickel crowd, who would play like sharks and smoke like factory chimneys while hot gossiping in Yiddish which always sounded to me like a choir of geese trying to escape the rigors of the lake.

Eventually, my mom married my dad. She was 24. He was 43. He was a generous, sweet, attentive and socially shy man whose smile was like a spotlight that shined directly on you. You always felt adored by him. I never once heard him say an untoward thing about anyone.

He was a high-end gloves salesman, whose factory was in Gloversville, New York. So I guess my mom had her share of pink angora mittens. We destroyed deerskin and mink-lined gloves by wearing them for snowman building and then leaving them to dry on the radiator, which turned them into brittle skeleton hands.

My mom, who was in the room when the baby died, grew up thinking that she was responsible for his death and since I was his almost identical twin as a child, she was going to make sure that what happened to baby Harry was not going to happen again on her watch. Ever.

So she frantically tried to keep me safe, tying me to trees and never and I mean never letting me out of her sight until I was 23. She would not allow me to go to sleepovers and was always the class and den mother so she could keep me in her hawk sights.

My friends adored her. She was funny. Pretty. Stylish. Witty and would always sit at the children’s tables at parties.

But behind closed doors, she was a part-time Universal Pictures kind of werewolf monster who would clean obsessively and suddenly turn, out of nowhere into a mouth-foaming feral beast who needed to beat some common sense into me, especially when I showed any signs of independence.

I never got to ask my dad if he knew what was going on. LIke my mom, I lost my dad when I was young. 25.

Eventually, my grandmother came to live with us in our tiny two bedroom apartment and her insanity only grew worse with time.

Eventually, her out of control diabetes caused her leg to turn gangrenous and had to be amputated. One of my memories is having to drive her leg in a small box to the cemetery to have it buried in her plot because in our faith the body cannot be separated.

We even had a rabbi led prayer at the grave.

There is more to write about all this. How I survived. How I dealt with her in my adult years.

That I think is the book to come. Soon actually. I’m finally good enough to be able to write.

My new play deals with a lot of this but it is hidden deeply behind the veil of magical realism. It’s a fine mix of laughter and sheer horror.

Still, I am so glad to have learned the truth of my mom at 17. I’m so glad that she had that time to indulge in life. To be so carefree and sparkly.

I had twinges of a kind of Back to The Future son crush on her. I wanted to hold her. Kiss her, love her and tell her that everything was going to be okay.

She died before I could ever get the chance.