quieted.
“Is she too special to hit, your precious Sonia?”
Progression in my mother’s preference for my brother (who, like her, suffered from her husband’s wrath). Progression in her steadfast resistance to me and my supposed charms. Here is my deepest loss, a life increasingly lacking in my mother’s good will, in which all my successes became her failures, and fueled a subtle, seemingly perverse resistance to both my father and me. I seemed to represent a challenge to her: all the books she did not read, all the insights she did not understand, all the messages to me that my father never gave her.
“Let her be in the kitchen, you need to study,” he’d say to me, of my mother.
That was fine with me, but all my mother wanted was a daughter with her in the kitchen, particularly when her mother died and left her alone. Liba had been hospitalized for pneumonia, caught, my mother said, when she’d picked me up from school on a wintry day. One night in the hospital, the nurse didn’t come when Liba had rung for her. Needing to go to the bathroom, she had climbed out of her bed, over the iron railing, fallen, and broken her hip. Not long after, an embolism in her lung had killed her. My mother was left, as she saw it, alone. Her husband was no substitute for the mother she adored, her confidante, her best friend. And I, perhaps the cause of her greatest loss (she had saved her mother from the Nazis but not from me), was meager comfort.
When I played the piano, a flashy, precocious version of my mother’s dimensional virtuosity, Simon had commented: “Gita, you play faster, maybe your pieces are a little harder. But Sonia, you put more feelings into your few notes than I have ever heard from your mother. You brought tears to my eyes.” And this was no metaphor; he would actually wipe his eyes. It was really unfair—she was the one who had studied all her life, who, even now, enjoyed those lessons with Mrs. Ruskin. I didn’t even really know my scales, and hated practicing.
Later, my mother would make sure she weighed in on the matter.
“Oh, you’re so smart,” she’d say by the time I was ten. “Such a talent. I really admire you.” Young as I was, I was aware of the bitterness. It came from a side of her that hated to be shown up by another woman, and her daughter, at that. Though she loved me, I felt she truly did not like me. It frightened me that any strength I had seemed to weaken her. Even strengths that I really didn’t have, like knowing who I was outside the world of praise.
My Hellen Keller Fixation
A NOTHER RIFT between my mother and me arose be cause of the most famous blind and deaf person in the world. One Sunday, as she often did, my mother took my brother and me to the movies. Usually the films were light and fluffy Hollywood fare, but this time, as the lights went out, there was no Doris and no Rock. Instead, the screen illuminated in somber black and white and the words THE MIRACLE WORKER
Suddenly, with no warning, I was lost in the world that came to life before me. Sitting in the darkness, I met the tragic child, cursed in her crib to be different. No one understood Helen Keller, no one knew her. Treated like an animal, in pain and wailing, lost in a world of unreferenced pain. Kicking. Trying to escape. Until the teacher came and released all her beauty. Until someone finally freed her from her jail.
When the lights rose, I could not move from my seat. My brother and my mother were already standing in the aisle, ready to move on and out to the delicatessen nearby. Then they noticed me, sitting in a daze. I begged my mother to stay and wait with me for the next showing. Sometimes, if a movie was really good, we did that. If I had had my way, I would have sat in that dark theater all day, waiting for the lights of the story to unfold, waiting for Helen’s inner light to be revealed. But my mother had found the movie disturbing. Worse, still, was my reaction to it. She
“Is she too special to hit, your precious Sonia?”
Progression in my mother’s preference for my brother (who, like her, suffered from her husband’s wrath). Progression in her steadfast resistance to me and my supposed charms. Here is my deepest loss, a life increasingly lacking in my mother’s good will, in which all my successes became her failures, and fueled a subtle, seemingly perverse resistance to both my father and me. I seemed to represent a challenge to her: all the books she did not read, all the insights she did not understand, all the messages to me that my father never gave her.
“Let her be in the kitchen, you need to study,” he’d say to me, of my mother.
That was fine with me, but all my mother wanted was a daughter with her in the kitchen, particularly when her mother died and left her alone. Liba had been hospitalized for pneumonia, caught, my mother said, when she’d picked me up from school on a wintry day. One night in the hospital, the nurse didn’t come when Liba had rung for her. Needing to go to the bathroom, she had climbed out of her bed, over the iron railing, fallen, and broken her hip. Not long after, an embolism in her lung had killed her. My mother was left, as she saw it, alone. Her husband was no substitute for the mother she adored, her confidante, her best friend. And I, perhaps the cause of her greatest loss (she had saved her mother from the Nazis but not from me), was meager comfort.
When I played the piano, a flashy, precocious version of my mother’s dimensional virtuosity, Simon had commented: “Gita, you play faster, maybe your pieces are a little harder. But Sonia, you put more feelings into your few notes than I have ever heard from your mother. You brought tears to my eyes.” And this was no metaphor; he would actually wipe his eyes. It was really unfair—she was the one who had studied all her life, who, even now, enjoyed those lessons with Mrs. Ruskin. I didn’t even really know my scales, and hated practicing.
Later, my mother would make sure she weighed in on the matter.
“Oh, you’re so smart,” she’d say by the time I was ten. “Such a talent. I really admire you.” Young as I was, I was aware of the bitterness. It came from a side of her that hated to be shown up by another woman, and her daughter, at that. Though she loved me, I felt she truly did not like me. It frightened me that any strength I had seemed to weaken her. Even strengths that I really didn’t have, like knowing who I was outside the world of praise.
My Hellen Keller Fixation
A NOTHER RIFT between my mother and me arose be cause of the most famous blind and deaf person in the world. One Sunday, as she often did, my mother took my brother and me to the movies. Usually the films were light and fluffy Hollywood fare, but this time, as the lights went out, there was no Doris and no Rock. Instead, the screen illuminated in somber black and white and the words THE MIRACLE WORKER
Suddenly, with no warning, I was lost in the world that came to life before me. Sitting in the darkness, I met the tragic child, cursed in her crib to be different. No one understood Helen Keller, no one knew her. Treated like an animal, in pain and wailing, lost in a world of unreferenced pain. Kicking. Trying to escape. Until the teacher came and released all her beauty. Until someone finally freed her from her jail.
When the lights rose, I could not move from my seat. My brother and my mother were already standing in the aisle, ready to move on and out to the delicatessen nearby. Then they noticed me, sitting in a daze. I begged my mother to stay and wait with me for the next showing. Sometimes, if a movie was really good, we did that. If I had had my way, I would have sat in that dark theater all day, waiting for the lights of the story to unfold, waiting for Helen’s inner light to be revealed. But my mother had found the movie disturbing. Worse, still, was my reaction to it. She
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