The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen Page B

WILD —albeit a loose definition of
wild.
Central Park is a carefully landscaped illusion of nature, designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmstead, maintained these days by the Central Park Conservancy. The purported “wild” parts are fenced in. Obedient tourists and locals stay on the paved paths. A man-made waterfall flows into the man-made lake. I’m sure the multi-ton boulders were deposited here by retreating glaciers in the last Ice Age, but what about that huge gray slab of stone, artfully silhouetted against the lake? Was that the work of Mother Nature or Mr. Olmstead?
    I’m amused by the trompe l’oeil effect. I like being tricked into thinking I’m in nature, when this park is as carefully contrived as Disneyland. Anyway, the trees don’t give a damn that they were planted by a landscape designer. The ducks don’t care that the lake is a ruse, fed by an underground plumbing system. To the thousands of migratory birds that land in Central Park each spring and fall, Central Park is an oasis of forest and ponds, not an elaborate stage set. They have no argument with the human landscaping, or with humans for that matter. I figure, if birds are tricked by Central Park, there’s no shame in being tricked myself.

    It was 1971, and I was sixteen. Eleventh grade.
    One day, Mom abandoned the falsies and went natural. Very Women’s Lib, except that the all-natural, braless attitude was more of an under-thirty thing, and braless feminists generally had breasts. But this was very Mom. Breastless and restless. She was already the only woman in our constrictive suburban ecosystem to
not
mow the lawn to precisely match the tacitly approved crew cut of the neighbors’ lawns. She was the only woman in our neighborhood who went to antiwar protests, who held two master’s degrees from Columbia University (Sociology, and Public Law and Government), who had contributed as a researcher to two books developed by renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, and who was working on a monumental, ever-growing, ever-unfinished, PhD dissertation.
    Mom had attained an enlightened state of antivanity. I admired her nonconformity, I really did. I was grateful that we went on family trips to antiwar marches on Washington. That was cool. I was glad she was a feminist. I should have been proud of her, but she embarrassed me. Her tirades at my school had made her the brunt of jokes. “Alice’s mother is weird, she’s crazy,” my classmates whispered. I wanted to punch them in the face, but I just walked past them, my cheeks burning.
    MEANWHILE, MOM STILL acted like she hated me.
    â€œI don’t want to be called Mommy ever again.”
    â€œShould I call you Mom?
    â€œThat’s just as bad.”
    â€œOkay, you want me to call you Louise?”
    â€œThat’s better.”
    She used to love me. What did I do? Grow up? Reach puberty? Nothing I could do about it. She never used to say mean things to me. I wanted to cry, but I was sixteen, so what could I do except be angry back at her? I was so angry I ate a whole box of Fig Newtons. That would show her. Ha!
    Some days I hated
her.
I never used to. It was because of her stupid breast cancer. It ruined everything.
    But I didn’t really hate her. I missed her. She probably didn’t really hate me, either. She liked my good grades and my artwork. I won an art contest in
Seventeen
magazine, and she showed everyone the issue with my prize-winning collage published in it! She probably missed me. She probably missed herself. Why did she have to get breast cancer? I hated, hated, hated cancer.
    She hated my boyfriend, Paul—more than was logically possible. I thought she also liked him, but she wouldn’t admit it. How could she not have liked him? He was fantastic. I was totally in love with him. We met at All-County Choir. Paul was in a band, and he played guitar and sang exactly like James Taylor. He was a year older