SADIE’S COAT

Paul is not worried; he has enough time in his life for all things to happen.  He lights a cigarette in celebration, after all it is New Year’s Eve.  

“Don’t you ever just take a day to do nothing?” he asks, a languid Southernness that was in his father’s background, seeping through.

I think of my hurried life and all I have missed. I want the spaces in between to see what comes up.  Yet, I am a novice at it and fear I will become frustrated and depressed.  Paul, with gangly limbs and blonde streaked hair, becoming a bit grizzled only to those who remember him through the decades or who see him before his morning ablutions or at that end of a long night, is a master at seeing the holes in the night.  Maybe it’s because of sensing where only gay men go, sharpened his instincts and ability to read below the radar.  

  New Year’s Eve, and the town will have a bonfire.  It’s a New England tradition that Paul seems particularly excited about.  He keeps talking about witches and superstitions, primordial flame, purging pyres and long, cold nights.  We peek into my mother’s front room, knowing we need to ask her to come with us.   She won’t go and there is no arguing with her even though the bonfire was only a block from the house, at the baseball field.  Once her mind was made there is no question although she was already bemoaning the event she hadn’t yet missed.  Her mind was fast forward and replay to an increasing extent as she aged with an alarming disregard for the present.  She sat on her faded, red velvet love seat in the front room of her house, the glassed-in porch, filled with all that was importantly hers.  Photographs of trips, plants, books by women discussing marital and family problems, a nude torso of a mannequin with a wide brimmed hat, her stone sculptures mounted on stands, an antique standing lamp with a light bulb dangerously close to the paper shade and the telephone.  Lifeline central.  

       “Go,” she commands.

       “Come with us, it’s New Year’s Eve and just down the block,” I say.

She is shaking her head slowly side to side, adjusting facial contours to speak of unspeakable grief that I don’t understand.  The spider fern bends towards her in sympathy but she doesn’t notice.  She is the queen in this little room, queen of a sorrow no one can quell, don’t even bother trying and thank you for closing the door on your way out.  My father, one of the main sources and recipient of this unspeakable grief, lingers somewhere behind me.  He has no room of his own, no mooring, and his vagueness and ability to cope has markedly dwindled.  Paul steps up and pokes his head into her room.  

“Not feeling well?” he asks in his chipper, diplomatic way.  Paul knows how to negotiate the stormy surfaces of life in a way that mends the waters.

My mother, with her privileged access to all her hurt and angry feelings, purses her lips and refuses to reveal.

“It will brighten you up,” he says, like she is a wash that just needs clorox.

She waves a sweeping hand, a gesture of why New Year’s Eve bonfires a block away come at an inopportune time.

“It’s just once a year,” Paul reminds her, “a good way to get to know the town.”

“Leave her,” I whisper.

Paul turns to me with that “you’ll feel guilty when she’s gone” look.

“She doesn’t want to go!”  I say it loud enough to  wake her up to her anger.

“Are you telling me not to go?”  she challenges.

I turn on my heels, grab Sadie’s coat and head out leaving Paul to deal with another go round.

Admittedly, it had been a long night, one that started long before the bonfire and should have ended earlier. And, of course, it started with my mother’s plans (as it always did).  What I  once scorned as a teenager as “kooky” became now as an adult, potentially interesting.  I had a grudging admiration for this small, wiry, oldster who still carried on, defying age and convention, who still drove all the way to the Bowery to pick up a stone for her sculpture class, who flew herself to San Miguel de Allende to check it out, who thought a good idea for New Year’s Eve might be a meditation.

Paul went along with it as did my father, who always basically did what he was told.  We bundled into the car and my mother drove us on the back roads, along the sea wall, to what was once a solid, brick, Christian church.  The mortar, laid between brick many years ago, spoke of simple elegance, of faith unswerving.  The trees were bare, it was cold and there were only tasteful Christmas lights dotting the way.   Still, it was the lowlands, close to the water and you could smell salt, knew the comfort of tides, marshes, beaches once you got out of the car.  The path to the church was marked by stones.  The warm interior was inviting through strained glass windows.  Once you entered, you knew that it had been transformed into some Eastern sect’s domain.  

        “It’ll wash away your sins,”  my mother says to me.

“There are no Eastern sins,” I say and she looks confused.

That’s the thing about my mother, something that has scared me since I was a child - she really doesn’t know what the hell she is doing.  

“That’s Christian,” I try to explain but she has already walked in front of me and I wonder about the sins she is referring to, immediately personalizing them.

Paul takes my hand and we walk into main sanctuary.  Paul, my ever faithful intermediary, the one who always comes down from Boston whenever I visit New York.   I wait for him to disembark from the train, for the long howl of railroad noises to start up again, by which time he’ll have lit a cigarette, bag over one shoulder.  In the dark, lit by globes of street lights, my father who insisted he accompany me in the car to the station, thought Paul was a woman walking towards us.  His willowy, slender, small form not anywhere masculine enough for my father’s eyes.

“We’re in for it tonight,” Paul, with his bleached blonde hair, skinnier than ever, says.  His tone is jovial, he appreciates my mother’s offbeat nature.

The entire altar has been redone.  Instead, it is a pulsating, backlit,  pink scrim.

“What sect is this?”  I ask my mother who has seated herself comfortably in the pews which are now covered in Indian fabric, plush cushions underneath.  She looks at me strangely.  There are different sects of this?

 It is all hot India inside, a striking contrast to the cold East Coast outside.  Hot flashes, sweltering colors - cardamon, curry, ginger, cloves, red pepper, tumeric, mango.  A woman in a sari plays atonal sequences on an electronic keyboard.

“Do you think you can handle this?”  my mother asks my father also seated in the pew but with Paul in between.  He is already tuning out, his eyes closed in what some might take as reverential but which I know to be sheer exhaustion of a lifetime catering to her whims.  He doesn’t even open his eyes to the question, just nods.

             I carefully lay Sadie Gottlieb’s black Persian lamb coat beside me. I had rescued it from the attic where it ineffectually resided beneath plastic sheathing from a dry cleaner’s.  It was discovered on my forays up there, twisted steps, the door barely opening, it holding all my mother’s various scarves, belts, pocketbooks.  Up there to find treasures or answers but the pickings were slim.  A baby book for a girl noting my brother’s progress written in my mother’s crabbed handwriting, an old record case for 45s from my high school years, a heart with ‘me and Steve’ on the inside.  The coat hung, boxy, curled lamb’s wool, a faint whiff of it like lamb stew, seemingly impervious to the decades.  I wore it downstairs and asked my father, seated in the one chair he seemed to permanently occupy, if my grandfather had made the coat for my grandmother.  My grandfather, Nathan Gottlieb, the proverbial Jewish tailor, a domineering man who landed with both feet running after passing through Ellis Island.  My father squinted at me with the coat on, memory flooding back and smiled.  ‘It fits you,’ he said.  

Sadie Bleiweiss Gottlieb.  I invoke the presence of my grandmother into the sanctuary.  Sadie, Sadie, foxy lady, Sadie, Sadie, sad lady.  She married my grandfather, an older man, possibly an arranged marriage.  She wrote bad poetry in a loopy handwriting, had a daughter who died in childhood from rheumatic fever, had my father who she poured out her miseries to, was thrilled to see me, her first grandchild, and died from breast cancer before I was two.  That’s all I know about her, all I ever will.

“How do you like the coat?”  I asked Paul when he first arrived.

Paul never answered any aesthetic question quickly.  It was all perusal, turning me around, looking at the seams, the overall picture, the touching of the wool.  “It fits,” he conceded, in his discriminating fashionista way, “and someday soon it might come back in style.”

I lay the coat out length-wise on the pews, its own animal presence taking up space.  There are not many people here on New Year’s Eve.    I lay it on the reconstructed pews where sins are not sins but maybe just poor choices, maybe like Sadie’s, maybe like my own.   The coat has begun its disintegration and with it my hopes of bringing it home to California.  The lining has started to shred longitudinally like someone had wielded knife to it.  Like puffs of smoke, the lining yielding to decades, the coat so substantial and then not.  I pat Sadie’s coat laid out lengthwise on the pew.  The meditation begins.  I could feel my mother beside me like a hen on her perch, feathers ruffled, sinking into herself.  There was no clear line to the beginning, the lights dimmed, the woman at the keyboard slowed down and stopped.  My eyes closed and I immediately fell into a sexual reverie about someone other than my partner.  Visiting my parents has always brought unbearable adolescent frustration to the surface.  I swirled and twirled and tumbled and generally didn’t bother with anything else meditative.  After all, it was New Year’s Eve.  At one point, I even let out a little yip and quickly glanced over at my mother, ashamed.  Were these the sins, all my lovers, real and imagined?   My eyes fluttered open to the vision of an older woman in a white robe seated on the dais.  Paul would be able to pinpoint the era of the chair she sat on.  He would swoon, “did you see the repro 15th century, French, white lacquered armchair?”  A subtle humming came over the loudspeakers like a swarm of impending insects.  The pink scrim pulsated. This was the meditative climax.  I closed my eyes again to fully enjoy it.

“Wasn’t that incredible feminine?”  Paul whispered in my ear as we descended to the lower level of the church for the little celebration and indoctrination.  

“And wasn’t that repro 15th century, French, white lacquered chair amazing?”  I ask.

The lower level was institutional and drab.  There was tea and little sweets laid out for us buffet-style. We sat at round tables on hard chairs.  A tall, very brown man began his speech in a lilting Anglo-Indian accent.  

“Your nature is good,” he confided, “everyday you have a way to get in touch with your true virtues, your positive energy.  Feel it through meditation, see how positive energy can change the quality of your life and your relationships.”

I can see my mother bristling. It’s one thing to sit in a comfortable space and close her eyes, another to be told what to do.  My father is slumped down in his seat.  The very brown man goes over and stands behind my father, placing his hands on his shoulders.  “Meditation will raise you up.  It will fill you with energy and self respect.”

        My father’s eyes pop open, he is not accustomed to being touched by another man.

The man passes out to each table the fun activity we will be doing.  It is called the VirtueScope, a piece of paper with all the months printed on a circle along with a pack of Virtue cards.  Each person picks this inner peace card and writes the virtue that we will be working on for each month of the coming year.  I look across the table at my mother, her face is hardening, her eyes squinting.  Paul is grinning; his life is an unsteady mix of restraint and hedonism.  I can see him honoring each virtue card for about five minutes on a good day.

I pick the first card.  I dutifully write it next to the month of January.

“Sweetness,”  I say.

I have always felt that I have a tremendous reservoir of sweetness just below the jaded surface of my life’s disappointments.

“Ha!”  my mother says.

I have a vision going back generations, lifting the mists of time -  a long line of bubbas, spoons waggling over a pot of chicken soup, wigs slipping over bald, orthodox heads, criticizing, haranguing, mortally disgruntled, vociferously disappointed.  My mother was born of such a woman and I try to remember this when I pick my next card for February,             “Compassion.”

“Why should I do these cards?”  my mother asks and the whole table turns to look blankly at her.  “If I want to be angry, I will.”

It has turned into church after all.  The virtues are too confining, too similar to Christianity.  I remember my long standing wish to not be part of this small Jewish family, small because my grandfather had disowned all his brothers and sisters.  I imagine established Christian or even Hindu families, tentacles reaching out like an extensive root system, spreading a wide, deep net of support and love.

“You do it if you feel it will make your life better,”  I say.

She considers this.  She is into making her life better which is why she goes to the meditations in the first place.  I can feel her struggling with foreign concepts, with something outside her own experience of defying authority, her own hurt and loneliness.

“Forgiveness,”  my March card.

“Can you forgive?”  she asks, leaving out the ‘me’.

“You can do these things a little bit,”  I say, remembering all the years of her screaming at me,  “they are just paths, you touch lightly, you work on it.”  

I’m up for “Honesty” for April.  Never a good policy according to my mother.  ‘Why must you always say what you are thinking?’ she would ask as if I was some village idiot with a loose tongue.  

“You know I’m always good for that,”  I say and she grimaces with a pained look.

Paul picks a card.  “Moderation”

“My, my, we really are getting what we need,”  I say.

My father picks.  “Appreciativeness”

My mother hisses.  He looks defeated. Her turn.  It’s “Honesty” again, someone must not have shuffled the deck well.   My mother considers her card.  I see a sly look cross her face.

“You know there is something about Sadie Bleiweiss Gottlieb that you don’t know,” she says.

My father bolts up in his chair.  I clutch the coat on my lap.

“Your grandfather had her institutionalized in an asylum,” she says.  “I thought you should know that about her.”

“Oh my god!”  I say.  

“That’s what they did in those days.  He was at his wit’s end.  She wouldn’t get out of bed, like some people we know,” and she glares at my father who lowers his eyes.  His fate is right there in front of him.

“What did they do to her?”  I ask.

“They tried everything.  Cold baths, hot baths, but it didn’t work.  So finally, they tried electro-shock treatments.”

“It was so barbaric then!”

“And it didn’t work,” she says.

My father’s eyes are misty.  “They gave her a partial.  She was never the same after that.”

“A partial?” I ask.

“A pre-frontal lobotomy,” my mother says impatiently like it has all been gone over a million times before.  I can see she is sorry she has brought this up.

“So I never really knew her at all,” I muse.

“Well, she died when you were so young so you wouldn’t have anyway,” she says.

I have a dim memory of Sadie, a bulky, indistinguishable form standing over me.  I remember looking up to find her eyes and seeing some teeth, a smile.

The very brown man instructs us in the final activity.  We write our wish for the new year. My father has written, “I will try new things.”

“I’ll remind you of that,” my mother says.

My wish splits a seam on the way out of the church, a large gaping hole as intricate renderings of black Persian lamb hang from my shoulder.  My wish was for a family who hadn’t disintegrated like the coat.

The bonfire is an artful assemblage of planks and discarded Christmas trees stacked up for maximum burn.  Paul joins me just as a man douses it with propellant and tosses in the match.  He watches it avidly.  “Now this is masculine,” he says.  The fire gives off sparks and Sadie’s coat warms up in the cold night air.