I.M. Read online

  But I wasn’t. And for as often as I know this caused her pain, she also related to it, because my mother felt different herself. Simply put, she and I have chemistry—an affinity. She’s a woman of words. And wit. And some tricks. And the sands sometimes shift among these attributes. A trick she used many times: If someone called on the phone whom she didn’t want to speak to, she would turn on the kitchen tap and bring the receiver close to it and say, “I’m sorry I can’t talk to you right now. I’m frying.” It was the perfect excuse to hang up, and it fooled everyone across the board. I use it to this day.

  We amuse each other to no end, and for all of my childhood and much of my young adulthood, I was her companion. Her confidant. I gave her a sympathetic ear. We spent a lot of time together, and I’m not sure who was more needy of the other. We shared secrets and protected each other from the family, who had some difficulty fathoming us: her, this erudite, sophisticated woman; and me, this creative, effeminate little boy. The confidence we shared cemented a bond, but complicated a traditional mother-son relationship. For all the nights I remember her seated at the edge of my bed, stroking my forehead, comforting me when I awakened from a nightmare, I also remember as many times when she was hard-selling me the virtues of the Syrian-Jewish community we lived in. Next she’d go on about how intellectually let down she was by her peer group, then she would obsess about marrying my sisters off by the ripe age of twenty. We had a great friendship, but I rarely felt like her “son,” and she was never purely my “mother.”

  We do look alike. Anyone would know instantly that we are mother and son. We have the same deep-set eyes. Hers are hazel green, mine go that color when I’m tired or on tranquilizers. I thank her genetic pool for my thick head of hair. All through my childhood she had a dyed black bubble coif. The styling varied a bit from decade to decade—higher in the sixties, slightly curlier in the seventies—but the sheer volume of hair, which she gets from both her parents, bodes well for me into my old age. Even today, at ninety-one, she has a goodly head of it. All her brothers and sisters and I have the same high, thick waist and long, stalky legs. The same small mouth and hook nose. Together we look like a flock of birds. Jewish flamingos.

  * * *

  When I was about seven and a half we moved to a new house and, not long after that, my habit of not sleeping well became a regular part of life. Every Saturday morning I would rise at the crack of dawn and wait for TV to start up (those were the days when most TV stations shut down at midnight). I’d watch one show starting at 4:00 A.M. that taught foreigners how to speak English. Finally, around 6:00 A.M., more kid-appropriate things would appear—shows I loved, like Dodo, the Kid From Outer Space and The Patchwork Family. By 8:30 I’d have set the table for two and begun cooking an elaborate breakfast for my mother. The rest of the family wouldn’t rise till much later, so Saturday mornings meant quality time for us.

  Sometimes I’m unduly influenced by the sounds of words. I like to say I became a designer based on how much I loved the sound of the word taffeta. I heard the word first spoken at breakfast by my mother, who assumed I knew what it meant. The word filled my head with curiosity, and when I discovered taffeta the fabric, the properties of it, it was the first step in my obsessive study of textiles. Around that time I heard the word “sauté” spoken on TV by Julia Child and looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which stood in the den in a little self-contained wood-veneered bookshelf that came with the set. What I found was more than a definition; there was an illustrated step-by-step guide. At once I taught myself to sauté vegetables and began adding them to our Saturday-morning scrambled eggs, which I knew would please my mother. She and I acknowledged sautéed vegetables in scrambled eggs were goo-ah-may. I also precociously learned to brew coffee, and to this day I hoard percolators.

  The table setting was important, too. Pouring the milk into a creamer was a fancy touch, and I always remembered her saccharin: tiny white pellets contained in a ceramic pillbox painted with a scene of a girl on a swing suspended from the branch of a tree. In the springtime I would cut some of the orange tiger lilies that grew along the edge of the garage to add to the table setting.

  It was over these breakfasts that our great friendship flourished. My mother told me stories of her childhood. She described her obsession with books and talked about her library card the way others talk about their passports. These stories conjured images of a middle-class, Jewish Francie Nolan, the heroine of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, out on a fire escape night after summer night, eating apples and reading books. She would tell me about her early adulthood and her courtships. She spoke about her frustrations with my father and his lack of interest in art and literature. She confided in me when we had cash-flow problems. There were definitely conversations which might have seemed inappropriate for an eight-year-old, but I also remember it was later at one of these breakfasts that she, not my father, told me about the birds and the bees. She insisted that the act only happened as result of a feeling of love, and she said it was something I would eventually want to do. From the description, I found that hard to believe at the time, but to this day I’m impressed by the pure and appealing way she framed the subject. I think one of the reasons I have such a good and guiltless attitude toward sex is because of this first description.

  My mother was the most fascinating person on the planet. I hung on her every word. She’s a gifted raconteuse and, simply put, she charmed me. She trained me to be her best friend. Ever since, so many of the friendships I’ve had with women mirror this early dynamic. It runs very deep. I live to be confided in, to bolster a woman’s ego, to be asked advice—whether it’s about a dress or a deeper, more profound matter. Since this early bond with my mother, I’ve found myself in many similar friendships in which I’m beholden to a woman who makes herself the emotional center of my life, and me the center of hers. It recurs with varying degrees of success, satisfaction, and neuroses.

  During our breakfast tête-a-têtes, my mother often expounded on her theories of style and culture, which I absorbed like a willing disciple, if not a stalkerish fan. While it clearly pained her that my father didn’t make enough money to keep up with her wealthier friends, she also warned me against becoming “materialistic.” It was a subtle distinction, the wafer-thin line between loving clothes, which my mother surely did, and being “too obsessed.” She warned me never to take these style issues too seriously, lest I be labeled Shallow. Though a pared-down look was fashionable in those days, I often think my mother’s aversion to displays of excess was her way of feeling superior to the women who had way more money, more clothes, better houses, etc. It was how she reassured herself that she had an intangible edge. And my artistic sensibilities—this line I skate between the dignified and the over-the-top—began with these discussions on Saturday mornings. It was drummed into my head that being smart trumped all else; wit and nerve were the most important elements of style; and money was not everything.

  * * *

  Around the time I was born in 1961 everyone wanted to look like Jackie Kennedy. And although my mother was someone with intense personal style, she was just as enamored of the First Lady and did a lot to emulate her. This was the naissance of the bubble coif. She also kept her makeup neutral—for the only time in her life, she wore nude, peachy-pink lipstick. Eventually she went back to her bright-red lips, though. “You know, brunettes look tired in pink lipstick,” she’d say. My mother had narrow “aristocratic” feet like Jackie, who wore a double A, and shoes were always a priority for her. “Your father married me because I had my shoes dyed to match my cashmere sweaters. He thought that was the end.” She preferred a pointed toe because it “lengthened” the figure, and she never wore platform shoes, claiming they were “vul-gah” and made everyone look fat.

  My mother wore plain clothes mostly, eschewing heavy, ornate embroideries and froufrou. And never jeans—even later, when Jackie O was photographed constantly in jeans, my mother resisted them. Mostly she wore day dresse
s in stripes and prints, A-line or tent-shaped or shirtwaists, usually without belts because of her straight middle. Around the house she wore swing-shaped, floor-length zip-front robes, in brocade or floral or leopard print, worn with channel-tufted Jacques Levine wedge slippers in gold and silver leather. She held ruffles to a nearly impossible standard of intellect; they had to be “smart ruffles,” which were integral to the design of the blouse or dress. I didn’t know it at the time, but these were the blocks with which my design philosophy was built. The best collections I ever did were inspired by the memories of how my mother looked in clothes. I also attribute my skepticism—my outright loathing for meaninglessly fancy designer clothes—to my observations of her at her best: pleated skirts and astronaut-collar sleeveless tops; lots of plain, handsome, neutral suits with boxy waists, some with fur trim, and accessorized with simple pillbox hats. Plain black evening dresses “jazzed up” in different ways, with the right accessories. “I’ll drape a piece of chiffon,” she’d say, onto something plain and make it fascinating. It was ingrained in me that personal passion and real design—the quality of ideas—always outshine the froufrou, especially where expensive designer clothes are concerned.

  My mother’s take on religion, however, was a much harder sell.

  The rules and traditions of the Syrian community weren’t clearly spelled out. In those days the subject was left open to individual families for interpretation, and there were subtle differences in religious observances. There was no name for what we were, as in “orthodox” or “conservative.” My family kept pace with the majority of the families in the community, which meant keeping kosher at home, strictly adhering to the major Jewish holidays, and observing the Sabbath loosely. We could drive on Saturdays, use electricity, and work, if necessary. I mostly managed to avoid going to temple, except on High Holy days and odd weekends when my parents got around to thinking about it. But some of my greatest memories of family life are of my parents taking my sisters and me on long impromptu drives on cold Saturday mornings to a frozen lake in Upstate New York to go ice skating. We’d stop at a general store on a steep hill to buy sandwiches and Fritos on our way to that lake. I wish those outings represented the better part of my childhood but they don’t.

  What I remember most is the repression and guilt of the yeshiva. There was definitely less religious structure in our house and in the houses of our Sephardic neighbors than there was in a lot of the Orthodox Ashkenazic Jewish homes of the kids at school. But we weren’t nearly as free as the Reform Jews, an example being my mother’s two brothers, who fled the community early on. They seemed to have happy families without any emphasis on religion. They lived in Manhattan, ate whatever they wanted, and there was no confusing weaving in and out of religious idealism. From what I observed, it was a smarter way to live, more natural. I admired and envied their freedom.

  Yeshivah of Flatbush was considered much better, more prestigious than other yeshivas in the area, it was—we were told by rabbis and community leaders—rated one of the top schools by the “National Board,” whoever they were. My parents sought to broaden our horizons a little beyond the Syrian community. A little. But not too much. They wanted to be slightly progressive. We attended Yeshivah of Flatbush with a few other Syrian kids from families who were also aspiring to be less “typically Syrian.”

  I was stuck at that ugly yeshiva for nine years. Like a lead weight covered in felt, like being smothered by too much heavy wool. Days began at 7:30 A.M. with prayers, then Hebrew study classes, which would last till noon, during which Hebrew was spoken exclusively; after lunch and more prayers came the standard elementary classes like English and math, and the day finally ended at 4:30 P.M. The Torah was full of boring stories about boring patriarchs that seemed improbable to me even at that young age—just propaganda to scare people into submission. I especially hated the story of Abraham’s random sacrifice of Isaac. Since it was a story about someone with my name, I took it to heart. The whole “only kidding” deus ex machina at the end seemed to trivialize my own life, as though killing Isaac was just as easy as not. I considered god to be extremely random and really mean.

  At a very young age we were told that assimilating was a bad thing. Not only assimilation into the world at large, but even into other Jewish realms. The Syrians I grew up with looked down on Ashkenazim, and we were discouraged from closely befriending and forbidden to—god help us—marry Jews who weren’t Sephardic. So confusing. For one thing, it was the “inferior” Ashkenazim who were credited with the more prestigious yeshiva. But it was stressed to me that “Sephardim are the aristocrats of the Jews,” which seemed elitist and exclusionary. I hated the idea that I was supposed to keep smart, funny people at arm’s length because they weren’t Sephardic, and especially so if they weren’t Jewish. It was a pattern with my family and a few others in the community. Expose a little, but don’t encourage.

  While the Ashkenazic rabbis at school were the classic black-hat-and-payot variety, the rabbis at Beth Torah, the Sephardic shul my family and I went to, were more modern looking, like the families who attended it. Some were even handsome and well dressed and smelled of Paco Rabanne cologne. But it didn’t make me like them any better. As a matter of fact, it felt like a kind of bait-and-switch. I mean: a handsome rabbi who smells of sexy cologne—what the hell does that even mean? The rabbis at school seemed to try to look terrible. It was as if the worse they looked and smelled, the closer they were to god. And to some extent that was appropriate. They looked terrible, they smelled terrible, they treated me terribly, and my fear of them matched the physical reality.

  The same was true for the women. At yeshiva, the ladies dressed in long skirts and high-necked, long-sleeved blouses, no matter the time of year. They wore wigs as part of the religion where modesty was paramount. The wigs they wore were not glamourous. The opposite, if you can believe such a thing. They wore these wigs to make themselves less attractive. Imagine. I couldn’t fathom it. And this is coming from someone who really understands wigs. This was so different from what I was used to in my house. My mother and her friends would never dream of purposely making themselves ugly.

  For those years, I could never tell what I hated more—being at that school, or being away from home. There were times that my whole mind and body rebelled at the thought of being in school. I would make up reasons for staying home, feigning some ailment or other. I did this a lot more than the average first grader, so I was able to wear my mother down and sometimes she would play along with the charade. On days when I went to school, I would panic as soon as I arrived. It felt like I was falling backwards into an abyss. The panic crept up as I left home, increased as I entered the school building, and before I knew what was happening, I was writhing on the floor, screaming. To this day I define madness as the event of not being understood. There is no more alienating feeling, and it feeds on itself. The less the adults around me understood me and what I needed, the more I screamed and writhed. I still occasionally have that “falling backwards” feeling in moments of terrible stress, and even now I’m terrified of losing control like that.

  One morning I was so desperate to not go to school that I actually punctured one of the tires of the school bus with a steak knife—not an easy thing for a six-year-old to do. It made no rational sense, but in the moment all I knew was that I was desperate to stay home. If the bus had a flat tire then it couldn’t take me to school. So while my two sisters watched in horror, I plunged the knife into the tire with all my might and then ran inside the house and hid in the hall closet, scared of what I’d done, terrified of being spanked or punished. That morning my father had to drive all the children to school in his car—back and forth in shifts—while the bus was fixed. Oddly, he seemed amused by my assault on the bus, and I never heard a word of reproach from him about it. I think he simultaneously respected the sheer planning that went into the tire-stabbing, and was perplexed and possibly even scared by my nerve and determination.

  Eventu
ally, on days when I made it to school, days when I would “fall backwards” and have screaming fits, my mother would be called to take me home. This happened repeatedly the fall I turned six, and ultimately I was suspended from school and my parents were told that I wouldn’t be allowed back unless they took me to see a psychiatrist.

  The school-appointed therapist was full of cautions about what a monster I was at risk of becoming, so my mother decided to shop for another therapist. We auditioned a series of them—some nice but ineffectual, others depressing. There was a chubby man with a red beard who lived in Manhattan Beach, a long drive away, in a brick house set back behind a great sloping lawn covered with snow. There was a Hasidic woman in a particularly awful wig who spoke in a thick German accent and whom I had to address as Geveret Galetski (Hebrew for “Mrs. Galetski”). I also remember a man who smelled like cumin and worked out of a windowless apartment in Park Slope. I don’t think I lasted a full session with him before my mother hustled me back out into the daylight.

  Toward the end of first grade, late one morning right before lunch, my mother showed up at school unexpectedly and took me out of class. This was a major and happy surprise for me. We drove out of the neighborhood and then through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel—another really good sign. It meant we were on our way to The City! Brooklyn may have been a part of New York City, but it wasn’t “The City.” In those early years my family traversed that tunnel only on special occasions—on our way to the theatre for birthday treats, or to visit one of my mother’s brothers and their families who lived in The City. Or to go to my father’s office on West Thirty-fourth Street, right across from Macy’s, where some of the more wonderful scenarios of my early childhood played out, including our yearly visit to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade from his office windows. I always associated great things with driving through that tunnel. I emerged from it feeling like I was on my way to someplace wondrous—a real-life Emerald City.