I didn’t want Dreamy Creamy to be the last polish I ever stroked on my mother’s perfect acrylic nails. I yearned for her nails to blaze red to the very end: Hot Ticket, Thrill of Brazil, Hearts on Fire, Red, Red, Red. Why then, at Lady Fingers, did I ever hold up those tiny glass jars of milky cool neutrals? What got into me—to have thought there would be time to experiment?

Back in March, when the rogue cells started to outmaneuver the latest miracle drug, Mom called me to say, “I can’t hold up.” Ah Mama, I soothed her, the way she had lulled me with Ah Baby. My older brother, Danny, had already moved into her basement with his monster Soloflex. He carried in the groceries, drove her to Manhattan for treatments, and covered her in blankets while she shivered the poisons out of her system. But at every opportunity, Danny slipped out the back door to plant lilies, pull roots, and wrestle with branches, and Mom had to shout for him out the bedroom window, so loud, she said, that her blood sugar spiked. To hell with dependence, Mom decided, on a day she felt strong enough to chic up in her new saffron tweed suit and black suede heels—and forget the cataracts, she piloted the blue Buick into the city by herself for Wednesday matinee. She spotted Aunt Bette in the half-price line wearing tan polyester pants, walked with her to Restaurant Row for paella, climbed to the upper balcony of the theatre, and dropped into a deep, snoring sleep for which she was poked and shushed from all directions. At intermission, she about-faced for home, setting off an Upper East Side commotion of horn honking, followed by the state police pulling her over for crawling at forty on the Major Deegan. Before the handsome young trooper named Tony ever checked Mom’s license, there she was—inspecting the wedding photo of his new wife and offering him pretzel sticks because, she said, he was too gaunt. Tony looked into Mom’s chocolate eyes, told her that she was a moving violation sent from heaven, and off he drove with his first appointment ever for couples counseling with Mom the following week. Mom said lucky she can spot depression in an instant, or her nap at the Shubert would have cost her an extra two hundred dollars. The next day, I cruise-controlled into New York at eighty with a pastrami on rye and three bags of Rein’s deli stuffed into the pink plastic sitz tub that Mom had requested. By dark, when the front door opened, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Her face was pale but not yellow. She stood in the dim foyer with her mother-loves-her-girl-glow, and right on cue, Gloria Bell Samson Sugarman delivered her line: “I was just starting to worry.” She didn’t know that for three decades, every visit home, when the door opened for me, she was just starting to worry.

“I was worried that you were worrying,” I said, thereby completing the worry transaction before I wrapped her, pulpy and petite, in my arms. Careful of her wounded breast, I nestled for the powdery scent of her face creams. Then I sensed a moment when I would open the door to emptiness. The hush of the cathedral ceiling. Her, gone.

Danny was outside, beyond the pear trees, transplanting two large forsythias. Mom shouted through the screened window, “Dan-nee. Nadine’s here!” then raised two exasperated arms, and followed me as I hauled my bulky black suitcase up the stairs into my childhood bedroom. To me, it was still flamingo pink, though the walls had been papered over in taupe Japanese twigs more than twenty years ago, when I returned home in defeat, paralyzed with pain from Hodgkin’s disease. I remembered the night my mother tucked me in, and how I yielded to the might in her eyes as if she were in charge of this issue known as my life. Now, we sat down on the bed, and I rolled the pad of my thumb over the sharp, squared-off edge of her cherry nails. I was taking the color for granted then.

Mom said, “Tomorrow, we’ll get the manicures. And let me look—I’m crazy about that skirt!” So up I twirled while she oohed and aahed, but why, she asked, was I still designing in black and gray, and where were the bright fabrics I had to trek around the world to find while she worried about lice and terrorists; and maybe, she wondered, she could have actually withstood the heat and gone with me on one of my designing trips to Bali, which she pronounced her way, as always, rhymes with Sally—Bally. Bah—Bah-lee, I said, like Salvadore Dah-lee, to which she said how do you know, and I said common knowledge, and she said not so common. Down I sat on the bed again and wrapped my arm around her chenille shoulder, and she said she was sorry to take me away from the studio in the middle of my painted silk collection. I told her I cared about one thing right now.

“I knew there was something I forgot to tell you!” she said. Millions of people would be praying for her on prime time TV tonight, which meant her schizoid patient who worked for Jesus Heals had once again sneaked her name onto the to-be-healed list. Mom did well with schizos. But she didn’t get the Jesus channel so we wouldn’t be watching tonight. She said, with all her patients, she was covered in every religion, unto eternity. We both fell quiet. I smoothed her scowl line that I always forgot about on the phone, and I pointed out the deepening of mine, questioning why, since we’re not scowly people, although there’s enough to scowl at for sure, and she said, “Astigmatism.” Meaning we squinted.

“Are you scared?” I asked.

“Of course I’m scared,” she said.

Mozart jingled from my cell phone, announcing my son Nicky’s third call of the day. From his dorm room in Boston, he worried, how was Grandma and did I need to cry. Not yet, my love, I said. Now, a roast crackled with salt and garlic from the oven.

Danny came in to carve, turned on the news during dinner, which I turned off, and Mom said, “Your sister drove four hours—talk.” So Danny talked about Mom’s cells over-expressing themselves and The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 that impacted one of his obscure software patents, then put his plate in the sink and disappeared into the night garden to orchestrate a summer of blooms.

With full bellies, until late hours, Mom and I did our ritual rummage through her jewelry drawer, shiny treasures spilled out on the bed while she told the stories behind them: old suitors, two husbands, three sisters, seventy-eight years of love in little boxes. We adorned each other with long strands of cinnabar, thick chunks of native American turquoise, traded rings, added hats, sent each other to the mirror, and with exclamations, we discovered that my father’s final anniversary bracelet to Mom matched, of all things, her get-back-at-him-flirtation-with-the-dermatologist stickpin. Then, we didn’t say a word, but the unfathomable echoed around us, a whole life’s buildup of riches on the bedspread, how much of it could I absorb for her—so I was careful to accept and accept and ended up with a shimmering pile of my own.

We moved into the pink bathroom where Mom lifted her arm and showed me the long scar on her breast, healing wide and jagged like bad caulking. In the mirror, we compared our faces. My high cheekbones, she said, were hers. The bridge of my nose, Dad’s. Mom liked to subdivide my nose so she could claim a part, and her part was the tip. I pointed out the recent creases in my lips, bleeding my lipstick into rivulets, straight from her.

“So we’re not perfect,” she said. “It’s good for us.”

I let that sink in, chuckled about how much fun Nicky and I had with each other’s imperfections, and how Mom usually defended hers. Then, like a little girl at bedtime, she asked if I would sleep in her bed tonight. “I’m not leaving your side, Mama,” I said.

I snapped on her old flannel nightgown, the one I loved, the one she kept with her slippery satins just for my visits. Mom’s face lit up as if her choice genetic material had survived selection. Under the blankets, she talked about all the real jewels I would inherit, the ones in the vault or stuffed into the fake Arrid deodorant can, diamonds and rubies fashioned into bracelets and earrings and rings by our own jeweler, Grandpa Saul.

“What will you do with them all?” she asked.

“I’ll wear them all,” I said. “I won’t let them sit.” And I stroked her thin hand, her smooth nails, Cherries in the Snow Red. She switched off the light, rolled toward me, and said she thought it was taking a turn for the worse.

“How am I going to get out of this one alive?” she asked, as if it were another predicament or an armed robbery, and between us there was a laugh, but so brief.

I brought her little hand to my lips and kissed it.

 

Every two weeks until the first heat wave struck, Mom and I spruced up for our outing to Lady Fingers, the nail salon. On our first bargain Tuesday, I backed the blue Buick up the driveway and she said, “Here we go, the girly girls.” For twenty dollars, including pedicure, Mom had discovered that she could purchase the nails of her dreams. Thirty-five years of the splitting, peeling, weak, inadequate nails of her marriage to my father had been put to rest with some plastic and glue. But we still remembered those old broken nails. And Dad, out of the house for over twenty years, still managed to show up in our conversations every day.

“He used to tell me that she had long beautiful nails,” Mom said. She was always Lenore. Lenore was a census taker who knocked on our door one day when Mom was out, obtained the state’s required statistics from Dad, on the couch, and now, she’s the wife.

“And now every single one of her nails is broken,” I said, “and she’s got that whatever-it-is crud on them.”

“And he goes with her to every damn specialist in New York—for the nails, the nose, the toes. Me, he let walk to the hospital alone, nine months pregnant, in a snowstorm! Watch out!” she screamed.

“I’m watching out,” I said, breaking far behind the SUV ahead.

“Seven o’clock this morning, he calls to tell me she’s nuts,” Mom said.

“Like he could tell,” I said.

“He told me that if she so much as hears the word cancer, she keeps him up the whole night.”

“Just the word?” I asked.

“Just the word. She is convinced that she has cancer. I said, ‘Lester, she HAD a little teeny precancerous dot on her nose—and it’s off. Gone. She doesn’t have cancer—I have cancer,’ I told him, in case he forgot.”

“It’s too much for him to pay attention to while he’s obsessing with bridge,” I said and took my ticket in the parking lot.

“And compulsive—he can’t wait another second, he has to wake me up,” Mom said. “Meanwhile, not once has he made it up to visit me.”

Her biggest regret, Mom told me as I drove around the parking lot, was that she had wasted so much time on him, taking him back, watching him leave, and for what? If he wanted Lenore, he could have her; he could have any of the tramps he wanted. Mom only wished she had sent him speeding toward his fantasies faster and sooner, freeing herself for what she never dreamed of, stout and sweet Morris Sugarman, her new true groom, and rock hard, dependable nails—the Ruby Red Glory restored.

We walked arm in arm from the parking lot to the nail salon. No, my manicured, pedicured mother did not die of a broken heart. She had eight years of her sweet Sugar Man before he lost his mind to Parkinson’s. She had time to repair. And along the way, so did she and I.

Straight down the narrow salon, the blue lights of sterilizing boxes zapped away at sharp, shiny metal tools hosting all sorts of germs, and Mom said, “You see…how careful. And look at the disinfectant jars. They soak, they sterilize; it couldn’t be safer.” With the diabetes, she worried about her extremities.

“Hilda Kaplan lost a finger,” Mom said, following me to the shelves of polish.

“The whole finger?” I asked.

“Half. From cuts, opening cans of dog food.”

“No kidding. Hilda Kaplan—with all that money? Didn’t she have an electric can opener? Neosporin?” I asked.

“She had a wing of a hospital to go to—that’s what she had. If she’d had a Grandma Hannah, she’d have that finger,” Mom said.

“That’s because Grandma Hannah had the cure to diabetes,” I said, extrapolating.
“That’s right,” Mom said. “Clean.”

Yes, clean. Mom and her three sisters, each named after a movie star, Gloria, Mae, Greta, and Bette, had been raised by Grandma Hannah with Clean as their religion. We were Cleanites. Aunt Greta actually wiped her own steering wheel with wet wipes. On the day my grandmother and three aunts saw my mother washing the insides of her dishwasher, there was a collective gasp.

Carlene, the owner of Lady Fingers, or Liquid Foundation Face, as I came to call her, walked up to Mom who gave a more enthusiastic hello in the greeting transaction, I noticed.

“My daughter’s here now,” my mother said, proud and twinkling.

“Beautiful. Like her mother,” Carlene said. “Go ahead, pick your polish, Darlins.” She looked away, turned back, and said, “Ready?”

“Still look-ing,” I said with an anti-rush tempo.

Mom chose a bright red called Hot Chili Pepper Red. I put a medley of shiny neutrals and blood reds in the palm of my hand because I was still undecided when Carlene pointed our toes to the back of the salon for a dunking into sudsy, peppermint, assuredly well-scrubbed tubs where Mom tried to spark up a conversation with a half-dead pedicurist. I took note that Mom had more empathy than I for people who gave nothing of themselves. Mom had made some real human beings out of inert material, but I was looking for her to get a realizable return on her warmth today. That’s because I was positioning myself at the helm of Operation Make Every Last Day Wonderful. I was also trying hard to like the place because Mom supposedly had status here, having saved Carlene’s life. A few years back, Mom had spotted the bruises on her collarbone, suspected the wino husband in the storage room, and with speed, skill, and a restraining order, my mother, the traveling therapist, turned her manicurist into one grateful, divorced owner of a nail salon who, I may add, continued to avail herself of free psychotherapy given generously by my mother from soak to topcoat. Plus tip.

What happened next could have been removed from my ideal agenda for Operation Wonderful,but it didn’t go that way. With our feet in the pedicure spas, surrendering to sugar scrubs and steaming hot towels, Mom and I were analyzing everyone in sight and out of sight, landing on my ex-husband, Gary Goodman, whose lying and betraying skills well surpassed my father’s, jumping to Dad, back to Gary, to Dad, logical jumps, when I straightened out my new, billowy, sky gray skirt of acetate/rayon from Boston Chinatown Fabrics and felt something sticky on my palms. Red nail polish guck had stuck to my skin, but worse, it had stained the skirt in splotches like blood. Mom screamed, “What happened!” the blood effect eclipsing her intelligence for an instant. She issued a full throttle SOS, Save Our Skirt. “Carlene!” she screamed clear across the salon.

“Shhhhh,” Carlene shushed with one long blue fingernail pressed to her violet lips as she crossed the salon at no breakneck speed, believe me, shaking her head as if my mother had violated all boundaries of decorum. That pretty much annoyed the hell out of me. Whatever happened to grateful? Free therapy? Then came the look. I just happened to capture it. Carlene crooked up a mug at my mother, whose voice, on the loutish side, apparently warranted curling lips, squinting eyes, a nostril flare—the signs of disgust. This is my wondrous mother in her last days of dignity. Who the hell are you?

With two fingers, as if she were carrying a dirty diaper, Carlene picked up the cracked jar of red polish that had leaked onto her pedicure cart. She dropped it into the trash as if the revolting item did not belong in her salon, and then she turned to me. “What? Whaddo you think I can do?”

Mom could tell that my interior was turning Hot Chili Pepper Red, and she nudged me with a cool hand, hoping to avert trouble. “Let’s see,” I said, “how about, help get the polish out! And two—how about give us a nicer look.”

Carlene put on the facsimile of a nicer look and said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Darlin’.”

Mom told Carlene that the skirt was a designer original from my own line—it wasn’t any old skirt. Carlene said there was nothin’ nobody could do about the polish. And off she strode, sorry about nothin’, and I upped my decibels. “At least you could care!” My mother begged me not to make a big deal of it; she’d get it out at home, one two three. She said something must be going on in Carlene’s life. I didn’t tell the Queen of Empathy that she was caring about someone who didn’t care about her, and we didn’t have time for that. I didn’t talk about the specifics of the l-o-o-k because maybe, hopefully, Mom’s empathy had eclipsed that display. I, however, caught the look because it was identical to one that could have come straight from my own old inventory. I’d been a prolific purveyor of that exact look. A lot of us daughters, passing through our teens and twenties, had vast supplies of disgust-for-our-mothers with matching looks. With my feet in the tub, I couldn’t bear for my frail mother to register that historic pain. But Mom whispered that she just wanted the sterilizers.

I passed on the manicure and waited outside. When Mom had ten Hot Chili Pepper Red fingers that she spread out like two fans, we strolled through the village of Hartsdale toward the sweet smells of Goldie’s Bakery. I was wearing the bloody skirt, fielding stares. Mom said, “Carlene’s not so bad. Her life is hard.”

“There are a lot of ways to go with a hard life,” I said, “including nice.” I lobbied for a change of salon, but Mom was afraid of half-fingers. We peered in the bakery window at the whole sinful, sugary, buttery selection, and I opened the door.

“So much for diabetes,” I said. “Don’t get a stroke.” In Goldie’s, Mom bit down on her creamy Napoleon, and I took a light whipped cream bite of my chocolate éclair, and it was excruciatingly sweet, our girly days.

It didn’t take much for Mom to remove every last smudge of nail polish from my skirt. She held it up to the kitchen light, and we both admired her skills. And then she said, “I don’t think we’ll tell Carlene. For all she knows, we had to throw it out.”

“How’d I get a mind like mine?” Mom asked, while I was thinking, I need her mind. What will I do?

Alas, I returned to Lady Fingers because I belonged to the Clean family. Every two weeks, I chauffeured, but I didn’t offer up my appendages again. As for Carlene, I applied an old technique that Mom had taught me by which I could make a person not exist. It was a handy mental prowess that allowed for Mom and me to continue enjoying our outings, and while her nails dried in the warm air, we strolled toward the sweet whiffs of Goldie’s Bakery as if, together, we owned the street.

In May, we canceled a Lady Fingers Tuesday, and I didn’t like it. Mom sat with a tissue up her nose in the living room, and I kneeled by her with a fresh box. On treatment day, we cooked up something resembling a party at Dr. Shirley’s, a twisted costume party, albeit, with four ladies hooked up to IV drips. Our extended family livened up the place, and I noticed Mom’s nails flit about with the verve of red. I made a private plea for her Hot Tamale tips to keep up the verve, and the next week, when we made it to the Thrill of Brazil, we doubled the topcoat. Lucky, because we didn’t get back to Lady Fingers for a whole month.

As Mom grew weaker and thirstier, we chased her symptoms around the house and into the gardens, while Aunt Greta from Florida sanitized Mom’s hands, Aunt Bette from the Bronx channeled messages from dead Grandma Hannah, and I couriered lime popsicles and strawberry licorice sticks. Danny pushed a wheelbarrow of oversized logs past us in the front yard. He had a new project—to build the sprawling white log fence that Mom had always wanted.

“Now, he gets around to it,” Mom said to us, and lay back on a chaise.

She rested her eyes on the saturated pinks of the late-blooming azaleas. Then came Millie Smerling in fuchsia, hustling across the street for some free counseling time over her husband’s obsession with group sex since his promotion into frozen foods. Mom didn’t mind Millie’s needy nasal voice the way I did, taking up our precious last hours. Like my grandmother Hannah who had set down bowls of soup at the doors of the sick, my mother had added an NYU graduate degree to our Russian matriarchy’s genetic inclination to save lives.

On another day, the mailman poked his head in the door for a moment of her counsel. And Tony, the state trooper, sat with her under the white pines with a bowl of sweet blueberries and I admit, that’s when I overheard Mom say, “Now let’s get to the real reason your marriage is lousy.” Tony told me later that my mother had really saved his life that day. She had no time to waste so she just said it, and he heard it, stark as the statue of David. “You like men.”

In gratitude, Tony sent her a giant box of pretzel sticks and a Special Ops Officer with panic attacks. On weekends, my six-foot son, Nicky, spent long hours in bed with her, taking notes: Do not be afraid of anyone. Be less judgmental. The phone rang morning to night and I listened to her end of the conversations: “You want his diagnosis? It’s schmuck! Honey, you’re making a big drama. Make a smaller drama.” None of us could get enough of the way she sliced and diced it. I wanted to make it mine—that click clicking of her mind, straight through the hullabaloo.

One Tuesday in June, the heavens opened up with a few propitious hours for me to escort Mom across town for a professional grooming of the nails. That was the end of the Thrill of Brazil; we repaired, repainted, and reinvigorated her flawless lady-fingers with Red Glorious Red. The fresh manicure gave me hope. Even when Mom could barely stand, she powdered and spritzed and the nails were elegant. Danny and I kept opening the door to patients, family, neighbors, and friends. Collectively, they offered holy water, prayer circles, police protection at the snap of her finger, and barbecued chicken. The Bronx gang, best friends since grade school in the Thirties, a group heavily weighted with social workers, provided in-house shrink care and big aluminum trays with meals to last a week. Mom would press her hand to her ample breasts and say, “How did I deserve such people?” Even my father hobbled through the door with his cane; Mom said, “Hurrah, he finally came.”

At the kitchen table, Dad held her delicate hand in his big fleshy palm and said, “Glory dear. My dear Glory, I’ve loved you for sixty-four years.” He had some tears.

Mom said, “And I’ve loved you, Les.” Which sounded to me like I’ve loved you less, but really, it was Lester.

Dad said, “I’m so sorry, my darling. I wish I could take it all back. All that madness.” His nose was turning red and dripping.

Mom said, “Deeno, put up the apple strudel.”

I’d been standing by the broom closet, and then opened the freezer. Blocks of frozen things came flying down on me.

Mom said, “I remember the day we met—in the courtyard.”

Dad said, “You were the most beautiful girl. I was smitten.”

I was skirmishing with the freezer, peeling off the frozen cardboard and positioning the strudel into the microwave while they shared inside jokes with snorts and tears. How their car broke down on the way to their wedding. What a big family we once were at Turtle Lake with all four grandparents, the three aunts, my father’s two brothers. The Depression. The war. How Mom decoded for the Manhattan Project, sat at a desk next to General Groves. I wondered how the US government had figured out that Mom was a gifted decoder. She went on to penetrate the codes of so many families and lives.

Dad said, “I was a fool to have thought I could ever keep a secret from you.”

Mom said, “You still kept plenty.”

The way she and Dad enjoyed the strudel together, it seemed like they were the true married couple, and Dad’s Lenore and Mom’s dead Morris were the empty chairs. I left them alone and wandered through the backyard gardens wondering if they had become lovers again. Would she ever have said yes to him? I called Nicky on my cell, while Danny, in his second decade of anger over Dad’s affair with Lenore, pounded in his white log posts. About twenty of them were standing up straight like alert soldiers. Under a violet sky, I walked Dad slowly to his car, and he hugged me for a long time so we felt the heave of each other’s sobs.

He said, “I can’t visit again.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I can’t bear it,” he said.

“Dad,” I said. “This is not about you. If it’s unbearable for you, then bear it, like the rest of us.”

But no, every workday morning, Dad closed the antique Italian door of his office and dialed Mom’s number. He never missed a day, but he never saw her again.

Every two or three weeks, as Mom’s steps grew littler and quivery, I drove her to the salon. I carried her purse, opened the doors, every step, lending my strength to her decline, until the last polish when she was Dreamy Creamied. Who knew it would be the last? It was a minor moment with an incalculable weight. At the salon, I held a few whitish jars in my open palms and said, “What the heck, a change.” Mom chose Dreamy Creamy, I said elegant, nails were painted, and off we drove. Two seconds on the road, Mom screeched as if a crash were imminent, but I passed the truck with ease. She got hysterical about my speed, so I drove at a crawl. That’s when Mom asked me if I remembered what I had done. Of course, I said. She said it was a terrible time. The sun bleached the blue out of the sky. She turned the visor down, and her whole face turned to fear.

 

It was the summer of 1976, after Dad had left for the last time and Mom had quickly hitched the honey, Morris Sugarman, with his cigars and the silent lurking Parkinson’s. My future husband, Gary Goodman, and I drove from Providence to New York for the Sunday wedding of Daphne Miller, a family friend. When Mom opened the door on Friday night, most likely she said she was just starting to worry, but I wouldn’t have appreciated it then. My patience for family drama had hit rock bottom; too many years of Dad and his suitcases back and forth, in and out. I had wanted them divorced already, an end to it all. That end came in 1975 in a bitter snowstorm when Mom discovered the infamous tangerine lipstick in Dad’s Firebird. She stormed inside, wound the tube out, dipped it into the toilet bowl along with Dad’s toothbrush, and tossed them both into a vamoose valise. Now I don’t blame my mother for telling me every detail of my father’s sneaky, rotten, nasty, and narcissistic undertakings, but back then, I was rebelling against her, which made for a conflict of my interests. Now I wish I’d been there for her, the way she was for me, with Gary. But while my father was secretive and silent in the harm he did, my mother was irritating in loud living color.

On the same humid night in May that, by coincidence, both my parents wed their respective second mates, Gary Goodman and I were dipping lobster in butter in his student apartment and dancing to Stevie Wonder’s “I Believe When I Fall in Love With You It Will Be Forever.” In a few weeks, he moved in with me. Daphne Miller’s wedding invitation arrived shortly after, and we spent a flirty hour at Roxy’s, a vintage clothing shop in Providence, where for fifteen dollars, I bought my blousy blue rayon strapless. Gary covered my bare shoulders with tiny kisses, and we waltzed out of the shop and into bed. We were poor, just-graduated, and working for our first year out of art school. We were poised to shine up the universe. On the summer night we drove to New York, wind blowing through the moon roof, Linda Ronstadt and Fleetwood Mac on high, my mother opened her front door for us, and in ten minutes, she hated the dress.

She hated it past bedtime on Friday night; she hated it all day Saturday; and the night before the wedding, at Café Gino’s, she hated it desperately; her opportunities to hate it were running out.

“You can hate it,” I said, “but please don’t tell me anymore. Do I say bad things about your dress? It’s not my taste, but it’s nice enough, which is exactly what you could say about my dress.”

“You want me to lie?”

“Yes. Lie,” I said.

“The dress is ugly and ridiculous and makes you look cheap!” she said.

“Okay, your opinion is registered,” I said over antipasto, over coffee, and the check. “You really don’t like the dress,” I said, from stoplight to driveway. “Mom, I get it,” I said, brushing, spitting, rinsing, ready to drop into bed. “No, I’m not going to wear your old size-eights. They’re not me. We have different bodies. Different shapes. Different tastes. Different! Different! Goodnight!”

By morning, it became unbearable for her. I’d be an embarrassment. How could I not wear stockings? It was impossible not to like one pair out of her hundreds of low heels. What could I have against an elegant clutch? Her gorgeous ivory silk shawl! Her pearls?

We were all dressing behind closed doors, and when I stole through the foyer, Mom caught sight of her nightmare—her daughter costumed in flea market rags with chunky sandals—and she couldn’t stop herself.

“No! I won’t, I can’t let you go like this!” she screamed. “You look like a clown!” And that’s when I struck her. I closed my eyes and swung a fist.

“Morris! She’s hitting me! Morris!” Mom screamed to her second husband. He ran out in his boxers and white shirttails and shimmied between us to shield Mom. Gary stood in the doorway, stunned. My arms flailed, blind, crazed swinging, not to hurt, but to disentangle. Gary silently cheered. I screamed, “Stop it! Stop it! Let me breathe!” Mom’s face froze with shock.

“We are separate people!” I screamed while she fled to her bedroom. “Sep--a--rate!”

We backed out of the driveway in separate cars. In the chapel, we sat in separate rows. Separate aisles. My pulse was still maniacal when I saw my high school boyfriend, Donnie, checking out Gary, who decided this would be an excellent time to run his fingers through my hair. I wondered if I looked like a clown. Was the dress too puffy? Should I have worn her fancy shawl? Did I look not a penny more than fifteen, secondhand bucks?

No one noticed that Mom and I never visited each other’s table during Daphne Miller’s wedding party. Gary and I danced one number and then cut loose for Providence, mile by guilty mile, leaving my mother behind for nine months of separate.

 

With all the medical minds in the world, in July, the cells and the pain advanced into her spine. The air conditioner broke down, and the heat was unbearable for her. I turned on the dance music and gave Mom fashion shows of my latest designs to which she said: love, hate, so-so. We were lying on her bed, waiting for the Fedders man, and as I stroked her pale blah Dreamy Creamy nails, I realized that the color was a big mistake.

Mom said, “Am I really going to be dead in the ground? I have so many opinions.”

“Well, you’re not just going to stop giving them,” I said, locking fingers. I knew she believed dead was dead, but maybe she’d reconsider that position now. “Besides, how could I possibly live without your opinions? I’m addicted.” I had been waiting for this opportunity. “Mama,” I asked, “will you promise to contact me—after?”

“Don’t worry, Honey,” she said. “I’m intrusive. I’ll come.”

Yes, she was intrusive! “What do you think about making plans now?” I asked. “Like you’ll open a door at some significant moment? Or fly as a cardinal to my window?”

“I can’t, Sweetheart,” she said, her dark eyes turning inward. “It’s too much.”

I regretted that I had pushed it so far. Mom had rigged up a complicated barrier to the main subject of the summer with only scattered portals, and every other minute, I wanted to crawl through one, curl up in her lap, and cry out for myself. For my life without her.

But that day, on her bed, I said, “You’re right. We’re fighting this!” At which point—how can I explain this—a minute event, the acrylic on her index nail broke, and a simple sensation of the annihilation of my total world hit with a high-impact wallop. Outside her window, the sky smoldered. I announced with minor urgency that we had to get her to Lady Fingers tomorrow. We had to repair her with plastic and infuse vital color. In the middle of the night, I heard her faint cries. Her mouth was dry as chalk. Danny brought ice. By midday I knew we wouldn’t make it outside.

It seemed like it was sudden, the way the nights opened up for us to wrestle through them. Shampooing her hair, dry and matted, turned into a whole day’s goal. Day and night, Danny and I ran up and down the stairs, yelling at each other: “You left the milk out! Your fence is irrelevant! I was here first! You’re angry I was born!” Like that. He kept beating in the logs. I searched the house for loose cotton sundresses to fit over Mom’s belly, swelled like a melon to sixty pounds. I moved like a whirlwind through the heat.

One moonless midnight, I lost my footing on the stairs, catapulted into a free fall, and carpet-burned my elbows and knees. I lay still with my mouth in the Berber wool until I yelled upstairs, “Mom, we need to hire someone! I need sleep.”

“I won’t have a stranger in my house,” she called down to me.

“You’ll get to know her and she won’t be a stranger,” I said, inching to the bottom stair.

“No. I won’t do it!”

“Why are you so stubborn? I’m falling off my feet—it’s too much for me.”

“If it’s too much for you,” she yelled down, “then go home!”

“And then what will you do?” I asked.

 She said, “I’ll hire someone!”

Mom didn’t have the spirit to laugh. But when I found Rosetta to take over the night shift, Mom was ready for the care. Rosetta sang her to sleep with Amazing Grace and Alice’s Restaurant, gave her the problems of her family to fix, soothed her with lotion, and prayers, and Andrea Bocelli, and washed and set her hair before I woke up. One morning in August, I heard shouts from the driveway and dashed outside. Rosetta was crossing herself and fleeing, and Danny was yelling, “Who the hell are you to take away my mother’s hope?”

 “What happened?” I shouted while he chased Rosetta into her little Dodge. She rolled up the windows and locked the doors. Danny shouted, “Go! And don’t come back!”

“But what did she do? Danny—what!”

 He glared at me with wild blue eyes. “She talked to Mom about dying!”

“Shush, listen…” I said, turning toward the open window, because there was Mom’s voice, hoarse, straining, pleading with us to stop, come inside. She had heard the whole thing. Danny and I filed up the stairs, stood at the foot of her bed, and Mom brought forth all her strength to say, “Danny, I needed to talk about it.” And so, Rosetta returned. Danny pounded in the horizontal rails of his fence and shoveled holes for twelve new rosebushes: crimson and coral.

Mom sent me hunting through the chaos of her closets. I started in the basement and advanced daily into every room of the house, every closet brimming with her inexhaustible, colorful esprit. One afternoon, in her office, a white sunlight struck the silence, the therapist chair, the couch, all the troubled lives she had re-mothered. It took bicep power for me to push a whole stack of clothes to the wall so I could take a better look at the vermillion red suit that had caught my eye. I caressed the fine wool bouclé. She had worn this to our last Broadway play. What a classy woman, I thought, and crumbled to my knees. As her only daughter, it would be my job, and I’d choose this. In some cold room, they’d dress her body in this. Limp on the carpet, I cried without sound while across the hall, Mom lay in bed, parched, broken-nailed, waiting for me. And it was the smallest of missions that helped me rise. “Mom,” I called out.

The plan to procure a nail care home visit revived me. We will fix her back up. We will paint all twenty, Fire Engine Red. I sat her up and slipped an old flowered smock over her head, then brushed her hair gently over the thin spot.

“Mom, I’m going to ignore the whole truth of my significantly negative feelings for Liquid-Foundation-Face and call her.” She patted my hand. Placid yellow had saturated her eyes. Her high cheekbones had emerged again like the young Glory in photos wearing 40’s feathered hats. Mom watched a succession of solitary crows flap across the sky. I told her she looked noble and beautiful.

“Sure,” she said, “and what shade of yellow do you like?”

I told her I loved chartreuse. She said, “Good, now get the lipstick.” I watched as her left thumb flipped open the gold compact, and her right hand painted a perfect, plump, Razzleberry heart. Her lips pursed, the compact clicked shut, and she said, “Carlene won’t come.”

“Payola,” I said. “I’ll pay her whatever she wants.” I was thinking about forever, how much would I pay for forever, my mother’s nails, tough and inextinguishable red, red, red—robust, hot stuff, live wire, strong as blazes, every time I’d ever close my eyes.

I searched Mom’s dresser drawer for the Lady Fingers’ business card. “We’re always looking for something,” I remarked as I unearthed a stash of Valentine’s Day cards from my father to my mother—all while he was married to Lenore. “To my darling Glory, the love of my life, not a day goes by without my thinking how wonderful you truly are. You are as beautiful now as when you were fifteen. My Dearest, I will love you for eternity.” After that one, 1993, my father flew to Fiji with Lenore.

“Dad had a short eternity,” Mom said.

We were still chuckling when the receptionist summoned The Nail Queen, Carlene, to the phone. Mom looked out the window to the streak of a cardinal’s wing. I hadn’t even finished asking for the favor when Carlene said, “Darlin’, I’m runnin’ a business here,” which I interpreted as a “no”.

“I’ll pay you twice what you’d get for your time,” I said. “Three times,” I added, bargaining myself up, “and a cake from Goldie’s,” but she wasn’t going to do it no matter what. Not at night, not on Sunday, not, not, not.

“Your mother’s a nice lady,” she said. “Wish I could help, really do.”

“Oh, really,” I said. “Carlene, I keep remembering how my nice mother went out of her way for you. Remember that? Remember the free part? Yeah, well, I just want to say that it really STINKS.” And I clicked off with a flourish.

 “I was right about her,” I said to Mom.

“You’re right more than you’re wrong,” she said. And we tallied up, as was our pleasure. I was right about this person; she was right about that. Not a soul passed through our lives without succumbing to our microscopes: her therapist lens, my artist’s eye. “How could she not do something so small?” I asked. “It would be an easy gift. Why not give it?”

“Who cares,” my mother said. “Carlene is not a battle we need to fight.” We lay on the bed, our four feet nestling on a single velour pillow. And that’s when Mom told me about her first battle with Dad. Over a party dress.

She and Dad were newly married, she told me, and stationed in San Antonio, Texas during the war. Dad worked as a chemist, transforming everyday cleaning agents into explosives. Mom landed a job as secretary to Roy J. Spence, owner of a pecan shelling company. On Saturday nights, Dad would bedeck himself in full regalia, cap and badge, hold out his arm, and off they’d go to the officer’s club to jitterbug. Mom wore her little girl’s clothes, because, she said, she was really only a little girl, married at nineteen, fresh from the Bronx, Barnard College, and a bedroom shared with three sisters. After a month, Roy J. Spence announced that Mom was the worst secretary he had ever hired, but by far, the most brilliant. He promoted her to be his assistant. Mom slipped her new paycheck into her purse, headed for the department store, and emerged with a dress that was “gorgeous and sophisticated.” She had paid for it with her own money. Thirty-five dollars. 1942. At home, Dad took one look and raised hell, earsplitting, red-faced, she did not have his permission to treat herself so well. He packed it into the box and ordered her to return it, conversation over. Mom flipped the dress out of the box onto the floor, stepped on it, kicked it, and said, “That took care of this! Tomorrow, I’ll buy another one, and if you’re not happy for me, another one, until all the closets are filled.” In the end, Dad cleaned it, hung it up, and please, he pleaded, keep the dress.

I sat up on the bed and told her that she was a brilliant, bold, spitfire fighter and thanked her. “Where do you think you got it from?” she asked.

“Trained by the master,” I said.

“And you gave it back to me, too,” she said, “plenty good,” admitting for the first time that she probably deserved some of it, but I didn’t say anything. In my fightin’ days, I had a mother who would never die. She was indomitable, and we had forever. Now, I massaged her hands, trying to plant in my memory the soft feel of her skin, the delicacy of her bones, her nails—if only they had that red verve and good fresh glue. We lay on the bed, staring at her open closet, a palate of pizzazz, and I wondered what the whole history of our fashion would say about our deeply interwoven lives. Could she ever really understand why I did what I did before the wedding? But as she shifted her weight to ease her pain, it didn’t matter—I couldn’t bear how I’d hurt her.

On the August morning that Trooper Tony brought pink roses to celebrate the new man in his life, I made fast tracks for Rite Aid. There was a whole wall devoted to do-it-yourself acrylic nail kits, over fifty from which to choose, the simple two-step to the complete ten-step. I thought I probably needed the ten-step program by now. Then I read the warnings: avoid contact…well-ventilated…medical attention...and I started driving around to nail salons to secure a professional. At last, a sweet-faced Korean woman agreed to a house call—I had appealed to her inner nail healer. In two hours, she’d ride up Secor, down Wild Rose, and into Mom’s bedroom before she would fly home to Korea that night. There are those who service and those who don’t, I told Mom later. Mom was a servicer. But just before the much-anticipated appointment, the fluid from her liver started oozing from the pores in her legs. We couldn’t get her down the stairs. Tony radioed a police van, and just when the new nails would have been glued on, three armed and uniformed state cops carried Mom down the stairs in a wheelchair, flashed their police lights through Manhattan traffic, and wheeled her into Dr. Shirley’s office.

I sat with her in the treatment room and stroked her battered nails. A second and third had broken, but she couldn’t be bothered anymore. Dr. Shirley needled the well in her belly and clear fluid drained through a snaking tube. I watched it drip into a rubber bucket and considered two things—passing out or buying that kit in Rite Aid. I opted for taking on the fake nails myself. Short-term goals are helpful in a procedure room, I noted. On a night when the Bronx gang visited, I dashed out and purchased the kit, the Double Deluxe Home Salon, ten steps to Hollywood hands.

The next day, in the quiet of late afternoon sun, I helped her walk to the soft suede chair, let her weight down slowly, lifted her legs onto the stool, and wiped the streams of fluids. I set up my tools on a 50’s black lacquered tray: plastic molds, powdered acrylic, glue, sanding block, primer, gel, sable brush, and mouth masks for the fumes.

“Mama,” I said as I dipped her nails in a bowl of soapy water, “do you forgive me for everything I ever did?”

“I forgive you, my darling. There is nothing to forgive. Our love is perfect and pure.”

While her fingertips soaked, Mom fell asleep in her chair, head back, mouth open. For a split second I imagined her face-up in a coffin, and I shook my head to chase the vision away. I have her now, I said to myself. I have her now. I dried her hands and sat quietly for a long time, watching her breathe.

 

For nine months after we waged war over a dress, Mom tried to contact me many times. No, I said each time, no, separate, different, I am not a clown, I held my ground, and I wouldn’t speak to her, and I didn’t speak to her for more months than she could endure. Each time she called, I heard in her voice the pain of my cold, hard, unyielding, torturing extrication. It took all of my courage and all of my meanness to say I cannot talk to you now, hang up, and breathe my own air into my chest. I would file her devastation far away, in a hard-to-reach place.

And then, minutes after I completed the final illustrations for my first collection of cocktail dresses, I touched my neck and noticed that my gold, heart-shaped locket was missing. For days, Gary and I searched for the heart, a gift from my great-grandmother to my grandmother to my mother and then to me, but it had disappeared. I was distraught, stroking the bones of my bare chest when I deciphered the code: mission achieved, stop, to go any longer will incur more losses, stop. I picked up the phone and dialed.

Mom and I agreed to meet for lunch in the city. We would find each other at the information booth in Grand Central Station. It was the only time I drove to New York without knocking on her door. I can still see her coming toward me, a blur of red in the bustling midst of travelers, a small, suffering woman in a red coat, red hat, and a fur muff. That image, now, is unbearable, of Mom walking toward me, pleading, willing, anything, wanting her beloved daughter back, blood red, Russian red, my mother who fought for me, who loved me more than life.

Across a small table in the corner of a tearoom, my mother and I retrieved each other, one cup of tea at a time. Her eyes, dark as fudge, found every missed day in my face. She examined me for new strength, felt my body for thinness, asked about Gary, love, and my art. We skipped over my outfit. She told me about her practice, how she was treating generations of families, how Morris was being tested for Parkinson’s, the usual Dad and Lenore. Her presence was like the full feel of earth under my feet. She magnetized me into alignment. Every event in my life became ready to archive only after I shared it with her. We had been talking for hours, just a little about our battle, when a smooth-faced man from the tearoom approached our table. Mr. Hall was his name. His services were explained on a white card. We agreed and he sat down. First Mom swooshed the tea and grinds around three times, clockwise, and then she turned her cup over, emptying the last sips into the saucer. Mr. Hall asked her to tap the cup once. And then he read the leaves that had stuck to the sides. I remember only this: for ten dollars that he refused to take because of my mother’s “beautiful brown eyes,” he said, “I see that the road between New York and Boston shall forever be strewn with flowers.”

 

How small our worlds become in the end. At the count of three, Mom held her withered arms around my neck while I lifted her out of the comfy chair and walked her to the window. I stood so close, pulled stray hairs behind her ear, and watched the strength in her gaze. This window had framed her view for almost half a century. She looked at the cardinal’s nest, the walnut tree Dad had planted, the hydrangeas and roses that Danny had carefully placed for her, the fence, almost finished, and the vast blue sky. It would be her last view of this world, everything she could see from this window. “It’s no life,” she said. Her legs could no longer hold her weight; her feet were like bloated hooves; every organ was bleeding fluid. “A voyage to the Far East?” I asked, referring to the chair at the far end of the room. Two trembling hands gripped my arms. More than half of her nails were broken; the last specks of Dreamy Creamy were hanging on.

That night, I brought dinner to her on the black lacquered tray. I rubbed her swollen belly with alcohol and injected insulin, and showed her the few bites of her favorite foods on the plate: barbecued chicken, blueberries, Muenster cheese.

I wished we hadn’t lost a single moment. I wished I could tack those nine months onto the end. Onto our pure and perfect love. Her gaze drifted away and then back. I pleaded with the merciless vanishing act of time and bargained with the possibility of forever and always, by the shine of a red acrylic nail and by the blaze of Glory, let us not be separate, not separate, not separate.

I lifted the cup to her dry lips, swallowed with her, yes, good. Mama, my beautiful Mama. In the stillness of that summer night, I bore every beat of our immense heart.