Never Simple: A Memoir

Liars

I need to tell you something.

I looked up over the edge of my book. My mother was standing in the living room doorway in one of her endless array of flowered, crepey muumuus—the Shut-In Chic Collection, I called them privately—with one hand on the knob, her face grave. I was on fall break, my freshman year at college; the last year, after this conversation, that I would consider my mother’s apartment home. I let the book fall facedown on my chest.

What?

Well. She fiddled with the knob, coughed. You said you were going to take driving lessons and get a learner’s permit when you go back to school.

That’s right.

That’s going to be … hard. I don’t think they’ll give you one.

I laughed, a little offended. "I’m sure it can’t be that hard. Millions of idiots do it every day."

"That’s not what I mean. Look. More fiddling. They’re going to ask you for identification, a birth certificate. You don’t have one."

So I’ll send away for a copy.

"No. No. Will you listen to what I’m saying? There’s nothing to get a copy of. I never filed a record of your birth at all."

I scrabbled my elbows under me and sat up, my breath sharp in my throat. Finally, I thought. This is it. A bureaucratic boulder she couldn’t lie her way over. An official document even she wouldn’t dare forge. At last: answers. I don’t understand. Why not?

Well. Deep breath. I was married when you were born. But not to your father.

No one lies like family.

We lie to each other all the time. We lie to keep each other at a distance, to give ourselves some elbow room in the claustrophobic nuclear unit. To spare each other’s feelings. To cut short a conversation, or to begin one. To ensure that the artichoke-heart softness of our insides is sealed safely off forever. As I write this, my two toddlers are in the next room, cheerfully belting out some interminable preschool song and throwing stuffed animals at each other. They’re too young to ask me about my missing father, or my never-spoken-of mother, or why I am the way I am. They’re too young to understand how much they don’t know.

Then again, I haven’t started lying to them. Yet.

This is the story of digging out the biggest lie I was ever told.

CHAPTER 1

The Man Who Wasn’t There

My father was long since dead, but never mind: we had each other. My stylish, petite, sardonic mother and me. There weren’t a lot of single mothers around, and the few we knew—heads together in the playground, Marlboro Reds gesturing furiously, given a wide berth by the married women sheep-dogging their husbands away—were divorced. Mom was a widow, without any of the usual indicators that archaic, weepy word implies—no black dresses, no red-rimmed eyes. He was too long gone for that. He was forgotten. We were a team: one big, one small. Two sparrow-boned, sharp-eyed blondes, hand in hand.

There was no trace of my dead father except an ancient white leather backgammon set, which I kept reverently boxed up under my bed. She’d married him not long after divorcing her first husband, and in the early weeks of her pregnancy, he was killed in a car accident when he stopped at a red light and the driver behind him didn’t. In a storm of grief she burned all his photos, including those from their wedding, at which she wore a borrowed ivory pantsuit that she dutifully returned. It was such a whirlwind romance that even the few friends she didn’t alienate—and the very few members of our family who were alive and speaking to each other—had never met him. Family, dead. Friends, moved away.

This story is, of course, total bullshit.

But I believed it. Why wouldn’t I? Parents in children’s books died all the time. I was a city kid, and as far as I was concerned, cars—in which I almost never rode—were gas-snorting, two-ton death machines.

I asked about him, anxious for the details.

What did he look like?

Like you, Miss Mouse. Blond, gorgeous. (I blushed.)

Was he excited to have me?

It was too early, honey. He didn’t know.

Oh. That stumped me, the specifics of pregnancy fuzzy at best. Then: "What was he like?"

She pushed up her glasses into her hair and sighed. Elizabeth, this was all a long time ago. He was a good man. I’m sorry he’s gone, but he’s gone. Now, what should we read tonight?

I worshipped her. I loved her smoky cackle and her jokes, even though most of them went over my head, and I loved her whole-body storytelling, and her habit of pulling me out of school whenever something more interesting was happening. I loved that she adored me above everything else on earth and told me so on a roughly hourly basis. I felt like the small, slightly ratty sun around which the galaxy revolved.

So how was it possible that she was lying to me?

The paucity of belongings wasn’t the problem. I could believe that a person could be swept away wholesale with nothing to show he was ever there. But the stories were such clear fabrications, haltingly told, a note of panic in her voice. She wasn’t a good liar, despite all the practice.

The other kids I knew who were missing a father hadn’t misplaced theirs quite so badly. Theirs came to pick them up for brunch on Sunday mornings, or dinner every other Thursday. They may have been shitty, and plenty of them were, but they were known quantities. Mine was a blank with a fuzzy blond halo and, apparently, a love for backgammon. Was he out there somewhere—in a Kips Bay divorced-guy apartment, or a row house in Queens—wondering if she’d ever let him meet me? Or unaware I existed at all? I surreptitiously scanned the faces of blond men on the street who looked to be about the right age. Is it you? Years later, when I donated eggs, I did the same with tiny blond toddlers with a mixture of curiosity and detachment. My anonymous genetic children were hypotheticals, but my father—he had to have been real. (Evidence: me.) But where was he?

Telling exorbitant lies was easier in the 80s. There was no internet, no way to track down the clues, especially for a six-year-old who rarely left the house. ("If any of your friends’ fathers touch you, you tell me," she warned, even though she usually insisted playdates take place in our own living room, under her watchful eye.) She could reasonably believe that if she didn’t give up the truth, I would never find out. But I knew something was wrong with her story. She was reluctant to talk about him, and I suspected that her reticence wasn’t due to the patina of grief, but the fear of slipping up. What was she hiding?

The obvious answer, to me, was that he was still alive. When I was very young, I thought: A spy! An astronaut abandoned on a distant planet! The foreign service! Wrongfully imprisoned in a case of mistaken identity! Older and more cynical, I thought: married.

I knew perfectly well that there was a lie happening, somewhere, but I couldn’t parse out to whom it had been told.

I did have his name: Warren Steven Livingston. I repeated it to myself, turning it over and over in my mind. I printed it in careful capitals on the Hebrew school submission forms for trees planted in Israel in the name of a loved one in exchange for donations to the Jewish National Fund. I hung the certificates proudly on the wall, and my mother winced and averted her eyes every time she passed. One memorable day while she left my eight-year-old self alone for an hour while running errands, I called every Livingston in the New York City white pages, trembling, asking if they were related to him. No one was; their brusque voices softened when they heard my high-pitched child’s voice. But none of them knew a Warren Steven.

It will not surprise you—you will probably already have figured out—that no one recognized the name because she made it up. When she finally admitted the lie, that day in the living room, she told me she was afraid I would find the place where he’d died—a stretch of sidewalk only two blocks away from my childhood home—and make a shrine out of it. I’m skeptical. I think the real reason is that she was putting off the day I would find out her two shames: that he wasn’t Jewish, and that they weren’t married. Well: not to each other, anyway.

I speed-rifled through her room, paging through old photo albums, while she was down in our apartment building’s hot, airless laundry room. Somewhere, there had to be clues as to the story that was more and more evidently untrue. But my career as a pint-sized secret agent was short-lived and unsuccessful—her filing cabinet was locked tight, and I never could find where she hid the key—and I tried hard to forget about the man who wasn’t there. She must have a good reason, I thought. Anyone can learn to live with a lie.

And so: there we were. Mother and daughter. Senior and junior. A comedy act, a vaudeville team. But I had no idea who I was really living with, only that she transformed behind that locked apartment door.

CHAPTER 2

Yorkville on My Mind

Think of New York City in the 70s and 80s and you think: Blackout, riots. Tagged subway cars and a pre-Giuliani Times Square, lined with head shops and hookers. Crime and needles and the concrete jungle. But it was also a time when you could live on a regular income in Manhattan, could take kids’ art classes at the Metropolitan Museum for next to nothing, and get $20 rush tickets to Broadway shows. My New York was Shirley Temples in tiki mugs at Panda Garden on Second Avenue, old Hungarian men patting my hair as I raced past the Orthodox church on Seventy-Ninth Street, Simon & Garfunkel’s concert in Central Park, a picnic blanket and a battered Pan Am carrier bag full of sandwiches, wine for her and milk for me. The tree at Rockefeller Center, sure, but also the origami tree at the Museum of Natural History, where volunteers fashioned fiddler crabs and the Empire State Building out of shiny paper.

I was born in Yorkville, the very far east of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which butts up against the gray-green East River. This was not the Upper East Side of mansions and embassies, Park Avenue duplexes and the Metropolitan Museum. Yorkville had been heavily settled by German immigrants, and the briny smell of the East River mixed with the meaty, spicy scent of sausages wafting out of Schaller and Weber is the olfactory record of my childhood. Let Proust have his prim, delicate madeleines; I’ll take the salty bite of bratwurst any day.

Jews name their babies after dead relatives, for reasons both superstitious and practical. If a child is named after a living older person, we reason, the Angel of Death, apparently both nearsighted and not particularly bright, may sweep up the baby when it’s the grandmother’s time. Reserving the name-honor for the dead also keeps the family peace. No one’s fighting over who gets a baby named after them when naming after the living is bad luck.

Mom took that one step further and named me after Queen Elizabeth I, to whom we were definitely not related. She didn’t bother to name me at all for the first six months; I was born at home, and it’s not like there was anyone else around who could credibly be confused with the baby. When she finally did, she hit me with the one-two punch of Verity as a middle name. I was considering Verity, Chastity, and Serenity, she said to a friend, airily. But then I figured I wouldn’t wish chastity on her, and no child of mine is going to be serene. (I dined out on that one for years.)

Verity, from the Latin veritas, meaning truth. What’s in a name? Probably nothing. But for all my faults, I am very truthful.

Like most New Yorkers, we lived in a space most outsiders would consider outrageously small, but which was plenty for us. The one-bedroom apartment had a large closet in the entry hall that had been converted to accommodate a twin bed for my mother, and I lived in the bedroom. That apartment now probably costs the earth, but in the 80s Yorkville was a quiet, middle-class grid of beneficently wide avenues and brownstoned cross streets. We lived just above an Associated, a grocery chain that carried enough kosher food to assuage the conscience during Passover and enough bacon to calm the soul the rest of the year.

Mom didn’t work, or didn’t work anymore—she had retired in her late thirties from her career as an attorney specializing in copyright protections—and I didn’t know enough to understand that this was strange. She hired a middle-aged woman named Margaret, a recent immigrant from Hungary, to care for me and run our lives, keeping my kid clutter in check and carefully forking sputtering, golden hand-cut French fries from pans of oil for Hanukkah parties and birthdays. Margaret had a nervous poodle named Pepper and a handsome, reticent husband, Sandor; he took me to Father’s Day dances at their church and swung me through the steps, his gleaming shoes tapping and my braids flying.

We went to museums and to the ballet, to puppet shows in Central Park and ice-skating on Wollman Rink (I skating, my mother sitting on the rinkside bench with hot chocolate); only tourists went to the showy, expensive Rockefeller Center. I clambered over the rocks near Belvedere Castle and wandered in the Ramble, she sometimes speeding us up, talking loudly, to cover up the evidence of what I now know was the most active cruising ground of the carefree gay early 80s. We bought lychee from the street carts in Chinatown and giant brown-paper-wrapped multipacks of wintergreen Life Savers from Peter, the hot dog seller on the corner of Ninety-Sixth Street, just above the entrance to the C train, who was no more immune to her charms than any other man she met. Have the most wonderful day, Mrs. Scheier! he’d beam, handing over the carton, the rolls heavy like a box of ammunition. No one called her Judith. No one would dare.

We never took subways. No one I knew did; they roared through the tunnels on shrieking tracks, reeking of urine and so heavily tagged that you couldn’t tell the original paint color. We walked most places or took Checker cabs, where I begged, as a treat, to sit on the seatbelt-less jump seats that folded down from the divider, which even the toughest-looking drivers slid shut, looking askance over their shoulders, as my mother chain-smoked in the back. We took lumbering crosstown buses that wheezed consumptively across the transverses, and the swifter M104 down Broadway to go to the theater.

On New Year’s Eve we went to Zabar’s and bought one of everything that looked good: babka, lox, pickled herring in cream sauce, tiny crisp cornichons and giant full-sour pickles. Do we really need all this? I’d ask, sagging under the weight of the bags. Oh, reason not the need, child! she Lear-quoted, and marched us across the street to H&H for bagels. She arranged it all carefully on bright primary-color trays, and we celebrated our annual Great American Pig-Out in front of the TV, watching the ball drop on Times Square

Every June, she threw a sumptuous birthday party; the year I turned six, on 6/6, she threw a whopping six. For my second birthday, all my tiny friends clambered on the gym equipment at the 92nd Street Y; for my eighth, we played with fossils and ate novelty dinosaur-shaped chicken tenders at the American Museum of Natural History. For my tenth, the Bronx Zoo, with handsome animal puppets, a different one for each child, from Toy City on Eighty-Sixth Street. I was her one shot, and by God, she was going to do it up right.

So: Where did the money come from?

How were we affording these parties, these presents? How were we going away for a month every summer? How were we paying the mortgage?

A mystery.

She wasn’t a big fan of children’s books, and so she read me classics starting when I was four—The Yearling, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield. I lay next to her on the couch, my legs hooked over hers and head resting on her arm as she read aloud, pausing to take drags off the ever-present cigarette smoldering in her cut-glass ashtray. We kept a legal pad handy to note the words she couldn’t define, rare though they were, to look up later, and gave up on the dense Last of the Mohicans when the list in her neat but illegible handwriting ran to a full page. Those few kids’ books she did read me were heavily annotated to suit her sensibilities; I was an adult before I learned that Christopher Robin was not the only male character in the Winnie-the-Pooh books.

She still left the apartment in those days. She still had friends. She knew there was something not quite right about our home, although she thought it was the fact that she was a single mother. She constructed a village from scratch, providing half a dozen father figures, deliberately and carefully cultivated. Her friend Jim, an illustrator who sketched out Greek heroes and puppies at his giant drafting table as I sat spellbound in his lap; her friend Shannon’s husband, a grave, Lincoln-bearded man who tried and failed to teach me to pitch; the wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor down the hall. But they all belonged to someone else; they were someone else’s daddy. I didn’t want the shades-of-gray connection to a man who was only peripherally mine. I wanted the DNA connection, the guy who was mine and mine alone.

I craved a picture, desperately. If I couldn’t smell his neck or hear his voice or feel the hoist of his arms from ground to hip, I wanted to know what his face looked like. I wanted a glimpse of the physical fact of him—the real person—even if what he really was was dead.

But I rarely said a word, as even the most off-handed question ended in tears, whether hers or mine or both. She’d claim ignorance and a poor memory—They had known each other for so short a time! It was so long ago!—and then retreat to her room, where she cried herself blotchy, emerging shiny eyed and edgy as a feral cat. I shut my mouth and kept it shut.

Her rage had a very specific smell, like the ozone sting that fills your nostrils when the anesthesiologist turns on the pump. I could pick up the smell of fury from across the room, and hear it in the slap of her slippers as she crossed the apartment. Slow was normal, fast was danger, and a half-run meant I’d better leap out of that bed and lock myself in the bathroom. Fast.

There was no telling what would set her off. It was never the same day to day. If an interaction didn’t inspire irritation, it inspired rage, and if not rage, fits of weeping. When the building’s handyman mistook my sled, set against the wall of the emergency stairwell to drip-dry, for garbage, she flew into a tantrum and screamed at him that he was too stupid to live. A screed on the letterhead of the law firm for which she had once worked followed, and I never saw him again. I proudly showed her a dress I’d stitched for her childhood doll, and her eyes lit on a hairline crack on the doll’s age-hardened rubber leg, the consequence of my six-year-old hands pulling the comically too-small dress over it. She fell prostrate on the bed, her face buried in the doll, in a rush of angry tears. "Oh Bethy, she wailed. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know she’d break you with her stupid dress!"

Leaving a water glass in the sink went unnoticed nine times out of ten, but the tenth time, lightning crackled through the air. She rarely hit me, but it was her voice I feared; her eyes glistened and sparked, and she screamed so loud, and with such abandon, that her eyes slid out of focus and spittle clung to her chin. It was the lack of control that was so terrifying. You could look into her eyes, if you were dumb enough to get that close, and see that no one was behind the wheel. On one memorable occasion I made it to the bathroom just ahead of her, and slammed and locked the door behind me; our prewar building was solidly built, and she pounded at the door a few times before deciding it was fruitless. The fwoop-fwoop of her slippers walking away; silence; a yip. The slippers came back.

Elizabeth, she said softly through the door. I was in the bathtub, scrunched against the back wall, my head thudding hotly. You can’t be in there by yourself with the door locked. What if there was a fire?

There won’t be a fire, I said defiantly.

Her voice turned sorrowful. I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but I can’t have you locking doors behind you. I have Mischief here, and if you don’t come out, I’m going to take her down to Dr. Howell’s and have her put to sleep.

My heart filled with lava; I worshipped that dog, a hyperactive Maltese with an unflattering crew cut that I maintained, with more enthusiasm than skill, with an electric beard clipper.

He won’t do it!

Softer still. He will, honey. I’ll tell him she bit one of the kids in the building, and he’ll have to. It’s the law.

I knew that she was right; even other adults didn’t cross my mother. Mischief whimpered. I unfolded myself from the tub and unlocked the door. She carefully put down the dog, who wisely scampered away. I didn’t see her hand coming, but I did see the tile coming at me as I hit the floor.

There was always a peak to the fury, and as her anger ebbed, horror and self-flagellation flooded in to take its place. It was as if she had been possessed. As her eyes came back into focus she would dissolve into tears, keening and tugging at her hair. I’m so sorry, Elizabeth, she’d weep. I don’t know why I do this. I don’t know why I’m so vicious to you. I’m just so sorry. And I would wrap my arms around her middle, breathe in the smell of her Emeraude, and promise her that it was OK, that we were OK. The tangle in my stomach would soften and unknot, and I would relax into the sudden