HotmailUnmarried? Not a spinster, just a ‘Late Bloomer'
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The next morning, on our way up to the Prague Castle, we walked along Golden Lane, a row of tiny, colorful cottages built into the castle wall in the sixteenth century to house the castle guard. I was wearing my apron dress again, a painful reminder of our dinner the night before, while my mother was wearing a cheerful plaid blouse, a twill skirt, and coarse, ropy espadrilles that made her heels turn a painful shade of pink.
It was a warm, windless spring day, and we stopped to stand outside of a squat, light blue building where Franz Kafka had lived briefly with his sister.
“I hope you have a kosher wedding,” my mother said, reaching deep into her public television tote bag and patting around for her camera. “With Kafka, I just keep wondering what influenced his work. Did he see a cockroach in the kitchen and imagine ‘The Metamorphosis’? I know he had TB, and I think he was starving to death when he wrote ‘A Hunger Artist.’ ” She regarded the small building, looking up at the second-story window. “Was he in love when he lived here? Was he depressed?” She smiled. “It’s fun to imagine, isn’t it?”
I looked at her, not exactly sure how to react.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “My wedding? I don’t even have a boyfriend.”
“I know,” she said, framing a shot of the house, careful to include the heavy shingled roof. “I’m just saying when. When you have your wedding, I hope it’s kosher. I wouldn’t want my kosher friends to have to eat from paper plates.”
Why I chose to argue about this, I still don’t know.
“How many kosher friends do you have?” I asked.
She began to count.
“Well, there’s Rabbi Hershkowitz and his wife, Tsipora — that’s two. And Sam and Audrey Bloom — so four. I’d like to invite the Yarones from Israel, which makes six, but I doubt they’d come.”
I’ve read that nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but I think a close second might be the rate at which I went from age twenty-seven to thirteen.
“No, I don’t want a kosher wedding,” I said, my arms now tightly crossed. “What if I want to serve shrimp?”
“You don’t love shrimp,” my mother said. “Why do you need shrimp?”
“Because maybe my guests will want it. Or my fiancé.”
“You could have mock shrimp,” she said.
“I’m not having mock shrimp. If we’re having mock shrimp, we might as well have mock ham. Or why don’t we just have a mock wedding?”
“You really feel that strongly?” she said.
“I’m thinking very seriously of eloping.”
“Why not make it completely vegetarian?” she said, a reference to the ten years I’d gone without meat. “When I took that class on the history of Judaism, we learned that the basis of kashrut is, in fact, vegetarianism, which seems right up your alley. We could have an Indian theme with curries and papadams. There are still Jews in India.”
“I” I started to say something, but instead exhaled, thickly.
“You what?” she said. “You what? Tell me, sweetheart.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation,” I said. “This is crazy.”
“Well, I hope you change your mind,” she said.
I could tell she was upset by the hasty way she began marching up the hill.
“Are you coming?” she called.
I didn’t answer.
She started back. “I asked if you were coming.” She got closer to me. “Sweetheart, are you crying?”
I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and when I finally spoke, I took long gasps every few words.
“I just feel like men don’t like me. Or they like me for a little while and then I screw it up.”
“What are you talking about? Everyone loves you.”
“No, they don’t. Mom. They don’t. Not even close.”
“Oh, rubbish. Yes, they do.”
“I didn’t tell you, but before I left, I started seeing this really cute screenwriter who I’d had a crush on for a long time and who just broke up with his girlfriend, and I’m such an idiot, because he just broke up with her, and it was a recipe for masochism, but we fooled around a lot, we didn’t sleep together but” I stopped long enough to catch my breath — “but we saw each other a lot and then I offered to make him dinner. That fettucine recipe that I made you”
“Which I loved,” she said. “It’s your best dish.”
That was so my mother. To say it was my best dish, when I only had one. “And I spent over fifty dollars. And I also baked him a Duncan Hines cake, like an idiot, and”
My mother put her arm around me. “And he broke up with you.”
“No! Worse. He never showed up. I called him like five times that night and left these pathetic messages, like ‘Oh, hey, did you forget?’ Like a f------ loser. If I had any self-respect, I would have called and said, ‘F--- you! You lying piece of sh--! Go to hell!’ But I didn’t. Instead I ate the entire cake, and then he didn’t call me back for over a week. When he did finally call, he said he’d forgotten about dinner and that he had gone to Wisconsin for a week, and I knew he was lying, and I didn’t even let him have it then. I said, ‘That’s okay, I understand,’ because I’m a sheep. I just felt like such a stupid, stupid piece of stupid sh-- because I should have known. Which is how I feel a lot these days, Mom. Like sh--. I do.”
She was silent.
I had often said I felt like a house men were happy to rent, but when it came time to buy, they balked. Several boyfriends had told me that being in a relationship with me required work. A lot of extensive work. I was not the brand-new house with central air and freshly polished hardwood floors, the one that was ready to move into immediately. I was the fixer-upper with plenty of room for improvement, one the real estate agent says “could be a gem if you’re willing to do an enormous, exhausting amount of work.” I was the house in desperate need of renovation. And if I kept eating the way I was on this trip, I’d be the biggest house on the block.
“Let me tell you something,” my mother said. “You are the furthest thing from sh--. You are beautiful and wonderful and so creative, and by the way, that’s my daughter you’re talking about and I might have to punch you in the nose if you say you’re sh-- again.”
“Mom, I’m serious.”
“After I got divorced, I got knocked around myself all the time before I met your father,” she said.
My mother had married a psychiatrist at twenty-one, who, she said, loved baseball, Freud, Groucho Marx, and her — in that order.
“I was a divorcée in the days when it was still considered shocking, and I think maybe that’s why I had low self-esteem and chose such terrible men. I went out with an alcoholic who worked for the Associated Press, when he wasn’t having blackouts and canceling dates with me, and then that Broadway producer I told you about, the one who knew Esther Williams and Jimmy Durante, who I know was scheduling our dinners between hopping into bed with showgirls. I got dumped all the time. Constantly. And then I met your father. And he was sweet and honest, and I was ready for a good man because I’d had such first-class sh-- before him. I married the wrong man the first time, and I almost made the same mistake again, until I realized what was really important to me. And it was all very roundabout the way it happened. Do you get my drift?”
“Uh huh,” I said, wiping my nose.
“If you want to know the truth,” she said, “I wasn’t so impressed with our friend Miguel. He was a little unctuous, if you ask me. Kissing my hand good night? I was half expecting him to click his heels. It was too much. You need someone more original. And I, for one, am really looking forward to meeting him.”
“Yeah, well, you and me both,” I said.
Excerpted from "The Late Bloomer's Revolution" by Amy Cohen. Copyright 2007 Amy Cohen. All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion.
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