Little Failure
“Note the pretty bow in her hair. The year is 1956, and the place is the Soviet Union.
“IT SEEMS LIKE you don’t really know me.
“You see me through your father’s eyes.
“And sometimes I think I do not know you.”
It is my mother’s birthday, and we are in the rotating restaurant atop the Marriott Marquis. My father and Aunt Tanya, my mother’s younger sister, have sat down at our table awaiting their truffle soup and steak medium to medium well, but my mother wants ten minutes alone with me. We are ...sitting by the ladies’ toilet in the restaurant’s nonrevolving core, watching women pass by in their piquant suburban outfits, so much flesh on a freezing December night.
My mother’s line of thought confuses me. I know she is anxious about the memoir I am writing. They both are. “Tell us, how many more months do we have to live?” my father will ask about the impending publication date. But how can she say we do not know each other? We have spent eighteen years living in such close proximity that any non-Jewish, non-Italian, non-Asian American exposed to even an hour of such closeness would raise up her blond locks to the sky and cry, “Boundaries!”MoreLess
“IT SEEMS LIKE you don’t really know me.
“You see me through your father’s eyes.
“And sometimes I think I do not know you.”
It is my mother’s birthday, and we are in the rotating restaurant atop the Marriott Marquis. My father and Aunt Tanya, my mother’s younger sister, have sat down at our table awaiting their truffle soup and steak medium to medium well, but my mother wants ten minutes alone with me. We are ...sitting by the ladies’ toilet in the restaurant’s nonrevolving core, watching women pass by in their piquant suburban outfits, so much flesh on a freezing December night.
My mother’s line of thought confuses me. I know she is anxious about the memoir I am writing. They both are. “Tell us, how many more months do we have to live?” my father will ask about the impending publication date. But how can she say we do not know each other? We have spent eighteen years living in such close proximity that any non-Jewish, non-Italian, non-Asian American exposed to even an hour of such closeness would raise up her blond locks to the sky and cry, “Boundaries!”MoreLess
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