God's Love Toby

Laurie
God's Love Toby
Starbucks, March 25, 2008

In the 1970s, my sister’s husband buys a health food store on 52nd Street, and my parents work there, my mother in the front, the Czarina of vitamins, my father, the ex-coat manufacturer, in the back, whipping up smoothies and lunch specials. “Where is Toby?” people ask, first thing. My mother is never happier; the streets are inside the shop. She kibitzes with Greta Garbo, pretending not to know who she is. “You, Toby,” Greta asks, “you know what it is, a man?” My mother shoots a look at Murray, who is slicing an avocado. “That’s what I know, end of story.” The store booms for ten years, but the landlord jacks the rent and my brother-in-law is forced to sell. After my father dies, my mother cooks for God’s Love We Deliver, the organization that feeds homebound people with AIDS. She stands on her feet during three-hour shifts, dicing onions, potatoes, and carrots, and she’s part of a crowd again. They drag her out for coffee and Chinese food. God’s Love is what she talks about: Karen’s dating debacles, Ben’s heart murmur. I volunteer there, too, and one day the head chef calls me complaining that Toby is making racist remarks. They’ve put up with it for more than a year. “Talk to her,” he says, and so I go to her apartment and we sit at the cherry wood dining table with walnut inlays.

“May I be struck by lightning if I ever said such a thing.” She doesn’t look me in the eye. “They're lying.”

"Frankie says you talk about ‘them,’ use the word ‘swartzers’. Everyone knows what that means."

"You're siding with them?" She shakes her head and presses her lips together. “I should have known. You’d sell me down the river in a heartbeat."

“I’m on your side," I say, but can this be true? She wants my allegiance no matter what, and I want hers. So what else is new?

She eyes a plaque on the wall: a reproduction of an Assyrian lion hunt from the Met. A lion is crouching at the feet of galloping horses, mighty in himself with eyes ablaze but cornered. "Who the hell are they to tell me what I can say? What, I’m going to be fired from a volunteer job?"

"How would you feel if people slammed Jews?"

"They hate Jews! That's why they’re ganging up on me."

"Ma, you’re doing the same thing."

"People are jealous of Jews, blacks included. I can't stand them."

"All of them?"

"No. Some, I like."

"Well. You have to think about other people’s feelings."

She sets down her cup, and the saucer rattles. "I thought about other people my whole life. I don't want to be gagged."

"Just stop being nasty. How hard is that?" I ought to know. I wake up mornings with lists of lost friends I’ve offended. The rats that survive the longest are the ones that adapt. The rats with the longest lives retain the fewest unhappy memories.

Toby is silent, searching for a way to be herself and yet remain at the party. In the end, she’s asked to leave, and she looks sad and ashamed when she tells me. I feel for her, but then blood flows into her cheeks. "I don’t need them. I don't need to work there anymore."

During the months before she dies, she goes in and out of dementia. When her aides go shopping, she flings herself from her wheelchair onto the floor and tumbles to the door, bringing down tables and chairs. She can’t walk, but there is strength in her right hand and leg. She strips off her pants and underwear, crawls into the hall naked, and bangs on neighbors’ doors. She wheels herself to the elevator, rides to the lobby, and tells the doormen she’s being beaten by her aides. She wants contact. Every time she falls, she has to be picked up and held. Before she was disabled, she was uncomfortable with touch. Afterward, she kisses people’s hands and slides them across her cheeks. All of her aides are black. She is scared that Primrose, who has been with her since she returned from rehab, will leave. I say she won’t.

In Richard’s family, hostility is expressed through pity. “Poor old uncle Henry,” his father will say, “he never did get much of a break in life.” My sister tells a story. My mother is having coffee after attending a class at Hunter College, when a voice burns through the cafeteria din, “So you’re still alive.” It’s my mother’s sister, Bell, who disappears, or maybe Toby lowers her head. Next a card with a picture of a rat arrives in the mail, signed Bell. “You believe this happened?” I ask Ellen. “Mom’s address and phone number aren’t listed.”

One time when Ellen calls, Prim asks my mother if she knows who Ellen is. Toby says, “My sister.” I think she may have confused Ellen’s name with Bell’s, or mixed up the words daughter and sister. When Ellen visits, Toby remembers a quarrel with Bell, and Ellen says, “She’s probably dead.” Toby bursts into tears, saying she has seen her sister on TV, waving to her.

On the phone, my mother tells me: “Primrose says you come to New York every week and don’t visit.” It’s not true, I say. “That’s what Primrose says.” My mother reminds me of my grandmother when she was old and confused. She once called me to report she’d read Toby’s obituary in the newspaper and wanted to know where her daughter was buried. Did she want Toby dead, given that my mother had refused to speak to her for over a decade?

On the phone, Toby asks if I have children.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They’re not that easy to produce.”

“I thought you would have six by now.”

I look at my hands that are hers, small boned and veiny.