Love Saves the Day

In a way, it was like living with my parents all over again. Our home was silent—no conversations, no music. I knew Laura resented my music, I knew she blamed me for loving it so much that I’d raised her the way I had. She screamed it at me once. It was a month after I’d gone to see Mr. Mandelbaum at the SRO, when I had to tell Laura that he’d died. I had gone to visit him every day after I’d found him, bringing food and soap and whatever comfort I could. I had succeeded so far as getting him to change into the clean clothes that I’d brought. But I couldn’t persuade him to leave that place altogether.

It wasn’t that Laura blamed me for his death exactly, but that she blamed me for everything—for our having lived in that building in that neighborhood in the first place. “Because of your music!” she’d yelled. “Because your music was more important to you than I was. You could have gotten a job, you could have asked your mother for help, you could have done anything when I was born that would have gotten me out of that place. But you didn’t!”

And what could I say? I had given up music for her. I’d stopped trying to be a DJ or a performer and went into the business side of it. It was only now, now when everything had ended, that I could see my mistakes. I wanted to say, I was only nineteen! Only four years older than you are now! Music was the only thing I knew anything about back then. I wanted to say, I didn’t want to be one of those single mothers who spends all day in an office and never sees her children. I wanted to spend every second I could with you. I didn’t just want us to live, I wanted us to have a life. I did the best I could, the very best I could at the time …

I wanted to say those things, but I couldn’t. The hardest thing in the world is to admit obvious past mistakes. Not because the admission of guilt is hard (I would have confessed to, would have apologized for, anything at all to win back Laura’s love). But because, in light of how stupid you turned out to have been, your defenses end up sounding like nothing more than excuses. Lame excuses, at that.

For years I thought I resented Laura for the guilt she made me carry. (As if I wasn’t carrying enough already.) Guilt for things that were beyond my control, for decisions I’d made so long ago (and for such good reasons!) that it didn’t seem fair to punish me for them now. For the first time in my life, I craved the silence I’d grown up with. I came to understand my mother better, how a woman could decide that she didn’t want to talk to her own child. There were times when I’d catch a look on Laura’s face, as if she were about to say something of more substance than Going to the library. I’ll be back later. Perhaps if I’d encouraged her … but I don’t know. I never did encourage her. I didn’t want to hear her repeat the accusations I made against myself daily. Sometimes I thought there was nothing left inside me but tears, and that if Laura said the wrong thing I’d put my head down and cry all those tears out until there was nothing left of me at all.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Laura needed to be angry at someone. Who could she be angry at if not at me? The City? The developers greedy for more land they could overprice? Those were anonymous entities, nothing more than a thousand worst-case scenarios Laura blamed me for not having thought enough about. And then one day the anger and silence become a habit. One day it’s been so long since you’ve talked to someone that it’s impossible to say the things you should have said years ago.

Maybe that’s why I blather so relentlessly at Laura when she comes to visit me now. Too late I realized how insidious silence is. I think sometimes that maybe—by sheer accident—I’ll find the one right thing to say, the one thing that will make Laura look at me again the way she used to.

After Laura graduated from college and moved away, she was no longer my legal dependent, and I had to move out of the Mitchell-Lama building. Not that it mattered much to me. That apartment had never felt like a real home, anyway.

I moved back to the Lower East Side. I had to go all the way out to Avenue B—once an unthinkable place to live, certainly for a woman alone—to find an apartment I could afford. It wasn’t exactly the same when I moved back (you can never go home again, as they say)—not even remotely the same, really. But it was the only place where I could find traces of what had been, and what might have been if not for one rainy day and a few fallen bricks.