TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 149

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 12, 2000007


Dear Ecstatic Wonders,

	This morning I got a photograph of Zinnia 
Nygren via e-mail.  It's a close up of her face. 
She's wearing curl around sun glasses.  You know, 
those disposable black plastic glasses that come 
curled up in a scroll?  The optometrist gives 
them to you after you've had your pupils dilated. 
They grip your temples and protect your eyes.

	Zinnia is my step-granddaughter.  Alex is 
my eldest, the son of villainman and Vicki. 
Zinnia is seven months old.  She has a round moon 
of a face.  Alex and Heather live outside of 
Atlanta now.  For the time being.  Heather wants 
to come back.  They brought Zinnia with them to 
visit our neck of the woods in late December. 
There was my first grandchild, even though not by 
blood.  I raised her father, raised him through 
thick and thin.  It's hard to contemplate what I 
went through for Alex and his brother Ben.

	So here is this picture of Zinnia.  I 
looked at it, and Alex looked back at me.  Right 
there around the mouth, she is her father's 
double.  It is marvellous how these 
characteristics flit across our children's faces. 
The next moment, I saw Heather in her.  The 
likenesses are so subtle that one person can see 
them, and another cannot.  "I think he looks just 
like his mom."  "You do?  I can't see it.  He 
looks like his dad to me."

	I don't look like either of my parents. 
I've seen photographs of my great aunt Anne when 
she was young, and those look like me when I was 
young.  I expect now that I am getting older that 
all the similarities to my parents will start 
coming out in me.  My mother says that she 
watched her uncles start to walk like their 
father, Goodman Brodofsky, and the older they 
got, the more like him they were.




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What the men are for

	After one of my parents' more dramatic 
battles, my father marched out the front door, 
slamming it behind him and notifying my mother 
that he may or may not be back that day.  He knew 
this would get to her.  The uncertainty of his 
whereabouts and the added uncertainty about if 
and when he would be home stabbed her deeply. 
This was primal stuff for her, who followed us 
around, wanted to know where, why, what, when and 
who, and routinely announced if she were about to 
go to the bathroom, or take a shower, go down to 
the mailbox to collect the mail or take a nap for 
twenty minutes.  Sometimes, we'd hear our names 
being called, urgently, and we'd answer, 
shouting, "Yes?!"  Then we'd hear her shout back, 
"Just checking!" and we'd go back to whatever we 
were going back to after the interruption.  When 
he walked out like that, he intended to inflict 
the most harm possible, like a monkey who bites 
the victim and then shakes it around violently to 
make sure the wound is complicated and the 
bacteria well deposited.

	This time, my mother was in tears.  She 
stood looking out the side window staring off 
into wherever her husband might be going, or 
might not be.  She was muttering, "Why does he do 
this to me?  I can't stand it.  I hate him.  I'm 
so miserable."  I leaned against the wall, 
watching her misery, watching the tears fall down 
her cheeks.  Crying is something she never did. 
She was stoic.  But here were the tears and they 
called me into unsustainable sorrow, even a 
panic.  My mother was the backbone of my world, 
the only reality in the ocean of chaos my father 
created.  If she were coming apart with grief, 
then what would become of my sorry world?  There 
would be no reality at all.

	I touched her shoulder.  "Mom.  If he 
makes you so miserable every day, and your life 
is so awful with him, why don't you leave him?"

	She kept staring out the window.

	"Why don't you leave him?"

	She turned her head toward me and said, "But who else would have me?"

	Something inside me collapsed.  This 
thing was hopeless, wasn't it.  My mother was 
pretty, intelligent, gifted, funny, kind, warm, 
communicative.  But none of that mattered, did 
it.  It wasn't just that her vision of herself 
was warped, but the whole deal about what is 
important and what isn't was warped.  In many 
ways, I worshipped her.  I showed her things I 
had created, read to her things I'd written, 
played music for her that I'd composed.  All so 
she would approve of me.  All so she would love 
me enough to save me.  And it turned out that 
what mattered, after all was said and done, was 
that a man see fit to "have" you.  My hopes for 
my life suddenly lost all their blood.  What was 
I doing with my life if all of it were so that 
some man, any man, might "have" me?  And if there 
were doubt that a decent man might "have" my 
mother, what kind of a world was this?  You mean 
all that was possible for such a woman was a 
match to a hunched over, sadistic pervert with an 
unfortunate quantity of brains to power his 
whims?  She deserved so much more than what she 
had.  But she didn't think so.  Maybe she thought 
herself unworthy of even him.

	I could have snuffed myself out as I 
heard her reveal to me what the priorities were 
in this life.  Certainly no one in his right mind 
would have me:  this soiled, humiliated, beaten 
sex object, a young woman with plenty of promise, 
but a toxic body that drew even her father to 
her.  I was poison.  My mother was worthless.  We 
all would have to sit on the bench waving our 
hands demurely, trying to attract the attention 
and affections of defective men.  It was only 
these defective men who could save us.



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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net