Writer's Block

A random musing while doing too much housework

I whisk a dusting cloth over the top of my mother-in-law’s picture in its Lucite box frame on the wall.

“Hey.”

I freeze. It’s her voice; I haven’t heard it for years. “What?”

“I hate this picture,” she says. “I’ve always hated this picture.”

I step back, take it all in. The painfully perfect posture. The frozen smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “You do look unhappy.”

“No kidding I was unhappy. It was my parents’ idea to call the photographer. Engagement portraits. Who does that anymore?”

I know a few things about her past, because she’d told me, one squirmy afternoon while I was making soup in her kitchen. She’d never really wanted to get married. But she wasn’t allowed to say that, not then. She did it because everybody was doing it. Everybody in the 1950s graduated from high school and got married, or else they’d call you an old maid. Nobody wanted that. So, you got married too young, before you knew what was what, and you had children and lived in the suburbs and threw dinner parties and smiled when you didn’t feel like it and slowly died inside. Occasionally there were cocktails. Sometimes pills, if you knew someone or had a doctor who was willing.

“You’re free now,” I say. “Shouldn’t you be off, I don’t know, what do Jewish spirits become?”

Dead,” she says. “They become dead. And they haunt their children for the rest of time.”

That sounds a little like her modus operandi for when she was alive, too, but it feels too rude to say out loud.

“And you,” she says. “What the hell are you doing? You’re still young, yet. And here you are stuck in this house with the cleaning and the cooking and the schlepping, week after week dusting these fakakta frames full of dead people. You should be writing.”

“I know. That’s why I’m dusting fakakta frames full of dead people.”

“So, what’s the problem. You write stories, you were always with the stories.”

I sigh. Not so much, lately, with the stories. There are too many things I can’t control. The state of the world, the state of the country, the state of my own life. What I can control is my immediate environment. I’ve never dusted or vacuumed so much in all of my almost 64 years. My house has never been so clean. People close to me should stage an intervention. Seriously. Send help.

“Do me a favor,” she says, her voice so uncharacteristically soft it pulls me closer to her image. I wait. In the picture her hair is perfectly coiffed, her makeup professionally crafted, her outfit painstakingly curated. She resembles a Jewish Audrey Hepburn or a young Elizabeth Taylor. I want to think that someone so young and beautiful can’t possibly be unhappy, but I’m old enough to know what a good costume can conceal, and where to find the cracks in the façade.

Finally she says, “Take down the pictures. Put up some art, something nice. Then go, I don’t know, go for a walk. Get a life, as the kids say.”

“The kids don’t say that anymore.”

“What do I know from what the kids say now? I’m dead. Just…get out of here. It’s like a museum, all these people.”

“Some of them are still alive, you know. I like looking at their pictures. I like looking at yours, and your family’s, and my family’s…it brings back nice memories.”

She makes a rude noise. “Nice memories are for when you’re in some rest home drooling into your oatmeal.”

“Don’t you have someone else you can haunt?”

“Feh, they don’t listen to me.”

“And you think I will?”

“You’re the most likely candidate. Plus if I do a mitzvah, I get special privileges in the spiritual realm, or whatever the hell they call it up there anymore, it’s always changing. I might even get a cigarette or two.”

A Jewish heaven where you’re allowed to smoke? I get the feeling I’m not the only storyteller in the family. “All right. Jeez.” I put down the cloth.

“You’ll write me another novel?” she says, voice full of hope.

“Maybe,” I say.

“Come on, already. The library here is full of junk. I need something good to read.”

Speaking of memories, it floods back to me that she was one of my first and biggest fans. Even when I didn’t think I could do it. Especially when I didn’t think I could do it. “Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll get on that.” A bird chips as if inquiring if anyone is home. “But first, I’m going outside.”

And maybe when I come back in, I’ll track in some dirt and not do a damn thing about it. I swear, when I take a final glance back to her picture, the young Audrey Hepburn’s smile meets her eyes.