The Tender Bar Read Online Free PDF Page A

memories, I still come upon one of my mother’s lies, like an elaborately painted Easter egg that was hidden too well and forgotten.

    The earliest lie I can remember came about when my mother and I had moved into a small apartment five minutes from Grandpa’s house. At last, she said, we’ve escaped. She was loudly, riotously happy, until she got laid off from her job. Soon I found food stamps in her purse. “What are these?” I asked.

    “Coupons,” she said brightly.

    She didn’t want me to know we were broke. She didn’t want me to worry more than I already did. For this same reason she lied when I asked if we could buy a TV. “You know, I’ve been meaning to buy us a TV,” she said. “If only the TV makers weren’t on strike.”

    I nagged her for weeks about the TV strike, and she concocted detailed stories on the fly about picketers at the factory and breakdowns in the negotiations. When she’d saved enough for a used black-and-white Zenith, she came to me and announced that management had caved. For years I believed there had been a bitter work stoppage among Long Island’s TV makers, until I heard myself telling people about it at a dinner party and saw them staring at me.

    On those rare occasions when my mother was caught in a lie, she was refreshingly unrepentant. She had a “relationship” with the truth, she explained coolly, and like all relationships it required compromises. Lying, she believed, was no greater sin than turning down the volume on the radio to protect me from The Voice. She merely notched down the volume on the truth.

    Her most inspired lie marked a watershed in our relationship, because it concerned my most cherished possession, my security blanket. Made of mint green satin, quilted with thick white thread, the blanket was my other addiction, besides The Voice. I grew edgy when it was out of reach. I wore it as a poncho, a sash, a scarf, and sometimes as a bridal train. I regarded my blanket as a loyal friend in a cruel world, while my mother saw it as an adult emotional disorder in the making. Seven was too old for a security blanket, she said, trying to reason with me, but when did reason stand a chance against obsessive love? She tried seizing the blanket, but I howled as though she were hacking off my arm at the joint. Finally I woke one night to find her on the edge of my bed. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

    “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

    Over the next few weeks I noticed my security blanket getting smaller. I asked my mother. “Maybe it’s shrinking in the wash,” she said. “I’ll use colder water.” Many years later I learned that my mother had crept into my room each night and taken a scissor to my security blanket, snipping off an imperceptible slice, until it became a security shawl, a security washcloth, a security swatch. Over time there would be more security blankets, people and ideas and particularly places to which I would form unhealthy attachments. Whenever life snatched one from me, I would recall how gently my mother pared away my first.

    The one thing my mother couldn’t lie about was how deeply Grandpa’s house offended her. She said Grandpa’s house made the Amityville Horror look like the Taj Mahal. She said Grandpa’s house should be burned down and the soil plowed with salt. She said Grandpa’s house was Manhasset’s answer to Alcatraz, except with lumpier mattresses and worse table manners. She’d escaped that house at nineteen, literally flew away, joining United Airlines as a stewardess, jetting around the country in her aqua blue uniform and cap. She’d sampled other fun jobs, including a stint as a girl Friday at Capitol Records, meeting Nat King Cole, eavesdropping at the switchboard on phone conversations between her boss and Frank Sinatra. Now, thirty-three years old, a penniless single mother, she’d returned to Grandpa’s house, a bitter defeat and a sad step backward. She juggled three jobs—secretary, waitress,