Seesaw: Love, Hate: 1 of 6
May 13 through May 16, 1957
Interference and Argumentation
Engaging with a sharp click, the grinding of the machinery of the ascending elevator could be heard above the normal din of the studio.
Plagued by mostly imaginary slights, not knowing if it was her son in the elevator, but if it was wanting to confront him the moment he arrived, sliding the window open, Myra waited to see if the elevator was even coming to the third floor… It was. The moment the steel doors separated, “Mitchell, come in here!”
Recognizing the irritated and so irritating tone of his mother’s voice, knowing he’s about to hear it again, sighing, he went into her office, but the phone rang.
“Yes, Mister Schaub, they’ll be in the mail this afternoon… Yes, Sir, goodbye.”
As the connection was broken, “Mitchell,” she said angrily, “do you realize it’s almost two months since Michael and your wife…” the words “your wife” said venomously, “have been home from the hospital and you’ve been to my house only one time! Just once!”
“Mom,”—said defensively—“they’ve been home about six weeks and you’ve been over yourself twice, and with Ma and Pa once and dad and the kids another time, and Marsha really hasn’t been feeling well and I’ve been out working almost every night.”
“You don’t work on Sundays, my dear, sweet son,”—said just as venomously—“but I’ll bet your wife feels well enough, and has plenty of time to see her mother!”
“I did work last Sunday and, really, we don’t see that much of my mother-in-law!”
True… kind of true . He did make one call last Sunday and, true also, he did not see that much of Rhea, and Marsha, if given a choice, would see far less of her mother than she did, but if Marsha didn’t go to the twelfth floor, Rhea would come down to the fifth.
“Mitchell, I don’t believe that, not for a second!” Myra still hated the fact that her son’s family lived in the same building as his in-laws and was still extremely jealous of the time she imagined they spent with Rhea. “And whenever I call your wife to invite you over she always has an excuse for not coming! And also, I thought maybe, just maybe, after she had the baby and knew what it feels like to be a mother, maybe, God forbid, you dear, sweet wife would begin to address me!”
Thinking, shit! Here we go again! Then, as always, not having an excuse for this ongoing portion of his mother’s tirade, he said nothing in response. “It’s not an excuse, Mom! Her stitches are not healing well! They’re forming adhesions and seep constantly, and she says they’re ‘drawing’ and hurt! And really, she hasn’t been feeling well!”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t convince me that there hasn’t been some time, in all this time, that you couldn’t take a ride to Skokie with your wife and baby, for just a few minutes!”
“I’m sorry, too, Mom!” he said angrily. “But whether you believe it or not, Marsha has not felt well enough to go anyplace!”
“Well, my dear, sweet son, I don’t believe it!”
“Mom, what the hell do you want me to do? Divorce Marsha?”
***
On that day, Marsha did go to the twelfth floor.
“In two whole weeks he’s only made two sales?”
Mrs. Gerwitz, so it seemed, had been a lucky fluke.
In the ten days he’d been out, since that first evening, even though on some nights, if the locations were close enough he would take three leads, Mitchell had made but one other sale. Also in all that time—other than a few small, one or two-time customers—he had been unable to open so much as one decent account for the studio that might, even remotely, bring him closer to meeting his draw.
“That makes, what,” Rhea asked sarcastically, “seventy dollars? For two whole week’s work!”
“That’s more than he’d make working at Field’s.”
“Yeah, but at Field’s he’d be working on two evenings and Saturdays, not every night!” Laughing dryly, “Mitchell’s the only person I know that, somehow, is able to find a way to work longer and make less! And also, now it’s costing car expenses and if that’s not enough, you have to pay fifteen dollars a month for those lousy pots and pans!”
“That’s an investment, Mother,”—thinking briefly of Rhea’s investment, that cost her and Mitchell their house money—“and that happens to be a very good set of pots and pans.”
“Yeah, that you need like a loch in kop (a hole in the head)!”
“The news says we’re in a mild recession and Mitchell thinks that’s why things are kind of slow.”
“For people like your husband,” Rhea said emphatically, “‘things’ are always slow!”
“He’s doing his best! What do you want me to do, Mother? Divorce him?”
***
That evening, between the time he came home from work and went back to work, “Marsha,” Mitchell said in his irritated and irritating tone of voice, “I want us to visit my folks this Sunday!”
“So go!” Marsha said in her irritated and irritating tone of voice.
“No, I want us to go!”
“If I feel up to it, I will, and if I don’t, I won’t!”
“What the hell’s the difference, Marsha? If you’re just going to lay around and feel sick all the time, you might just as well lay around and feel sick at my folk’s house once in a while, too!”
“Oh? Lay around?” She’d been preparing dinner. “Is that what you think I do, Mitchell: lay around, all the time?” Placing a dish with a thick slice of meatloaf, peas and mashed potatoes on the table, “here’s your dinner!”
Taking a bottle of formula from the saucepan of boiling water, sprinkling a few drops onto her wrist, going to the sink, Marsha cooled the bottle under cold water.
“You know I haven’t felt well since I came home from the hospital,” she said contemptuously, “and yet you’ve never come home when I didn’t have dinner ready for you!” Staring at him angrily, “have you?”
Going to the crib, lifting Michael, sitting on the sofa, Marsha brought the bottle to the baby’s mouth. “Have you?” she demanded. But before Mitchell could respond, added, “and I don’t hear you, maybe, just maybe, ever offering to help me out around here once in a while!”
Sounding to Mitchell a lot like…too much like his mother.
“I don’t hear you offering to give me a break once in a while! Offering, once in a while, maybe, to get up in the middle of the night to feed your kid so, maybe, I can get a full night’s sleep, too, once in a while!”
“Yeah, Marsha, all that stuff’s right, Marsha!” He tried to eat but because of his anger, and guilt for not offering to help her with Michael and also, most of all, anger at his mother for causing this and anger at himself for starting this, the food tasted like cardboard… “But that’s what you’re supposed to do, Marsha: take care of the baby and me. And I do what I’m supposed to do!”
“Yeah,” she hissed, “and what’s that, Mitchell?”
“Earn a living, Marsha! That’s what I’m supposed to do!”
“Yeah, Mitchell, that’s what you’re supposed to do! But you sure ain’t doing a very good job of it! Are you, Mitchell?”
Slamming the fork down, “Go to hell, Marsha!” Pushing away from the table, standing, going to the closet, taking his jacket and coat he started to the door.
“As far as I’m concerned, Mitchell, you don’t have to come back!”
“Screw you! Maybe I won’t!”
“Screw you, too! I don’t care!”
May 15, 1957
The Pressure Cooker
“Mitchell, we’re family.” Myra stared at her son. “So I thought, ‘why stand on ceremony? So I tried again and called your wife and asked if she’d bring Mikey for dinner on Sunday. And do you know what your sweet wife had the nerve to say to me, Mitchell?”
Having a pretty good idea, he said nothing, but when she didn’t go on, “no, Mom,” he said tiredly, “what did Marsha say?”
“‘I’ll come if I feel up to it.’”—Actually, Marsha had said, “We’ll come if I’m feeling better”—“If she feels ‘up to it’! Don’t you have any control over your wife, Mitchell? Don’t you?”
Looking at the floor, looking anyplace but at his mother’s face or into her eyes, “Mom, please, I’m doing everything I can!”
***
Sitting alongside her daughter, “I wouldn’t let her get away with it!” lighting a cigarette. “The nerve of your mother-in-law! Telling you, ‘you can’t be that sick’! How the hell would she know how sick you are? If I were you, Marsha, I’d tell her to go to hell! Better yet, I’d tell that gutless husband of yours to tell his mother to go to hell!”
“Mother, please!”
“But that husband of yours would never say that to his mother because he’s too much of a ‘Mama’s boy’!”
Staring at some imaginary, far off place, remembering Mitchell’s reaction and the slap she’d purposely wielded out of him last August when she’d called his mother a bitch and him a son-of-a-bitch…
Mama’s boy? Marsha thought. Knowing she should have said something in her husband’s defense, Marsha said nothing.
May, 16. 1957
Steaming
“Mitchell, your mother’s very upset because you and your baby and that God-damned wife of yours haven’t been to the house in three weeks!” Poking his forefinger into his son’s chest, “doesn’t what you want…” poke, “count in your house?” poke, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” poke, “Are you…”
Knowing he shouldn’t, but letting the “God-damned wife” comment pass, half expecting his father to say…
“…a man or a mouse?” Walter said, poking Mitchell again.
“Dad, please!” he said pleadingly. “Will you and mom please lay off me? I’m doing everything I can! You know how stubborn Marsha can be!”
***
Coming into the apartment, “you look terrible!” Going to the crib, Rhea looked at the sleeping baby.
“Thanks, Mother,” she said facetiously. “I don’t think I even had an hour’s sleep last night.”
“Mikey keeping you up?”
“I’ve been really restless lately, and in a place small as this,” motioning to the room, “every time he whimpers I hear him. Then there’s the night feedings.”
“You tell him you don’t feel well and you’re tired and he still won’t give you a hand with the baby, eh?”
“You’ve got to be kidding, Mother! My husband says it’s ‘not what a man does,’”—although, actually, Mitchell had been helping a bit more in the past two days—“and, Jesus, if once in a while I get him to change a poopie diaper, he leaves it in the toilet for me to clean out.”
“Hate to tell you, sweetie, but you married a real jerk.”
Marsha said nothing.
