Jed Wolf

Not knowing what else to do in the final hours of my mother’s life, I fired up karaoke and Dave and I sang “If Momma was Married,” from the musical “Gypsy.” Explaining it was one of her favorite songs, I asked a nurse’s aide to shoot a video for posterity. I’d shot one of my mother scattering my father’s ashes in Long Island Sound singing, “Is That All There Is?” which seemed strange to Dave who was raised Catholic, until knowing my family for twenty years, continuing the tradition felt right.

Everything grows gradually yet deteriorates so quickly, I thought, holding my mother’s frail hand, no longer heavy with rings, stolen I suspected by nursing home staff. I couldn’t tell if touching her still made her anxious, but figured it’s what normal people did at a family member’s deathbed.

My mother once whispered she didn’t deserve a plastic bag. “You’ll be better off without me,” she regularly quipped for attention in her final years like an undeserving witch. Relieved and heartbroken while sitting beside her ember, I was surprised to see she still had her wedding band and recalled being taught how to make one from gum wrappers by a girl named Tina.

Tina and Taffy Shafer were pretty twins who rode matching bicycles around our neighborhood in 1961 like a force. Their succesful parents standardized the practice of allowing their remarkable daughters to roam unsupervised. New-to-the-neighborhood families like mine emulated the Shafers, attending the same parties, joining the same clubs, and letting kids run free. Identical from a distance, my sister and I collided with the twin’s glaring differences playing games.

They taught us to dodge, jump, sprint and avoid body slams. They were unbeatable with their long legs and molten hair. Sprinting like Atalantas across neighborhood yards, Taffy captured everyone she overtook while Tina let slower kids get away.

Tina babysat a time or two and showed me how to make rings from aluminum gum wrappers while her sister slumped in sportscars with boys. I learned how to gossip discussing their virtues, as “naughty and nice” congealed in my six-year-old brain. Professing my devotion to wholesome Tina, I secretly fantasized about her sister and the tight jeaned boys she rode with.

“Guess who’s babysitting tonight,” My father announced adjusting his ascot. “Taffy Shafer, my sister and I repeated wide-eyed, before running to the top of the stairs to await her arrival. “Tina was unavailable,” my mother said applying lipstick, anticipating a groan, but my sister and I were thrilled.

My eleven-year-old sister Lisa still bit her fingernails but her bald spots from obsessively pulling out her hair had recently grown in. In addition to chewing my own fingers, I bit my toenails, deliberately puked in bed, and had fireproof curtains.

“She’s here,” my father announced downing his scotch and soda answering the door. “Come on in, he said curiously, as Taffy slipped in front of him wearing a short plaid skirt and an un-tucked white shirt like a parochial school tart.

“Oh Dick, I’d argue with you if you weren’t so God-damned gorgeous,” I’d heard a woman say at one of my parent’s cocktail parties and felt the same tension from downstairs as fifteen-year-old Taffy flattered our décor. “We’ll be home by nine kids,” my father said before he and my mother sped off to the yacht club in their Jag.

Lisa and I watched Taffy sitting outside ‘til she rose, then we ran to our previous spots on the floor in front of my mother’s bed and continued watching Chiller Theater. Stinking like cigarettes, Taffy introduced herself like we’d never met which made me feel bad until I decided she’d rather watch us than ride in Chris Castro’s Corvette.

“We’re not allowed on there,” my sister said casually, after Taffy flopped on my mother’s bed. I could see her in the huge dressing mirror I’d often studied my mother in while she smoked and read magazines. “I’ll fix it,” Taffy said yawning while slipping off her sandals. “What’s on?”

Unbuttoning almost all the buttons on her shirt to be more comfortable, she yawned, stretched, and lay on her side for a nap. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she added with a third fake yawn. Unlike the satin lace I imagined, her white cotton bra lacked even a bow. I looked at my sister trying not to giggle. “Oh my,” Taffy sighed, stretching one of her arms toward the ceiling. “When my arm falls, I’ll be fast asleep.”

Her arm dropped beside her less than 10 seconds later as one half of her bra pointed toward the ceiling like the Matterhorn my parents visited on their Swiss honeymoon. “You can come up on the bed if you like. I won’t tell,” Taffy whispered as if in a dream.

Lisa and I glanced at each other and crept onto the bed beside her like Lilliputians. “When my arm drops, I’ll be fast asleep, again,” Taffy said before flopping her hand on my shorts.

It wasn’t quite like playing doctor, I thought as Taffy rolled, squinting to see the best position to be further undressed. Lisa and I stopped giggling after we got her shirt off and looked less at each other while undoing her bra. If we stopped to look at the TV too long, Taffy writhed in slow motion and moaned.

This went on for a while and preferring to not remake the bed each time, my sister and I found Taffy asleep in closets and bathtubs until Kennedy was assassinated and Taffy was rumored to be on drugs.

“Why,” I asked my mother who sat in bed with the TV on, holding her knees crying. The assassination had been rerunning all day, but every time I asked about it, my mother told me to be quiet. We both needed consolation yet sat apart; her on the bed and me on the floor like strangers. “Go clean your room,” she screamed when I asked a third time.

I didn’t know why she never wanted me around and imagined she’d intuited what I’d done with Taffy and taught other kids to do. I had no idea until forty years later what happened to my mother as a young girl, or what Taffy’s father was like, but my sexual fantasies have always involved being found asleep in beds and baths.

I’ve been awakened by high school teachers and other inappropriate playmates throughout my life who read my signals and played along or ran.

My mother never asked anyone for what she really needed and froze whenever she was touched. Seduced by her problems, I tried to read her mind until done attending to her mixed signals, bandaged legs, and shallow breath, she finally let me spoon with her at the end, a technique Dave taught me twenty years earlier after all else had failed, to help me actually sleep.