This essay is reprinted here from Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed by Mimi Schwartz by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2002 by Mimi Schwartz. Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press, 800.526.2617 and on the web at nebraskapress.unl.edu. No further use may be made of these materials without permission from the University of Nebraska Press and Mimi Schwartz.

Getting from here to there has always been a big deal in my family. Stu says it’s because of everyone having to leave Germany fast and because so many now live in Manhattan–without a car. But I, who shares their genes, know better.

So I should have been alert when my son, Alan, called just before we were leaving for a family reunion at an old Victorian lodge two hours up the Hudson River. It was my mother’s eighty-fifth birthday, and she had invited her progeny for what she said was “a last bash while all parts were working!” Forget that she has more energy than all of us, still baking Linzer tortes and Berches like the town baker.

“Mom,” Alan said, “can you drive Yuka and me home? Otherwise I have to rent a car and it costs a fortune.”

“Why can’t you go back with Julie and Doug? Aren’t they taking you up?”

“Yes, but there’s no room. They are taking Grandma, Dora, and Aunt Lisa back.”

It was late and I had to pack, so I skipped the family logistics and said, “Fine! Just so you’re willing to leave by three on Sunday. You know Dad in Sunday-night traffic.”

 Foolishly, I was thinking great hiking, not family transportation, as we drove up the winding road of October color and stopped in front of a wooden mansion, perfect for any Stephen King movie. My mother was waiting on the wraparound porch with Aunt Lisa: two trim ladies from Stuttgart, eighty-five and eighty-seven, dwarfed by the giant oak door. They had been dropped off at noon by my nephew Norman, who had returned to Manhattan for the next shit. (Three cars for twenty-two of my relatives going one hundred miles north required fifty phone calls minimum, I figured.)

I hugged both women, feeling sharp angles beneath the black, soft wool jackets. Before I could ask about their trip, I heard it: “Margo just ordered a limousine to take me back home on Sunday. I’ll take Lisa and for a.: My mother’s lips were drawn tight, her frame, like a twig about to snap. “But it is a fortune. Really, Alan should have rented a car.”

I knew the c conversation that had gone on all day, probably all week. My mother complaining to my cousin Dora, who complained to my aunt Lisa, who told my cousin Margo, w ho shook her head, called for a limo, and said what would be the weekend mantra: “Alan should have rented a car.” After all–and I could hear everyone, but especially Dora (former bad girl now acting like family saint), on the phone for hours on this–it is Aunt Gerda’s car, she should have a right to drive in it and not pay for a limo, on her eighty-fifth birthday, no less, and with her treating everyone. It’s just like Mimi and her family. She always was a spoiled brat.

I stomped off with the luggage cart and grabbed my hiking shoes instead of unpacking. It took twenty minutes of tromping along a trail with orange, red and gold everywhere before the Right Words dawned on me: “But, Mom, Alan and Yuka are riding home with us! We arranged it yesterday.” So simple, so sane, if I were in someone else’s family, to be followed by a good-natured hug: “Don’t worry, Mom! You’ll have a place in your car!”

I told her that stiffly, later in our room, when Stu and I were toasting her birthday with Dewar’s her favorite Scotch.

“So cancel the limousine, I said,’

“But Margo ordered it.”

“You don’t’ need it. Julie and Doug will drive you home, as planned. You like driving with Doug.”

She h ad lent my daughter, Julie, and her husband, Doug, her car for the winter (they paid the garage fees) because her right eye wasn’t so good. “Macular degeneration,” the doctor had said, “so best not to drive.” But my mother had kept the car anyway, much to the delight of both my children and Dora, all of whom live carless in Manhattan within twenty blocks of her Buick.

“Are you sure there’s room?”

“Mom, I’m sure.”

“Gerda, we’re sure.” Stu hugged her; she smiled. Whatever Stu said, my mother believed (he had been her advisor since my father died), or so I thought until breakfast, when I heard it again: “Alan should have rented a car.”

Three heads nodded in unison: Aunt Lisa’s, Mom’s and Dora’s. They were at one end of the only long table in a cavernous, wood-beamed room of round tables for ten or twelve. Two seats down was my cousin Mort, his newspaper sprawled across three plates, and beside him, in lemon-yellow velour, was his sister, Cousin Margo, hirer of limos without checking with anyone.

I feigned deafness. “Good morning!” I said, and kissed my mother on the top of her head.

“There’s a hurricane outside,” said Margo, and dug into her pancakes. She looked just like Uncle Kurt, my father’s brother, and had the family appetite. Big men and women, all gone now.

“You’re kidding!” I had heard wind and rain beating all night but thought the weather would clear.

“You should listen to the radio, Mimi.” It was Dora, playing the I-am-six-years-older-and-smarter-role. I counterattacked, as kid cousins do.

“MMmmm, that looks good,” I said to Aunt Lisa, w ho was eating granola with neatly sliced bananas. “Very healthy. You should try it, ” I said pointedly to Dora, who was drinking black coffee.

“You should!” my mother said. “And try adding some wheat germ. And some extra raisins. Excellent iron.”

I had h it the right nerve, Dora’s thinness–she lived on coffee and lettuce–so I k new that nutrition would supplant car rentals, at least until I could get an omelet and return to protect myself. Across the room a huge man in a chef’s hat was flipping them into the air.

When I returned fifteen minutes later (the guy dropped my first omelet), Stu was telling everyone, “Alan–is–coming–with–us. Don’t–worry. We’re–not–leaving–you–here–, Gerda!”

“Alan already told you that, Mother!” I snapped, pulling up a chair next to Stu, across from Margo. I called Alan when I woke up to complain about his not telling Grandma he was coming home with us. He said he’d told her twice.

“You did cancel the limo, didn’t you?” I asked my mother.

“I will,” she said. “I will.”

“Good.” I should have left it at that, but now! That was too easy. In true family spirit, I said, “Actually, we could take you, Aunt Lisa, and Dora if you want, and let Julie, Doug, Alan, and Yuka all go back together.”

“I’d like that,” my mother said, her future in safer hands because she could see her chauffeur before her, whereas her granddaughter’s husband was still asleep somewhere upstairs.

“Oh, I’d like that, too,” said Aunt Lisa, beaming. I was too pleased with my victory plans to bother about Dora’s frown.

“Who’s for bridge?” Dora asked, finishing her coffee quickly and looking down the table for allies.

Hurricane Josephine eased, and Stu and I took off in a drizzle. WE had our ponchos, and “So what if fog blocks the view!” I said to our children, who were joking around on their way to breakfast.

“At least they inherited your family’s genes for having fu n together,” I said, as we walked on a carpet of slippery leaves. “They’d turn teasing into compliments at your gatherings, and every child was perfect. Not like my family, who held Sunday tribunals over lunch to discuss how I didn’t’ smile enough, Dora was too wild, Mort wasn’t bookish enough, Margo, too fat, ad nauseam.”

“Maybe it was because they were immigrants, intent on fitting into a new life,” Stud said.

I was in no mood for logic.

We were halfway around a tiny crater-lake, a part of the lodge, and every few hundred yards was a bench with a plaque, “In Memory Of–.” Log-hewn lookout huts, also with plaques, perched on boulders leaning over the water. One was called Arthur’s Lookout, my dad’s name, and I wondered who had donated it. My mom would miss him tonight, his jokes, his singing, and how he pulled everyone together. We all would. I wanted to sit in the quiet of Arthur’s Lookout for awhile, but the rain was picking up again, the eye of the storm behind us.

At least we had a good hour outside, I told myself, as I filled my plate–Stu was changing his socks upstairs–with steamed veggies and sliced baked ham, cut to taste. I sat down happily next to my mom, waiting for her to say I should dry my hair or I’d get a cold.

Instead she said, “Dora said if there’s no limo, she’ll go with Julie and Doug.” I hadn’t picked up my fork yet.

“No room?”

But when I saw our kids on the porch and them the latest travel update, Alan said, “No room!”

“No room?”

“We have golf clubs on the back seat. Dora should go with you.”

“How about the trunk? It’s a big trunk.”

“Filled. You take Dora, Grandma, and Aunt Lisa, as planned.”

“Wait a minute. You were supposed to come with us, remember?”

He kissed me with his usual charm. “Your plan is much better.”

“Much better, Mom!” Julie chimed, putting her arm around her little brother.

How was it that these two, who had fought nonstop for ten years (it took Julie that long to get used to Alan being born), were now buddies, and I was stuck n the same fifty-year family battles over whether the sky is blue?

“Okay, okay!” I said, and set out to announce new plans. No answer in Mother’s room, no sign of them in the TV room or on the verandah, with its fleet of rockers for watching the tiny lake on nicer days.

My mother was off in the Great Room, playing bridge with Margo, Mort, and Mark, my nephew who lives in Oregon, smart man. “Dora has to come with us–in our car,” I whispered in her ear. I could feel her bristle. Another force squeezing her; she was caught in between.

“And why is that?”

“Golf clubs in the back seat. No room.”

My mother led with a club, my nephew nodded, and Margo put down a heart, trump.

“I can’t deal with this anymore,” my mother said “You discuss it with Dora. Really, I can’t …if only Alan had rented a car.”

“Then I wouldn’t be trying to get Margo’s deposit back on the limo,” Mot said.

“Nobody told anyone to order one!” My adult self had disappeared. I was again twelve, facing the bully who had stuffed red grapes down my while blouse. “And where’s Dora, anyway? She was so hot to play bridge.”

“The kids wanted her to put makeup on them. You know her . . .” Mark laughed.

“Hey, are we doing bridge or what?” said Mort, puffing his unlit cigar, and everyone straightened up.

“Okay, I’m off,” I said, thinking another walk in the hurricane sounded great. Dora could wait.

We were gathered in my mother’s room, waiting for the Oregon contingent, so we could open the champagne and pass out the “So You’re 85” album. Everyone had contributed a page–with pictures, poems, stories, letters, drawings, whatever. The album was the big surprise.

My mother looked elegant in a black lace dress she’d knitted, her silver hair dazzling under a crown of stars and sprinkles, designed by my sister’s grandchildren. Dora and I were both on my mother’s bed, Dora sprawled against the headboard, my legs hanging over the edge. It reminded me of when I was eight and used to tickle her back for ten cents an hour. At ten I got smart and raised my rates, too late. She left for college and got married a year after that; we hadn’t been on the same bed since.

“You have to go with us, ” I said. “There’s no room in the other car.” I waited for the ax to fall.
“And why is that?”
“Alan’s golf clubs.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why didn’t he rent a car and save everyone all this hassle!”

“There’s no hassle if you come with us.” I was already thinking that the golf clubs could go in my nephew’s station wagon. I’d ask him. Then we could pack our car and my mother’s together and see who and what would fit w here. That was my fatal mistake: never plan flexibility in a family that thrives on absolutes.

Kids were racing around the other bed, shrieking, “You’re it!” while their mothers gabbed, the men talked life insurance, Aunt Lisa rearranged soda bottles and champagne glasses, and my mom was looking at her watch, “We have to got to dine soon.”

Relax, Grandma.”

“Relax, Mom.”

“Relax, Gerda.”

“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birth. . .” It was Oregon Mark, his wife, Marla, and their two kids, carrying a mini-cake with two candles, one shaped like an eight, the other shaped like a five. We all sang. Stu made a toast–“To Grandma, whom we all love”–and Julie read her poem, “A Week in the Life of Gerda.” Then we gave her the album, which she flipped through, laughing and crying, and said she’d spend the whole night reading it. As soon as she put it on the coffee table, we all pounced. Niece, grandson, great-granddaughter, son-in-law, everyone wanted to know who she was to others, in other times. I grabbed, too, wanting to see what I had missed in her life.

I saw a child with dark braids and almond eyes, a half-smile more impish than I would have imagined. I saw her as a stick-figure doll tumbling from a doll carriage on Aunt Lisa’s page of story and drawings:

Well, the trip around this big table started. Faster and faster, you fell out of this carriage, you screamed. Your mother came to your rescue and the parade around the table continued, she was trying to calm you down. I followed crying, too. It was a sad parade.

I saw two teenage girls in dark striped dresses, my aunt earnest and erect, legs close together, my mother sprawling out across the piano, sexy. I saw my mom, maybe forty-five, in front of the light blue Pontiac. I’d forgotten that car, how s he’d drive it with the top down, her black hair flying, needing to ask no one for rides.

I saw her at Mort’s wedding, tucked between my father and his two brothers, their bald heads gleaming around t his glamorous women in a Jackie Kennedy red dress, peals, a pillbox hat above salt-and-pepper hair. Margo wrote:

I always admired you as a courageous spunky woman who came to a strange country and developed a business out of talent and hard work.

I did not know that woman. I knew the one who filled her family’s homes with Gerda’s Creations, as I call them on my page of photos: Stu holding up six sweaters she’d made for him, me holding up four, not to mention five needlepoints on our walls alone.

I saw her with Stu, holding a cookie sheet with her famous bread, Berches, which she had just shown him (who cooks nothing) how to make. And there she was in my father’s arms, high in the Swiss mountains sixty-five years ago, a schoolgirl smitten by an older man of thirty.

I didn’t want to stop, feeling awed by the woman metamorphosing on these pages and how she was here and happy with whomever was left–and there was no one left, really, from hose days except aunt Lisa. “Let me see, too!” “Can I take a look?” “I’m after you!” Little hands and big hands were tugging for their turn as the book criss-crossed the room, until my mother announced, “It’s time to eat. We’re late,” shepherding us toward the dining room.

I was all smiles in the morning. We really were a family having fun. My mother had called before seven to say how much she loved the album (early morning phone calls, like travel plans, are a family affliction;) last night’s family dinner had been delicious; and Dora and I had actually talked (I told her she could home in either car, and she admitted I’d been a cute brat).

I was serving myself French toast, thinking Stu and I would take another walk, pack the cars, and leave in caravan by three–t was all set–when Margo bounded over.

“We already put Aunt Gerda’s and Aunt Lisa’s luggage in your car.”

“You what?

“Yup. It’s all set.” She beamed. I was amazed. Was my mother still that afraid we’d leave her here?

“Who let you into the car? It’s locked.”

“Oh, Mort tipped the valet. No problem.”

I pushed past her, thinking, be calm, be charming, six more hours to go. It’s do-able, even among these lunatics. I headed, French toast in hand, for my mother, we was again wedged between Aunt Lisa and Dora, all looking grim.

“I don’t want to go antiquing.” My mother was brittle with worry in a world she could not control.

“Who is going antiquing?” I snapped. “No one!”

“Alan said he wanted to go antiquing on the way home.” Mom started to cry, and I started yelling.

“For God’s sake, no one is going antiquing. Will you just stop getting excited! My God.”

Then I heard it again, someone whispering, “Alan should have rented a car.”

“I’m so glad you have such a calming influence, Dora.” It was Stu to my rescue. My white knight, the reason I married him. I stormed to the other end of the table, where Alan, engrossed in Yuka, was eating pineapple, a plateful.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

He held up a brochure: Antiquing. “I thought maybe one car could go antiquing with those who want to do it, and the other could go straight home.”

I glared at my child, thinking: Where are you, Dad, who, like Moses, led the family out of Germany? You could get us home, I know it–and without all this crap, because your two cents was more powerful than anyone’s. My mother was trembling, and I tried to think of a joke, the way my father used to after yelling, his face red, and then minutes later, a smile.

“Everything is fine!” I said dully, hugging her–When did she become so small?–and grabbed the brochure with its unnerving list of new options. My son, God bless him, was–is–still sweet, handsome, and charming, but my family was right for once: Alan should have rented a car.