Farina Twist

Farina Twist

She would never have stepped onto the barroom dance floor but they were all doing the twist out there. Normally she is not a dancer. She is too shy, too afraid, too self-conscious to move like Gumby. But it was the twist, after all, and her friends were beckoning her to join them, and so she downed her rum and got out on the floor; after all, you can’t mess up the twist.

Everybody does the twist. She remembers her father twisting with her in the finished basement. The basement was their family room. It was the place where her sister had boy-girl parties and she had birthday parties and played with friends and later, made out with boys. It was the place where everyone watched TV on the massive Zenith resting its heavy haunches on in its carriage with wheels. Her mother’s ironing board was set up facing the enormous TV, and all the clean laundry was piled behind it on a red hassock, waiting to be pressed and folded. There were the built-ins: shelves and cabinets with the Philco hi-fi and everyone’s books, games and records. A black oval wooden table with four black chairs stood in one corner of the room where the kids did their science projects and played with their Barbies. For a while, her pet turtle Sylvester lived on the table in his plastic kidney-shaped turtle pond with a ramp and fake palm tree, until one day he disappeared. Climbed out of the turtle bowl and slowly crept away. Her mother found him dead two days later behind the washing machine and tossed him down the toilet but she never told her daughter.

But it was the deep, dim, descent down the stairs that looms in her memory, and the time she slipped on a dirty, wet rag her mother had tossed down the stairwell for the laundry. She slipped as she was carrying her bowl of hot farina on her way to the Zenith to watch Saturday morning cartoons when she was five years old.

Twelve stairs down from the main floor to the tiled basement. It must have been the fifth stair that held the rag that snagged her slipper, sending her tumbling down the hard, cement steepness, the metal edge of each step slamming her small back, down, down to the bottom. The bowl crashing into pieces, hot farina splattering everywhere, on her pajamas and in her hair, the tang of the spoon bouncing off stair after stair until it hit bottom with an echoey clang like an old fire bell.

Her mother came running from the kitchen screaming, as if it were the child’s fault. Her mother yelling and picking up pieces of broken bowl, as she made her way down the stairs to the child sitting there stunned, watching her. The mother was screaming, “You could have broken your neck!” The mother frantic, her anguished face wracked with worry, exploring her daughter’s body, looking for bleeding gashes or bruised wrists or twisted ankles, then collapsing, crying into her child’s sweet, soft neck, smelling her baby and the milky semolina.

“It’s ok mommy,” the child whispered, not quite believing that she was the one comforting her mother and confused because she didn’t know if she made her mother mad or sad. Usually, she made her mother mad, and usually she didn’t know why. Her mother was always yelling about something. Her stoic, angry mother, full of fear, anxiety, post-war trauma, holocaust survival and family abandonment. Her mother never imagined she would live in America when she was a young, poor Ukrainian Jew living under Stalin. Now she was a middle-class immigrant Jew living in the suburbs of Illinois under LBJ.

She felt sorry for her mother but she didn’t know why. “It’s ok mommy,” she said again, and her mother released her from her clutching arms and began compulsively cleaning up the mess. She told her daughter to go change her pajamas and she would make her a new bowl of farina.

Her mother wore darkness like a yoke around her neck. She was the ox that bore the burden and gnawing guilt of the one who escaped, the one who made it to freedom and left her family behind. The weight of this heavy load resulted in debilitating back problems all her life. She could be a different person around her friends, fellow war survivors, but around her children the anger, the sadness, the grief emerged in terrible ways, frightening ways, paranoid ways that left the kids bereft and emotionally wounded. Yet, her mother could also be so loving, braiding a thousand mixed messages into her childhood that kept her afraid and guarded, always guarded.

She is guarded now, even as she twists and turns to John Lennon screaming, “shake it up baby” on the barroom floor, while trying to look like she’s enjoying herself. The ringlets of her hair are unfurling in the chaos of the dance and she cannot tell if it is sweat or tears streaming down her face as the tangled, contorted intensity of her youth comes blaring at her. She recalls her mother’s rage at the gut-wrenching, untimely death of her husband, the man who brought her to America and gave her a new life. She spent the next thirty years alone; a sorrowful widow, her children scattered across the country like scared mice, abandoning her just as she abandoned her family in Russia. History repeats itself like a smelly belch.

She thinks sadly of her mother aging into the slow, heartbreaking, mind-twisting bleakness of dementia. She ponders this all as she smiles weakly at her friends and twists uncomfortably beside them.