City Mom Versus East End Daughter

Everyone loves the East End of Long Island. I believe this because I see the constant stream of weekenders and tourists arriving daily in zippy little electric cars, fancy convertibles, Jitney buses, long white stretch limos, Miami Vice cigarette boats, and last, but not least, the dreaded helicopters. You name it; they will find a way to come out here.

Yes, everyone loves the East End: everyone that is, with the exception of one person ─ my mother. Mom’s a city gal. Now I’m not talking: Park Avenue, doormen, shopping at Saks, lunching with the lady friends at some trendy new eatery ─ kind of city gal. I’m talking about someone who lives in an attached old brick row house in a crime-ridden section of Philadelphia. She’s not too far from an area actually nicknamed, “The Badlands.”

Mom nonchalantly tells people, “It’s the prostitute capital of the country.” I think that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by too much. On her daily walks to her favorite thrift stores located in the darkened underworld of the elevated train tracks, she passes burnt out buildings, drug dealers and those infamous prostitutes. She gets up early and sweeps drug paraphernalia off her porch. Nothing much fazes her. She won’t move. This is what she prefers to the bucolic East End.

Every day at four o’clock, she sits down at her grand piano and plays classical music for two hours, even amidst the constant pounding bass of her neighbor’s stereo that vibrates the walls of her narrow living room. She’s scrappy, a sturdy World War II – era dame, a child of the Great Depression. Usually it doesn’t take much to please her, but she seems to enjoy saying, “I wouldn’t live out by you – even if they paid me.”

I’m the East End daughter. I used to be a New York City kid, born and raised, up until my late twenties. After that, I kept moving farther and farther east. My husband and I are wimps. We live on the North Fork. Our modest ranch style house is on an acre that backs up to farmland. On our drives to do our daily errands we pass lush vineyards, pristine bays, swans swimming in ponds, charming little shops. People half expect a kindly Andy Griffith of Mayberry to be the sheriff here.

Mom finds it “boring” out here. She’s not a beach person, so scratch that off the list.

How about wine tasting? That won’t work. She’s not really into the nuances and depths of their distinct flavors or the unique complexities of their overtones versus their undertones. She doesn’t care if their tannins are well managed. She keeps a giant gallon of cheap red wine in her basement fridge and takes one swig of it a day, for “medicinal” purposes. She’ll only buy a new jug when it runs out. I think they last her about a year or so. How about art galleries? Mom is artsy, I’ll give you that. She does like to paint occasionally. The problem is if we take her to an art gallery I have to hope that no one, especially the artist, will be within earshot when she inevitably will ask in her loudest theatrical voice, “What kind of garbage is that?” Mom tells everyone I live in the sticks. “Where are the sidewalks? There’s nowhere to walk and you don’t even have subways.” Mom wasn’t always a city girl. She was born in a small rural town in Pennsylvania. She and her sisters ran barefoot in the hills picking blueberries. Her mother emigrated there from Hungary and told her that the Earth was flat. My mother grew up believing she lived at the end of the world. She dreamt of leaving the endless farms and hills and heading in the opposite direction, where excitement lived.

She eventually moved to Center City, Philadelphia, and became a concert pianist. She met my father in an orchestra. He was an opera singer from Brooklyn. They married and bought a little old house in Astoria; it was there they raised my brother and me. It had a make shift kitchen in the cellar with cement floors that would flood regularly. We had a hose from a sump pump going out to the streets through a small trap door. Strange cats would find their way in and stretch out on our sofa while we ate dinner. My mother would give piano lessons to neighborhood children and in the evenings accompany my father while he sang. Music filled the air; everyone was happy and grounded.

After my father died, she lost her anchor. By that time, I was married and somewhat stable, but instead of leaning on me, she floated off to Europe, untethered for four years. Every few months she would call or write from a different city. I was afraid she would drift off the edge of earth and never return home.

One day she called, and said, “You can come visit me.” When I asked what country she in, I was shocked to hear her say, “I’m in Philadelphia. I found a cheap house here so I bought it. Astoria got too expensive. I’m sorry I sold our old house there, but you can’t change fate.”

After our first few initial visits to her place, my husband would insist on staying at a hotel in a safer area, closer to the attractions and culture of Center City. My mother could never understand why we spent money on a hotel when we could just sleep on the old futon at her place. Every night at eight, I would call my mother to check on her. Everything was steady as she goes until last year when a team of doctors informed her she needed a critical and very risky heart operation. They didn’t know if she would make it through, and if she did, she had a 20% chance of becoming paralyzed from the surgery. “I don’t know how this is going to turn out,” she shouted. “Sell your house right now and buy a two family in Astoria so we can all live together after this.”

“Mom,” I pleaded, “just come and live with us out on the Island.”

“Are you kidding? I would die of boredom. Get us a house in Queens. And hurry up!”

I panicked and started looking at real estate ads. “Look at these horrible houses in our price range,” I yelled at my husband.

Never one to react quickly to change (I think it would take a crowbar to move him) he asked, what the heck was I doing?

My head was spinning. “She won’t live here, she’d be miserable. What if she’s paralyzed? She has to walk every day. She’s like a wild alley cat; she’ll go nuts if she’s trapped.” I was frantic.

“I’m never going to live in Queens,” he said.

“Do you ever get tired of living in our small town?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I’m happy here. Who needs a big world?” He eventually convinced me to slow down and just wait to see what happened.

The operation turned out to be successful. When I asked her if she still wanted to live somewhere all together, she said, “No, forget it. I love my freedom. I want to stay where I am. By the way, someone in my neighborhood shoveled all the snow from my steps and sidewalk while I was in the hospital. Can you believe it?”

My husband constantly reminds me we can’t force her to move. I guess our soul knows when it has found a sense of home and belonging to a place. When we are there, we feel nourished and whole. It can’t be argued. It just is.

The last time she came to visit, my husband and I waited for her Jitney at our Jamesport stop. The 4:00 bus came and went, with no one getting on or off. I began panicking. Mom doesn’t know how to use her cell phone. After around thirty minutes, my phone rang with a man’s caller ID displayed. The male voice said, “I know this sounds strange, but I’m calling for a woman who says she’s your mother. She got off the wrong stop. She’s here at the Bar and Grill in Mattituck if you want to come get her.” We rushed over and found her waiting outside. Before we could go, she dragged us both inside the darkened paneled interior. With a grand gesture, she stated loudly to everyone, “They’re here! This is my daughter and son-in-law. They live on Long Island.” Then with a laugh, she just had to add, “But I can’t stand it here!”

So for now, my mother continues to hide her purse and walk the streets of North Philadelphia, while I putter around the back roads of the East End of Long Island.