A Puzzle

by Fran Schumer

Rachel and her mother, Sarah, are sitting in the living room of Rachel’s parents’ apartment. Light floods the apartment, which is on the 31st Floor. A golf course and beyond it, a carpet of green. No people. No noise. Perhaps her parents are preparing for the next stage: heaven.

Rachel’s father is asleep in his remotely operated Lift chair, when her mother, turning toward Rachel, comes out with this:

“I never really understood you.”

Rachel is surprised. Considering that she’s 54, and her mother is 80, it’s a little late in the game for that. What is her mother up to? Rachel ponders this question but before she can formulate an answer, her mother speaks again.

“I got you all wrong.”

For once, her mother isn’t being sarcastic. She’s serious, shaking her head somberly like she did when hearing the news about Norma Weinstock’s hip replacement surgery.

Unfortunately, the aide, Linda, an excellent caretaker but a non-stop talker, insists at this moment on fussing over Rachel’s sleeping father. Babbling on about some grocery order, she prevents further conversation.

Rachel can’t stay anyway. The traffic between her parents’ apartment in Queens and her home in New Jersey is notorious, and like her mother, whom Rachel believes she does understand, Rachel feels a constant urge to go ‘home.’ Even when she is home, she wants to go home.

In a way, it’s gratifying, Rachel thinks while sitting in traffic on the Cross Bronx. Her mother has finally realized that she isn’t who her mother always wanted her to be. On the other hand, it’s depressing. Rachel is, and never will be, who her mother wanted her to be. Rachel, herself, isn’t the person she wanted to be. Dr. Schlang is away this week, but as the cluster of cars thickens, Rachel imagines what she’d tell the therapist if they were having their weekly session.

“Maybe she’s finally accepted the person I am,” Rachel envisions herself saying.

“And who is that person?” the ever-laconic Schlang would ask.

“Well for one thing, a person who isn’t going to dye her hair.”

In her reverie, Rachel imagines Dr. Schlang laughing. Rachel spends half the session trying to make Dr. Schlang laugh, which may be why she doesn’t get much out of therapy. She is, as usual, performing.

Hair is a big topic. It’s one of the thousand superficial things on which Rachel’s mother, who is not superficial, focuses. She is especially focused on Rachel’s hair now that the front part has grown in not just grey but white.

“Don’t you think my daughter should dye her hair?’” she’s asked Rachel’s friends when they come with Rachel to visit. Or to Eugene, Rachel’s husband: “Why don’t you tell her to dye her hair, Eugene?”

“Because I like her hair,” Eugene answered the first time and then every time Mrs. Silverman asked.

There isn’t a day Rachel doesn’t thank the god in whom she’s not sure she believes for delivering Eugene to her, whether her parents appreciate him or not.

Rachel’s hair is like her father’s, kinky and unkempt.

“I get lost just looking at it,” Rachel’s friend Louise once said. Rachel didn’t mind. She knew Louise, who has straight hair, considered Rachel’s wild, boom-boom curls a luxury. They’re not like her mother’s thick, lustrous, waves of silky, auburn, carefully managed at a beauty parlor each week, where Sarah would like Rachel to go. Her mother has said that Rachel would rather stand in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles than spend an hour under a hair dryer. And why bother, when her hair spends most of its time squished beneath her bike helmet or stuffed into a bathing cap while she swims?

In the car, her phone interrupts her various reveries. It’s Louise, her best friend and advocate of wild and crazy hair; also wild and crazy Rachel.

“Hey.”

Like Dr. Schlang, Louise is a woman of few words. On the plus side, however, Rachel doesn’t have to pay Louise, and sometimes she thinks Louise is smarter.

“What is it your mother doesn’t understand about you?” Louise asks.

“Why I didn’t become the well-dressed lawyer or college professor or whatever you’d expect from a person whose high school voted her ‘smartest girl.’ Also, why I didn’t earn enough or marry someone who earned enough so that she didn’t feel the need to bring me cans of tuna fish on sale from Waldbaum’s every week.”

A grunt from Louise.

“At least your mother cared. My mother sat on the couch all day reading ‘The New Yorker.’ She didn’t know where we were.”

Rachel loves Louise. She loves her skepticism, her wry comments on life. She especially loves that Louise is skeptical about her. Louise and Eugene, whom Louise introduced to Rachel, agree: Rachel is an unreliable narrator.

“And then there’s the house. I never decorated my house as beautifully as my mother, or rather Bunny Fox, her decorator, who decorated the house in which we were raised.  What did I know about window treatments, which frankly, bored me. I was much happier up in my room doing puzzles.”

Rachel designs crossword puzzles for a living. Some are ingeniously themed, with references to history or literature and some, if Rachel feels truly ambitious, include scientific data or themes. One was so perfectly conceived that it ran in the Sunday Telegram Magazine, but that was years ago. “Wouldn’t it be nice if they gave you a full-time gig?” Rachel’s mother asked at the time. Even then, Rachel knew she’d disappoint her mother. The Telegram wouldn’t give her a full-time gig and for a good reason. The editor made such a fuss over the first puzzle she submitted that Rachel froze. She couldn’t imagine constructing another one as good. Sometimes, she couldn’t even believe she’d created that first one. These days, she contents herself with the less stressful task of supplying puzzles to the local town newspaper. “Very nice,” Rachel imagines her mother would say. “How much do they pay?”

“Well, at least your parents appreciate Eugene,” Louise reminds her.

“Not at first,” Rachel says. “I mean they were happy that I was getting married. After all, I wasn’t young, but they would’ve preferred, you know, some rich doctor or at least some do-good lawyer, head of the American Civil Liberties Union or something. Remember the joke my brothers used to make? They could bring home women who were Phi Beta Kappa, and beauty queens and her mother would object. ‘She doesn’t have much personality, does she?’ On the other hand, if I brought home Vince, the child molester, my mother would say, ‘Oh well, people change.’”

Louise has to go walk her dogs but having pondered Rachel’s situation, she finally gives Rachel her opinion, which is more than Dr. Schlang usually does:

“Your problem isn’t your mother, Rachel. It’s that you accept as a condition for you to be happy that your mother approve everything you do. It’s not her responsibility but it is yours not to wish that she would, or to feel diminished that she doesn’t. I love your hair. Eugene loves your hair. Eugene loves you. And you just heard that that French language puzzle you did about cycling will run in L’Equipe. What more do you want? I suppose you’re right, but your parents are still your parents, and you want them to approve of what you do, even though I never did,” Louise says.

Finally, the traffic moves. An hour later, Rachel enters the house that her mother thinks is too small. Eugene is working late—the college where he lectures has some event tonight—and she has time to stuff her crazy hair into a bathing cap and run out for a swim. When she’s finished, she emerges from the pool feeling like she always does after swimming, powerful and confident. Why can’t she feel like that instead of feeling like the daughter who has disappointed her mother? The unknown writer of what? Oh, puzzles.

No, Louise is right. It’s up to her to recast her definition of success. She is, after all, old enough. In fact, isn’t that what her own mother did? Sarah, for all her wanting better for Rachel, disappointed her own parents initially. They’d wanted her to marry a college graduate or a professional and instead, she married Rachel’s father, a deeply thoughtful, intelligent man whom everyone loved. And thanks to Sarah’s example, Rachel did the same. She married someone she loved. Now it was up to her to settle into enjoying her own precious and beautiful life.

At a little after ten, Eugene comes through the door. She greets him as she always does, with a big kiss. And then he does what he always does, kisses her, asks about her day, and musses her hair.