If someone put a gun to my head and said, When was the beginning of the end, I would have to say: my mother-in-law’s funeral in 1983. That moment when, standing over the coffin, looking down at Blanchie (two hundred pounds in the flush of life, now a prune reposing on satin), I realized suddenly and without a shadow of a doubt that I could not allow my daughter to win our weeklong argument regarding the movie Flashdance.

Not technically a lesbian film, but who are we kidding. 

And boy did I try to kid myself. Why on earth would an eleven-year-old girl beg with such abject passion to see Flashdance, I had been asking no one, or God. The question had been keeping me up at night. As if I didn’t know. I did know. I knew enough to say, on instinct, no Flashdance. Over my dead body would I be taking her to this film. I told her it was age-inappropriate. To which she pointed out that I had dragged her to see Saturday Night Fever, a surprisingly violent movie about disco dancers, at age six. My daughter had watched wide-eyed, immobilized with terror in that chilly budget theater on Eighty-Fifth and First. Well. We ate cheeseburgers afterward, on English muffins at an Irish pub. My way of apologizing. It’s all gone now, that theater, that bar. But the point is, I had a ball that day. The dancing, the Bee Gees. A ball. As long as I didn’t have to look over at my child trembling in her seat. For this I’m sure I could be forgiven. My other sins not so much. But I needed to see John Travolta, and if I had to schlep my daughter to this movie so help me God, I would. About Flashdance, however, I was not to be moved. The more my daughter pleaded and howled, the more firm was I in my resolution. Thou shalt not see Flashdance, not on my watch. 

There was something very wrong in her level of desperation. In the history of knowing my daughter, no movie had evoked such histrionics. This was a girl who didn’t give a shit about dance. In fact, she had at one point been suspended from school for refusing to participate in ballet, and now the sudden interest? The pouting, the pleading, all to watch a movie about⁠—well, when I thought about it, when I really faced the truth⁠—this was a movie about women in Pittsburgh who took off their clothes. 

For whatever reason, looking at Blanchie in her burial outfit was when it all hit me. The specter that had haunted me throughout my married life: distant, for-no-good-reason-haughty Blanchie, now a shrivel in a blue dress. I realized then and there that all my dreams had died.

In case it seems like I am the kind of person who likes to get a good gander at dead people, I would rather not have had anything to do with Blanchie’s body, but I was in the process of being silently, unjustly accused of having tampered with the contents of the casket. Specifically, a photograph had gone missing, one that was meant to be buried with Blanchie. And I knew, from the way Stephen’s brother Saul was glaring, that suspicion had fallen on me.

Meanwhile, Saul⁠—this glarer, this accuser, this absolute zhlob⁠—had the brilliant idea of bringing a cheese-and-cold-cut platter to an open-casket ceremony. In that moment it was impossible not to feel enraged at men and their self-satisfied blundering through the world. It was very Saul to enrobe a funeral in the stench of deli meat. Nothing was sacred. Even the reverence for death had to be pickled in mundanity. I marched to the window and cracked it open, trying to make the point that never in the history of open-casket funerals had one been so acutely salami-scented.

Saul, however, was deep in an inquisition of the funeral home director, who insisted that the casket had remained untouched since it arrived by freight on its flight from Florida two days prior. In fact, no one noticed me airing out the room except for a pair of dogs taking syncopated dumps on Coney Island Avenue. A thread of sooty air leaked in, casting a chill across the shins of my pantyhose. There was something about the combination of this shin-chill with the odors of the street and the cold-cut platter that made me nauseated, and my stomach twisted with that high note that lets you know that queasiness is a prelude to actual vomiting.

I would have liked to blame Stephen for everything, but I couldn’t. The truth was that I had bound myself to this man and his cold-cut-bringing family decades prior, and from thence came all the rest of it. Including giving birth to a daughter, who, it turned out, not only wanted to see women take off their clothes but wanted also to be a man. Hadn’t I done my best, trying to keep her away from the corduroy blazer she was constantly digging out from the depths of Stephen’s closet?

In fact, just that day I had conducted one such enterprise⁠—not so easy, by the way, in a shoebox apartment. Three rooms that opened onto each other, like a flower with the majority of its petals plucked. One might think it would be impossible to conduct clandestine operations in such a small space, but I had a way of imagining myself as Ilona Massey on Top Secret, alert in a silk slip dress, forever waiting to poison a Nazi with a doctored glass of bourbon.

Sitting in the living-room-cum-den-cum-dining-area, I could perceive each individual noise of our abode without turning my head. If I sat long enough, still enough, I would sort of expand and become the apartment. I was a map made solely of family sounds⁠—the rustle of Stephen turning newspaper pages in the bathroom, the irregular blasts of sitcom laughter from behind my daughter’s bedroom door.

When I was assured that everyone was otherwise occupied, I slipped over to the shallow little nook next to the entryway, a.k.a. “the hall closet,” a ridiculously tiny cost-shaving compromise common to that whole swath of apartments that had sprouted from Fifty-Ninth to Eighty-Ninth Streets, east of Third Avenue, after the war. 

Each week it seemed another friend from the old neighborhood was installing themselves in one of these apartments nearby. You’d go across the street for a game of gin rummy and⁠—boop!⁠—find yourself cramming your overcoat into the same little void you crammed it into at home. At the time it felt kind of comforting, like a Catskills bungalow colony or a college dormitory. Not that I had ever lived in a dormitory.

As time passed, though, I started to dwell. Who were these WASP engineers who had deemed such minuscule containers suitable for us? From whence came their sadistic agreement that the Jews of Yorkville should have only tiny little pockets in which to hang an entire family’s coats? Jews should be happy to even have an apartment in Manhattan and not be dead in a ditch in Europe, I guess.

However, just that day as I heaved open the humidity-soaked door from its suture to the jamb, I indulged a hope based precisely in the losing proposition of this closet and what it represented about the slumminess of our lives. In the smallness of this nook lay its promise: the genuine sequestration of the corduroy blazer.

And Stephen’s sport coats did constitute a kind of fortress, packed to the point of being practically grouted into that miniature span of wall-void. They made a forbidding barrier, which I shouldered aside as I frothed up the scent of my husband into the microenvironment of the closet. A trench coat exuded Stephen’s musk: peppermint Life Savers, pipe tobacco, old rain. I sucked it all in like the dregs of a Camel Light.

With barely an inch to move, I hunted and shoved and shouldered until I came to the corduroy blazer. Wrenching its hanger neck from the millipede of other necks I removed the jacket from its position and then launched myself through the small opening I had momentarily managed to pierce in the citadel of blazers, javelining the corduroy one behind the row and catching it on the belt hook along the back wall. I pushed the closet door closed, raking up dust from the wall-to-wall pink pile carpet, then secured it against the paint-shedding jamb with a bump of my hip and retreated to our bedroom, where I sat down at my dressing table to prepare my makeup for the day.

Who would believe that this offspring, this golem of upside-down gender, persisted? Not five minutes before we were to leave for Sherman’s did I stumble upon my daughter modeling the sport coat in the full-length mirror on the interior of this very closet door. An elf twisting and turning in a sail of corduroy, pinching the blazer at the small of her back to affect the mirage of tailoring. I cannot communicate the level of despair this scene inspired in me.

“This is why,” I said, under my breath, emerging from behind so that we were both briefly reflected in the mirror⁠—me in my black Anne Klein belted blazer dress with my hair out to here, and her in, well, also sort of a blazer dress if you think about it.

I folded my arms as she turned to face me. I was not technically blocking the way, but once you are a mother you become differently sized, and certain things can’t be helped. I felt my own power radiating off me, something in which you might think I would have reveled but which I never entirely liked, because while on the one hand, as a mother, you do become larger, you also become smaller. I will come back to this point later.

“Why what?” my daughter had the audacity to ask. Methought the blazer was giving her unusual boldness.