Free Any Place I Hang My Hat by Susan Isaacs Page A

Chicky’s eyes could fall on his giant watch and he’d want to rush off, dreading the wrath of Fern. This probably would be the only time I could get him to talk about my mother, and I needed to get some sense of what kind of person she was. For two days, I’d been thinking about Freddy Carrasco: Let’s say he wasn’t psycho. Let’s say he was what I guessed he was, a sweet, pathetic case, a motherless kid trying to make himself bigger by identifying himself with a rich, power-wielding guy. Freddy had picked himself a United States senator, a father figure he could study on C-SPAN or Charlie Rose. He could even confront him in the flesh, albeit unsuccessfully. All the information I could get on my mother, Phyllis Morris Lincoln, who took off before my first birthday with a guy whose last name might have been Hussain, resided in my father’s brain. Not exactly a situation fraught with promise.
    “Chicky?”
    “Yeah?”
    “What was my mother’s ethnicity?” Even before the third syllable of ethnicity, I realized all I could get was my father’s double blink of blankness. “I mean was she a Wasp? Morris is an English name.”
    “I can’t remember. She didn’t look Jewish or Italian or anything, not with her red hair. And she had a cute little nose. Up, but not like Miss Piggy. But maybe Jewish? I don’t know. Irish? She was darker than that. Her hair. Very white skin. That’s it. That’s all I can remember.”
    “Did she have any special interests?”
    “You mean like model cars?”
    “Right. Or reading, knitting, cooking.”
    “She couldn’t cook for shit, to tell you the truth. Not that I blamed her. She was only a kid. Like she really hated to talk about her family. She wouldn’t say a word about them. But one time she said her old man made her old lady get a cook because the only thing she could make was cinnamon toast.”
    It was so odd, imagining that half my genes came from a family that had a cook and a porch. Just for a second, I pictured myself reading a nice, fat novel on a porch glider in the shadow cast by the great weeping willow. Probably Great Expectations. “Was there anything she liked to do?” The sudden right shift of his eyes away from mine was a clear sign of verboten father-daughter territory. It didn’t take five and a half years of higher education to comprehend that the woman who was my mother liked to do it. “I mean, besides going out with connected guys and their girlfriends, was there anything she was enthusiastic about?”
    “Like it pissed me off. She would do things for a week or two and then drop them. Sewing a thing for a pillow, where you go in and out of little holes.”
    “Needlepoint.”
    “Yeah, but then she forgot about that. So it was like one week futzing with her hair, then two weeks walking around downtown—the Lower East, Chinatown, the Village—then another week being friends with Lil, which was really funny because all the rest of the time Phyllis didn’t want nada to do with her. Hate at first sight, the two of them.” He made a big deal of glancing at his watch and looking horrified, but he must have understood I knew it was an act because he finally went on. “She read books and magazines sometimes, and don’t ask me what ones because I don’t remember. I probably never knew. Ladies’ magazines and books from the library.”
    “What about when she did get pregnant? Was she happy about it?”
    “Not at the beginning. To tell you the truth, she wanted, you know, to get rid of it. You. Sorry. I wasn’t going to stop her, but then she was the one who changed her mind.”
    “She wanted to have me?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe more like she kept putting it off, and then it was too late. Listen, Amy, don’t feel bad. She could have done it and she didn’t. I’m not saying she was like Mother of the Year, but she didn’t get an abortion, even though she was puking a lot and was panicked about …” he pointed to his chest “… sagging