According to my mother, when I was a little girl, really little, like three or four, I was toddling down the street on the Upper West Side, holding her hand as she pushed my brother in his stroller whose handles were laden with large Zabars bags. Only now that I have friends with babies do I understand the sudden shift that comes with “becoming a mother.” You're still the same person you were before the child, a human woman with interests and experiences, but suddenly, to the world, you're “a mom.” Now, when I see women with young children I think, wow, you're experiencing whiplash.
Anyway, my mother, this newly minted matron of the Upper West Side, toting two little children and a bag of heimish comestibles, who was only three years separated from her former life as a young woman who lived in Brooklyn and went to “the Tunnel” for book-release parties, walked right by fellow Upper West Sider, Philip Roth, a novelist she’d loved even in her former-former life as a teenage girl. My mother made eye contact with this beloved writer, smiled, and in return Philip Roth shot my mother, no longer some young woman literary fan but instead the picture of Jewish domesticity, a look of total disgust. It was the perfect Philip Roth moment, she’s always said, I got to live Portnoy's Complaint.
-Zoe Dubno