It was gloomy at the store, but somehow business went on; people kept coming in for cigarettes or an issue of Ramparts or Jacques Loussier doing jazz versions of Bach pieces. When I arrived, my father was pacing, clearly annoyed by one of the regulars, known in our family as “the mooch.” The mooch was at it again—standing in the magazine area and leafing through the pages of the latest issue of Playboy in his short-sleeved seersucker shirt, not noticing the foot traffic all around him. As always, the mooch was careful to turn the pages gently so he didn’t damage them. But after all these years, he’d still never even bought his cigarettes at Smoke and Records, or candy, or gum. And this time, while he was “reading,” he had a bright green RECORDS—AT A DISCOUNT! bag lodged between his feet.
I braced myself; I just knew that any second, my father was going to let the mooch have it once and for all. Instead, my father went up and leaned strangely, quietly underneath the guy, as if he were looking at the Playboy upside down. I heard a click that sounded like a chrome cigarette lighter closing; then my father stepped away. But I still didn’t understand what was happening until a second or two later.
“Hey, what the hell—HEY!” The mooch leaped backward and dropped the burning magazine on the floor, stomping it out, trying not to get his feet tangled up in the green RECORDS—AT A DISCOUNT! bag. The faint smell of singed hairs from the mooch’s forearms wafted toward me as Bob Metcalf guffawed. The mooch was sweating, and his belly was heaving up and down.
“I’ll show you the fires of passion!” my father shouted gleefully. Drew whooped with laughter, and Hildy and I looked at each other and giggled as the mooch ran out of the store with the green bag, nearly mowing down a pretty, skinny woman as she came in.
My father scooped up the ruined Playboy and bowed elaborately, as if he had just done a magic trick for the customers. There was clapping, and one guy gave a loud whistle in appreciation. Drew stood next to me and kept saying, “That was so cool!” over and over.
“Shalimar, you missed it!” said Hildy.
“Missed what?” The pretty, skinny woman—that was Shalimar. She turned to me. “You must be Martha!” she said, reaching out a thin hand. I could tell right away that she wasn’t really my father’s girlfriend. She was way too young for that, and way too neat a person. She was tall and bubbly, and she wore a long, loose, green skirt and a green-and-purple peasant blouse. She smiled all the time. She seemed very intelligent. “Nice to meet you. I’ve already met Hildy and Dave.”
“Drew,” I corrected, tousling my brother’s hair.
“Drew, of course! Duh! I’m very sorry, Drew!”
“It’s short for Andrew,” I said. I wanted to help her.
“Right!”
I took the opportunity. “What does Shalimar mean? I’ve never heard it as a name. Only as a perfume, at Hink’s. Which—I really like the smell,” I added.
“Well, my real name is Susan, but everyone’s named Susan! So I started calling myself Shalimar a few years back. In Pakistan and in India, it means ‘abode of love.’ My parents think I’m cracked, of course, just like they think I’m cracked for studying Indian art. They still call me Susie.”
“Don’t you hate that?” Hildy asked.
Shalimar shrugged. “It’s just the way they are,” she said. She turned and looked at me with concentration, as if I were the only person around. “I know you’re wondering,” she said.
What was I wondering? Why she’d have my father for a friend, I guessed.
“I’m twenty-six,” she said. “I’m getting my PhD in Art History. Or maybe I should call it my ABD.”
“AB—?”
“All But Dissertation. You know. I have all my other work completed. Courses, research, all that. I just have to write it now.”
“Oh.”
“Your father is such a sweetie.”
“He is?” Shrug.
“He’s been helping me as I write it,” she went on as we kids gathered around. There was something magnetic about her. “He’s really encouraging—I’ve never had that kind of encouragement. The last month or two, I’ve gotten so much done!”
Hildy nodded in agreement, catching my glance: See? Our dad really is great.
“I mean, it’s not that I don’t know what to say,” Shalimar explained. “I’m writing about Amrita Sher-Gil—she’s an Indian painter who led this amazing life. She was only twenty-eight when she died, but her work is just as significant as what the masters of the Bengal Renaissance accomplished. That’s what I’m trying to show in my dissertation. But the thing is, I have this block. Like, writer’s block. I get really tense when I actually have to sit down and do it.”
“Kids! Let’s go!” My father was itching to get out of there. It was really too early for dinner, but he wanted to take us to the “Human” Village, and I could definitely eat.
“Are you coming with us?” Hildy asked Shalimar.
“You go on,” Shalimar said. “I think your father wants to spend some time with you. Besides, I already ate.” She kissed my father on the cheek.
On the way over, my father walked ahead, his arm across Drew’s shoulders. Hildy and I talked. “Shalimar seems nice,” I said.
“She’s really neat,” Hildy agreed.
“Why did she go with him to Mr. Hinge’s?”
Hildy stopped and looked at me. “Dodo! They’re sleeping together!”
“What—? Are you sure? I mean, she’s so young! Why would he even think of—why would he be interested in her?”
“Well, Martha, duh, she’s a lot prettier and younger than Mom, not to mention nicer. And smarter.”
“But—isn’t Dad against, you know, like, graduate school and that kind of stuff?”
Hildy didn’t answer. “Shalimar thinks he’s really great. Maybe that’s what he needs, after living with our dear mother.”
“But I mean, is she—” I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “Does she, like, love all the same music that Dad does?”
“I think she likes Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan, and that piece Bolero by Ravel. Oh, and the Brandenburg Concertos.”
“Concerti,” I sighed. I might as well stop trying to understand. I was the one who loved Beethoven string quartets, and the Bach unaccompanied cello suites performed by Rostropovich, and the Barber Concerto for Orchestra—and my father still didn’t like me. When he was singing along at the end of the last movement of the St. Matthew’s Passion—praying, almost, savoring that long, exquisite, dissonant B natural just before the piece ends—I understood that he couldn’t be disturbed. And now he chose to spend time with someone who didn’t recognize how irritating Bolero is? Seriously, this is the kind of crap I had to deal with.
Mr. Hinge had told my father not to fight with my mother over her plans. My mother sounded “emotionally unstable” to Mr. Hinge, and if provoked, she might do something even crazier. Mr. Hinge had also said I was considered old enough, legally, to have a say in where I lived.
In a back booth at Human Village, Drew and I sat on one side and shared an order of pot stickers. Hildy, sitting next to my father, had a bowl of won ton soup. My father ignored a large plate of fried rice and tried to explain what Mr. Hinge had said. I’d never seen him try so hard to imagine what it would be like to be us kids. I could practically see the gears inside his head grinding with the effort. Or maybe the gears inside his heart.
Apparently, I didn’t have to call any of the people on my mother’s list, and besides, my father had given the list to Mr. Hinge, so he didn’t even have it anymore. Mr. Hinge said that for now, I could stay with a friend. As we sat there, I allowed myself to relax, a little, into my father’s reassurance. Stephanie had told me Sylvia said I was welcome to move in with them whenever I wanted. I’d started to adjust to that idea, even though I kept having flashes of worry because Sylvia wasn’t on my mother’s list. I’d always tried so hard to give my mother no reason ever to be angry with me. It felt very weird that I was now being told by my father—and by a lawyer
—to do something my mother would be furious about.
“What about me?” Drew wanted to know.
My father picked up his chopsticks and poked at the fried rice, the little watery cubes of carrots, the withered peas. “So listen, son, I think you might like that farm—”
“Why can’t I stay with you?”
“—it could be an adventure for you. And it’ll be temporary, anyway.”
“Dad, how do you know that?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Just sit tight, all of you! It’ll all work out.”
“Stop saying that!” I cried. When I was worried about a test in school, he was always saying it’ll all work out. And I would say yeah, it works out because I study! I was sick of it.
My father shot me a glance, the one that said how dare you judge me?
Shrug. Shrug.
“Stop that shrugging now!” he said.
“Dad, she can’t help it,” Hildy said.
My father sighed very slowly, put down his chopsticks. “Son, I can’t really do anything. Not just yet. I’m working on it.”
Drew was silent. We all were. Then Drew started to talk, but we could barely hear him. “Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven—”
“Drew, what are you saying?” Hildy said.
“—Nineteen. Twenty-three.” Drew was louder now. “Twenty-nine. Thirty-one—”
“He’s reciting the primes,” I said. “Drewy, stop it now.” I jiggled his arm.
“Stop it,” my father said.
“—Fifty-three. Fifty-nine. Sixty-one. Sixty-seven. Seventy-one—”
My father pounded his fist on the table so loudly that we all jumped. I looked at him, ready to glare, but there were tears in his eyes. “Son, stop it now,” he said thickly. “I’m doing the best I can. Eat, now.”
No one ate.
“I said eat!”
We were all crying. I pulled my left sleeve down, not wanting the cut to show, and put my arm around Drew, kissed the top of his head. Tears ran down my face. I needed to blow my nose, and as I reached for a napkin from the chrome holder and caught sight of the red menus stacked upright against the wall with Hunan Village printed in large gold fake-Chinese letters, I realized something. We Goldenthals were crying because grief was part of the Hunan condition.
I started to laugh, and I couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard that I couldn’t talk, even though everyone was demanding to know what was so funny. My father and Hildy got mad at me, but at least Drew started eating again. Then he said, “Shitballs! I’m full.”
I kept expecting my mother to ask me about the list or my phone calls, but she didn’t. She didn’t seem to care that Hildy was staying with my father, either. She was busy putting things in boxes and making arrangements on the phone, and wasn’t spending any extra time in bed, as far as I could tell. Drew dragged a heavy old army-green sleeping bag with a plaid flannel lining out of his closet and set up camp on the floor of my room. My mother didn’t even seem to care about that. She just called it Drew’s “camping trip.”
In the evenings after I read to him, Drew fell asleep, and I did more homework and packing, as quietly as I could. Sometimes I lay in my bed and wept, my face itching as the tears rolled down into my ears. Sniffing would have been noisy, and blowing my nose would have been worse. I kept a roll of toilet paper behind my pillow and tried to blot the flow silently.
Of course there was nowhere to put the used tissue. When I grew up, I was going to have a wastebasket in every single room, even closets, and pretty pastel-blue and pink and yellow boxes of Kleenex everywhere so that even if you were crying, at least there was something to cheer you up a little. But for now, I wound up shoving the balled-up wads up my nightgown sleeves, just like my mother. I hated her with every cell in my body. In the mornings, the only thing that got me out of bed was that I knew if I missed school or was late, she’d never write me a note.
22
hinge
The landlord had extended the lease for an extra couple of weeks, but there was still a lot of merchandise to deal with. For now, my father was selling popular items like magazines and candy at the regular price. Other stock, like imported pipes and loose tobacco, would have to be sold at cost, or at a loss. At least the unopened cartons of cigarettes and the boxes of twenty-four candy bars could be returned to the suppliers for full credit.
The distributors wouldn’t take back very many of the LPs. Mr. Lucas had agreed to buy up some of the inventory, but there were a lot of leftovers. Mr. Lucas didn’t have room for everything, partly because he carried a lot more pop than my father.
My father said he’d be damned if he was going to offer even his pop records to those cretins at RECORDS—AT A DISCOUNT! He’d sooner move every single leftover LP up to his apartment and start selling the records at the flea market. He’d sooner let his kids open the shrink-wrap and listen to whatever they wanted. Whatever we wanted.
There was something disorienting about my father’s sudden permission, and Hildy and I both ignored it without even discussing it. All the Beatles records we’d ever dreamed of (most of them, anyway, since some were sold out)? It was as weird as if my mother suddenly got us Barbies, or started keeping Nestle’s Quik and fresh milk around the house. If we had a house.
Hildy and I met at Smoke and Records each afternoon, something my father seemed to expect and appreciate at the same time. There was work to do; the cartons he was packing needed to be taken up to the apartment, one at a time per person because records were so heavy. Even though we didn’t talk about it, Hildy and my father and I had to be together to console ourselves about Drew, who’d been gone for nearly three weeks now.
We called Drew from the apartment every day as soon as the in-California long-distance rates went down at six o’clock, but we didn’t always get to talk to him. There was just the one pay phone in the dormitory, and the line could be busy for hours, which was another reason for starting at six. Sometimes we’d get through, and whatever kid happened to answer the phone wouldn’t go find Drew, or said they didn’t know who he was.
With Shalimar’s encouragement, my father tried calling the Plowshares office during the day, not caring that daytime long distance cost more—sometimes calling right from the store, where the call was even more expensive because rates were higher from business phones—but he didn’t get far. Maybe it was Plowshares’ policy not to let the kids talk to their parents very much. Or maybe my mother had warned them not to allow contact between my father and Drew, Jules being a very sick person and a highly damaging male role model, blah blah blah.
My father’s studio was already jam-packed with LPs, but Hildy and I kept making trips, and if Shalimar was around, she helped, too. When we got inside the apartment, we’d take the records out of the cartons and stack them on top of the bookcases as high as we could. The clutter didn’t bother my father; he just didn’t want us putting the records anywhere near sunlight or the radiator, or anyplace where they might be tripped on. Once we were done, we’d bring the empty cartons back down to the store to be refilled.
Hildy and I sorted through the records, making room in the front closet for our finds. While she set aside Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel albums, I found other treasures, like Prokofiev’s Symphony #5, the one whose second movement opened with that violin and clarinet dialogue they used as an introduction to the nighttime news. Finally, I had a copy.
Sometimes we’d open a box to find awful surprises—Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass; a Lesley Gore album with “It’s My Party” on it; an album by Perry Como, whom my father had always called Perry Coma because he was about as musically engaging as general anesthesia.
The few times I got to talk to Drew before taking the bus back to Stephanie’s, he sounded like a smaller version of himself. He didn’t like it at Plowshares. Most of the kids there were older than he was. He was trying to be brave, but I could tell he was scared, and I was glad he had some street smarts.
“I’m telling you, it’s the othe
r way!” my father grumbled as we rode north in the cab along Shattuck. We were going to see Mr. Hinge and had taken a cab so we wouldn’t be at the mercy of the bus schedule.
“It’s not,” Hildy assured him. “Mr. Hinge said Shattuck at Hearst, across from Oscar’s. I wrote it down right here on this piece of paper.”
“Bullshit!” My father clutched the carton of Chesterfields he’d brought for Mr. Hinge. “It’s south of University,” he insisted. “We’ve overshot!”
“Dad, calm down,” I put in, worried about what the cab driver thought of us and wondering why Hildy, as usual, didn’t seem embarrassed. According to Hildy, my father and Shalimar smoked grass every night after the phone call to Drew. Sometimes Hildy joined them. Hildy said in my father’s case, grass was a good idea, because it made him a lot calmer. Too bad the pot had apparently worn off.
“Look, Dad, there’s Oscar’s,” Hildy soothed. “Mr. Hinge said it was a brown-shingle with a bright green door. See it?”
My father folded a couple of bills from his pocket and handed them to the driver as the cab stopped. In spite of myself, I suddenly felt a wave of pity for my father. Just his folding the money with such self-assurance when we didn’t have any—it was almost dignified the way he did it, hurriedly, as if it were just part of being a man, as if nothing could be more obvious, when things were completely falling apart, than going to a lawyer with his daughters and taking a taxi instead of a bus. I was glad I was still a kid for now. I didn’t have to figure out what to do with plaid tobacco pouches or Italian operas that no one wanted. I didn’t have to find lawyers or figure out how much to tip cab drivers.
We were a few minutes late, but it didn’t seem to matter because Mr. Hinge was on the phone when we got there. There was barely room for the three of us in his airless office. My father took one dark wood chair with a curved back and Hildy and I shared the other one. The armrest kept poking into my back.
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