Shrug

by Lisa Braver Moss

“Because I’m at my dad’s and she doesn’t want to talk to him! Duh.”

  “Martha, she didn’t call when you were staying at my house, either.”

  “That’s because she didn’t approve of my being there.”

  “I swear, she always has an excuse! If she cared about you, she’d call.”

  “She can’t,” I repeated. “My dad says I should call her. But that’s probably just him thinking he’s so great because he’s capable of being nicer than she is—”

  “Yeah, when he’s not hitting you.”

  “—when really, it’s just another way of his acting like nothing bad has happened and I have no right to complain.”

  “Why can’t Hildy or Drew call your mom?” We sat down next to each other in the Latin classroom.

  “C’mon, I’m the only possibility. And I don’t really even want my family there when I call her, and the apartment is small, so where would I go to talk? Plus, I don’t want to run up my dad’s phone bill.” I knew my father wouldn’t care about the bill. Maybe I could find a time when everyone was going out, and say I needed quiet for a history assignment or something, and then tell my father about the call afterwards. I knew he’d be glad, not angry about the cost.

  “Look, why don’t you come over after school and call your mom from my house? That way, you’d get it out of your system. And I can be right there with you when you’re talking to her.”

  “Really, Steph? I could do that?”

  “Dummy! You shouldn’t’ve moved out of my house in the first place.”

  “I had to. The court said.” I swallowed the lie. “If I call, I’ll have to wait for the long-distance rates to go down.”

  “So? Stay for dinner.”

  “I think to call New York, the rates go down at five. And don’t worry, I’d pay your mom back.”

  Mrs. Fry rushed in, dressed in her usual plaid suit and pumps. “Discipuli? Page two-twenty of your texts. Celeriter!”

  “Grandma?” My heart was beating fast. At the last minute, I’d told Stephanie I wanted privacy, and had gone into Sylvia’s study alone. I was sitting in an uncomfortable desk chair, but it didn’t look like the telephone cord was long enough for me to move over to the low couch at the other side of the room.

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  “It’s Martha. Your granddaughter.” I shifted my weight on the chair.

  “Oh. Well, you must be calling for your mother. Hang on a minute.” The receiver knocked loudly as she put it down.

  “Wait, Grandma?” I thought it would be more polite if I asked how she was, but I was too late, and she was probably drunk by now anyway. I’d only met my grandmother a few times, and it wasn’t easy to get her attention. Mostly she lectured me and Hildy and Drew about how we should try harder with my mother. By now, she was probably as mad at us as my mother was. The clunk of the receiver echoed in my ears.

  “Gladys!” my grandmother shouted, no doubt irking my mother by using her birth name, maybe because she was too drunk to remember the name Willa. I was hoping she’d just tell my mother, “phone,” but I heard a brief muffled back-and-forth.

  My heart kept beating, too fast. My mother would demand to know whether I was wearing undershirts. I’d feel compelled to be truthful. She’d yell, Are you crazy? It’s freezing! even though it was still Indian summer here in Berkeley.

  My mother picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

  “Mom? It’s Martha.”

  “Well, hello, Martha. What is it?”

  “I—I’m just calling—”

  “Why are you calling?”

  I couldn’t remember. “Um, just to tell you—I’m working on my college applications,” I blurted.

  “Well, good for you.”

  Wait, she didn’t care if I went to college? “And just to see if you’re, you know, okay,” I added. “Like, so much has happened, and I’ve been kind of worried, and we haven’t talked, so I thought I’d say hello—”

  “Well, hello then, and goodbye.”

  “Wait! Mom—”

  “What is it?”

  “I just—” I remembered in a flood how many times I’d thought about this conversation, how I’d envisioned it as a chance to scream at her. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay!” I shouted. “We’re all okay here, and—”

  “Martha, I really don’t have the patience for this neurotic shit of yours.”

  “Neurotic—?”

  “I’ve had my bellyful of your goddamned anxiety! Look, I don’t need you to explain. You couldn’t handle the conflict. So you made your choice.”

  “What? Mom, that’s not what happened! You’re the one who—”

  “I let go for you! Don’t you understand? The conflict, the having to choose, was killing you—”

  “Mom! What was killing me was, you made me choose!”

  “—and it was killing me.”

  “Wait, which is it?” I yelled. “You wanted to save me, or you wanted to save yourself?”

  “I did what I had to do to survive, Martha. To survive”

  “What about my survival?” I shrieked. “What about Drew’s? Do you even care what it was like for him in that place?”

  “I’ve had enough of this, Martha. I see Jules has brainwashed you, too, with his lopsided perceptions. Goodbye!” The phone clicked.

  “Mom?” I cried, ridiculously, before hanging up.

  I swallowed. I stood up. The door of Sylvia’s study made a card-board-ish sound brushing against the carpet as I opened it. Helvetica was waiting right outside as if she’d been eavesdropping. “Steph?” I called, my voice wavering.

  Stephanie came out of her room into the hallway. “That was quick.”

  “Yeah, I probably owe you about fifteen cents.”

  “How’d it go?” Stephanie put her arm around my shoulder.

  “I knew she’d say my father had brainwashed me. I just knew it.” I had to feel there was something I’d been able to anticipate.

  “Oh, Martha.”

  “She’s so goddamned predictable. Vicious bitch.”

  “You know,” Stephanie said, “that should be a medical condition in my dad’s DSM book. Vicious Bitch Syndrome!”

  I laughed so hard, I knocked Stephanie’s arm off my shoulder. “We finally have a diagnosis!” I shouted gleefully.

  “The heartbreak of VBS,” Stephanie intoned. “If caught early, this condition can be treated. But most people are too embarrassed to discuss it with their doctor.”

  “No, wait! Most VBS sufferers don’t even know they’re sick.”

  “Right.” Stephanie adopted the doctor voice again. “Fortunately, the disease is not painful to the VBS sufferer.”

  “Sure does stink for those around her!” We laughed and laughed, until I was crying. I cried for a while, and Stephanie comforted me, and then we diagnosed my father.

  Fucking Idiot Disorder—FID for short.

  28

  no singing, no humming, no conducting

  My father held on to the job at RAAD for a month and a half, which, realistically, was longer than any of us thought he’d be able to stand it. The manager, whom my father called simply “the guy,” was a complete ignoramus, my father said—the type of anal retentive who had a cheap ballpoint pen installed on a chain behind the counter so it’d never disappear. The guy was in his late twenties, and was only in the business because his uncle owned several RAAD stores around the Bay Area. The uncle was an ignoramus, too, my father said: that was why the so-called classical sections of all the RAAD stores were stocked with dreck like Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Hits, Bach works performed on a synthesizer, mediocre Haydn symphonies— and Mozart flute quartets, which, let’s face it, there’s no way anyone would purchase unless they were hell-bent on finding a reason to hate chamber music.

  The guy was constantly opening up new pop records and playing them on the store turntable, setting my father’s teeth on edge. After a week or so, the guy would take the records to the back and put them thro
ugh a shrink-wrap machine to make it look like they were fresh from the factory. A lot of classical LPs weren’t shrink-wrapped (which is how my father was able to listen to so many of the records he’d stocked at the shop—and as for plastic-wrapped LPs that my father felt he just had to listen to, he could usually get a spare copy from the wholesaler). Anyway, as if it weren’t immoral enough to pass floor copies off as new, the guy didn’t respect LPs in the first place, dirtying them with his greasy fingers right in the middle of the tracks when my father had told him in plain English never to do that.

  “But Dad, you hate pop records,” Hildy pointed out. “So why do you even care?”

  My father gaped at her as if to say, That’s the most moronic remark you’ve ever made. Sometimes I understood my father so much better than Hildy did—not that it got me anywhere with him.

  My father tried to talk the guy into revamping the classical section, or at least letting him take over the ordering. But the guy said they weren’t looking to expand that section; in fact, they were consolidating it with the jazz. The guy needed my father up front. He told my father never to make any comments about the customers’ taste in music. My father was to leave his crossword puzzles at home, direct people to the appropriate section, answer questions, and ring up sales. “Like a robot,” my father told us, but without bitterness.

  Previous customers of my father’s started coming into RAAD to see him late in the evenings, after the guy had gone home. In between shifts, my father would scan the dimly lit apartment shelves for copies of César Franck’s organ works, or Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, Opus 133, or the Isaac Stern recording of the Barber violin concerto with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Then he’d take them back to RAAD and sell them for cash during his shift, using bags left over from Smoke and Records. Unfortunately, the guy got wind of what was happening when a customer came in one morning to return the wrong purchase in the wrong bag—a Smoke and Records bag.

  Stop or be fired, the guy told my father, and my father said fine. From then on, even when customers came in looking for things like “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” my father would send them to Mr. Lucas, who at least maintained a semblance of a classical section.

  And then of course, my father would entertain himself by delivering elaborate lectures to unsuspecting idiots. When one customer came in looking for Johnny Mathis, my father gushed about Edith Mathis’s recordings of Bach cantatas and Schubert lieder, complimenting the customer on his discernment and suggesting he visit On Record for the best selection of the brilliant soprano’s LPs.

  Sales at RAAD started dipping noticeably in the evenings. We were never sure how the guy found out about the Mathis incident, but it was the last straw. “I told the guy it was an honest mistake,” my father said afterwards, winking at us. “So I mixed up Mathis with Mathis! Coulda happened to anyone. Jerk.” Hildy laughed, and that made Drew laugh.

  But how were we going to get by on the money my father made selling records at the flea market? I didn’t want to use my savings for family groceries. I knew both Hildy and Drew would spend their own money on the family, no problem, and maybe I should be ashamed that I didn’t feel the same way. But my father always acted as if any generosity on my part were owed to him—the least I could do to redeem myself, since I was generally such a horrible disappointment. It didn’t exactly make me want to jump in and help. Besides, I was going to need all the money I had for college. Now I just had to get in.

  Fortunately, a cashier had left at Prufrock, and the next week, my father went to work there. Right off the bat, he didn’t like it, starting with the fact that he had to fill out a time card. Worse, the management piped in Vivaldi all day, every day—how many times could a person be expected to tolerate The Four Seasons, with only Pachelbel’s Canon in D thrown in for so-called variety? Plus they kept telling him he couldn’t whistle. My father wasn’t whistling, he said: why would he whistle to the mediocre offerings piped in through the PA system? Then they said he was humming. Then they said he was conducting.

  My father tried to get a job at Cody’s, but they weren’t hiring. Neither was Moe’s. So he quit Prufrock and continued with the Saturday flea market in Berkeley. He also started driving out to some big field near the Oakland airport for the flea market they had there on Sundays.

  Finally, an old customer of my father’s called to tell him that KPFA needed a host for their classical music program on Sundays from six to ten a.m. My father was no morning person, but he took it. Oddly, on the day he started, someone at the station mentioned that KALX, the radio station at Cal, was also looking for an announcer to do a classical music show. That gig was from midnight to six a.m. on Thursday nights (Friday mornings, really). Both stations said he could bring his own records if he didn’t see what he liked in the studio’s collection.

  Of course, my father had to learn the ropes of live radio, starting with the fact that singing along with the music wasn’t okay, even if the microphone was off, because mistakes do happen on air. No “conducting”—there wasn’t room to move around in either studio without the risk of banging into some important piece of equipment. And no humming, either: Glenn Gould may have wheezed his way through his studio sessions, but that didn’t entitle a radio announcer to indulge in the kind of vocalizing the eccentric Canadian pianist had done during the recording of what was arguably the greatest Goldberg Variations rendition of all time.

  At 5:55 that first morning, Drew and I dragged ourselves off our futons and huddled around the kitchen radio to hear my father’s first moments on KPFA, Drew’s red army blanket draped across his narrow shoulders. We put the portable heater on full-blast and leaned our elbows on the red-and-white-checked, cigarette-holed oilcloth that was sticky no matter how many times we sponged it off. A couple of noisy buses passed on Bancroft. My father had left a package of powdered sugar-covered miniature doughnuts in the fridge for us. We’d taken it out, but it was too early to eat. Drew yawned and played solitaire, his messy dark curls sticking up on one side of his head. I made hot tea. My stomach was in knots because of the early hour, plus nervousness about how my father would do.

  We moved the dial until we found KPFA. Normally, since my father was a sound sleeper, Drew and I listened to KFRC or KYA while we crunched our Cheerios, even though both stations seemed to rotate only seven songs: “Imagine,” “Maggie May,” “Theme from Shaft,” “American Pie,” “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” “Superstar,” and “Have You Seen Her.” Drew and I both hated “Have You Seen Her,” with its goopy narrated opening and closing. Whenever it came on, we’d try to keep straight faces as we sang along in a maximally histrionic way, substituting the word “emphysema” for “have you seen her.” It was practically the only time Drew would laugh.

  Actually, Drew and I kind of hated all the songs except “Maggie May” and “Theme from Shaft,” and we were getting sick of those, too. The announcers on KFRC and KYA were shrill. They were always interrupting the songs with blaring ads and inane comments. Plus, they’d start playing the next song before the one that was playing was even over yet, even if the ending was the very best part and, musically, should never be interrupted. When we were little, my mother had told us that our home radio was the type that only played classical music, and we believed her for years. After that deprivation, access to AM radio was like getting to eat from our Halloween candy bags as much as we wanted: even when there was nothing good left, the idea of it never got old.

  Since Plowshares, Drew hadn’t initiated eye contact with me—or with anyone else, as far as I could tell. But at six o’clock, as soon as my father said “This is Classics in the Morning” in a ghostly, tentative voice and didn’t introduce himself, Drew looked up at me in alarm. Then we both burst out laughing. We couldn’t believe how wooden my father sounded, how scared. It was as if a whole chunk of his personality had disappeared now that you could only hear his voice. “I’m going to play Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” my father offered in the same hushed b
land tone, like a timid schoolboy obligated to recite the Pledge of Allegiance—as if he’d never had an audience before, when in fact, he’d had his very own stage. I started laughing again, but Drew didn’t join in. He opened the package of doughnuts and took one and we kept listening. Cornstarchy sugar stuck to his lips.

  A guy named Bruce Rolligan, Jr., had moved into the brown-shingle with Hildy and Ann. He’d come to the Bay Area after dropping out of college somewhere in Connecticut, Hildy told us. He couldn’t stand being called “junior” and he didn’t really like the name Bruce in the first place, so he went by Rolly. Rolly was thinking of going back to school, but in the meantime, he was doing some carpentry work.

  For months, Hildy called him “my housemate” or “Rolly,” so it took a while to figure out it was really “my boyfriend.” Rolly didn’t come with Hildy when she visited us, because he was shy, and Hildy had never invited us over there. So we didn’t actually meet Rolly until the time we drove Shalimar to the airport.

  It was a drizzly December day. Hildy had said over the phone that she wanted us to stop by so she could say goodbye to Shalimar, but that the place was a mess and she’d rather we not come in. My father left the motor and the windshield wipers running and pulled up on the curb while Drew ran in to get Hildy. It took longer than we thought, and my father started hyperventilating. The wipers whined.

  “Jules,” Shalimar said, and my father turned toward her as she pulled a little gold charm out of her wallet. It was on a gold chain. “I was going to give this to you when I handed in my dissertation.”

  My father turned off the motor. “I can’t take this,” he said thickly.

  “Of course you can!” Shalimar laughed. Then she turned around to me. “It’s my Phi Beta Kappa key. Don’t you think your dad should have it?”

  I didn’t know. Was it something having to do with a sorority?

  “Phi Beta Kappa is an honors society,” Shalimar explained. “If you do well in college, in the liberal arts, you get elected to it.” She turned to my father again. “You know I would have been stuck forever if not for you.”