Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister?

by Wendell Jamieson

  My best friend at this age was a kid named Elliot Bertoni. He was blond and had freckles. The idea of him smashing my fish tank with a brick—which I now saw in my mind, complete with water spraying, flying shards of glass and doomed fish flapping around on the floor—seemed as absurd as the idea of one country winning a war by destroying the planet.

  I asked another dicey one around this time: “What’s wrong with Louis’s dad?”

  This was at the end of the birthday party where we fired off rockets in the park. After the cake, the other boys’ parents started arriving to pick them up. After a while, only my friend Louis was left. For half an hour, as the air cooled as it does on late May evenings, the two of us played in the backyard.

  Then his father showed up, a middle-aged man in a green raincoat and a crumpled black hat. He was smoking a cigarette. But what was most distinctive about him was the way he was walking, kind of weaving around, pausing at awkward moments and laughing a little too hard at everything my father said. Louis seemed annoyed and rushed his dad out of the house. I experienced a vague cringing sensation I had never felt before. After my father locked the gate and came back into the hallway, I asked him what was wrong.

  “Oh, Wen, sometimes people go out to celebrate, have a good time, and they celebrate a little too much and they have a little too much to drink. I think Louis’s dad just maybe celebrated too much this afternoon.”

  This made me happy for him, that he’d been able to have a nice celebration at the same time as my party.

  I asked my parents about nuclear war and about a friend’s drunken father, but I never asked them about the war in our house.

  The fights began soon after we moved to Brooklyn, in the evenings, after Lindsay and I had been put to bed in our room on the third floor. Indistinct voices at first, raised just slightly, then shouts, then out-and-out screams punctuated by smashing glass, and even, once, the reflected flashing red-and-white lights of a police radio car that had been called by neighbors.

  Anything could set off these fights.

  One Saturday night we were watching Adam-12 in the kitchen while we ate dinner. I liked these two clean-cut policemen driving under blue skies, lawns everywhere; they looked a lot different from the cops who had come to our house. I asked my dad if he liked these two California policemen, too.

  “No,” he said. He sort of rolled his eyes and his head at the same time. “They’re a couple of ignorant clods.”

  My mother glared at him. “Jamie, I’m not sure you should call police officers ‘ignorant clods’ in front of the children. And how do you know they’re ‘ignorant clods’ anyway? Have you met them? They seem nice enough to me.”

  My dad rolled his eyes again, even exaggerating the gesture a little. He seemed to enjoy getting this reaction.

  “Oh, of course they’re ignorant clods, look at them.”

  “Jamie!”

  “Well, they are.”

  Lindsay and I glanced at each other.

  After we were in bed, the shouting began.

  I also remember tension about some kind of drill my father bought for my mother. That’s not as bad as it sounds—my mother was now several years into her career as a goldsmith—but something about the drill was not quite right. This prompted a dirty look from her after she opened it, and dirty looks in return, and again the issue simmered all day before boiling over after bedtime.

  I’d try to fall asleep before I heard the first distant voices. But then as now, trying to fall asleep kept me awake. (“Ronan puts on his coat the regular way,” my sister would say one day.) I’d listen closely, hoping that the first high-pitched squawks were fragments of laughter and not angry screams. Lindsay and I would then sit on the carpeted steps, leaning on the creaking dark wood balustrade, trying to pick out enough words between the slamming of doors and cupboards to figure out what was going on. We’d construct a cohesive narrative. The sounds were muffled, but the rage seeped through those heavy doors.

  The house had very old light switches, three round buttons on each floor landing that turned off the hallway lights on the floor you were on, as well as the one below and the one above. Lindsay and I would press them, turning the lights on and off on the other floors, trying to get our parents’ attention. Finally, we would go downstairs, bleary-eyed, and the sight of us in our footie pajamas and nightgown would usually deflate the conflagration, at least for the night.

  Once the fight erupted on a Saturday afternoon and came up to the bedrooms: it moved like a thunderstorm from the front of the house to the back; one of the glass panels in the doors between our room and our parents’ room was kicked out, shattering into a hundred pieces.

  This went on for years.

  One by one, my friends’ parents got divorced, beginning with Elliot Bertoni’s. Soon it seemed that every family in Park Slope had separated. I have a theory that the beauty in those houses, all the woodwork and antique beveled mirrors and raised details in the plaster, helped drive families apart. It was as though the reality of being married and having children could never live up to the ideal of a happy home carved into those details; the houses mocked the stressed families living in them and set a standard of perfection that could never be attained by humans.

  When my parents told me and my sister that they, too, were splitting, the four of us sitting around the kitchen table, there were tears, but not as many as might have been expected. I felt a mix of emotions—abject terror at the huge change about to descend on our house, with my dad gone, but also, quite clearly in my memory, relief.

  This was a few days after Christmas, the Christmas when my sister put her tooth under the pillow and it was still there when she woke up, the Christmas Santa Claus ran over the tooth fairy with his sleigh. My parents had decided to split a few months earlier, but wanted to wait until after the holidays to tell us. During this time, this Phony War in our house, there had been no fights, no slammed doors, no police. There was even laughter from my mother as my father joked about the tooth fairy that morning. Lindsay and I had wondered what was going on, hopeful yet hesitant—I hesitated to ask what was going on because I didn’t want to spoil it.

  When they told us Dad was moving out, I felt the same as I had in woodworking class a few years before when a couple of rotten boys told me gleefully that there was no Santa Claus: it made obvious, yet tragic, sense.

  I swore to myself that Helene and I would never fight in front of Dean, or even let the sounds of anger reach his ears. Listening to my parents fight were the most awful moments of a childhood that was otherwise filled with funny answers, and happy summers, and a beautiful home, and good music.

  I kept my promise until I broke it.

  A fight can come out of the relaxed air of a Saturday morning like a summer squall: you can’t see it on the horizon, it doesn’t show up on radar. A few words are exchanged and the situation is suddenly untenable—nations release their missiles, enough to destroy the planet a dozen times over, and there is no stopping them once they leave the silos.

  That Saturday morning was dragging on. Paulina was crying, the neighbors downstairs complaining as Dean ran across their ceiling. Neither Helene nor I had had a good night’s sleep. I decided to take Dean to the amusement park at Coney Island to spend a few hours on the kiddie rides, and called a friend to see if he and his son wanted to come along. He liked the idea of Coney Island and we made a plan.

  But after we were all dressed and ready to go, he called back and said that he’d be about two hours late. Dean and I went into standby mode. His sneakers came off and he ran around some more. The baby cried. The neighbors banged. The apartment, spacious by Brooklyn standards, got very small.

  I snapped at Dean, and Helene glared at me.

  “He’s allowed to run around his own apartment,” she said. “Why don’t you guys just go early and wait.”

  I put my shoes back on and got Dean’s sneakers. I slipped them on his feet and started to tie the laces when I felt Helene’s presence ov
er my shoulder. I looked up at her.

  “Be sure to double knot them,” she said.

  “Yes, I know how to tie shoelaces.”

  “I’m not sure you do.”

  “I know how to tie shoelaces.”

  “Barely.”

  (My mother: “They seem nice enough to me.”)

  (My father: “Oh, of course they’re ignorant clods, look at them.”)

  Dean and I put on our coats and headed out the door. But I was angry about Helene’s tone of voice, the way she had questioned my shoe-tying ability, and I decided to call her on my cell phone and tell her so. I fumbled with it with one hand while holding Dean’s in the other as we walked down the street. But this was bad timing.

  “I’m just picking up your socks,” she said as she answered, before I even got started, echoing a complaint about my own personal laundry disposal that my mother could have made thirty years earlier. “Do you have to be such a pig?”

  Now the cell phone wasn’t good enough: I had to go back and yell at Helene in person. I told her I was going to do this and hung up. Dean and I retraced our steps, back through the lobby and into the elevator. My heart pounded. I felt myself get angrier and angrier as the floor numbers on the elevator lit up one by one. I work hard all week, I thought—I can leave my socks around!

  The front door of our apartment was shut. I got out my keys and undid the locks, but the door would only give a few inches: Helene had locked the chain. I pushed a few times but it wouldn’t go. I yelled through the six-inch crack, the chain taut against the bridge of my nose, sort of like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, except instead of “Here’s Johnny” I was saying: “I am not a pig!” and “I can leave my socks around!” and “I know how to tie shoes!”

  I had always wondered about that chain. How strong was it, really? It seemed pretty crappy. If a gang of kidnappers wanted to take my wife and children, and pillage and destroy my apartment, would it stop them? I tested it now by throwing the weight of my body against the door. The chain snapped without the meekest complaint, and I was suddenly in the apartment, a little surprised, and Helene was fuming at me, even more surprised. Dean seemed impressed that I had broken through so easily.

  Helene and I started yelling at each other from two feet away. She even went into a fighting stance—left fist raised, right fist cocked. I was ready to take her on when Dean let out a high-pitched scream from the threshold. It practically shook the apartment and shattered the windows; I wouldn’t have been surprised had it been heard in Manhattan. It even quieted Paulina down. We turned to look at him.

  “Stop it!” he said.

  And we did.

  You could almost feel the air rushing out of the room.

  Dean had screamed the way Lindsay and I had pushed on ancient light switches and then descended groggily down creaking stairs in footie pajamas. His method was more direct, but the result was the same—the fight stopped, the clouds dissipated, the missiles went backward as the film rewound.

  Later that night at bedtime, memories of a delayed but still successful Coney Island outing fresh in his head, he asked me about it. “Why did you guys yell at each other?”

  “Well, kid, you yell and scream sometimes. You yell at me. And Paulina, she screams all the time—”

  “She’s a baby.”

  “Okay, she is. Good point. What I’m saying is, people who love each other still get angry and yell at each other all the time. Mommy and I were just in a bad mood, that’s all.”

  “You really broke that door down. You were like King Kong.”

  “I didn’t break it down, Dean, I just broke the lock. It was like a test to see how strong it was. You know, when I was little my mother and father—Pops and Grandma Bessie—used to fight all the time. For a while it was every night. They broke lots of things. Lindsay and I used to sit on the stairs and listen for hours. The police even came once. Pops or Grandma Bessie, I forget which one, smashed a panel of glass in a door. It went all over the place.”

  “Wait—Pops and Grandma Bessie used to live together?”

  “Yes, of course. They’re my parents.”

  “What about Kathy and Tom?” (These are my stepparents.)

  “It was before they met them, before they got divorced.”

  “What is divorced?”

  “It’s when two people who were married get unmarried.” I thought to myself: While almost all of my friends’ parents split when I was little, I can think of only one of Dean’s friends whose parents live apart.

  “Why did they fight all the time?”

  “You know, I’m not sure. I don’t think I ever asked them. I know they were much younger than your mother and I were when they got married and had kids. I think Grandma Bessie thought Pops was annoying, that he spent too much time telling her what to think, and I think Pops thought Grandma Bessie was angry too much of the time, had a bad temper. I think he actually enjoyed getting her angry sometimes. Also, it was the seventies—it was a different time, man.”

  “Well, if they were fighting all the time and I was little I would have told them to stop. I would have done what I did today: I would have yelled really loud, and they would have had to stop, or people would have come to the house.”

  “That would have been a good idea.”

  “Because today, you know, I saved the day.”

  “If the Empire State Building was hit by a plane, would it fall down, too?”

  —DEAN, three years after 9/11

  Ron Klemencic, structural engineer, former chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago:

  “The planes that hit the World Trade Center—the bombs, really—were huge and filled with fuel, as opposed to the plane that hit the Empire State Building in 1945, which was much smaller. Some of the photographs of the World Trade Center after the planes had hit—but before the buildings had collapsed—showed gaping holes; in one of them, you can actually see the imprint of the airplane that hit it. It is almost from wingtip to wingtip. And you can see the structure around that opening almost acting like a bridge, holding up the rest of the building. The floors of the World Trade Center were unusually large, so that when the planes hit they didn’t slice the buildings in half. The planes may have sliced any other buildings in half. The speculation is that any other building would not have fared nearly as well, and that the devastation would have been much more immediate.”

  Engineers, I’ve learned, are as cautious with their opinions as they are with their buildings. And this question is so speculative that it seemed impossible that there was only one answer. So I went in search of a second opinion. I can only hope we never find out who’s right.

  Silvian Marcus, Cantor Seinuk Group, the engineer of record for both 7 World Trade Center (which collapsed on 9/11) and its replacement:

  “The Empire State Building was hit by an airplane, a B-25 bomber, back in 1945. This was a light plane without the speed that planes have today, and it may not have had a large tank of gasoline, and there was no structural damage at all. The jets that hit the World Trade Center were much bigger and faster; the larger the plane and the higher the speed—the velocity—the larger the energy of the blow. It is like a hammer: the heavier the hammer, the more muscular the person swinging it, the faster the hammer goes.

  “But there are major differences between the buildings. The methods and technology used at the time the Empire State Building was built were developed to a lesser degree than they are today; same with the mathematics and the physics. This meant engineers had the tendency of being very prudent, if not to say more conservative. So what is the difference? This building is a steel building, like the World Trade Center, but is done with many, many pieces, and many connections. There is this fabric of so many pieces interrelated—all the steel is covered with either brick or stone or concrete or other materials, both for aesthetics and fire protection. Today you see lots of glass and lots of metal, light materials. If jets hit the buil
ding at five hundred miles per hour, it would be seriously damaged, but my belief is that the building would not collapse, it would stand, because of the fabric of material. If one or more pieces of the fabric were destroyed, the others would take the weight, the suffering. It is like a very large family of people: the larger it is, the harder it is to destroy.”

  “Why do they put clothes on people who die? No one’s gonna see them.”

  —ALYSSA WENDOLOWSKI, age seven, Springfield, New Jersey

  Bill Bromirski, a fourth-generation owner of Bromirski Funeral Home, Jersey City, New Jersey, which has been in the same family since before 1896:

  “Everybody who goes out of our funeral home is fully dressed, including underclothes, socks, shoes, all garments. Because my father always said that when we have the last accounting up in Heaven, he doesn’t want anyone standing there in the nude. We dress everybody, whether someone is going to see the person or not. It is a custom with us. It is to show respect. Let me take it a step further: occasionally we will bury someone who doesn’t have any family, and when we take the body into church, if there is no one there, we stay. We stay as the closest person to them—no one should go alone. These are just the customs that have evolved. Same thing with the clothing. We do Muslim funerals. There is a tradition that the body be wrapped in new cloth, brand-new muslin or linen, that is cut specifically to fit the body. There is a ritual prayer service, washing and dressing. That is a requirement. It can get traumatic if you are a young man or woman and you have to wash the body of your mother or father who died suddenly. That can be hard. But it is all out of respect.”

  “Why is there war?”

  —CONRAD KASSIN, age four, Los Angeles, California, after watching his cousins play a particularly violent video game