“What gives?” he asked.
“We’re watching Mrs. Finch, Daddy,” I said.
We all stared as Mrs. Finch walked out of her house.
“She’s probably getting ready to go to church again,” Paul said. Mrs. Finch was born-again and spent a lot of time at the local Evangelical Southern Baptist church. When she wasn’t going to church, hauling gravel from one side of her yard to the other, or tending to her menacing cactus garden, she was at our front door trying to convert us. We were the only Jews she’d seen outside the pages of her illustrated New Testament, and converting us would have granted her an express ticket into Heaven.
“What that woman needs is a good shtupping,” my father said. “She’s sublimated her sex drive into religion.” My father was always spouting his own fractured Freudianism.
“Paul, what’s the temperature going to be today?” he asked. “Do I need my heavy underwear?”
Paul wanted to be a meteorologist and tracked the weather minute-by-minute. Regardless of the season, my father liked to wear fine wool sweater vests and thick wool pants, as if he’d never left Detroit. He made my mother sew a piece of wool blanket inside my coat’s lining so I wouldn’t “catch a chill and get pneumonia.” No other child at school had a blanket hidden in the lining of her coat.
Ira opened the screen door and walked outside to check the thermometer affixed to the porch beam. His robe flung open in the breeze.
Paul shouted, “Mom, he’s out there naked again.”
“Ira, please!” she shouted.
“I’m not naked,” Ira yelled back. “I’m wearing my robe. Paul, why are you such a provocateur?”
My mother came into the room, opened the screen door, and coaxed my father back in as if he were a wayward pet. “Please, Ira. You’re making a spectacle.” My mother hated spectacles, and Ira and I were always making them.
“Does a man need permission to look at his own thermometer?”
“You’re exposing yourself.”
“I’m wearing a robe.”
“But the neighbors can see your pupik.”
“So let them enjoy the show,” he said. A circus ringmaster, he bowed from side to side, waited for the applause that never came, then thumbed his nose at the audience. For his finale, he curtsied like a prima ballerina.
“Can Alice Finch see you? Don’t we have enough trouble? The Business . . .” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. If the neighbors complained about the crazy Jews on the corner running a business out of the house, they’d shut us down; we’d go under; we’d be on the streets. She didn’t have to explain to me or my brother that my father was incapable of getting up in the morning and making it to a real office. At home, he could indulge in frequent snacks, lie down hourly, and have access to his fully stocked medicine cabinet.
“Why don’t you put on some clothes and then you can check the thermometer?” my mother said.
“And how do you suppose I’ll know what clothes to put on before I check? You’re always more worried about what other people think than about your own husband’s welfare. It’s all right; I’m coming back into the dungeon.”
The dungeon was the house on the corner of Teasley and Briggs into which my family had moved just before I was born. Their prior home was too small to accommodate a third child. In the beginning, the cypress bushes that surrounded it were wispy saplings, the lawn newly seeded and weed free. The tract had not been finished, and sawdust scented the air. Eventually crabgrass and weeds would overtake that lawn; Paul’s hoarded junk would fill up the living room; and Paul and my mother’s mangy cats would roam its halls.
Teasley Street terminated in a canyon where Paul and the other boys in the neighborhood hunted for American Indian arrowheads. Briggs Avenue turned and twisted up the hill to an elevation of over 3,000 feet and then dead-ended in the mountainside. On rare winter days we could drive to its top and see snowflakes fall and stick to the branches of the pine trees.
My mother welcomed the move as progress. My father resisted it. Though always restless for escape, change brought loss, and loss smacked of decline, and decline teetered on the precipice of death. Progress was an illusion. The very passage of time, even the sun’s going down each evening, made him melancholic. Paul told me that everything changed for the worse for him too when the family moved. “Before you were born, I was the baby, and Daddy was nice to me,” he said. “Now he only likes you.”
By the time I was five, the allegiances in our family seemed indelibly drawn into two unresolved Oedipal alliances: my mother and Paul vs. my father and me. We were like vs. like: I not only resembled my father physically, I shared his emotional intensity, his allergies and hypersensitivity to any minor shift in the environment. Paul had my mother’s lanky build, her light brown hair, hazel eyes, and shy demeanor.
Ben, ten years older than me, five years older than Paul, was a free agent. With his black wavy hair, dark eyes, swarthy complexion, and full beard, he already looked like a man. He carried a switchblade knife, wore a brown leather jacket, and passed as Italian or Latino at the high school he attended in Glendale.
Our housing development was made up of single-story ranch houses, painted in pastels of blue and pink and tan, with gingerbread trim around the shutters that featured cutouts of songbirds and Valentine hearts. The very appearance of those houses argued against anything dramatic going on behind their doors. The streets seemed made for bike riding and impromptu football games, the yards for summer barbecues.
My father never let me participate in any of these neighborhood activities: my bike would careen down Briggs and be struck by a car; a football would hit me in the head and give me a concussion. Barbecue smoke gave us both asthma.
Distinguished from its neighbors by the mezuzah on its door, and its placement high on a hill on the corner, our house was one of the few on the street with a porch and a view. On a clear day, we could see the peaks of Mount Baldy, the gray smudgy outline of City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, and beyond that, a narrow blue strip that was the Pacific Ocean.
My mother hoped our elevated location with neighbors on only one side would keep my father from feeling hemmed in. On a good evening there might be a breeze, and my father could sit on our front porch and look out at the lights of the city thirty miles away. But the view only intensified his longing for escape. He fled whenever he could “into the city” for movies and restaurants and nightclubs, to the May Company and Bullocks Wilshire’s art deco tearooms, and to Los Angeles’s grand old synagogues for Saturday morning Sabbath services. He craved pageantry, ceremony, excitement; my mother, serene stability. Too much stimulation gave her a migraine.
“Hey, there’s something else I want to show you,” Paul said. I knew what was coming but played along as my brother held the binoculars to my eyes and panned from left to right and back again.
“See, there’s the Finches’ living room,” he said, “and that’s their dining room. And there’s their kitchen, and down that hall, where you can’t see, are the bedrooms and the bathroom.” He was growing more animated. “Notice anything familiar?”
“It’s like our house?” I said.
“Like looking at the mirror image of our house. Their house is just like ours except it’s flipped. Get it? Flipped.”
To our neighbors, of course, we were what was flipped: Jews with murky, trauma-tainted ancestries in Eastern Europe. My parents, liberal Democrats with Socialist pasts. All of us, loud, terminally anxious, and preoccupied with bodily afflictions, real and imagined. To us, our neighbors seemed overgrown, blue-eyed, strapping, militantly athletic people who took the health of their bodies and their release from them in the afterlife for granted. The fathers went off to work early in the morning; the mothers stayed home and volunteered for the Church auxiliary, Girl Scouts, and PTA. My parents worked side-by-side into the evenings, my mother always poised behind a typewriter, a stove, or a sink.
Our house on Teasley Street would be Ira and Eva’s last add
ress, as they both—Ira in 1981 and Eva in 1995—would die in nearby hospitals. That was not the future they’d envisioned when they met in Detroit when Eva was fourteen and Ira eighteen. She was gangly and so self-conscious that she blushed if a boy so much as spoke to her. He had luscious dark curls and piercing eyes. A star of school plays and head of the debate team, Ira had grand plans—to be a Labor organizer, a crusader for the oppressed. Eva shared his idealism and would serve as a kindergarten teacher in an impoverished neighborhood. It was the Depression, and both believed a class uprising imminent.
Ira promised a way out of the apartment Eva had grown up in with her two sisters, parents, grandfather, and uncle over her father’s hardware store in downtown Detroit. Her grandfather and uncle, formal Russian men, had no tolerance for the noisy commotion of children, enforcing a household culture of silence. She remembered her uncle once kicking away a visiting toddler who tried to right herself from the floor by grabbing onto his leg. The silence deepened when my grandmother Gertrude’s favorite brother was killed in a streetcar accident. She went mute for a year.
Eva grew up accepting that the expression of any strong emotion was self-indulgent. And yet, she told me, “I was crazy about your father. He made me feel something.” Her family never forgave her for marrying my father. They regarded his birth defects as the outward manifestations of deeper mental deficiencies. That boy is meshuggeneh, they told her. They forbade her to go out with him. They told her that her sister Rose, who had no interest in dating, had to be married before her. From the beginning, it was too late; Ira had become my mother’s project, akin to the feral cats she took in but never succeeded at taming.
My father would blame his failure to realize his ambitions on his physical deformity. The city of Detroit would not let him into social work school, he said, because they told him clients would be put off by his hands. Even his own mother, Rebecca, favored his younger brother over him, he lamented, because Nathan with his pale eyes and soft blond curls was a beautiful physical specimen.
“Rebecca thinks that God gave me deformed hands to punish her,” he explained to me as we raced one Friday afternoon to pick my grandmother up at her house in Glendale and get her back to our house before sundown and the advent of Shabbos when Orthodox Judaism forbade riding in a car.
“My mother felt guilty for having enjoyed shtupping Sam,” my father said. “She thought my hands were God’s punishment.” Those misshapen hands represented a cosmic insult from which Ira never recovered. When children in the neighborhood stared and asked what had happened, he said, “God ran out of fingers by the time he got to me,” and if he was feeling more perverse, he’d add, “so Satan made my hands.”
Rebecca divorced Sam when Ira was twelve and Nathan eight. She could not abide his gambling, drinking, flagrant eating of traif, and general violation of the Jewish laws she and her parents held sacred. The brothers took sides—Ira cleaving to his maternal grandfather, who took him to shul every day and taught him the liturgy, Nathan siding with his father and embracing all his vices.
After my father fled Detroit for Arizona to escape the ragweed that gave him daily asthma attacks, my mother wrote him long letters every week vowing to join him. He tried to discourage her: “I’m not really solid husband and father material.” When she arrived in Phoenix, she found him ensconced in a by-the-week hotel, surrounded by prostitutes and poker players. As she walked down the hall of the hotel, a neighbor joked, “Oh, are you Zipporo’s girlfriend?” His neighbors had bestowed the nickname on him when, one day, he’d caught his member in his zipper. Fearing blood poisoning, he doused the cut, and just to make sure, his entire penis, with Merthiolate. The stinging caused him to run through the hotel halls, penis in hand, shrieking in pain.
My mother chased the prostitutes away and gave my father the pain medications she’d stockpiled for him. Soon afterward, they moved to California, fantasizing that Ira had only to knock on the door of the studios to be offered a job as a narrator. No one would have to look at a narrator’s hands. When that did not pan out, they started the insurance agency where my father’s oratorical gifts could be turned to sales. Periodically the fantasy of fame would resurface, and Ira would write a novelty song and try to get it produced (Oh the Easter rabbit thought he was a chicken so he laid a furry egg . . . and on for five verses and five ever more dysmorphic eggs).
After my parents married, La Crescenta attracted them with its claims as a health haven. Asylums, retreats, and sanctuaries for asthmatics, tuberculars, and mental patients abounded. Nearby in Montrose, at the Rock Haven Sanitarium, Marilyn Monroe’s mother was committed.
Unfortunately, by the mid-1950s, rather than providing the clean air the Chamber of Commerce’s brochures had promised, La Crescenta had some of the worst air in the country. It hung like grey sludge over the valley, its particles sticking to the hoods of our cars. In the back of my throat, I could taste metal. I just assumed it normal for breathing to hurt.
Our community also offered a congenial retreat for the far right. Nazis rallied at Hindenburg Park in the 1930s, and in 1964, George Lincoln Rockwell chose nearby Glendale, where Rebecca lived, as headquarters for the American Nazi Party. Within a few miles of our house, there were not one but two branch offices of the far-right John Birch Society. The editor of the local newspaper stirred up the populace daily with rumors of Communist spies hiding among us, and our neighbors built fallout shelters to protect themselves from the Russian attack to come. After purchasing the house on Teasley Street, but before moving in, my parents received threatening phone calls, suggesting that, as Jews, they would be happier living among their own kind.
In one of my mother’s ceaseless attempts to simulate normalcy, she bought my brothers linoleum flooring stamped with images of cowboys and Indians, horses rearing up, tomahawks and spurs, six-shooters, lariats, and ten-gallon hats. She covered our beds with pastel cotton chenille bedspreads dotted in orderly rows of protruding tufts. Eva had not anticipated that one of Paul’s nervous habits would be a tendency to unravel those tufts and stuff the threads up his nose, requiring her removal of them with tweezers.
In a concession to my father’s taste, our living room walls were painted an intense blue-green, a shade somewhere between turquoise and aqua, my father’s favorite color. On the wallpaper in the adjoining dining room, fanciful horses with bodies composed of sketchy loops of chalky pastel danced against a turquoise background. They leapt and twirled, the outlines of their bodies overlapping and bleeding color. I’d stare at them until my eyes blurred, until I could imagine myself made out of the same weightless ethereality.
The Finch house remained dark. Paul turned his attention to tracking the movement of some promising storm clouds. Ben came out of the bathroom, black comb in hand, fluffing the sides of his pomaded hair, honing his ducktail. He smelled like Brylcreem.
“What are you two up to, spying on the neighbors again?” Ben bellowed and scowled. “Someday they’re going to catch you and you’re not going to like what happens.”
“We’re not spying,” Paul said. “We’re observing phenomena . . . like scientists.”
“Paul was showing me how our house is backwards,” I said.
“Maybe their house is the one that’s backwards,” Ben said.
“Give me the binoculars. I want to look at my dog,” I said, this need having become urgent.
“All right, but just for a minute,” Paul said. “I’ve got to keep an eye on those clouds; they’re moving fast.”
I pointed the binoculars across the street at the copse of trees behind the Finches’ house that looked to me like a dog. He came into focus with his bushy head, small drooping tongue, four legs, and upright tail.
“Woof, woof, woof,” Ben teased.
I looked up.
“That’s just a bunch of trees,” he said. “There’s no dog.”
“There is too,” I said.
“Give me those binoculars,” Ben said, “so I can see the woof woof too.
”
Ben moved toward me to take the binoculars. To protect them, Paul lunged. As their hands met the binoculars at once, someone pinched my fingers. I yelped. Louder than the pain required, loud enough to perform my protest.
“You’re a bully, Ben. Give them back,” Paul said.
“Why should I?” Ben taunted.
As Paul and Ben tussled over the binoculars and I struggled to hold onto them, I yelped again. Even louder. A cry of alarm to rouse my protector.
Ira came running, which is to say, he limped into the room as quickly as he could, leaving a trail of pre-breakfast Mallomar cookie crumbs in his wake. He had decided on the heavy underwear, and the buttons of his long johns popped open across his belly. He had long since lost the trim physique he’d had when my mother married him, and carried well over 200 pounds on his on his five-foot-five frame, most of it around his middle. “What’s going on?” he shouted, black eyes blazing. “Who hurt her?” My brothers glowered at each other.
“I didn’t do anything,” Paul said.
“Oh, please,” Ben said, “nobody hurt your precious baby.” He said it in a high-pitched voice, mocking me and my father.
“Give her back the binoculars,” my father said.
“She’s a spoiled brat,” Ben said, storming out the front door, the screen door slamming behind him. He felt independent because he could stick out his thumb and hitchhike.
“Don’t leave my house when I’m talking to you,” Ira shouted. “You think it’s okay to show no respect to your father? Going to see your pachuco friends?”
“C’mon,” Ben shouted from outside, “be serious.” He was bigger and stronger than my father and they both knew it.
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