Just then Paul noticed some signs of new activity in the Finches’ house across the street. “Quick! Give ‘em back, I’m missing it,” he said. He tried to twist the binoculars out of my hand.
“Owww,” I said. “You’re hurting me. Daddy!”
My father screamed, “Paul, goddamn you, I told you to let her have the binoculars. You’re always making trouble.”
“They’re my binoculars, Mommy bought them for me. Mom! The baby always gets whatever she wants. There’s no justice in this family.” He glared at Ira.
My mother had come into the room and was struggling to hold my father back by the arm.
My father raised his poor approximation of a fist in the direction of Paul’s face. “If your mother wasn’t always babying you, I’d make a real man out of you.” Paul put up his arm in defense, and my father lunged forward and struck it. Ira rubbed his hand. “You hurt my hand,” he said, eyes darkening further in rage.
“You hurt your own hand,” Paul said.
“Stop!” my mother said, grabbing her chest. Eva’s heart fluttered whenever we fought. “Just stop before you give me a heart attack.”
A somatic complaint usually could call a halt to any emotional display, but this time it was too late to contain my father. He slapped Paul on the head. Paul pushed him back. My heart pounded and the room spun and I knew this was all my fault. I had set my father off, and he was about to kill my brother, and my mother was about to collapse with a heart attack, and I’d given her one more reason to hate me. I started to cry, then shut my eyes, put my hands over my ears, and screamed my earth-shattering scream. The one that constituted a spectacle. The one that often made the neighbors call and complain.
Everyone froze in their tracks. My mother held her chest.
“All right,” my mother said. “Enough. Enough. If any of our neighbors were trying to have a nice Saturday, we’ve ruined it for them now. Is this how your mother taught you to observe Shabbos, Ira?”
“He hurt her,” my father said.
“She doesn’t look hurt to me,” my mother said.
Paul buried his head in my mother’s chest. “I didn’t do anything, Mommy,” he said. “He’s always picking on me.” Paul turned around to face me and twisted his head from side to side as if to burrow deeper into my mother’s body. He smiled up at me, triumphant in her favor. She allowed his head to remain, put her hand on his shoulder, but did not fully embrace him.
Paul was her child and I was my father’s. I cried harder.
She turned to me, “Do you enjoy getting your father all worked up against your brother this way? Do you like it when he gets agitated?”
“I just wanted to see the dog,” I sobbed.
“Now watch, she’s going to get totally hysterical and put on a show,” my mother said. When I cried, my mother described me in the third person. She shrugged Paul off her body.
“Ira, you know you get upset when you have low blood sugar. Come on, and I’ll make you some breakfast.” They started to leave the room. My father turned back.
“Are you bleeding?” he said.
My father’s question stopped my crying. Bleeding! Was I bleeding? Did I have an invisible puncture wound that was going to give me tetanus? Were the binoculars rusty? Were my brothers’ hands dirty? I couldn’t remember how hard my finger had been pinched but my father’s alarm made everything in my body hurt. Was this the way tetanus felt? My heart throbbed in my chest; my head ached from screaming and crying. I held up both arms and hands so my father could examine them. What I really wanted was for my mother to hold me against her body the way she’d held Paul.
“Give her the binoculars back,” he said to Paul, who handed them to me.
“Daddy, you can see the dog in the trees, right?” I said. I always took my father’s side, and he always took mine. I needed a show of loyalty, a confirmation that we shared the same reality, even if no one else in the family saw what we saw.
“Of course, baby,” he said. But he wasn’t looking; he was following my mother into the kitchen. Now all I had left was that dog. I pointed the binoculars at the tree, and couldn’t make out anything but leaves and branches. My tears flooded the eye piece. I turned the knob until the image went out of focus. I willed the dog back into existence. He had seemed so vibrant, his head distinctive, his rib cage moving in and out with the movement of the wind, his tail upright. But he was gone. I was getting old. The trees were becoming only the trees.
Present, Bedroom, 2:30 a.m.
Coming out of a dream, I feel my father’s hand press down on my wrist, implore me not to leave him. I shift in bed, come to fully, and the phantom hand becomes my husband’s, the bed our bed, the house our own. I recite the facts of the present that blur in the middle of the night. The house on Teasley Street where I grew up has been lost to foreclosure, and my brother Paul forced to move into a cheap apartment. He will never forgive me and Ben for not buying the house for him. Ben and his wife live in the San Fernando Valley. Their adult daughter, my niece, lives near them.
My parents are both dead. Gone. In my waking life, that is the way they stay. At night they come back. My father roams the halls of Teasley Street in my dreams, faded like a photocopy when the ink is running low, perpetually stuck in the process of being erased. He’s confused, disoriented; he wants something from me he cannot articulate.
My mother, perhaps no vaguer in death than she was in life, is the one I want something from. In my dreams, she prepares elaborate meals for my brothers that I am not allowed to eat. Sometimes I approach her, hemorrhaging from an open wound. She’s embarrassed by the spectacle of the blood. “Put a Band-Aid on it,” she says. “Don’t make a fuss.”
She said nearly the same words to me at my father’s funeral: “Please don’t make a scene and embarrass me.” Any scene, beyond the obvious one my father was making by being laid out dead in a coffin, would be my fault.
In my middle-of-the-night cosmology there is no afterlife, no god. Not Rebecca’s fickle, His-name-never-to-be-spoken-aloud patriarch, not the neighbors’ boyishly handsome savior. Although I’m not sure I like my parents being quite as present as they become in the middle of the night, I cannot bear to think of them as forever gone either.
Tonight I have dreamed again that my father, beside me on his bed, has pinned my wrist with one hand as he whisper-shouts about the conspiracy between my mother and Uncle Nathan and a slew of doctors. I have felt once more that vertiginous swirling and sinking as I fluctuate between longing to trust him and not wanting to believe that what he’s saying could be true.
After years of being with one crazy man after another, telling myself they weren’t really crazy crazy, or knowing that they were crazy and trying but failing to save them, I have married a man more like my mother: stable, rational, dependable. This is my husband’s body in the bed next to me, not my father’s. This is a body I associate with safety, with pleasure, with love. Like my mother, my husband is not prone to the excessive displays of affection that, like my father, I crave. Still, in the middle of the night, as I mold my body against his, even in his sleep, he reaches out to hold me.
CHAPTER THREE
My Bad Habit
As my father predicted, Roy’s was only my first death, and I didn’t have to wait long for the next. A sweltering night a few weeks before the first day of kindergarten. I already dreaded it, having watched Paul go off to school most mornings pale and trembling. He regarded the spanking new Monte Vista Elementary a prison to which my mother heartlessly committed him every morning and which he could never count on surviving till 3:15 p.m.
Our family in the backyard, drinking lemonade at 9:00 p.m. We were congregated outside because my father had deemed it stuffy indoors, stuffiness a phenomenon as much existential as atmospheric. Ira could condemn an environment as stuffy for any variety of causes: an irritant or vapor in the air, mold, mildew, my Uncle Nathan’s lingering cigarette smoke in a carpet or drape, stale popcorn in a movie theater lobby,
any house in which old, sick people resided or—God forbid—had died.
The stagnant air of a summer night in La Crescenta definitely qualified. While my father could splash Lysol and Clorox on any surface he deemed germ-ridden, which had resulted in our toilet seat’s being bleached colorless, stuffiness was not so easily defeated.
“I can’t breathe in here,” my father had said, grasping at his throat and prompting the entire family’s exodus. Stuffiness prevailed despite the two four-foot tall gray metal fans, which I regarded as two kindly robots that whirred all summer long in the living room and across the hall from the bedrooms in an attempt to cool us off. They required we shout to be heard over them, which wasn’t a problem since shouting was our usual form of communication.
In the backyard, the atmosphere had just begun to cool, the smog to lift, and the crickets to chirp when my mother heard the phone ring. All three phones lived in the office, with their long cords coiled and tangled around my father’s ancient desk, into which my brothers and I had relentlessly carved doodles.
An ominous feeling came into my stomach. When the phone rang that late, it could only mean something bad had happened: car wreck, home robbery, pipes burst in a bathroom, fire in a kitchen, roof blown off in the wind. We were in the bad-things-happening business. His anxiety made my father the perfect salesman for insurance. He could conjure up all manner of bad things happening.
The ringing stopped. My parents went into the house and my father limped out alone.
“Long distance,” he proclaimed stentoriously. Long distance meant Detroit. My mother spoke to her family once a week on Sunday mornings, the calls stilted, my mother never forgiven for marrying Ira. Her family waited for that germ of a catastrophe he carried within him to eventually take us down.
My father went back inside and then returned immediately. He proclaimed the news. “Your grandmother Gertrude has passed away. Her heart.” That ominous feeling inhabited me. The air felt sullen and I could smell acrid metallic remnants of ozone. The crickets’ chirping suddenly sounded off-key. My stomach turned over and over. Did I feel bad because I already knew this was going to happen, or had my bad feeling made it happen, or had I only felt bad after I heard what had happened? It was so easy to become mixed up about cause and effect, before and after, the connection between thinking and dreaming, willing and acting, between what was inside my own head and what was in my father’s.
God was punishing us; my grandmother Rebecca had taught me that God stood poised to punish Jews for every minor failure to perform His commandments. It had to be my fault; what had I done this time? The “bad habit.”
A weekday afternoon earlier that week. I crawled into bed while my parents worked in the office. Jeannie, one of the sexy women from the Jewish Center whose office help my father demanded, in addition to my mother’s, had come over. I could hear her screeching and laughing at my father’s jokes, his potching her on the tuchas as she walked by him in her bright red capris. I would take a nap; yes, that’s what I was doing. My mother always encouraged me to be like the other normal children in the neighborhood and take a daily nap. But as soon as the smooth cool satin edge of my yellow wool blanket touched my cheek, the sensation transferred immediately to that other part of me between my legs.
I put the satin edge inside my legs, turned over onto my stomach, and gripped the blanket tight against me. I tried to hide what I was doing by pulling the rest of the blanket over me, to shut my eyes and not move, so that no one could see the pleasure inhabiting me. If I shut the bedroom door, it would look suspicious; no one in my family ever shut a door. My mother could come into the bedroom to check on me at any minute. I tried to move as little as possible, but my body overrode me.
With the blanket’s edge between my legs, I beat my legs together, faster and faster, more and more furiously, pulling more and more of the scratchy wool part of the blanket against me. Lost in the sensation, carried by the movement of my legs, I forgot to worry about how I looked, about whether my mother would be fooled into believing this was a nap. Waves of pleasure washed through the center of me. What could be so bad about this? Could it hurt me somehow? There were so many things that my father said could hurt me. If I didn’t pee as soon as I felt the urge, he said my bladder would burst, and this felt like having to pee; could it burst my bladder too?
My mother came into the room and knew immediately that I was not taking a nap. She walked over to the bed, stood over me, and pulled my hands away from under me. My body called out to my hands; all I wanted was to keep touching myself, to keep making those waves of pleasure inhabit me.
“Get up,” she said. “You need to stop doing this. This is a very bad habit.” I went back to my carrot seed record, to my toys, but I could smell myself on my hands, I could feel the yellow wool fibers on my fingers. The space between my legs called out to my hands more persistently, I rubbed my legs together without using my hands, I leaned in and rubbed against the corner of my table, the corner of my bed. But nothing felt as good as my yellow blanket. It wanted to be between my legs as much as I wanted it there.
There was something bad about my body; there was something bad about what I did with my body. My mother’s body must not have been anything like mine or she would have understood.
And now doing the bad habit had brought on us the wrath of God and killed my grandmother. A grandmother I had only met once when my mother’s family came on the train to visit. I had sat on her lap and pressed my body against the shelf of breast that extended from her neck to her waist. I’d followed the thick braid that wrapped round and round the top of her head with my eyes, amazed that I could not locate the beginning or ending of that one seemingly infinite loop.
We all went back into the house then; I needed to see my mother. The news on the phone had blanched the color from her face. I followed her into the bedroom, though she did not acknowledge my presence. Loss had rendered me invisible to her. I watched as Death threw her down on the bed, curled her up in a fetal position, convulsed her body in sobs. It was going to dissolve her and me along with her.
“Mommy,” I said. “What’s wrong?” I knew, of course, I knew, but I just needed to hear the reassurance of her voice.
“How can you ask that?” she said. “My momma . . .” Unable to complete the sentence, she sobbed deep, impenetrable sobs that felt as if they could break her in two, break me in two.
“Just leave me alone,” she said, her voice a sharp blade breaking through a watery surface, confirming my culpability.
My mother remained curled up on the bed, in the dark, from that night until the next afternoon. Until that moment, death in people had been confined to Roy whose image I felt responsible for rehearsing lest he be lost forever to me. Now I understood that even mothers could die. Mother-loss was a disease that spread through my mother’s body, blighted her from the inside out. Filled her with some foreign material. From my grandmother’s sick heart in Detroit to my mother’s grieving heart to mine, mother-loss was contagious. Death could make mothers disappear.
And I understood instantly that my love for my own mother, which I’d believed to be singular, special, charmed, was not. I loved my mother, my mother loved her mother, and that mother had died.
My mother emerged from the bedroom the next day wearing a somber gray sheath dress. Circles of rouge congealed in blotches over the unnatural pallor of her cheeks. I can still see her leaning over the low broiler shelf in our kitchen, smoke in her face, fanning the flames off three T-bone steaks, gray and shriveling, shrinking within their rim of fat. With a large fork, she turned the steaks over as they spat and kicked grease into her face. Uncle Nathan had gone to pick up Rebecca, who would move in to take care of us. Rebecca kept kosher and would not cook traif meat for our dinner. So my mother’s parting act was to feed us.
“Be good for Grandma,” she said, producing a dry kiss. “You know she doesn’t put up with any trouble.” Her body felt stiffer than ever, as if she’d steeled herself from
the inside out against her own grief. Then she was gone to get on a plane to Detroit for the funeral.
When I got out of bed the next morning, something besides my mother was missing. It was me, the reflection of me in the large square mirror over my mother’s dresser. The mirror in which I used to look at myself next to her had been blacked out with a cloth. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and there, the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet was also covered. I flew from mirror to mirror then—the mirror behind the door of the hall closet, even the small pane of mirrored glass on the front of my mother’s upright piano—all covered.
My grandmother watched me bounce from one covered surface to the next.
“What! You’re so vain you need to look at yourself all the time?” Rebecca spewed the words, digressed into Yiddish, and then surfaced in English again. “You don’t need to admire yourself when your grandmother has just died,” she said. I could only imagine what Rebecca would do if she discovered me doing the bad habit.
I found my father in the office, puzzling over one of his own notes from the day before. My mother usually stood over his shoulder and translated his writing for him.
“Jeannie’s coming over to help me,” he said. He sounded worked up. My father said that my mother was regal with her long neck and broad, square shoulders. But Jeannie was one of the sexy women my father favored. They wore pedal pushers and bright coral lipstick, and screamed at his jokes, and ate with their fingers. They had honeyed East Coast accents and showed off their painted toes in golden sandals. Their breasts looked like ice cream cones planted upside down on their chests.
Eva wore what she called “tailored” dresses and never left the house without stockings on. She only owned one tube of lipstick. She had no patience for women who indulged in frivolous activities like card games and shopping and gossip. She hated the women who giggled and flirted with my father but lacked the power to banish them from our house.
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