While Rebecca raked, I sat in my sixth grade classroom listening to the wind howl against the windows. My teacher, a gentle, thoughtful man who let me write poetry while everyone else did math, stood before us in his Brooks Brothers pin-striped oxford cloth shirt, a figure of calm and measured male authority.
In the classroom next door sat my new best friend, Wendy. Since the summer before, Wendy and I had traveled everywhere as a duo, through the halls of school, to the miniature golf course and the bowling alley, to the stores of Montrose where we tried on shoes and ate donuts and gossiped about our classmates. Though the daughter of a pastor, Wendy never sought to convert me or warn me, as did other classmates, of the Rapture to come.
Many nights she ate dinner at our house where she found my father’s farting at the dinner table, or pulling her hair, or singing his improvised off-color songs, wonderfully freeing.
“At your house it feels like anything could happen anytime,” Wendy said.
My grandmother’s project that day was futile; she’d rake the leaves from her lawn onto the sidewalk, and from the sidewalk into the gutter, and the wind would blow them back again, as even more leaves descended from the trees that bordered the street. I can see her still—standing in front of the three bright red steps of her stoop, a rusted rake in her hands. She’s wearing her usual costume: a short-sleeved, small-repeat-patterned viscose dress that hangs loosely over her four-foot-eleven frame, stockings, and a slip despite the heat.
If my grandmother couldn’t do anything about the weather, at least she could counter its most destructive effects by pitting her own industriousness against the chaos at foot in the universe. Idleness and disorder, my grandmother hated them. How could she have been the one who raised my father? A Vilde Chaya, she called him. A wild animal.
Cursing one of the trees shedding most heavily on her lawn, Rebecca noticed a strange woman approach wearing a suit and hat despite the hot weather. She looked as if she might be on her way to church.
“Do you think Glendale would be a good place for my sick mother to live?” she asked. Another woman appeared out of nowhere and announced that she’d discovered a bag of money on the street. According to the woman, a note inside the bag revealed that the money was being sent to avoid paying income taxes. The person sending it was a criminal, my grandmother concluded, and its intended recipient probably a crook as well. The two ladies concurred.
That was the critical moment at which my grandmother felt lured into a conspiracy with the women, the moment at which I’ve always imagined myself intervening.
“Grandma, no,” I say, “go back into your house and lock the door; it’s a trick! You know better than to get mixed up with goyishe gonifs. Don’t trust them.”
But I was not there to protect her. I was in school, keeping the secret of the enemas safe, even from Wendy.
Head swimming from the heat, my grandmother knew she should call the police and report what she and her new comrades had found. Instead, Rebecca invited the two women in for a cold drink so they could discuss what to do.
“She could have gotten out of it,” my father said later, in one of his endless rehashes. “They didn’t have a gun to her head.” I don’t think my grandmother felt endangered so much as important. She finally had something to do besides watching her daily soap operas and anticipating her weekend canasta game with Ben.
The three women sat in Rebecca’s living room and drank the store brand orangeade that she schlepped home in cases in her little metal shopping basket on wheels when it went on sale at the Dales market down the street. She had to be sure of never being caught without something sweet to stir her Metamucil into.
If it hadn’t been so hot, she told us later, if the wind hadn’t addled her brain, if it all hadn’t happened so fast—everything around her these days seemed to be happening faster than the pace at which she could absorb it. One of the women suggested calling her boss to get his counsel. He was apparently a very important man, the head of a big company. Ah, a macher, my grandmother must have thought, a smart man who bought and sold properties and supervised other people, a man like her father had been.
The woman pretended to call her boss on the phone. She reported back that the three women could split the money if they proved they were able to “handle money and not spend it in ways that attracted too much attention.” Did Rebecca imagine making a donation to B’nai B’rith just large enough to win approval but not so large as to attract undue attention? Handle money? My grandmother must have bristled. Hadn’t she nursed along a small inheritance for years, and lived off the income from her parents’ remaining rental properties in Detroit, with enough left over to bail out my father?
One of the women left and went through a pantomime of going to the boss’s house and being approved to receive her share. Then it was Rebecca’s turn. The two women escorted her to her bank, where she withdrew her entire life savings and put it into an envelope. Then she got into the car with them. One sat beside her in the back seat, Rebecca’s money on the seat between them.
I tried to imagine how my grandmother could have even momentarily let that envelope out of her sight. This was the same woman who gave Joey and me exactly one dollar each for Chanukah, crisp new one dollar bills that she kept in a brand new white envelope in her purse.
They drove up to a yellow clapboard house and promised to wait for Rebecca in the car. She rang the bell, no answer; knocked on the door, no one came. And then the story she had believed—the chance meetings, the money discovered, the great man—dissolved in a miasma of shame and self-pity as she realized the house was abandoned, her newfound partners gone. She opened the envelope and found her life savings replaced by play money.
Meanwhile, at Rebecca’s front door, Paul had turned away, having given up on his visit with her.
I had come home for lunch when my father got the call. The sound of his agitated voice brought my mother and me running into the office. I watched as he blanched and then flushed. White and then red, and white again.
“What happened?” I asked.
I could hear my grandmother wailing on the other end of the phone.
“They’re gonifs. You’ve given your money to gonifs,” my father said. “What have you done?” he shouted.
I felt nauseous. The possibility of my leaving the house, of returning to school that day, even to a teacher I adored, even to Wendy, receded.
And then the shift: “Did they hurt you? Are you in pain anywhere?” He sounded solicitous.
And the shift back: “You fool!” he said. “How could you let this happen?” As she sobbed on the phone, he harangued her in Yiddish, and then in English, a pleading, desperate harangue. “How could you be so stupid, so gullible? How could you give away your money without even calling me? Without calling Nathan? What are we going to do with you? Do we need to put you in a home?”
The police told my father that Rebecca had been the victim of an old con scheme called the Pigeon Drop. In my father’s mind, there had always been people out to get us—the ticket takers who wiped their asses with their hands, the waiters who spat in food, the car mechanics who made brakes grab, TV repairmen who stole tubes, Sparkletts water men who delivered off bottles of water. And the arrogant, upright doctors who denied him the dose of barbiturates his unusual body really needed and could never diagnose what was wrong with us. Now this included criminals who had attacked his mother.
In my nightmares, well-dressed church ladies with nefarious motives and guns hidden in their pocketbooks replaced the Nazis. My grandmother had nightmares too. She dreamed they came back for her diamonds, for her sealskin coat—came back to silence her. They forced their way into her house, led by the phantom man of the yellow clapboard house.
My father could not let go of what had happened. When his psychic engine wasn’t running on impulse, it was running on regret and recrimination. At the lunch table on a Saturday afternoon, he stuffed food into his mouth and ruminated. Ruminated and stuffed. Ruminate
d and stuffed and blamed. Paul, my mother, Ben, Nathan, himself.
“It’s not that he cares so much about Rebecca,” Paul said, interrupting my father’s tirade and turning to me and my mother. “It’s only the money.”
“Daddy loves Grandma,” I said. “You just want to start a fight.”
“He’s the one who likes to fight. Have you heard the way he yells at her? Does that sound like love?”
“I’ve had just about enough of your contempt,” my father said.
“What’s the matter?” Paul said. “Do you feel like you’re going to have to take care of her, when you still need her to take care of you?”
My grandmother’s falling victim to the bunco scheme only proved what my father had dreaded acknowledging: Rebecca was getting oyver-botl. “This could never have happened to her a few years ago; she used to be so sharp,” he said to Nathan. “This was not something I could have conceived of happening to Mama.”
“Ira, old people get taken in like this all the time. They were experts, con artists. She got overheated. We just need to keep an eye on her.”
Even before the bunco scheme, my grandmother had been getting confused. One morning she called to report she’d heard noises in the second bedroom, the bedroom she would not pay to heat. Whenever Joey and I went to visit Grandma, we’d tiptoe down the hall, stand on the threshold of that cold dark room, and peer inside it, too timid to enter. It smelled of stale sachet and soured talcum powder. On its walls rested massive bronze-framed, sepia-toned portraits of her dead parents, their expressions severe.
Rebecca walked into the room to investigate the noises she’d heard and discovered her parents who’d been dead for over forty years, come to visit. All dressed up and sitting on the bed.
“I’ve missed you, Tate,” she cried. “Why has it been so long?”
“They looked very well,” she explained to us, sitting in our living room a few days later, nursing a cup of Postum. Her mother had died of old age and dementia; her father had been struck by a train and killed when Rebecca was in her thirties. But here they were, magically restored. They looked the way they did when she was young, she said—before her own marriage and the birth of her two sons, and her shameful divorce—looked like they did when she still lived at home. She felt so happy, safer than she had felt in forty years.
They insisted she go with them, and she did not hesitate. She hurried out to the living room to get her sealskin coat from the back of the moth-repellent-infused closet; she needed a winter coat since she assumed the three of them would be going back to Detroit. By the time she returned, they had vanished. She remembered then that they were dead and grieved as if her grief were brand new.
One Shabbos, my grandmother forgot to tear the toilet paper. Jewish law decrees that on the Sabbath, one must not work, and the rabbis say that to tear is to work. For her whole adult life, among my grandmother’s Friday afternoon chores was the pre-Shabbos tearing of the toilet paper. She’d estimate how much she would need, always being frugal, never self-indulgent, and then leave a stack of neatly folded squares on top of the toilet tank.
After Shabbos had ended, she called and told my father.
“I was sitting on the pot and had nothing to wipe with,” she cried, stuck between two horrors: unmediated contact with the foul container of the body, and breaking the laws of the Sabbath.
The bunco scheme suggested that my grandmother’s dementia had escalated; it was one thing to forget about the toilet paper and another to give away all her money. The capacity for malevolent decline that my father saw everywhere had manifested in his mother’s brain.
The destabilizing forces of chaos and destruction were also manifesting in the larger world. Two months after the con women stole my grandmother’s money, an indeterminate time after dementia had begun to kill off the cells of her brain, another criminal assassinated President Kennedy. Just before we lined up to go back into the classroom after lunch, my teacher calmly announced the news. One boy in my class jeered and whistled. I looked around and could see that others were pleased but had better manners than to show it overtly.
Ira and Eva had been Adlai Stevenson loyalists. My father had wrangled a seat at the 1960 Democratic convention as a Stevenson delegate and had come home accusing JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, “a known anti-Semite,” of rigging the nomination. Since the election, JFK’s eloquence and wit, his intellect and energy and youthful vigor, had won my parents over.
Two days later, our family sat in the living room together and watched on TV as Dallas police transferred the presumed lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, weaselly and thin, from one car to another. A portly man wearing a suit and hat stepped forward and shot Oswald. I watched Lee Harvey Oswald’s thin body buckle and his mouth fling open at the pain. They ran the clip over and over again, in real time, and then in slow motion. We watched it again and again, as if only by repeated viewings could we believe our own eyes.
The assassination made my father’s global paranoia seem justified.
“We’re being conned,” he said. “This had to have been an inside job. LBJ had to be in on it, or maybe it was a Mafia hit. Bobby Kennedy really pissed off the Mob. Or the CIA or the Teamsters. They all had it in for JFK. They conveniently got rid of the shooter so he couldn’t talk.”
This con job was even more expert than the one that had taken in my grandmother. As I watched the footage, everything around me lost its settled shape. Strange things were happening not just to my body and my family, but to the whole country. If I couldn’t trust the government, if I couldn’t trust what I saw with my own eyes on TV, who or what could I trust? How could I tell what was real or who to believe? We were being asked to believe what seemed incredible, that a single unstrung man had killed the President, and another had stepped out of the shadows and killed him while police stood by.
In the days afterward, I watched Bobby Kennedy, drawn and pale and shaky at his brother’s funeral, holding Jackie’s hand. Then I wrote my own poem in tribute to the late president, and my teacher read it aloud to my classmates, nearly all the children of Republicans. My teacher praised my efforts and the sentiments; my classmates snickered, unimpressed. I felt proud and defiant. At twelve, I was getting the knack of writing elegies to honor my assassinated heroes; I’d written one for civil rights leader Medgar Evers just six months earlier.
FOUR FATHOMS FIVE
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Screw Nature
Rebecca was treating herself with Vaseline, her all-purpose miracle ointment. It softened skin, shielded wounds from water, greased the works. She stuck it up her nose with a Q-tip to get the dried “boogies” out—and recommended I do the same—she rubbed it into her withered hands each night and slept with them encased in white, cotton gloves. Vazeline, she called it, as if it had a z in it instead of an s. But in the months since the pigeon drop, she had been putting it somewhere else.
Vaseline was not an unfamiliar substance to me either, of course. Every night, my mother reached her fingertip into the large glass jar that sat on our bathroom counter so she could dab a clot of it on the rectal tip of my enema tube before inserting that tip into me.
My grandmother told herself that she just had an irritation; it wasn’t as if she could look. And if she couldn’t see that place herself, she certainly didn’t want anyone else looking. It was that locus of torture, where scheisse, that toxic, dirtiest of all the world’s impure substances, struggled to get out. Now the blood was one more shameful effluent confirming the body’s corruption. So she put globs of Vaseline in her rectum every time she saw red in the toilet, every time she felt a stab of pain. Bigger and bigger globs of it to try to stanch the bleeding.
When my father told me the story afterward, his mouth pressed a little too close to my ear, the details accounted a little too viscerally, I felt as if I were trapped there in Rebecca’s bathroom with the both of them, my grandmother’s remedy going not into her, but injected straight from my father’s voice into me
.
This time, the Vaseline failed to perform its miracles. When Rebecca finally allowed the doctor to put his clean, shiny scope up her, her rectum was blooming with cancer. “She’ll need to see a surgeon,” he told my father, who had been pacing the waiting room, sighing and pulling at his thick black curls, “but it may be too late.”
My first cousin Joey and I sat on the covered lawn swing on the grounds of Temple Hospital, where we had been consigned for “some fresh air.” Joey was six months older than me; at the end of the summer he would turn thirteen. Inside, the surgeons worked on my grandmother. Though I only got to see Joey on the weekends, we talked on the phone for hours nearly every night, whispering, giggling, sharing secrets.
If my father had had his way, I would not have been on the swing, I would have been at his side, taking it all in—the anguish in the atmosphere, the surgeon’s pronouncement that my grandmother’s condition was hopeless, the refusal to accept, the sobbing that ensued. For once my mother and Aunt Sonia had prevailed, and I was outside on the lawn with Joey, being buffered like a child.
The grounds of the hospital were well manicured with roped-off gardens of roses; the swing we sat on, ancient, its floral chambray faded from the sun and covered with leaves and tree pollen. Joey was using his pent-up energy to keep us in motion, one foot—shod in its usual high-topped black Ked—pushing us off from the ground every time our momentum flagged. The swing’s rusty chains squeaked as we swung over a big rolling lawn; birds sang and a sprinkler twisted somewhere in the distance.
A strand of hair in the side of my mouth, my shoulders hunched, I held my arms in defensively so they stayed out of contact with the bird droppings splattered on the swing’s splintered armrests. I could only bite my hair, rather than the preferred fingernails, because I suspected my hands might have come into contact with those droppings. The shedding wood also posed risks: if a splinter punctured my flesh, even if the splinter was tiny, and the wound it created nearly invisible, even though my father had already subjected me to a near overdose of booster shots, I could get tetanus and die. Our proximity to the hospital and my anxiety over what was happening to Rebecca made the prospects of a fatal disease feel especially imminent. Remembering my father’s warning, I opened and closed my jaw repeatedly to reassure myself of my lockjaw-free state.
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