“He checked himself into the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara for a head-to-toe workup. Your father loved head-to-toe workups,” my mother said. The more the doctors denied that anything was wrong with him, the more the woman’s offending hand swelled in his mind, her finger huge and taunting, sharp as a knife, aimed at his vulnerable internal organs. Whatever the doctors said, he knew he had been violated.
Finally, my father wound up at the Beverly Hills office of a cranky old orthopedist. The doctor took another chest X-ray and announced that my father’s rib had been “knocked off the breastbone.” He put him in a chest-stabilizing corset. The treatment afterward consisted of my mother’s bathing and powdering my father’s chest every day before swaddling him like a baby in it.
“It’ll take a few months to get better,” the doctor said. “Trust me, Ira, this will do the trick; just give it the tincture of time.”
“So was it true? Was his rib knocked off the breastbone?” I asked my mother.
“I don’t know if that’s even a real condition,” she said. “His rib might have been bruised or inflamed. I think the doctor just understood what your father needed to get better. He gave him a diagnosis that sounded dramatic. Your father is very susceptible to the placebo effect.”
“So you don’t believe there was anything really wrong with him?”
“Mit gornisht,” she said. Apparently the doctor had found a placebo with the right metaphorical weight. A rib knocked off the breastbone provided a vivid image of violent injury, yet Ira could also picture the process of its mending. It freed his hypochondriacal fixations from the narrative they got bound up in and fixed them to a story with a happy ending. After a few months of wearing the brace, he announced that the rib had melded back into position; he could feel it.
My mother explained that she and Ira celebrated his recovery by having long-deferred sex.
“My diaphragm had been sitting in the medicine cabinet for so long it had a hole in it,” my mother said. “And that’s how you were conceived.”
On the heels of a breakdown, Ira’s sperm slipped through that tear and found her egg, and the combination became me.
My mother laughed and bit into another piece of chocolate. If my father hadn’t gone nuts, her diaphragm wouldn’t have sat around, and if it hadn’t sat around, it wouldn’t have torn, and if it hadn’t torn, I never would have been born. So, in a sense, my father’s insanity was implicated in my very origins. It had spawned me.
This time, apparently none of the doctors had found the metaphor that could contain Ira’s free-ranging sense of disease. Nevertheless, his obsession finally settled into a couple of specific loci, his lower right abdomen and his penis. He never took a hand off one or the other of them.
In the spring of ninth grade, my English class read Shakespeare. “Ask Daddy to help you with your homework,” my mother prodded. “It’ll get his mind off his problems. You know, he’s very good at Shakespeare.” The tragedies had always called out to him—the poetry, the grandeur, the betrayals, the pageantry, people done in by their own fatal flaws, lots of blood on the stage, and scarcely anyone getting out alive.
I brought my homework into the living room, where my father paced as my mother ironed. The smell of the steam infusing the cotton fibers filled the room. There was already a foot-high stack of white handkerchiefs on the board. Ira would take a new one whenever he needed to blow his nose or wipe his mouth.
I sat on the sofa and began to read a section of Romeo and Juliet aloud. “I don’t understand all the words, Daddy,” I said. “Daddy, help me, you’re good at this.”
My mother coaxed, “Ira, help her. You’ve always been a whiz at Shakespeare.”
This captured my father’s attention enough to get him to stop pacing and to settle in on the sofa next to me. He was wearing Jockey shorts with the leg holes stretched out so that his floppy testicles peeked out on one side of the pouch. I tried not to look, even as I could not look away, drawn to and repelled by my father’s overexposed, overripe body. I had begun to blame that body—much as he did—for all the troubles besetting my family. If I avoided his bottom half, then my gaze could get stuck on his hands, whose appearance seemed odder and more disturbing the older I got. For years I had accepted them as normal, but with adolescence, the forked nails, and the way the bones protruded, as if trying to find their way to a normal architecture, made me queasy. I’d look at his contorted fingers and feel as if I might as well have been looking at his genitals, and if I moved up from his hands, there were his always too-invasive eyes.
“Romeo, O, Romeo / Wherefore art thou Romeo?” I read. Distracted, my father inserted his hand into the waistband of his underwear and massaged a two-inch area on the lower right side of his abdomen. Massaged is probably not the right word exactly—demonically, relentlessly, and yet unconsciously, he dug his fingernails into his flesh until he bore a red hole in the skin. As blood started to ooze out of the wound, my mother shouted at him.
“For god’s sakes, leave yourself be, Ira.”
“I’m not doing anything,” he said calmly. “Can’t you see it’s the parasites?” Often the more insane the content of my father’s words, the more elevated and refined his presentation.
“What parasites, Daddy?” I asked.
“You’re encouraging him,” my mother said, holding the iron aloft in her hand.
“Why don’t you look for yourself, Ev, if you’re so certain I’m imagining things? A good wife would believe her husband, stand by him, but not you. No, you have to discount me.”
“Oh, please,” my mother said. “Do you think anyone else in the world would have the patience with you that I’ve had?” She pressed down hard with the iron until it sizzled.
My father got up from the sofa and returned with the magnifying glass he used to read the fine print on insurance policies. He stood before my mother, thrusting his massive belly too close to her, and attempted to hand her the glass.
“Ira, get away from me. You’re going to get this hot iron on you if you’re not careful, and then you’ll have a real problem.”
“If you would just look with an open mind, you would see them crawling,” he said.
My mother turned her head and refused to take the glass. “Just stop,” she said, slamming the iron down in an upright position on the board. “I can’t take any more of this. Please just help your daughter read her Shakespeare.”
“Your mother’s never liked to face reality,” my father said. “She always turns away when things get unpleasant. Shuts her eyes to the truth. Go ahead,” he shouted. “Retreat. Be an ostrich sticking your head in the ground instead of helping your husband when he needs you.”
“You keep finding new ways to break my heart,” my mother said, pulling the iron’s cord out of the wall, and turning her back on him.
My father walked over and held the glass out to me. He smiled, full of sudden charm. I could not turn away from my father. And what if he was right? There was some truth in what he said; my mother could be oblivious, refusing to see whatever she didn’t want to see.
I remembered the day when, as a toddler, I’d gotten red ants in my pants from sitting on a branch of one of the old pine trees in our backyard and riding it like a horse. I could feel them biting me and I kept running into the house, and my mother would take off my pants and say, “There’s nothing there. It’s your imagination.” She’d put my pants back on, and I’d go back outside to play. By the time she found the ants, I’d been bitten multiple times.
So was it really impossible that my father had parasites on his skin? I put my Shakespeare down and took the magnifying glass from his hand. I moved my head in closer to survey the area of inflamed skin. This close proximity to my father’s round abdomen still signified a certain homey, comic comfort. I remembered playing with him on the bed when I was small, when touching each birthmark or freckle evoked a different physical response. I looked in his face for the familiar indications that what we were doing now was
a game, a private performance that would bind us closer, even as it drove my mother away. Yes, it might be a little crazy, and yes, there was always the risk that we might go too far, and the situation would grow too frightening, but it had always felt good to be in it together. And if I gave my father this, just this moment of reassurance, then we could return to the Shakespeare together.
In my father’s eyes I saw resigned panic. I moved the glass in closer and then farther away to get oriented. I squinted before the forest of curly black hairs that blanketed his fat belly. In between the hairs wove a map of red and blue lines, blood vessels, bumps, scratches, and a trickle of darker red blood. If there was something perverse, something grotesque about this encounter, there was also something so . . . intimate.
“Tell me what you see,” he said.
“I’m not sure what I’m looking for, Daddy,” I said.
“See that black spot,” he said, pointing to one area.
“Maybe.” I saw a lot of black spots.
“That’s the head of the paramecium.”
He said it with tremendous clinical authority. I looked closely. What were those specks of black? Hair follicles? Birthmarks? Dirt? As always, my imagination rose to the level of my father’s conviction; for just a moment, I saw the paramecium. It looked almost the way it had under the microscope in my eighth grade science class. A moment later, it had swum or hidden or dissolved away.
“I think I saw it,” I said. “How do you know for sure it’s a paramecium?”
“I can feel them burrowing around inside,” he said. “I can feel them. You believe me, Debbie, don’t you?”
I knew that paramecia didn’t burrow but, as with fidelity to the tenets of any faith, my beliefs did not rely on reason. I made the leap once more, and instantaneously parasites crawled not only on my father’s flesh but on my flesh as well. I felt them. First, just an itchiness on the surface of my skin under the waistband of my pants, and then, the insistent pressure of their burrowing.
“Daddy, I think they’re on me too,” I said. “I feel itchy. Like there are worms crawling on me; is that what they feel like . . . like worms?”
“Have I given them to you too, already?” he said gently. “You always get whatever I’ve got.”
“Gotteniu, there are no paramecia; there are no parasites; there are no worms on anyone,” my mother said, shouting and ripping the glass out of my hand.
“Ow,” I said.
“When are you going to stop being so suggestible to your father’s mishegoss? Or are you just doing this to antagonize me? You’ve always loved getting in the middle between us.”
“Give me the magnifying glass back,” he said. “Or are you afraid that I’m going to see something that’s going to discredit those all-holy doctors?”
My mother glared at me for having once more engaged in some illicit Oedipal collusion.
“You told me to ask him to help me with my homework. And now you’re blaming me.”
“Just stop it,” she said. “Both of you, stop it right now. I don’t have any more patience for this.” She handed the magnifying glass back to my father.
“Go, go and look at what you’ve done to yourself. You’ve torn up your own flesh. All this—done to yourself.”
He looked at her as if he were an enlightened being condescending to some lower order of mortal.
“Don’t you see? I’m only digging at my skin to allow the parasites a portal of escape.”
“Vey iz mir, your mother would be ashamed of you,” my mother said, walking away.
“I’ve got to do my homework now, Daddy,” I said. “Please, can you just listen? ‘And what love can do, that dares love attempt.’ What does that mean, Daddy? Can you help me figure out the lines, please?”
There was no bringing him back. He sat on the sofa, head down, magnifying glass in one hand, trying to see over the mass of his own belly to the black spot below.
“I can’t worry about your petty school assignments right now,” he said. “Can’t you see I’m a very sick man?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Conspiracy Theories
On the walls of my bedroom, I hung up my poems. They were close enough for a foot to touch when I lay in bed and stretched one leg out toward the cool wall. I’d copied them with colored markers onto butcher paper in my own approximation of calligraphy. In this graphic form, they provided an assertion of self larger than on the pages of my notebook or diary. I saw them when I woke up every morning, and they provided the backdrop as I fell asleep. This is who you are, they said, a writer, an observer, a fighter for freedom and justice. Hang on.
In the master bedroom at the opposite end of the house, my father also fancied himself an author. He was documenting his medical saga, writing letters of appeal to the medical boards, and to doctors whose favor he was trying to woo. He’d compose the letters aloud and hold my mother hostage as she typed them up.
Some of them angled to obtain prescriptions. “You’ve got to help me,” he wrote. “I was a good father who always included my children in all pleasurable activities.” He had an unusual metabolism, he explained, six sleeping pills a night were, for him, the “equivalent of one for any ordinary man.” His elevated prose and phrases of Latin sprinkled throughout were intended to convince “those bourgeois doctors” that he was educated and, thus, worthy of being saved.
When he could not get what he wanted from the doctors, Ira decided that they were refusing to treat him “on moral grounds.”
“I’ve been too much of a libertine,” he said. I’d joined him in the bedroom where he ate a very late breakfast of poached eggs on white toast with the crusts cut off, one of the few foods he said he could still digest. He spooned the soft, egg-yolk-yellowed toast into his mouth and mooshed it around gingerly.
“I need to be able to confide in you,” he said, “in a way I can’t talk to your mother.” Before I responded, he’d rambled on. “I’ve always had an abnormally high sex drive,” he explained. “Being oversexed has gotten me into trouble my whole life. It was the cause of so many battles with Rebecca. As a young man, my sexual frustration was making me physically ill, and Rebecca’s response was to suppress me more.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, afraid of what was coming.
“You have to understand, I wasn’t a cheater. I was never a cheater.” He had jumped ahead in time to his marriage to my mother. “I was loyal to Eva. Too guilt-ridden and afraid of disease to have intercourse with any other woman. I had lots of tempting offers. . . . It wasn’t as if your mother didn’t like sex—she was actually very orgasmic—but you kids and the business . . . got in the way.”
For a second I wondered why my mother had given me such a hard time about masturbating as a child, if she liked sex so much herself. She’d never made me feel as if it were all right for a woman to take pleasure in her body.
As my father held me in his gaze, I started to feel a sick clotting sensation in my stomach. I didn’t want to hear any more about my parents’ intimate life together or my father’s sexual proclivities. Even worse, he seemed completely oblivious of the impact his words might be having on me. But I couldn’t quite disengage either; I felt seduced by being placed in the role of adult confidante. I wanted to be a writer; shouldn’t I be able to handle hearing anything? I felt paralyzed by my father’s flattery and my own curiosity. At the same time the content of what he was telling me made me feel contaminated.
“I only fooled around a little. Even that’s too much for the bourgeois doctors to handle. A hand job here or there; you have to understand they were practically forced on me.” I felt the floor give way under me, the room begin to swim. Don’t tell me any more, I thought. Then, as I watched his mouth move and egg yolk drip out of the sides of it, I began to feel disgust and anger. Could my father not see that this was not the way fathers were supposed to behave with their adolescent daughters? Was he really completely oblivious to the effect his disclosure might be having on me; did he care about me or
only about himself?
“This is too much for me,” I finally said.
A few weeks later, after going into the hospital for a cystoscopy to determine why he was having so much pain in his genitals, my father came home raving that the doctors had intentionally inflicted harm. He had made his way from the bedroom to the living room sofa, where I perched at his feet.
“I shouldn’t have trusted them to do the procedure when I knew they didn’t approve of me. Now they’ve injected foreign bodies into my schmeckle. I knew it as soon as I woke up from the anesthesia,” he said.
“Maybe it’s just a sensation left over from the scope being in there,” I said. “An irritation.”
“That’s what the doctors said, but I can still feel it. They inserted a foreign body in my penis. Shrapnel, I think.”
“Shrapnel?” I asked. I flashed on my uncle Nathan who’d fought on the front lines in Europe in World War II, and then on the nightly news’ footage of battle scenes in Vietnam.
“I don’t know for certain. It might have been staples or nails.”
“That sounds kind of far-fetched, doesn’t it, Daddy?”
“Ech, now you’re talking just like your mother. Are you letting her poison your mind against me? Don’t you think a man can trust his feelings about what’s in his own penis?”
When I looked down, he was clutching it mournfully. I didn’t want to picture his penis injected with a foreign body. I didn’t really want to picture his penis at all. I sighed and looked away. I could feel how close I was to gaining a place in my father’s enemies column.
“There is no other explanation,” he said. “I can’t get an erection anymore; they’ve had their way and rendered me impotent.”
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