It was not snowing. It was not raining. There was no traffic. The GPS worked. The off-site parking had no line, and my registration was recognized by the system. Then the shuttle to take us to our terminal showed up right away. I watched my father’s forehead unpucker, his shoulders unclasp. He slapped me high five. “Gays on their way to Miami!” he yelled. He’d heard somewhere that South Beach was a gay mecca. I lost my temper and yelled at him. A bad atmosphere descended. He shook his head; I was such an irritable person.
I sent them all to the security line and went to the restroom to compose myself. When I returned, my grandfather was at the metal detector, his pants around his knees, half of New York streaming by.
“Pull up your pants!” I hissed at him.
“Again, they’re fucking with me!” he said. “Take off your shoes! Take off your belt!”
“Everyone has to take off their shoes!”
“So why are they checking my bag and not that fatso’s?”
I watched the TSA agent pull out of my grandfather’s bag a tube of toothpaste the size of a log; apparently, no wisdom had been gained on that front since he and I had gone to Paris and Israel. (Then again, he hadn’t flown anywhere since.) His toiletries were so large, he needed an i ♥ new york bag to fit them. Again, I had told him—a Ziploc. Small Ziploc. The one with the twist tie? No, a fucking Ziploc—with a zipper.
Everything got confiscated. I thought he would spit at the agent. Then he made his pivot. “Big deal,” he sneered at the agent, thankfully in Russian. “I got a thousand more where that came from. Brush your teeth, asshole.”
They—again, it didn’t matter who they; the they who held all the power—oppressed him on the airplane as well. With his half globe of a belly, he barely fit in his seat, but every time he snapped off his seat belt or reclined, the flight attendant re-cinched him and brought his seat back to straight. She did it less patiently the second time, and quite impatiently the third.
“I’m sweating,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong,” I said.
He mopped his forehead with fanfare. “It’s so hot here.”
“Soon we’ll be in the stratosphere,” I said. “It’s minus a hundred up there.”
“I don’t know what’s happening.”
I spun open his ventilation knob. He brought his palm up to it and winced theatrically from the effort. “I don’t feel anything. It’s broken. I don’t feel anything.” Surreptitiously, he reclined his seat once again.
My father leaned forward. “Hey, American, don’t you know they’re going to take you off the plane if you recline before we take off? So calm down. What? They’re going to take you off the plane, that’s right. And what’s with you—it’s hot?—take off your sweater.”
“New York doesn’t know it’s sitting on a world of gasoline,” my grandfather said. He called my father “the Kerosene Man.” As in—he poured fuel on fire. That was their routine as long as I’d known them. My father needled him; my grandfather flared his nostrils to show he was smelling the kerosene. Nearly forty years of hostile intimacy had dissolved their earlier animus into the casual derision of a long marriage.
My mother closed her eyes. Oksana was trying not to intrude on our madness by focusing on the flight safety brochure.
Up in the air, my grandfather believed the sweating had increased. His eyes searched the ceiling—for God, or more ventilation knobs. “Pa, Pa—look at me,” my mother tried to distract him. But he didn’t want to be distracted. He was busy feeling out the encroaching doom. Was he about to faint? Was his blood pressure spiking? The measuring device was up in the luggage compartment—he berated himself for allowing it to be stored so far away. And was that a headache? Were his fingers going numb? I made myself consider the possibility that he wasn’t exaggerating. Then I was responsible—I had forced him to go.
I turned to my father. “Can you tell me why everything has to be a certain way with you? Like this morning. It’s impossible to know everything in advance.”
He shrugged. “I like things to be a certain way,” he said. “For example, the closet doors. If they’re just a little open, I have to stop and close them.”
“Why?”
“That’s what makes me feel good.”
“But why?”
“I just told you why.”
“You told me the symptom. I’m asking about the cause.”
“I just want to close the doors—it’s neater that way.”
“But another person wouldn’t care.”
“Well, I care.”
“And Mom has to care, or she’ll hear from you,” I said.
I wondered if my father was secretly repelled by his gusher of a son. Secretly, because he would never admit it to himself. About this he was equally reticent. If you thought about it, even my grandfather, all secrets, was better known to me, and even before he had decided to talk. My father was a less noticeable cipher.
“What do you do?” he said.
“I close them, too,” I said.
His eyebrows rose, by way of asking, So? What’s your problem?
“Except I want to stop,” I said.
My mother leaned forward. “Can we talk about something else, please?”
“How’s the patient over there?” my father said.
The patient seemed fine—Oksana was “tying up” his ears with talk. He even laughed once. Oksana’s carry-on began disgorging tinfoiled sandwiches, passed across the row hand-to-hand like relief supplies after an earthquake. We occupied the row all the way across, so we were nicely shielded from skeptical noses and eyes; also, having four other bodies palming tinfoil next to me made it easier. I was too worn down to worry much about it, in any case.
Above the clouds, it had been eye-hurtingly blue, but we descended into a gray gauze. I so badly wanted it to be azure down below. I wanted them to see the place in all its splendor. I got a compromise—the sky was a bruised blue, but there was sun. The water was turquoise beyond turquoise. The triple band—the sky, the water, the gold of the sand—looked rapturous from above. My mother exhaled. “My God,” she said. “Everything is so within reach.”
“What was the last time they put paint on these buildings?” my grandfather said, turning his nose at the bright but weathered exteriors of lower Collins Avenue.
A homeless man, shirtless and giddy, weaved past us, his unpared nails clutching a supermarket cart of possessions. He was hollering into his beard and gave us a great toothless grin as he sailed past. “The great attribute of any major American city!” my father exclaimed.
At the Cuban restaurant where I nearly wept the first time I tasted the oxtail, it began before anyone had started the food. Sandwiches got torn and mashed onto other plates, rice and beans spooned and flung, the roast pork and onions hacked and scooped over.
“I don’t want it!” my mother was hollering. “How many times do I have to say it?”
“Just take it! Why won’t you take it?”
“I’m trying not to eat bread!”
“So eat this fish. Let me give you some of this fish.”
“I’m happy with what I ordered. That’s why I ordered it.”
“Just try the fish!”
The blocking was as aggressive as the sharing. No one who needed to give actually wanted anything from another. Except when they did. Then they said: “Is that good?” Then you had to offer it up. Then they’d protest and decline. Then you’d insist. And then, to accommodate you, they’d take some. But you could save them the charade by just mashing it onto their plates.
Only Oksana wasn’t shoving and flinging—she took whatever was forced upon her without protest, piling it to the side; made another pile of her own food for anyone who wanted to try it; and ate contentedly from what was left in the moated middle.
No one could find any fault with the Standard hotel. I’d chosen it because it was on the quiet side of South Beach, facing Biscayne Bay rather than the ocean, away from every
thing that had upset them about Collins and Ocean Drive. There was a marble hammam, and a mazelike lawn of hideaways with hammocks and fire pits. The infinity pool looked like it ran right into the bay. The bay looked bottle green, or periwinkle, or even slate gray, depending on when you looked. The sun beginning to set, the sky was streaked with violet, dull gold, and snapdragon pink; across the bay, distant studs of shimmering light on the mainland melded with the blue lanterns of the restaurant deck, the canvas of its umbrellas snapping in the light wind. Thankfully, the rooms were tiny, and into this setback our group’s members could channel the expectations of disappointment that built up in their chests and demanded release.
“Why can’t he pack his own toothpaste?” I said. My mother and I were floating in the pool, relieved to be away from the men, who were scouring the grounds for new marvels and problems. Oksana was unpacking and changing for dinner. “The KGB he could outmaneuver, but choose his own pants—”
“You have to understand, he spent his whole life looking over his shoulder,” she said.
“I know about all that.”
“Not the KGB,” she said. “Your grandmother. What she went through made her . . . She was very loving. To me and to you. But she could be very hard. If the three of us went to a café, I was allowed to order whatever I wanted, but not him. They had to economize—no money was ever enough. She was the boss. I think he forgot how to do things for himself.”
“We’re all like that,” I said. “About money, I mean. Even me.”
“Do you mind if we just swim and relax?” she said. “This is heaven.”
I destroyed heaven, because I proposed a drink at the in-house restaurant before going to dinner. The five of us were gathered around the drink menu like criminals reading our sentence. For a cocktail, we would be penalized sixteen dollars. For a beer only eight, but none among us drank beer; the proof was too low. And a cocktail diluted the point of the exercise—what about a straight shot? There was no column for shots, so I had to call over the server, Björn Borgian in his white shorts and polo. Shots were also sixteen dollars. Glumly, I translated for my grandfather and Oksana. My mother’s eyes bore into me: I couldn’t say eight?
“We can’t bring in our own bottle?” my grandfather said.
“They don’t allow it,” I said. “How are they supposed to make money?”
“By fleecing us, how,” he said. “Give the guy a twenty and he’ll allow it.”
“And you think his boss won’t notice a giant bottle of something they don’t have behind the bar?” The Standard didn’t carry Metaxa, the Greek botanical of choice back home.
“Oh, if only I had the English,” he tsked.
“How convenient that you don’t,” I said.
“Okay, guys!” my mother said.
Grimly, we ordered shots of the brown liquor that seemed to best resemble Metaxa. They arrived in snifters, which had the unfortunate effect of spreading out the liquor and making it seem like the glasses held almost nothing. We toasted to good times and capitalism, and they all wet the edges of their tongues on their nectars. They had to make this shit last. To show my derision, I grabbed my bourbon with the intention of downing it all in one go, but instead I knocked over the glass, spilling between ten and thirteen dollars’ worth of bourbon. My father and grandfather stared at me with something between bafflement and disgust. If only they registered the other—they were missing a rare chance for kinship. I was glad it was dark; I was crimson.
“It’s for luck to spill,” Oksana tried.
“I’m starving,” my mother said.
The restaurant was called Talula. Inside, it was autumn—dark-colored wood, candles, potpourri, chestnuts, pinecones, and Norah Jones. I’d eaten there twice, and though the courtyard had strung-up lights and a canopy of trees rustling in the breeze, it was more informal, so I’d requested the red leather banquette inside, a ledge of old photos over our heads. Only now I was looking at the menu through their eyes, and it made the Standard seem fairly priced by comparison. Fortune had smiled, and my father had forgotten his glasses; he had to ask me the prices. All I had to do was divide them in half. But I couldn’t.
“I guess someone won’t be drinking wine tonight!” he declared.
“Do you want to just go somewhere else?” I said.
He opened his hand in the direction of the staff: And what will they think?
“They’ll be fine,” I said. No one had come to the table in ten minutes anyway. The warm service, neither starchy nor fawning, had been one of the reasons the prices had seemed worth it on my previous visit, but I was chagrined to discover that the restaurant had a large party in the courtyard consuming its attention. “Want to?”
He shrugged. Like me with my grandfather, he wanted to bitch, not get his way.
“It’s expensive, but maybe it’s good,” my mother tried. “Let’s just decide what we want.”
I started translating the menu to Oksana and my grandfather. I had folded—I was halving each price. I sold my grandfather on “chicken with mashed potatoes, vegetables, and a piece of bread”—my translation of the “Pan Roasted Ashley Farms Organic Chicken,” served with “maple-whipped sweet potato, slow roasted brussels sprouts, house smoked tasso ham, cast iron skillet cornbread, and sage-bourbon brown butter.”
Then we began waiting. Those of us who dared order a drink had long finished it and did not dare order another. Ten minutes passed, then ten more. Then twenty.
“You know,” my mother said into the silence, “I recently learned that when people look at a boy and a girl dancing, it’s actually the boy they look at, not the girl. And I always thought it was the girl.” She turned to me. “What do you think?”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think there’s a rule.”
“I think I hear them killing your chicken, heh,” my father said, looking at my grandfather. My grandfather shrugged and pursed his lips in a confederate gesture: Must be a king’s feast if it’s taking this long. Oksana would have made ten dinners in the time that had passed. He didn’t mind kerosene as long as it was targeting somebody else.
“One day after the war,” he said, “my mother sent me to the market for a chicken. I’m on my way home, this beauty in my hand, and I pass by my friend’s house. His mother’s in the doorway—ancient woman. Says: ‘Sweet child, how much did you pay for that chicken?’ I say half what I really paid—let her be impressed. Then she says: ‘I’m an old lady, weak . . . Sell it to me. And then run back to the market with your young legs and get yourself another.’ What could I do? I had to give it to her. At half price. I paid price and a half for chicken that day.”
We all laughed, grateful for the reprieve.
“In that place, food was everything,” he said.
“We were well trained by Communism!” my father said, rolling his head toward the kitchen. “We know how to put up with tough situations!”
No one said anything now.
Several minutes later, he said, “Thank God I had a tough childhood with wooden spoons—I can put up with a little doing without!”
Silence.
At last, the food arrived. I closed my eyes and listened to my father say it. “Ah, look at that,” he said to my grandfather. “They didn’t even give you the whole chicken.”
“Very good, very good,” my grandfather said, not meaning it. He hadn’t tried it yet—he was busy tearing off a leg to deposit on Oksana’s plate. Seeing this, Oksana stopped chewing and began sawing off a piece of duck to put on the edge of her plate. She had to saw—it was tough. And thirty-eight dollars.
“I would share my pasta,” my father said—cavatelli with broccoli rabe, house-made Italian sausage, garlic, and Fontina—“if it wasn’t hard as a brick.”
“You have to know how to order,” my grandfather winked. I’d offered him the pasta dish my father had gotten, but he thought “macaroni with frankfurter” sounded boring.
“How’s your hundred-dol
lar entrée, Grandpa?” the Kerosene Man shot back. “Good thing kindergarten in Minsk got me used to small portions.” He was pointing at the toy-size skillet in which my grandfather’s corn bread had arrived. Not the right kind of playfulness for this table.
“Why don’t you send it back?” I said to my father. “You sent the fish back at the Cuban place.” And asked for a cleaner set of utensils. And a cleaner drinking glass. He shrugged in that way again. He would send the dish back in a simple place, but he was too shy to here.
I tried to study the old photos on the ledge above us—a credible distraction—and drifted away. When I came back, my father was talking about mysterious stones in Africa—he had heard something on the radio. Did I have more information?
I tried to make the adjustments. If he said, “I just saw a great movie, the one with the blond woman, the one who was the prosecutor in the other movie,” I had to think about brunettes who’d recently played judges.
“Machu Picchu?” I said.
But the waiter had walked up to ask about dessert. My father said he wanted a “cre-PAY.”
“Crepe,” I said, almost inaudibly, after the waiter departed.
“Cre-PAY?” he shouted. “Grandpa, you want to get a cre-PAY?”
My mother pushed out her chair and glared at my father. “I need to talk to you.”
“Oh, calm down,” he said.
“Right now—I need to talk to you. Come outside with me, please.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Can’t say a word to a person.”
She stood up and ran out. I followed her. Outside, in the velvety breeze so painfully at odds with the doings inside, I put my arm around her. She’d worn a festive yellow blouse.
“You’re no better than him, sitting there like someone died,” she said. “Why can’t you ignore him? Just let him be who he is.”
“But I can’t be who I am,” I said. “I’ve got to be the adult.”
“I wish I had a cigarette,” she said. Then my shy, self-conscious mother accosted a man on the sidewalk and made him give her a cigarette.
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