Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  What Julia did know was that this image of Bubbe Bertha ironing tinfoil returned to her at the oddest times, unpredictable and unpredicated, strangely if only momentarily debilitating. In the summer months after Mark first returned home, moving into the basement of the house where he had been so peacefully raised after she had long ago abandoned dreams of stardom or even modest success as a musician, that period after she’d given over every waking moment for two weeks clearing her instruments out for him to be able to sleep there, with a low-grade ringing in her right ear that she refused to allow her physician to diagnose as tinnitus or to correct when her hearing loss became something more, where Julia and Cal had poured every ounce of effort they had into reading Dr. Spock, into listening to their son’s hopeless violin practice and driving him to his hopeless baseball practice and his desire to take on a dying profession at which he’d never showed any real promise, when the torrential downpours of a Baltimore summer would bring along their inevitable electrical storms and ozone waft, it would come to her: The glint of light off a single piece of tinfoil. The puff of vapor jumped and spewed from the top of a white and bronze iron. A puff that never started and never ended but simply was. Was, was, was. Her bubbe’s varicose-veined hand pushing back and forth, back and forth, the slight smack of iron against tin on the countertop.

  What could she have told Cal she was experiencing, even if he asked? Could she say something like, “Oh, I think I’ve got that PTSD everyone is always talking about”—and not in the least mean it? At best you experienced what you experienced and then called it a flash, or a migraine. At best people would leave you alone to your indefinable indiscriminate inscrutable suffering. On any of countless nights when he came back from the hospital, from one of his endless shifts on the OB ward where he was bringing into the world the next generation of sentient memory-making eternally present beings, what they would call the latter stages of the millennial generation in the media in the decades ahead, lay back and said, “Any new revelations about what pushed the kid?” what would she have said? “Cal, Bubbe used to iron tinfoil in our kitchen so we could reuse it”? Or better, “I’m not sure my mind thinks Bubbe has ever stopped at her ironing”? This was less a conversational non sequitur than an ontological non sequitur, like seeing a duckbill platypus in its natural habitat, then applying for some kind of gene therapy that might allow one to have a beak grown from her face in the months ahead.

  Julia kept it to herself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE SECOND IMAGE THAT CONTINUED to return to Julia Brumfeld in the months and years after Mark’s troubles—it was a kind of flattening to call them troubles—was an image she’d pushed from her mind for so many years she didn’t know if what bothered her more was seeing it, or the futile and exhausting energy she’d put in to expunge it from her memory. It, too, was a simple visual image, but one that bore identifiable antecedents: bright white subway tile, a fluorescent-lit floor. On the tile, three stark streaks of red blood. The tile was white. The blood was red—when Julia allowed herself to think about it in words, it felt flat, meaningless, almost a cliché—oh, beautiful, you’ve described tile as being white, blood as being red, how evocative! Original! It could not be evoked and it could not be displaced, though it appeared as she cleaned out the basement, and again as she sat in her house in the days after Mark’s arrest. Words flattened the image, distorted and falsified it. It didn’t need words. Julia had long since accepted the clichés in her life. When she was seventeen it was as if her only goal in her life was to avoid becoming a cliché. She ran thousands of miles from her parents at great expense to her future selves to try to outpace becoming one. But after having Mark her life was a long, slow evolution of accepting and then walking inside well-worn paths and making them her own. That was parenthood itself when you viewed parenthood as an effect on the parent, not a responsibility to the child: living inside existing clichés, but lending them nuance. There was joy in it. Julia felt it every day until it was stolen from her by her own son, the responsibility for whose actions it was anyone’s but her own, a theft that began the day Mark announced he was moving home from Brooklyn and was confirmed the day she learned of his actions in that very basement she had spent weeks cleaning out for him.

  Images on the other hand were each their own, original and unique like DNA, and the image was image—incontrovertible, irreducible, and tangible as the tile in her own kitchen a hundred and fifty miles south of its referent. When she imagined herself speaking it, saying words like “tile” and “white” and “subway” and “blood” to anyone—to her beloved son, because Mark was still her beloved son even if she couldn’t bring herself to visit him for months after the attack or fully understand the charges against him, and no matter how her feeling for him might shift in response to his actions she would never stop loving him; to her husband, who would recommend to her a good therapist she would never assent to see and wouldn’t be able to hear, having rehearsed the narrative surrounding the images themselves enough times that he could no longer look at them with any semblance of objectivity; to a therapist, who would analyze the unanalyzable—it was somehow more painful than the image itself. As if that was possible.

  But that was the image: white subway tile, clean taupe caulking between each, fluorescent lighting, three long, thin splatters of red blood. It wasn’t that Julia could not have provided the data points, the useless facts she had sought through officious Dewey decimals or asked obsolescent Jeeves or looked up on facile capacious Google in the years after those images returned. She was six years old. That’s how old the memory was: she was sixty-seven now, she was six then, do the arithmetic. A memory older than many of her friends. A memory older than the federal agents pursuing her son, knocking politely on her door, trailing surreptitiously her car. Almost a year prior she had come home from school to find no one at her house. A neighbor came by to say her mother and father were out, they would be back—one of her parents would be back, someone would be back. But that wasn’t accurate. Her father wouldn’t be back for years, if ever. Instead he was sent to the state mental institution, known at the time in the official register as the Lunatic Hospital and in their neighborhood as the Nuthouse or the Looneybin, and though she couldn’t remember much of the long ride out Germantown Avenue until it became Germantown Pike, far past the western boundary of the city and into the city’s western suburbs into Montgomery County, past the low pastoral hills of the Erdenheim Farms and into the semi-urban realms of Norristown and Conshohocken—though she couldn’t remember walking into the immense brick edifice, or what she and her mother talked about or what music was playing in the background or what a squirrel looked like scaling the corrugated bark of a tree outside her window when they stopped at a stoplight at the intersection of Bells Mills Road, or what it felt like, or what its consequences meant when she would be raised without all the real spoils from the war, a war that had flattened her father to a mental patient and narrowed her access to all the spoils coming home so that only after she married Cal and got Mark off to college could she afford these instruments she was now being forced to move out of their autonomous space in the basement so Mark could return home—she had just a flash of white subway tile and the three thin lines of blood on it.

  If she was pushed, sure—sure she could picture the brick façade, the entry wing jutting out like the snout of some great rust-red brown bear, but memory was as much the result of looking at photographs over the years since as walking in—of plugging it into Wikipedia to see it and just as quickly selecting “QUIT” on the draw-down at the top of the screen, fumbling with the mouse to make it go away though she knew it would never end, as if a memory could be quitted like the screen on a computer desktop—it was so immense she wondered if that was a perspective she’d seen it from as a child. So instead it was just: white tile, three lines of flung red. It was not a memory she would have chosen to recover or would have chosen to discuss. But in the months after her son was placed under arrest
by federal officers, it began to return to her in flashes of pure image so that at times only a healthy 2 mg dose of Xanax, its acerbic bite dissolving under her tongue, or if things were really dire chewed and chalky in the pouch of her inner cheek and then feeling as it flowed sweetly into her veins relieving her of her burden, could save her from it as some inescapable, enduring present.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AND IT’S NOT THAT THERE WEREN’T MEMORIES of her father that pleased Julia from that period in her life. Those returned, too, as she took each fiddle in its case, each valuable mandolin Cal had let her buy though she could barely play it now, up to the cleared-out guest room. As a musician, so many of those memories were aural, came to her as the sounds twanging and warbling from their radio on weekends. Julia’s father was pious in shul and as secular as they came outside of it. Soon after his return from service and starting in business with his high school friend Fyodor Semyonich, Julia’s father had used what spoils they’d accrued after the war and bought a house more than ten blocks from her bubbe in Mt. Airy, his west of The Avenue, on Pelham Street. There on Sunday evenings her father would tune their old radio to the Grand Ole Opry. It was among her first memories, crossed with the vertiginous sounds of Hebrew on Saturday mornings, listening later in the weekend to the warp and wobble of Bill Monroe’s mandolin, to the schticky humor of Grandpa Jones, to the tough low growl of Jimmy Martin as he tore into “You Don’t Know My Mind.” It was how she’d learned to play fiddle, in fact—trying to play over her father picking his Martin D-45 worked after a fashion; by the time she could saw out a tune he was institutionalized, and in playing over the professionals there was a limitless sense of forgiveness, a sense every sour note or dropped beat was swallowed by that great brown box, incorporated into the tight performances being broadcast from a thousand miles south in Nashville. It was the only place her father seemed at peace in the times he did come home—guitar in his hand, tune in his throat. In retrospect was there a frown that came to her mother’s face when he was there and the radio was on and the King of Bluegrass sang his lyrics, when he sang “I’m lonesome all the time”? Memory had already skewed any hope Julia might have had for interpretation. She remembered they would turn the radio off and her father would play a couple of bars of taters on his pick-worn guitar, and she’d rub the thin amber of her rosin across her bow hair, kicking up a rarefied dust in the air around it, and she’d try to squeak out the melody of “Jerusalem Ridge” or “Whiskey Before Breakfast” or “The New Five Cents.” The titles made Julia almost wish there was a song called “The Fresh Ironed Tin Foil.” It might have seemed odd to their neighbors, she supposed, this family of Jews playing old-time American music on their long front porch in one of the westernmost neighborhoods of stolidly Northeastern northwest Philadelphia. But her father loved Woody Guthrie and Dave Van Ronk and her mother might have liked to have been Maybelle Carter minus the raised-top Gibson guitar, and anyway the Sidlers had been in this country since the Civil War, Jews who’d known what it was like to vote for Lincoln and read Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, Dickinson in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly as it came to their front doorsteps, even if they wouldn’t be able to attend Yale or Princeton for half a century.

  By the time she was ready to finish high school, Julia Sidler was a strong enough fiddler to sit in on gigs with her father’s friends from time to time, burly Jews who’d learned to play guitars and banjos like they were goyische and who welcomed her presence as a reminder of the old friend they were missing. She’d tried to get up a bluegrass band or two, but when she was a freshman no one at her Quaker Friends school seemed to want to play in that traditional idiom anymore. In the coffee houses in Center City it was just a guy with a guitar, Bob Dylan–style, mangling the classics into some new singer-songwriter message of political and social polemicism. Her first boyfriend had written twelve different versions of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol,” each its own didactic attempt to make rhymes out of local crimes and half of them still containing variations on the line “and emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level,” a line which, indivisible as shorn memory, could not be improved upon (“and emptied the trash cans on a whole nother level”; “and cleaned out the gutters on a whole other level”; “and washed off her art smock on a whole other level”—each worse than the one before).

  By the time Julia was ready to head for her first semester at Syracuse University, Dylan had already been proclaimed Judas in London’s Royal Albert Hall, and he had Al Kooper’s frenetic, jittery, raucous basslines running through his new songs, and a handful of freshmen in her central New York dorm owned tweed Fender tube amps, Strats and Telecaster Thinlines of varying pastel colors, and wah-wah pedals, trying to burn out chords and puff out shaky joints of seed-popping weed. That first semester and a half had gone fine for Julia, carrying over from her solid Quaker education at the Friends school she’d attended against her bubbe’s protestations, the best school in the neighborhood, but here in college she just couldn’t seem to find the right musicians, no matter how much she liked reading the history of art and Shakespeare and Plato and going to parties and hootenannies out in the barns of rural Dewitt. Her mother had set her up to wait tables at an Italian restaurant down on South Street starting in mid-May after that first year so she could earn some pocket money.

  Then halfway through her first spring semester she met Willie Schtodt. These were memories that arrived now because she’d willed them, allowed them as she rosined up her bows and looked at those old instruments in the guest room of her and Cal’s home. Willie lived in the dorm next to hers and kept to himself, though from time to time she would see him out behind the Hall of Languages, strumming a cheap dreadnaught knockoff of her father’s D-45, which to this day she still owned and had set up with a new nut, new strings, before Mark returned home. She’d watched all year as Willie’s hair grew wavy, then curly, a wispy beard mossing his lower jaw. But after holing up in the northeast cold all winter—it wasn’t unheard of for a half-foot of snow to fall off the lake the second week in April—one day late that month the sun came out. It blazed so hot after almost seven months of gelid winter it was like an outright assault on every sense. Girls walked from the Bird Library up to the quad in halter tops. One time she saw a girl from her pre-law class wearing no top at all, just her breasts taut on her chest covered in paint like a pre-modern Scotsman marked for battle. And sitting with his back against his dorm there was Willie Schtodt, a new ersatz Gibson Hummingbird pressed to his shirtless, hairless chest, a rudimentary attempt at a bird on its burgundy pick guard, singing Jimmy Martin tunes, one after the other, affecting Jimmy’s rasp and growl. He’d been holed up all winter like some snowbound Robert Johnson, learning bluegrass tunes at his own lake-effect-blizzard-imposed crossroads. They didn’t even make eye contact. She ran back to her dorm and grabbed her fiddle. Before she knew it, they’d jumped into his MG-B and were headed across the country to San Francisco. His friends phoned to say they’d rented a place in the Inner Richmond, and against every objection her mother—her mother who’d been reduced to visiting her father in the State Lunatic Home on weeknights and weekends, who’d managed to send her to schools that allowed her scholarships to get to university in the first place—treading those very blood-strewn white tiles Julia couldn’t strike from her memory more than fifty years later—she left all but her fiddle and the clothes she could fit in her backpack at a friend’s house off Westcott Street and headed for the opposite coast, taking advantage of a freedom that felt earned and necessary and all but inevitable.

  What she found there was nothing like the idyll Willie Schtodt had promised with his energetic renditions of “Sophronie” still ringing in his throat and the mushrooms his friends had picked off the manure dropped by some cows in a farm east of campus in Skaneateles looping gossamer threads through his brain. The three-room apartment his friends were all—all!—to share wasn’t in the Inner Richmond after all, but in the Mission, a dingy old Victorian at Dol
ores and Twenty-second, where kids slept on flattened dirty cardboard in the cool misty San Francisco evenings and begged beers and joints from all the new heads headed in from the same coast they’d themselves just fled. There were good parts to the first weeks there—the Dead played a free show in Golden Gate Park and Julia got almost far enough to the front to see Bob Weir in his ripped jean shorts barking about empty spaces and someone named Cowboy Neil driving the Further bus and taking the band through the entire twenty-two sententious minutes of “The Other One”—but after she came home to find one of Willie’s friends, a high school kid from suburban Boston, pumping naked atop his girlfriend on what she’d understood to be her and Willie’s bed, Julia resolved to head back to Philly however she could, as soon as she could catch a ride.

  Willie begged her to come to a party with him that weekend. “Fine enough if you wanna head back to Momma,” he’d said, “but at least have some fun before you take off for the straights back East, you’re out with the heads now.” He sounded to her even then like someone reading lines from a poorly written screenplay about the era, hippie language loose in his mouth like ill-fitting dentures. Whatever authenticity Willie had evinced when he sang like Red Allen was absent when he tried to talk like a character in an Antonioni movie. So she was ready to leave but Willie convinced Julia to go out for one last night with him and his friends. There was a big old Victorian on Haight Street where some friend of a friend of a friend of Owsley Stanley had dosed the entire bowl of lemonade with some of Bear’s own acid, at least they all said, and it was as if the top of Julia’s head had been blown off for the next two days. They all brought their instruments with them, carrying them all the way from the Mission up the hills to the Haight. Where in the past she might have waited for Willie to pull out his ersatz Hummingbird and start a jam, and then lug out her fiddle and play quietly so no one would take too much notice, now Julia had her fiddle in her hands at all times. All in one epic night she became that Girl with the Fiddle. The Fiddle Girl. TFG. Tiff. It had been the only comfort to her that first night with Bear’s lemonade—she could feel her jaw tightening half an hour after her first thimble-full of the stuff, could see that somewhere at the seared edges of the visible world the corners were turning up just the slightest bit, like the corners of a photograph touched on all sides by fire.