An example of which is the sofa bed. If the pillows are hidden in the chest-bottom of the Oriental side table with the remote controls on top; if the blankets are folded up into the groove between the piano and the wall; if the pajamas are in the children’s room; if the kitchen bowls and cookie tins fit concentrically inside one another, inside the cabinets with their clever wire separators; if the children sleep on top of each other; if the sofa bed pulls out to the door—
My mother apologized to every person who entered our home for its size. She told strangers her dream of a bedroom with a door. She designed duplex apartments, four-bed, three-bath; she made pillow recommendations to the owners of five-story brownstones; she was responsible for the strippable, nonwoven wallpaper of Connecticut summer homes. Two healthy daughters and one city-priced bedroom later, her salary was spent. She did what she could to make our space count.
• • •
I don’t remember why they fought. Why was my father always, always screaming? I can’t remember it ever having to do with my mother herself. It was a performance for her, as she was his best audience. “He’s an actor,” his mother had said. He was, with his wildness, showing my mother how genuinely angry he was: a good and smart man who worked hard at what he loved, in the field where he had become at last excellent, making work that he knew was beautiful and useful, but that nobody ever used.
He bellowed. He never struck her. It was not that kind of attack. My father was only screaming a version of Love me, because I love you, because you allow me to suffer, because it feels good when we suffer near each other.
Other fights were fights about fighting.
“You only know how to bark,” she would say.
He would shout something unintelligible.
“Bark! Bark!” would be her retort.
Sick of her barking, he would storm out.
Whose problem was it? Mine, or hers, or his? In the chain of things, it became mine: my father was an innocent victim of the medical community; my mother was an innocent victim of my father; I was an innocent child. If it wasn’t our apartment’s door that he slammed, it was the diner’s door. If it wasn’t my problem, it was nobody’s, and then what? Innocence felt so much like inertia to me, I wanted conviction. This desire coincided with high school. I wore my pants baggier and baggier, my shirts tighter and tighter, my headphones the size of my head.
My parents were older than all of my friends’ parents. They had been college seniors in 1969 and lived in Greenwich Village in the seventies, but I knew that my parents had never been involved in any kind of free love, that they hadn’t bothered over Dylan or Mitchell, that they listened to the same Bach partitas then as now. I don’t know what they were doing while their classmates were stringing flowers. I pictured them climbing concrete staircases.
The way my parents weren’t cool was timeless, as if all the bands and pant shapes and shoe heights of all the ages had passed right by them, leaving their good sense intact.
With pride, my father always said I was born a “dark, serious” baby. He always followed that, sadly, with the fact that I had become “a blabbermouth.” It was difficult to be nearly as serious, as Bach-like, as my parents liked things to be. When my younger sister turned eighteen, she began dating Scott Glenny, a boy who had been allowed to play video games all his life. He would turn out to be a gifted computer programmer, but my parents couldn’t have known that. Scott’s talent bred in him a rude form of confidence, one that led him to mock my father’s “doodles,” and even on occasion to belittle Sarah’s veterinary studies—her “girlie” love of animals. My parents suspected him of being a jerk and a moron. When my sister came home from his big messy bedroom, she would beg for the radio station to be switched, for something other than Chopin to be played in our house. It never happened.
We all lived together in our one-bedroom over the Crane, a classic American restaurant whose classic American roaches scared me when I turned on the bathroom light. I went out and could not come home at night without opening the front door right into the sofa bed and my parents’ open-mouthed sleeping. The only way we knew how to be was in each other’s way.
I could not call it a loveless marriage. There was this certain, occasional thing that happened where my mother held my father’s head in her hand and brushed his hair off his forehead. I knew their tenderness when I saw it. But was it the luminous partnership I wished for myself, and for my sister?
• • •
My father and I were at the kitchen table for breakfast. I had woken up early from a night full of Robert nightmares, but my sister was still sleeping deeply, her taxicab lullaby evidently a success. My mother was in the kitchen, scrambling eggs.
When the eggs were hard, and the juice poured, and the napkins folded perfectly, my mother sat down. I moved the toast and the Nutella from the kitchen counter to the table. Morning light bounced off the back of Sarah’s chair.
“Sleeping Beauty,” my father called to the bedroom.
And then the bedroom door opened, and Sarah and her left hand came to the table.
Had it been there the night before? She sat down and we stared. Had I failed to see the sparkle in the dark, on the fire escape? Sarah rested her adorned hand on the lid of the Nutella jar.
She looked around the table, pausing at each of our faces, but none of us spoke, so she opened the jar, dipped her knife to the bottom, and spread a piece of toast over until it was completely brown. She bit and chewed with her lips closed, smiling.
“How did he propose?” I asked. My sister began her answer, which to my embarrassment I could not fully recall when Yasha asked me about it months later. They had taken a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. I think Sarah had been posing as the Statue of Liberty when Scott got down on his knee. While she told the story, I was distracted by my mother’s enormous eyes, which were full of agony. My father was ready to speak. I saw something on his mind gaining momentum. When my sister ended her story, my father said, “Good, because your mother and I are separating.” He added, “Good you’ll be out of the house.” He looked at my sister, then at me. He concluded, “There won’t be a house for you anyway.”
My mother said, “Saul.”
He said, “Cat’s out.”
She said, “Saul.”
My sister said, “Mom?”
My mother said, “Congratulations.”
“He’s a schmo, Scott Glenny,” my father said. “You’re marrying a schmo.”
• • •
I went as quickly as possible to Grand Central Station. Without a ticket, I boarded the train and lay flat across three seats.
My sister was at Scott’s dorm by now, being consoled. I wondered if she would tell him what my parents had said. Schmo. Putz. All the Yiddish words for not this guy. The wedding was scheduled for September. Mrs. Glenny was hosting. Mr. Glenny would spend the summer repainting the Glenny house; they could marry in the Glenny garden. Summer didn’t come to San Francisco until September, Scott’s mother told Sarah, and when it came, it was glorious. In explaining the arrangements, Sarah repeated the word glorious. My father repeated the word schmuck.
Scott was my year, graduating. Sarah intended to take a year off before her senior year, move to California, and then see about graduating with work-credit transfers. Dropbox had offered Scott a staggering entry salary. Sarah would have plenty of time before she needed her own income. I knew this would only encourage Scott to call Sarah’s work “superfluous.” My mother wanted to know what she had done to drive Sarah to this marriage. My sister wanted to know what she had done to drive our parents to this separation. None of us could fathom one another.
The jig is up, I thought, riding the front car of the 11:07 train. We’d finally canceled one another out. It was a two-hour ride back to school. I had one more week of exams. Two months until Robert left for Japan. Four months until the wedding, if there was going to be a wedding. All the sailboats in New England were mounted, dry, along the shore that curved i
n the train’s eastern windows—boats that would soon be waxed for summer. I wanted to steal a boat. Preferably a houseboat. Someplace where I could live for a while, while my family adjusted.
I wanted to know whose idea all this had been. I wanted to know if my father had been a good kisser. I wanted to know how many men had kissed my mother, and how well. I wanted to know if she planned on kissing new men now. I wanted to know if my mother was a good kisser. I had been told that I was a good kisser, and I wanted to kiss my mother and talk to her about romance.
Sarah and Scott had gone on their first date in October of Sarah’s freshman year. My parents, from the start, found Scott unforgivably un-Jewish, unimaginative, tasteless, sporty, and dull. My sister found his talent for leisure and his lack of anxiety breathtaking (our family loved work, loved anxiety) and spoke to me about his being a “liberated man.” I think it was this very liberation my parents resented. And was my sister liberating herself, then, via marriage?
The conductor came and asked for my ticket. It was a young conductor, his uniform too large for him, and I was crying, and this frightened him. He apologized for asking, waited a second, then asked again. I wanted to make him comfortable—I sat up straight and slapped myself on the cheeks a little and gave him my debit card. He charged me the station price. He apologized again and said that I had saved four dollars. I thanked him and blew my nose in my ticket and turned back to the window. More boats, more houses.
I hadn’t ever made a decision as large as getting married, or getting divorced. I liked to move alone through vast fields or pastures. Throughout college, during the summers, I would find ways for the university to send me somewhere, wherever they were sending people. I went with a small suitcase, to stare intensely at the livestock—Irish sheep, English sheep—paint the animals, and find somebody with a funny foreign name to make love to on a foreign kitchen floor before coming home to my parents’ empty refrigerator.
There would be two refrigerators, surely still empty, humming in the corners of my parents’ separate apartments. They were taking the summer to move out of our old place and find new ones. I wondered if they would eat more without each other. Whether they would grow fatter and happier, or waste away. And why they were doing this, doing it now, after not doing it for so long. An announcement said, “Please take all your belongings with you.” The train pulled into the station with a screech and a thump, marking the last time I would come back to school before it too ended.
• • •
I shared a dorm with four girls, most of whom had made some kind of plan. One was accepted into the Yale School of Drama. Another was accepted, together with her high school sweetheart, into the University of Chicago Law School. A third got a job in the offices of Kaiser Consulting.
My father had never worked in an office. In his post-college youth in New York, he ate toasted bagels with his friend Carl at Fanelli’s on Prince and Mercer, got drunk on spiked milk, and occasionally helped his mother package blush behind her makeup counter. His proudest commercial achievement was “making change” (“Do you have to make change?” he asked brightly when I got a high school waitressing job) on his parents’ noncalculating cash register. New York no longer had room for this particular, charming kind of bum.
My friend Igor wrote code for Google. I had recently visited his office for lunch. We’d jumped in ball pits and cruised down the halls on Razor scooters to reach the cafeteria. In the first draft of my cover letter to Google Marketing, I had written about my enjoyable visit to the Google office and “the jazz of the ball pit.” My cousin, a software engineer, suggested I cut this phrase. I rewrote the letter to include the terms product, content, and enable. My interview gave me an excuse to wear a magenta blazer, but I didn’t get the job.
At the open information session for private equity jobs, I had gotten as far as a pair of giveaway rubber flip-flops and a Rubik’s cube. I had a preliminary interview with the Boston Consulting Group, but I couldn’t say how many dentists there were in America. The interviewer suggested I begin my calculations, next time, with the number three hundred million.
I wasn’t cut out for these jobs. I had been born, as Robert Mason had pointed out, into a desperately artistic family.
Perhaps there were other parts of the world, I thought, where one could make a living as an artist. I sat by the window of the pizza parlor nearest the train station and ate a Grandma slice, trying to imagine the Arctic. Was it yellow up there? Was that what this man’s paintings were all about? I didn’t know what it meant to live in an “artist colony,” and I wondered how many artists there would be. If they were local artists, they would be very good, by now, at painting wide-open spaces. Maybe they could teach me how to paint light. Maybe I could teach them how to paint buildings. Maybe they knew of whole new un-American colors. Colors New Yorkers would want to buy. Colors that came out of that thin northern air. A breeze blew in through the pizza shop’s windows. I put back the oregano. In the computer lab down the street, I found the colony’s invitation halfway down my Gmail trash folder.
It promised to be solitary, and terribly far away. The directions described an eighteen-hour train ride that started in Oslo and connected to a four-hour ferry across a major fjord. It was recommended that I bring gear for heavy storms. The colony denied responsibility for the health and well-being of its tenants. The master painter was not to be held accountable for the artistic progress of apprentice painters. The Norwegian government requested that all international tenants state their purpose to the local police upon arrival. Leaving the colony was possible only when the fjord proved crossable, on select and unforeseeable days.
I asked the Arctic if it would still have me.
A girl named Ingeborg had taken the apprenticeship. The committee did not fail to describe her talent, her cordial personality, and their excitement at the prospect of her joining the Yellow Room project before explaining that she had subsequently declined the position and instead taken an internship at the Norwegian National Gallery.
In the morning, our last roommate, the one who kept track of job offers by sticking Post-it announcements to our suite’s front door, who herself had not yet found a job but would soon become the cactus expert for the Natural Gardener in Austin, Texas, posted a note on the wall with my name and the words Far North.
• • •
On Graduation Day, my parents arrived with Sarah, who’d flown in from a hiking vacation with Scott’s family. I had never seen either of my parents put their feet into water. I had never seen my father’s calves. My parents liked to be clothed, indoors, and in Manhattan. To the graduation ceremony, my mother wore a royal blue dress with large buttons and black rubber-soled shoes. My father’s tie was brown-red, the color of scabs. I was wearing a cowboy hat with small red berries embroidered around the brim.
I don’t remember the origin of the hat tradition, but all of us graduating had our heads covered: with straw, crowns, helmets, plain yarmulkes, open books tied to the head with ribbon and worn as bonnets. We filled the yard in our folding chairs. My friend Emily was called up onstage to accept the George Andrus Prize for intellectual achievement, character, and personality. Robert Mason was called up onstage to accept the Hart Boell Award for qualities of courage, strength of character, and high moral purpose.
I recalled the bus station where he’d left me. I thought of highways, superbridges, stretched lines, my father’s pencils, my future canvas. All I had was a direction, north.
What did my father have? Saul had the American songbook, the Brooklyn Bridge, his love of babies, and Catherine Deneuve’s chocolate cookie recipe.
My mother, though this was perhaps not a blessing, had a new interior to design. As the honorary degrees were conferred, I pictured my mother living alone. It looked queenly. When I turned around to look for her in the crowd, I saw she had taken a seat behind my father. My mother looked like she could see the whole world from where she sat. My sister sat in the row behind my mother, looking ju
st like her, except pinker in the cheeks. My sister’s focus was narrowing steadily on a single point: Scott Glenny. She and my parents were still barely speaking to one another, overwhelmed by what all three called disgust.
Robert came down from the stage and retook his chair, not far from mine. We too looked straight ahead. All the graduates rose and were recognized.
After the ceremony, I packed up my room, keeping only what I’d take north. How hot was an arctic summer? I took both sandals and wool sweaters. I gave shoes and dresses to my sister. I took my necklaces, my brushes, and all my socks. My roommates picked from among my books, and the rest were left outside the library in a cardboard box. It took a long time to make the room really empty. I didn’t know then that I was practicing for a greater emptying, the one I’d perform four months later, when the entire Gregoriov Bakery would need to be closed and cleared. Once my dorm room looked ready for someone else to move in, it was time to go.
We got home and found the sofa bed unmade. My mother, in our previous life, would never have left it this way. Now she flung her handbag onto the heap of blankets, removed her shiny black shoes, and sat on the corner of the bed nearest the window. She leaned her head back, as if in meditation. My sister moved her bag and sat atop the blanket heap. My father sat on the corner of the bed nearest the door. I was left the fourth corner, the one canopied by my mother’s collection of orchids. I slouched under the flowers and found they had no smell. None of us faced each other. For the first time, the thin pull-out mattress seemed large, seemed adequate.
The Sunlit Night Page 2