His father yells something from the living room. Mira glances at Lenny, her gaze uneasy. His mother yells back. There’s a tremendous crash and pop that shakes the walls. His mother runs into the living room, and screams at him. Mira and Lenny walk out and see the huge stereo face down on the carpet, the wires and torn mesh fabric on the back exposed. His father looks down at it blearily. Some of the records have spilled out of a side pocket and fan out of their sleeves. The turntable still spins and clicks, but then stops.
His mother yells something, and he replies, “I don’t want it anyway.”
“It is time for you to leave,” she says quietly, in English. “Our agreement is that you leave this house today.”
He nods his head. “I am almost finished.”
“Go.”
His expression tightens and he looks as if he’s going to argue, but Lenny’s mother cuts him off with, “This house belongs to me today. Do you really want me to call the police?”
“You would call the police on me?”
“I should’ve called the police years ago when you started beating me.” His mother has a calm expression. She’s utterly confident and unafraid. Lenny has never seen her like this before.
His father stares at her, then glances at Mira and Lenny. He then mutters something under his breath as he goes to put on his shoes.
Mira and Lenny eat quickly, and leave the house. They want to sneak into the church, but see the front office lit up. They peer over the bushes and spy the pastor on the telephone. He wears a sweater vest, his chubby, pale face bright under the fluorescent lights, and he rubs his forehead while he talks, a red welt forming over his eyes. This is the minister who came here after the former one had an affair with his secretary and divorced his wife. Mira and Lenny have never met this one. They walk to the side of the church, and sit on top of a wooden fence that borders an elderly woman’s house. Her sidewalks are rusty brown from her old sprinkler system.
Mira asks, “Where is he going to live?”
They watch their father load his Cadillac with more boxes. He then lugs a huge suitcase, and throws it into the back seat. Lenny says, “I think he’ll be in Flushing. Mom said he might have a new job at a bank in Queens.”
“Will we see him again?”
“I have no idea.”
As he carries another box, the bottom breaks. Computer paper falls out and tumbles down the driveway, the perforated sheets unfolding. The wind lifts a long section of it, spreading it farther across the sidewalk. Lenny’s father drops the box and kicks the stack of paper, the long sheets extending and fluttering onto the lawn. After a moment he stares at the paper, picks it all up and dumps it into the garbage.
It’s getting darker, and they see the pastor locking up and leaving the office. He walks across the lawn to his house next door. Mira and Lenny hurry to the back entrance and jimmy the door open. They move quickly through the dark, quiet halls and onto the stage of the back room. Lenny remembers the steeple and searches for the entrance up there while Mira stands on the stage and asks him to turn on the spotlights.
“Not yet. Just in case the minister comes back.”
She speaks to her imagined audience, telling them that this next song is dedicated to her fans.
When Lenny climbs down from the back of the stage and into a small stairwell, he sees a narrow built-in ladder that leads up to a panel in the ceiling, very much like his own attic entrance. He can’t find a light switch, so he climbs in the dark, using the smooth walls to guide him. The higher he climbs the warmer it becomes, but when he finds a handle and pushes open the ceiling door, he immediately feels the night breeze blowing around him. He calls down to his sister.
“What is it?” she says.
“I found the tower.”
“I don’t want to go up there. I’m afraid of bats.”
“All right. You stay down there.” He pulls himself up into the tower, and sees the wooden beam crisscrossing above, but there’s no bell—two large bullhorns bolted to the beams connect to a tape deck and amplifier. Lenny moves closer to one of the ledges, the guardrail dusty and dirty. His sister calls to him, asking him what’s up there.
“Not much. But there are no bats. Come up. Be careful.”
She climbs up and clutches one of the large support beams in the center, peering cautiously down onto the street. A strong cold gust blows through here, and she says she’s cold. Then Lenny points to the house, the garage light on and their father still loading his car. They see more lights turning on inside and outside the house. Their father can’t close the trunk lid, so ties it down with string. He then walks out onto the sidewalk, looking around. He calls Lenny and Mira’s name.
Mira says, “Should we answer?”
He shakes his head. Lenny knows his father wants to say goodbye. Their father puts his hands on his hips and calls to them again, shouting toward the church. At one point he looks up, and Lenny pulls back slowly, although he doubts his father can see them.
Lenny asks Mira if she remembers how he wanted them to perform in a talent show at this church. She doesn’t.
For a brief time they all went to this church. When they first moved there the minister, Reverend Ames, and his wife welcomed their family with apple pie and an invitation to attend Sunday service. The Ames’ had four children, the youngest about Ed’s age, and all of them treated Lenny and his sister as cute, huggable babies, which he didn’t mind, coming from the two daughters.
Reverend Ames and his wife were calm, quiet-spoken, and seemed to Lenny possessed of a New England reserve and charm that was foreign to him. He never saw them raise their voices or even give any of their children dirty looks. Everyone seemed unnaturally well-behaved.
This model family undoubtedly served as a nagging comparison to the Changs, and when there was a church talent show and potluck dinner, and some of the families were planning on performing, Lenny heard the envy in his father’s voice as he told them that he wanted the family to do something. None of them had any real demonstrable talent, so his father wanted them to get on stage and sing a song together. He wanted them to sing “Edelweiss,” from The Sound of Music, and, again, Lenny knew that the idyllic image of the Von Trapp family was serving as a template in his imagination, but unfortunately none of them could sing.
Ed flatly refused, and since he hadn’t been going to church anyway, and everyone knew he would just disappear if he was required to be there, their father didn’t press him. But then his mother said she didn’t want to get on stage. None of them knew how to play the guitar, and she’d have to learn the piano accompaniment, which she didn’t have time for. Their father looked at Mira and Lenny, and Lenny said that if Ed and Mom weren’t going on stage, then he wasn’t. They turned to Mira, who had a gleam in her eye, but their father then sighed and said never mind.
None of them went to the talent show, and their father brooded for days. Lenny heard him arguing with his mother in Korean, his frustration at the family directed at her. But even as a kid, Lenny knows that the fault lies not with her, and not even directly with him. This is a family that wants out. His father dreams of the sea. His mother dreams of freedom. Ed already has been making excursions away. It’s only a matter of time before Lenny and Mira begin planning their escapes.
And as Mira and Lenny watch their father call out their names again, his voice hoarse and weaker, Lenny says, “He’s getting ready to leave.”
Mira is quiet. Their father calls out one more time and seems deflated. He drops his arms and walks slowly back to his car. Lenny knows all he has to do is go down there and say goodbye, but there’s a hardness in him that wants to punish his father in any way he can, and that means not saying goodbye.
Mira and Lenny watch him look around for another minute. He then climbs slowly into his car and starts the loud, rumbling engine. Black smoke spews from the tailpipe. He backs down the driveway, the muffler bottoming out because of the weight of the boxes. The brakes squeal. He pulls into the street and,
after revving the engine to warm it up, he drives down the street and turns the corner, the rumbling engine echoing and fading away.
PART V
A Sonata in Sunlight
33
Yul is such a gravitational force in the family that the orbits spin in unexpected and strange directions after his departure. Umee, now the sole provider, works many extra hours preparing for her real estate appraiser exam. She wakes up before dawn—her steps creaking above Lenny’s ceiling—and studies in her home office until she heads to the real estate firm. Then, when she returns at seven or eight, she eats a quick dinner at her desk and continues working until well past midnight.
Over the next few weeks they begin leading lives that rarely intersect. Mira stays over at her friends’ houses, and Lenny works on his various projects. He sets up in his room a small color TV that he bought from a pawnshop in Massapequa, and hooks up the illegal cable line. It’s surprisingly easy: one night he simply brings the ladder out to the telephone pole and connects the coaxial cable to the splitter box. Then he takes a registration tag from another box down the street and attaches the tag to his line.
He doesn’t even need a descrambler, because all the channels, including one premium channel, come in unscrambled. He finds, to his delight, more Asian imported Kung-Fu flicks.
He also continues reading up on different methods of marijuana cultivation, and studies his attic, the basement, and the back yard for possible growing sites. It’s too late to start a new crop—the best time to begin is after the first frost—and he understands why Sal chose the remote swamp. But Lenny also critiques Sal’s limiting the size—Sal could’ve spread out the plots and doubled or even tripled the number of plants. He could’ve also just dispersed the seeds randomly, and let the plants survive on their own, and then harvest them when they were ready. Despite this disorganization, it could’ve yielded more with less of a chance of being discovered.
All this is an academic exercise, because he doesn’t think he’ll grow anything on his own, especially because he’s not sure how to get seeds. But he likes the problem-solving nature of this, and he even decides to check the pH level of the backyard soil by buying pH test kits from a gardening store. Dissolving sample soil into a test tube with a special solution and comparing the color to a chart, he finds that his soil is slightly acidic. To make the soil more alkaline he needs to add lime. He decides to do this, just in case. When his mother sees the bag of lime in the garage and asks him about it, he tells her that with Dad gone he will take care of the yard. She smiles. “Good boy,” she says.
While prepping the yard he finds pieces of concrete from a pond his father had tried to build. Last year Lenny saw his father digging a pit in the back yard. He had taken off his shirt and shoveled the earth with a fervor Lenny hadn’t seen before. He stabbed the ground, his back muscles twisting, and threw the earth onto a growing pile. Lenny walked outside and watched. Without breaking his rhythm his father told Lenny that he was building a pond that would have fish and turtles. He would have water lilies and smooth stones. He would have a small fountain that would spout water.
He went back to work. After a while he grew tired and asked Lenny to help him dig out the larger rocks. Lenny used a gardening spade to pry out fist-sized quartz, and was startled to find a large bone, which he thought might be from a dinosaur but which Ed would later tell him was a cow bone. Much of this area had been farmland.
Over the next week his father finished digging out the hole, which was about the size of a shallow grave, and one Saturday morning he mixed a few bags of concrete with soil and rocks, and began lining the pond. Something didn’t seem right to Lenny, though, when he saw how the concrete caked at the bottom. Ed also saw this and looked at the concrete bags closely. He turned to Lenny, made a face, and shook his head. Later he told Lenny that their father had added soil to pre-mixed concrete, ruining it. But at the time Ed had just made a disgusted face and walked away.
When their father finished cementing the pond, he let it dry for a few days and then tested it by running a garden hose to it and turning the water on. Lenny watched from the back steps. The concrete was rocky and dirty, the hole misshapen, and as the murky water rose up bits of debris floated to the top. His father let the water reach ground level, and turned off the hose. He then used a broom to clean off the top. He looked down at the dirty brown water. He peered closer. The water was slowly receding. He turned the hose back on and refilled the pond. But after a few minutes the water level fell. Obviously the cement had leaks.
He pulled out the hose and stared at the receding dirty water. Lenny knew the pond was nothing like his father had envisioned, and to Lenny’s young eyes he thought it looked more like a muddy trench. Lenny watched him coil up the hose and walk back into the house. Lenny moved closer to the pond to inspect it, and could only see swirls of dirt beneath the clotted surface.
The empty pond sat there for a few weeks until his father filled it in with dirt and never mentioned it again.
Lenny sees Sal again on his new motorcycle, but this time he has a girl riding with him, hugging his waist. She wears a helmet, but her long blond hair flutters from her neck. Sal pulls up to Lenny and tells him that he’s quitting the business. The girl takes off her helmet and flips her hair back. She has wide, blue eyes and freckles on her nose.
“This is my girlfriend.”
She gives Lenny a gorgeous smile, and he suddenly feels shy.
Sal says, “I want to go to college. I got my high school degree and am going to Nassau Community. I’m getting my shit together.”
“That’s great,” Lenny says.
“I have seeds if you want them. Let me know. I’m definitely not going to use them.”
“Why don’t you sell them?”
“I’m done buying and selling—”
“And using,” his girlfriend adds.
“And using.”
When can I get them?”
“No hurry. Those are sealed and good for a while. Come by whenever.”
His girlfriend puts the helmet back on, and Sal waves to Lenny before riding away.
Lenny has never seen him with a girl before, and as they disappear down the street he feels lonely. He walks up to the train station, lays down some pennies and, while waiting for the train, he calls Nancy. But the number has been disconnected. He tries again and then calls the operator who says that the number hasn’t been changed, but turned off.
He thanks her and hangs up. He remembers Nancy mentioning working at a camp during the summer. He sits down on a bench and wonders why he doesn’t have more friends.
A train approaches, and he stands near the edge of the platform, looking down at his pennies. The train stops, a few commuters walk out, the conductors peering out of the windows, and the train pulls out of the station.
Lenny jumps down to collect his squashed and warped pennies. A woman yells, “Hey! What are you doing?”
He turns and sees an elderly woman with a Macy’s shopping bag rushing toward him. She says, “Get back up here! You shouldn’t be down there!”
He ignores her, pocketing the pennies, two of which are almost perfectly oval-sized. The woman glares down over the edge and says, “Young man, you can get killed down there.”
“I’m fine.” He hoists himself up onto the platform, and dusts off his jeans.
“How would you like me to tell your father what you’re doing?”
He says, “My father is dead.”
She blinks, startled. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“He died last month. Heart attack.”
“Oh. I… I…”
“He died in front of me.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He walks away. The strange thing is that the story feels true.
Lenny will see his father only a handful of times over the next decade, and the final confrontation—which will involve his father refusing to acknowledge any fault in the violence in their house—allows Lenny to cut all ties
with him. His father, then, does die in Lenny’s mind, for after the break Lenny never sees him again.
34
The chores multiply. In addition to cooking, washing dishes, laundry and yard work, Lenny also has to vacuum the house. Mira is supposed to empty the garbage cans once a week, but she never does. He has to remind her dozens of times, and she just doesn’t seem to care. He ends up doing her chores, because no matter how much he hounds her, the garbage cans overflow.
Mira becomes secretive, refusing to tell him where she goes. When Lenny tells her to come home for dinner, she says, “You’re not my parent.”
“I’m in charge when Mom’s not here.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You better listen to me.”
“Or what? You’re going to tell on me? I’ll tell Mom that you have a lot money from somewhere.”
He freezes. “What did you say?”
“I know about all the money you have.”
“What are you talking about?”
She taunts, “Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?”
He grabs her arm and shoves her against the wall. Lenny had hollowed out the book to hide his cash. He yells, “Are you snooping in my room?”
“Ow! You’re hurting me!”
“Did you take any of my money?”
“Where did you get all that?” she demands. “Did you steal it?”
“You searched my room!”
“Let go!”
He lets go of her arm, but blocks her way from leaving the kitchen. He says, “You went through my things? You know that’s wrong. How would you like it if I did that in your room?”
“I bet you stole it. I know you go sneaking out at night sometimes.”
He steps back, not sure how to respond to this. “Did you tell Mom?”
“No, but I will if you’re not nice to me.”
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