by David Adjmi
“What time is it?” I asked, my voice still phlegmy with sleep.
“I didn’t want to wake you up,” he said.
I sat up and my upper back throbbed with pain. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go in to work. Cookie’ll come get you. I was gonna call you later.”
“You’re working on Sunday?”
“We’re very busy, honey.”
“I thought we were getting breakfast.”
“Cookie’ll come get you,” he said. “We’re very busy.”
He left and shut the door behind him. I tried getting back to sleep. I tossed around, climbing out and around the depressions and large leather folds in the sofa, but each time I felt myself drifting off I compulsively replayed the scene in my mind. When did he get this supposed phone call to be at work—at dawn? And why would Cookie need to get me? I could walk in and out of houses! I was ambulatory, for God’s sake! My father was speaking nonsense to me. He was obviously lying to me. And though I generally excused his lies, this one revived the outrage I’d been trying to bury from the previous night: I was suddenly completely hell-bent on holding him accountable for something, anything. Maybe I could confront him before he drove off, I thought. I hobbled exhaustedly to the door, my back rippling with knots. I fumbled for the knob but there wasn’t a knob, just a keyhole. One could ostensibly turn a key in the keyhole to open the door that way, but there wasn’t a key. I tried pushing the door open but it was locked from the outside. I banged on the door and screamed to be let out. I thought of jumping out a window, but there were just grids of glass built into the wall. I looked for another way out, but there was just the one knobless door. Who lived like this—with doors that trapped people from the inside?!
Cookie’s number was scrawled on a pad near the kitchen. When I called she sounded like a totally different person, curt and very cranky. I wondered if I’d called too early. “No,” she said, “I’m up. I’m always up.” My father hadn’t mentioned anything to her about getting me but it was “no problem” and she didn’t find it an unreasonable imposition, she said, though she undercut this apparent sangfroid by repeating “I have a million things to do” and “I’m sorry” over and over in a tone that indicated not apology but resentment, because she was very busy, and had a lot of errands, and couldn’t get me right away. Cookie seemed unhealthily intent on setting a boundary with me for judging her (which I wasn’t) for not being prompt or maternal or available enough, and I felt suddenly caught in a whole miserable skein of neuroses and transferences. To calm her, I said reassuring things like “take your time” and “I totally understand” even though I did not understand and couldn’t bear another second in the carriage house. I felt claustrophobic and panicked but didn’t want to say or do anything to agitate Cookie for fear she’d become too nervous and angry to free me from the house. Though I didn’t know her terribly well, I had to assume she was like my father, crazy and labile and inconsistent, and that I was hanging by a thread. I hung up the phone and made myself a cup of acrid instant coffee. I poured in two percent kosher milk that pooled up to the surface of the mug in stale-looking cirruses. I showered using my father’s scented bar soap, which by that point had deliquesced somewhat eerily into a kind of thick emerald cream that somehow kept its bar shape. The water pressure felt good on my aching muscles. I was exhausted from lack of sleep. I was furious with my father. I didn’t know how I would get his silly, vacant look out of my head—the stain of dereliction in his eyes. Usually he could block out upsetting conversations, but maybe this was the beginning of some period of reckoning. Maybe once you got older your capacity for denial was leached from you the way minerals were leached from bones, making everything porous and breakable. He was riddled with guilt—a guilt for which I was a living symptom, like the anamorphic skull and bones in that famous Holbein painting. I was a buried secret coming to light and it horrified him.
When I finished showering I got dressed in my father’s bedroom. I hadn’t seen it in daylight. There was the same drab furniture he had in his last apartment, dropped in as if by construction crane; the same fungible bedspread, the kitsch figurines. On the credenza were the tiny vulgar enameled sculptures of elephants I knew from childhood, tiny geishas hiding their faces behind imbricate ivory fans. On the dresser near his bed were school photos of children I didn’t know poised against a backdrop of fluffy white clouds. The children, like the figurines, were decorations, evidence he belonged to something. There were no pictures of my siblings or of me. We were from some other life, some past that had faded and vanished. He was creating a new past, one that exonerated him. Maybe it was a fundamental human desire, to erase the parts of life that threw it out of balance or made a person feel weak or guilty or inept. As I slipped on my socks and pants I noticed a queasy feeling in my stomach, from the coffee probably, but it seemed a symptom of distress—like the distress I experienced as a small child when I’d lay in bed late at night, unable to sleep, fending off my many nameless terrors. I remember looking around at my darkened room and feeling it was haunted, like I’d broken into some other child’s life. I felt that same dislocated emptiness now in my father’s house as I slipped on my socks, washed myself with his green bar of soap, drank his acrid coffee, sat where he sat. My father was to me what those children in the school photos were to him: a prop, a set decoration. He was someone I looked to when I needed a father, but he wasn’t mine.
Across from my father’s end table was a long, flat oak dresser. On top of it were two rolls of quarters propped up vertically, like twin towers. I took one. My father wouldn’t notice. I didn’t care if he noticed. It was another transaction, one of many that comprised our sick relationship. I didn’t save the roll of coins. I used the money on tolls for the drive home. When it was spent, I disposed of the sun-faded pink wrapper in the trash.
Galaxy
MY MOTHER’S PRIMARY aim in life was to become relaxed. She often spoke about being relaxed, when she might be relaxed, whether you were or weren’t relaxed. She wasn’t a hedonist, she wasn’t a pleasure seeker; pleasure was too full, she was after the skeleton characteristic: pleasure without content, beyond calm, divorced from any stimulus.
When she was in the process of achieving said relaxation my mother would narrate in running commentary its various phases, registering like a Geiger counter any shifts in her arousal: “I feel less nervous now,” she’d say, or “I’m nervous!” or “I’m feeling more relaxed.” At times she seemed almost surprised that it was even possible to get to the place of calm she’d arrived at. To reinforce her sense of certainty she liked to repeat how relaxed she was, and ask rhetorically of others “Isn’t this relaxing?” and “Aren’t you relaxed?” with the hope of generating a sort of feedback loop of homeostasis.
The flip side to my mother’s obsession with relaxation was her encumbering nervousness, and only cigarettes could subdue it. When I was little I viewed her addiction as a steely resolve: an unrepentant individualism that cared nothing for social trends or ghastly images on posters of tar-rotted lungs. In truth, she was just addicted to cigarettes. She tried to quit smoking when it became fashionable in the late eighties—the first of several crusades—but at the slightest skirmish, the slightest hint of a problem, she was back off the wagon. My siblings and I staged interventions, we threw out the cartons of Benson & Hedges Ultra-Light 100s she hid in her drawer, but she’d just get new cartons and find new hiding spots. We made vociferous complaints, we warned her she’d get cancer, but nothing worked.
Then, just before she turned sixty, she was diagnosed with something called an acoustic neuroma, a tumor lodged between her brain and acoustic nerve. The tumor was benign but still potentially life-threatening, and she needed to get an operation. The doctors insisted she quit smoking prior to the surgery, and we were all shocked when she was able to do it—particularly in light of how nervous she was about having brain surgery. After her recovery she tried to make it stick, but there was a problem, wh
ich was that when she was nervous all she knew how to do (if she denied herself a cigarette) was torment herself with nervous anxiety.
To worsen matters, my father was suing her for divorce—he made the despicable moral error of serving her with divorce papers the day before her operation. He had the temerity to show up at the hospital the day of the operation—he even brought a rabbi with him to give her an extempore blessing. My mother snubbed them both as she was wheeled away on the gurney—she didn’t need some shit blessing from his shit rabbi. When she was recuperating, Dad started in with his inveigling, urging her to sell the house, explaining how she didn’t need to live in that big house anymore, it was too big for her. The money would be a nice chunk of change for my father, but it wouldn’t get Mom a decent apartment, not in New York. How was she going to live? She had no collateral, no savings. And she desperately wanted to retire. She was pushing sixty, she couldn’t work at her receptionist job forever.
In the skein of these unpleasant thoughts—and as an intermediary respite from the horrors she conjured in her overactive mind—my mother decided to book a luxury cruise to the Caribbean with my sister. There were only two beds in the cabin, but for a couple hundred bucks, she said, I could join them—there was some kind of pull-out sofa or trundle bed.
It wasn’t the most appealing offer, but at the time I felt rootless and a bit lost. I was about to leave home for three years. I’d gotten into a graduate program for playwriting in Iowa. I’d written a one-act play and used it as a sample, and they accepted me. It was very prestigious—I was thrilled—but I’d be leaving a trail of broken relationships in my wake. I was no longer on speaking terms with my father. And in the spring, Kurt broke up with me. It was my first relationship, and my first breakup, and I was crushed—even if I knew deep down that the whole thing had been a disaster.
For one thing, Kurt was constantly driving up to visit his wife (they were meant to get a divorce, but never did) at that house they shared in the Thousand Islands, because the dog allegedly missed her, and because it was just so tonic and lovely, he said, in the Thousand Islands. He was driving up every weekend, and since he worked late during the week we almost never got to see each other. If I balked, he dismissed me; if I asked to drive up with him, he drew a line in the sand. But the wife thing was symptomatic of bigger problems: a rotten sex life, the sickening cocktail of my garbagey self-esteem, and his oppressive need for control. It was a bad match, but I took that failure as an indication of my failure as a person.
I worried I was too damaged to have loving relationships—and I was desperate to be loved. My life seemed like a catalogue of rejections. After the breakup, I was in desperate need of comfort and care—and I’m sure I harbored some liminal, dimly conscious wish that my mother could be a person who might tender such things if we were trapped in a confined space for ten days. And after that terrible experience with my dad, I wanted to prove I could meet at least one of my parents at some vague horizon of adult communication.
I flew into San Juan, where I met up with Mom and Arlene. The ship was nice, but the cabin was significantly tinier than I imagined—it barely fit the three of us. Arlene already seemed to be anticipating the bad time we’d all have in the small cabin, but my mother was in a “roughing it” mode: we’d hardly be in the cabin with all our activities and sunning and dining and relaxing. While the surgery was deemed a success, the healing process was going to take a bit, and my mother was almost entirely deaf in her right ear. The deafness caused her to shout at everyone, but she didn’t think she was shouting because she couldn’t hear herself. As we unpacked, she loudly lectured me about sunscreens and warned me about the dangers of the Caribbean sun, explaining that it was “NOT LIKE THE SUN YOU THINK YOU KNOW” and that it could “BURN YOU ALIVE.” The other residual effect of the surgery was that it left her with a constant sensation of imbalance. Every so often she’d lean cautiously, her fingertips grazing a wall or a piece of furniture to steady herself. Or she’d become oddly still, then slowly hold out her hands with her palms facing out as though she might do a pirouette. She’d look over to one of us, and inquire “ARE WE MOVING?” in a loud monotone. Her eyes were sweetly uncomprehending; her feet planted unsteadily like a child just learning to walk.
I thought it was cute but Arlene was visibly annoyed, and she huffed and marched around the cabin. The two of them went on vacations all the time, and things generally went badly. Arlene was essentially a nervous person, and her nervousness often triggered my mother, who would in turn criticize her (not deliberately, she was trying to be helpful) and their conversations would become threaded arbitrarily with these small warnings and minor correctives from my mother. Arlene would try to work around Mom’s obsessive critiques (Did she want to be alone for the rest of her life? Didn’t she want to read the great books and be spiritual? Shouldn’t she see a dentist before it was too late?) but she lacked coping strategies, and eventually, no matter how pleasant or luxurious the trip, always ended up beaten down.
We got all dressed up that first night to go to the Orion dining room. Mom lurched unsteadily down the port hallway; if she lost her equilibrium one of us grabbed her arm to steady her. “ARE THERE WAVES,” she said on the elevator, prompting looks from the other passengers. “Ma, you’re being loud,” Arlene whispered. She wobbled a little to the left, then pressed her fingertips against the wall of the elevator as though performing a sacrament. “I FEEL MOVEMENT,” she said. “Ma,” repeated my sister, “you’re being very loud.”
“I’M LOUD?”
“Ma, you’re screaming,” I said.
“I’M NOT SCREAMING.”
The elevator doors opened and I walked ahead of my mother, who wobbled down the port hallway navigating turbulence both real and imagined. She careened through the maze of tables in the dining room, which was huge; it took a long time to get anywhere. It was decorated in shades of gold and cerulean. On the center of the ceiling was a polar-projection world map: a token reference to the name of the ship, I supposed, which was the Galaxy—even if the world was not the galaxy—the motifs on the ship in general seemed confused.
The maître d’ seated us at a table near the galley, we had to share it with a squat midwestern couple and their daughter. The father wore tweeds; he was bearded and had an owlish face. The daughter, like her mother, wore lace-fringed Laura Ashley. Her dress had a ribbon near the sleeve and a deep border of embroidery.
“SO WHERE ARE YOU FROM?” screamed my mother quite suddenly, as though she was broadcasting into a loudspeaker. Her volume made the father’s chalk-white face turn scarlet.
“Minnesota,” he said.
“YOU LIKE IT THEH?”
“Oh ya. It’s nice,” the wife said.
“I JUST HAD BRAIN SURGERY,” my mother said, not to anyone in particular. “I HAD SOMETHING CALLED AN ACOUSTIC NEUROMA.”
“Ma,” Arlene chided, “they don’t want to hear about your acoustic neuroma.” Arlene eyed the family, half in complicity with them. Like my sister, I tried to give subtle nonverbal clues to the midwestern family that I was in solidarity with them, that I too was mortified by the loud overbearing presence of our mother, who didn’t appear to notice our discomfiture—or if she did, she didn’t care. She was going to be sociable and have a good time!
Our table was near the silverware station, and for some reason my mother, who was otherwise mainly deaf, was acoustically extremely sensitive to the sounds of tines and spoons and all manner of silverware—a point she needed to emphasize with absolute clarity every couple of minutes by declaiming things like “ITS SO DAMN LOUD!” and “SHUT UP WITH THOSE FORKS ALREADY!” When our waiter refilled my mother’s wineglass she became inexplicably livid, and demanded he pour the wine back into the bottle because she hadn’t asked him to pour the wine into the glass, and as part of her extensive reprimand, demanded that this one bottle of Pinot Grigio be kept for her “in the back” and that at every dinner thereafter the waiter was to pour her “ONE GLASS PER NI
GHT.”
By the time dessert came I had a migraine, and my sister had gotten so anxious she was unconsciously pulling the kinks in her hair and ripping at her eyebrows. I felt badly for the midwestern family, who’d collectively sunk into a quiet capitulation. They tensely sipped their ice water, careful not to clink the ice or touch their silverware or do anything that would incur further umbrage from my mother. When we got back to the cabin I took two Advil, put in my earplugs, and went right to bed—but I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my trundle bed all night planning my escape.
After that night, though, we actually started to have fun together. My mother learned to adjust her volume so she wasn’t shouting all the time. We had breakfast and disported ourselves in deck chairs. We sunbathed while a band played music and people served us ice cream sundaes and candy and alcohol. We loitered at the duty-free store, watched movies, made desultory trips to the casino. The ship had a touristy gaudiness, but I didn’t mind that; in fact I found a kitsch enjoyment in all the gold and marble and Muzak. Arlene was picked—one of just a few passengers—to be in a fashion show. She modeled outfits from the boutique to Robert Palmer’s “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On” standing on plinths, slinking blankly and modishly around the shuffleboard area. The Caribbean sun really was hotter than other kinds of sun—my mother was right—and on the second day I got badly sunburned. My sunburn was painful but I liked the way it looked on me, pink and bright. When I angled myself a certain way in the tinted mirror of the elevator I looked distinguished. The cruise prompted vain reflections: I kept looking at myself, thinking about myself. I felt improbably rugged on the ship, whipped by austral winds on sundecks and mezzanines, my hair slicked in place by condiments and waxes. I felt, for the first time in my life, almost gallant.
I kept having fantasies that some steward or epaulet-studded sailor would pick me up on some deck, which didn’t happen. Then, one afternoon, I found myself being unmistakably cruised in the locker room. The guy couldn’t have been older than twenty-two or twenty-three. I noticed him at the pool the day before. He was wearing a black Speedo, and had just finished swimming. As he reclined in his deck chair, droplets of water trickled down his torso and stomach in spotty rivulets before quickly evaporating in the heat. Now he was standing before me in a towel. His flesh was studded with goose bumps, nipples pinched and purple. He looked plucked, like a duckling. I wanted to suck him off right there in the shower but I was scared we’d be caught—and we couldn’t risk going back to my foldout sofa. “I know a place we can go,” he said. He got dressed and walked me around the side of the ship, then up a small staircase. He brought me to a tiny enclave near the lifeboats, which were harnessed in rows about the deck. We started kissing and I could taste the brackish white film on his cheek. Neither of us seemed to care if we got caught having sex: we were caught up in the fantasy of the cruise, where only pleasant things could happen, especially in an open-air vista. Afterward we leaned against the guardrail, pensive and happy. “I’m Jim,” he said.