Estranged

by Jessica Berger Gross

  Neil and I met at the cooperative café (because he had asked where I liked to hang out). It was snowing, and what did I think about taking our coffees to go and going sledding? We traded turns riding our makeshift sled—the plastic rectangle meant to go underneath a dish rack—down a snowy hill. Afterward we went for wine and pizza. Neil’s car had a busted heater and a rusted-out hole on the floor of the passenger seat, covered by newspapers and books, but our conversation kept me warm. Over the next few weeks we would go ice-skating on a pond, dance to eighties music at a cheesy club in town, and hear a piano concert at the university’s Music Hall. We sat in neighborhood bars, drinking Wisconsin beer. For Valentine’s Day, I gave him my copy of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. We stayed up all night, kissing and falling in love. I started daydreaming about a life with him.

  Neil was different. For starters, he was from California. Not like the hipster Vassar and New York City boys I’d dated, with their studied cool, nor the earnest hippie Madison activists, he was academic and ambitious. This was a combination I hadn’t encountered often. There was something else. Neil, in a youthful act of ironic rebellion from his parents, had worked as a police officer between college and graduate school. Though he must have been the gentlest cop on the street, I took comfort in knowing he could protect me.

  When I stayed over at Neil’s apartment, a grown-up place with central air, a stocked fridge, and books stacked on a dusty weight-training bench, he cooked for me and happily handed over the front section of the newspaper. He was brilliant and handsome and going places, yes, but also a nonconformist with zero tolerance for bad behavior—including mine—and the sort of emotional manipulations I was used to. When he heard me on the phone with my parents, Neil looked uneasy. He didn’t like the way we talked to one another or the way I tore myself apart afterward, and he seemed to understand why I sometimes vigilantly avoided their calls.

  Neil was an only child with parents who’d moved from Los Angeles to Northern California, one town over from Berkeley. His father, Herb, was an aspiring novelist who’d practiced entertainment law before heading north and settling down to a career as an editor for a university legal publishing company. He read constantly, from philosophy to psychoanalysis to poetry.

  Neil’s mother, Sonya (nicknamed Sunny for her disposition), had left college at nineteen to get married and put her husband through law school with an office job at Frederick’s of Hollywood. Later on, she became a creatively inclined (if somewhat frustrated) stay-at-home mom who took a young Neil to school and camp and the petting zoo in Tilden Park, and threw dinner parties for her gourmet club, cooking from Julia Child’s cookbook.

  Sonya and Herb were Jewish but steadfastly secular. They were intellectuals and atheists and armchair Marxists who put up Christmas trees and lit Menorahs, who organized Easter-egg hunts and served latkes and pastrami sandwiches. They lived quietly and contentedly as three. Like my parents, they’d made it to Europe as a family only once, but with hardcovers and paperbacks purchased at Moe’s and Cody’s and Black Oak and University Press Books crowding their small house, stacks upon stacks of them, they were far more worldly than my parents.

  Years before we met, when she was fifty-seven and Neil was just a college student, Sonya became sick with a fast-moving cancer. She died at home later that year. When Neil left California for graduate school, he called his father every day. They were best friends.

  Neil didn’t care about being cool, something I’d worked on diligently since ninth grade. He loved his studies and put them before anything else. Out for Sunday breakfast one freezing morning six weeks into our relationship, I suggested we take the newspaper and get back into bed for the day. Neil turned cold. The thought horrified him. He had work to do.

  I felt rejected, and I felt like an idiot for wasting my twenties pursuing men. Why had I signed up for a degree in a subject I was no more than vaguely interested in? Why hadn’t I tried to do something I loved? It was too late, I figured. Instead I’d focus on our future. Aloud. I pushed, was always pushing. I was impatient; I wanted to know how this would end up. I wanted us to be together forever.

  Inevitably, Neil asked for space. I protested weakly. We went to separate parties that Saturday night. I kissed someone else, a co-op guy, maybe the revolutionary bookseller. On a final late-night phone call, after I begged him to come over to discuss the end of our relationship in person, Neil refused, and I gave up.

  “I love you,” I said right before we hung up. “I thought you should know.”

  I hadn’t said this before. The next day Neil flew home to see his father in California.

  * * *

  About a week later, Neil called. His father, Herb, had had a heart attack. They’d eaten lunch at a Thai restaurant and then come home, Neil napping on the couch; Herb working on a short story in front of the computer; the rest a secondhand blur. Neil performing CPR. The EMTs’ attempt to restart Herb’s heart. The ambulance ride. Herb, seventy-one, brought to the same Berkeley hospital where Neil was born twenty-eight years earlier. Nothing could be done.

  He didn’t want me to fly out for the funeral. But he did want to talk. I made him promise to call me the next day, and again the next, and then the next one after that.

  After the funeral I picked Neil up at the Madison airport. He was standing by the baggage carousel, looking solemn and older and utterly alone. He was the only one left in his family.

  We went back to his apartment and sat down on the living room couch. He started to cry, waves of exhaustion and tears, an onslaught. I held him. The days and weeks continued on like that. Neil wearing his black bathrobe and flannel pajamas all day, until one day he decided to get dressed. We saw a movie with his friends, Boys Don’t Cry. We went for Indian food. We fell into bed and started over.

  For the first time in my relationship history, I had to be the strong one and not worry about whether we’d end up together. I didn’t press him about the future. I was applying for jobs in New York for after graduation, and Neil had no idea where he’d be teaching after he finished his Ph.D. I tried to appreciate the time we had together without thinking ahead.

  Neil met my parents when they came to Madison for my graduation that May. The four of us drove out for a house tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. There must have been a celebratory graduation meal, but I can’t remember any details. Perhaps Neil sat with them during the ceremony. As difficult as my relationship with my parents was, I wanted Neil to like them.

  That late spring or early summer, Neil and I took a trip to the Bay Area to pack up his parents’ house. Herb had left behind a huge personal library of fiction and history and sociology and philosophy and religion. It would take a lifetime to read all those books, Neil said, so he wanted none of them, and he impulsively sold the collection to a Berkeley bookstore. Sunny’s rings and necklaces sat in her jewelry box, though she had died a decade before. He threw out some tangled costume stuff, and wrapped an antique engagement ring and wedding band in tissue paper, tucking them in the front pocket of his jeans.

  We returned to California later in the summer, this time to Palo Alto. Mark and Tamara had a new baby, and my parents sent a ticket, instructing me to come for the bris, the circumcision. Neil joined me on the trip and sat at breakfast and dinner tables, looking uncomfortable. My father and brothers congratulated him on the car he’d bought with money from the sale of his father’s house. At dinner, my mother chastised Tamara for eating sushi while breast-feeding, and Tamara walked out of the restaurant. My family—all of us, including me—were critical, argumentative, and bossy.

  In Madison, I packed up my room at Martha’s and came upon the plainly written paperback Outgrowing the Pain, which I read with renewed conviction. In particular, I noticed a sentence I’d underlined furiously in college but was just now ready to believe: For whatever reason, whether you were neglected or abused physically, sexually, or emotionally, it was a problem with your parents, not with you.

  FOURTEEN


  ON AN AUGUST Sunday morning, I woke up in my childhood bedroom on Long Island, not knowing my life was about to change. I was just in from Madison and back in my parents’ house before a week of job interviews in the city.

  I’d been gone and back for years, gone and back since as early as I could leave—to those theater summer programs and then to college, to Nepal and then to Israel, to my beloved crappy apartments in the East Village and Brooklyn, and then to graduate school. But somehow, as far as I ventured, I always found myself back here in this bedroom.

  My room was exactly the same. The Laura Ashley wallpaper my mother and I had picked out together, the matching white bed and dresser and schoolgirl desk. The stereo handed down from Mark and Josh, and an old TV sitting on a wood cabinet that one of them had made in a high school industrial arts class. Posters from school plays hung on the back of the door next to pictures of J. Crew models cut out from the catalog, scruffy guys with intense eyes in roll-neck sweaters. My menagerie of stuffed animals on wicker shelving. Buried somewhere deep inside my closet was a Raggedy Ann doll and her mate, Andy.

  The door still had the skeleton lock my father had installed when I’d hit puberty. Sleeping there for the first time in several months, I’d made sure to lock myself in before bed.

  Perhaps this visit would consist of nothing more than sushi in town, strip-mall Italian food, and a trip to the Roosevelt Field mall for an interview outfit. I was older now, an adult. I had Neil back in Madison and five job interviews in Manhattan scheduled for the coming week.

  I got out of bed, visited the retro bathroom I used to share with my brothers, and wandered downstairs to make myself breakfast.

  My parents had recently renovated their kitchen, hiring professionals rather than having my father take on a DIY project like he used to when we were little, stripping and sanding cabinets over months of weekends. They were proud of the new kitchen. They’d taken out a second mortgage, I think, worked with an interior designer or architect of some sort. Or maybe they’d simply hired a contractor or handyman, but even that sounded to me like something rich people did. It was the sort of kitchen meant to impress the other teachers in my mother’s book club, with a cooktop built right in to the requisite granite countertops, a large eat-in island in the shape of a kidney bean, aluminum navy chairs, and stainless-steel appliances. I missed the old kitchen of my childhood with the regular wood table and the clunky yellow fridge. I took a pre-sliced sesame bagel from the stainless-steel freezer and stuck it in the stainless-steel toaster oven.

  My father was already downstairs. He was wearing his old green terry-cloth robe over a white Hanes V-neck undershirt and drawstring pajama bottoms worn soft, with a pair of thin slippers on his feet. I’d seen him in some version of these same bedclothes for my entire life. He was fifty-seven, and he and my mother (with her good skin) prided themselves on looking young for their age without any special effort, but his gray hair was coarse and dull, and his pasty skin was rough.

  He was in a bad mood. He commandeered the kitchen, huffily and noisily pouring coffee and a second bowl of cereal for himself, acting all of a sudden put out by my very presence. I remembered this feeling viscerally, the feeling of being unwelcome in my own home. Almost always it took me by surprise, hitting just when I’d let myself get comfortable and vulnerable.

  I didn’t want any trouble. Certainly I didn’t want to get into it with him that morning. He liked to blame me for his moods, but this time, at least, I hadn’t done anything to deserve his attitude. But then, when I reached for a coffee mug, I miscalculated the weight of a cabinet door and it swung wide open, imperceptibly nicking the new refrigerator. Or had it been the other way around? Had I been reaching for something from the refrigerator and scratched the cabinet?

  However it happened, my father was steaming, fuming, the red spots on his face turning textured and pronounced. Like some sort of twisted comic-book character. “You have no idea how much things cost,” he said. “Do you know how much I paid for this refrigerator? For this entire kitchen? Do you?”

  The tears came immediately. My heart was pounding.

  But you could scarcely see the damage, I pointed out. It was an accident. A mistake. I felt horrible and guilty and frightened and in an escalating panic, because I knew I couldn’t fix it or repay him. On the other hand, the smudge might be the kind to come off with some sudsy warm water and a paper towel.

  It was a small thing, a petty thing. But I knew that in their house small things could have consequences.

  My father slammed cabinets, rattling canned goods. Did I even respect his things? Did I even respect him?

  So this was what it was going to be like. Still.

  I tried to calm myself down. I took my coffee into the family room where my parents kept the computer. I needed to print out hard copies of my résumé in case my interviewers asked for them. I wanted everything to be just so, to be perfect. What I wore and my résumé and the answers I’d give to questions like “Tell me one of your weaknesses” and the way I’d charm and convince myself into a do-gooder nonprofit job paying forty-five thousand a year—an unimaginable sum to me at the time—and, if I was lucky, an apartment in brownstone Brooklyn.

  Plus, I thought changing rooms might diffuse the argument.

  I sat down at my father’s desk and tried to figure out the uncooperative printer.

  They’d bought a new carpet and a matching plaid overstuffed couch and love seat for the family room, but the walls were lined with the same fake wood paneling from when we’d moved in twenty years before, and the shelves were still stuffed with my brothers’ sports trophies, my horseback-riding camp participation ribbons and drama club plaques, and the small handprints on gray ceramic slabs that we’d made as preschoolers.

  “Get up,” he said, coming into the room. “Stand right there,” he ordered, pointing to his right. He wanted me to watch while he sat and worked the printer. He was telling me that, even now, I couldn’t get a job without his help, without his goddamn shitty printer.

  We’d had thousands of these fights before. Fights that started out stupid and petty and meaningless but escalated until he scared me to death. We fought in person when we were together, and when I moved away, we fought in letters and over the phone. In Madison I’d held the phone to Neil’s ear so he could hear my father scream at me, like I used to do with Franny.

  But that day, for some unknown reason, I felt something new stirring. Was it courage? Was it no longer giving a shit? Was it the knowledge that I could go to Kinko’s? All I knew was I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, slink away again, wouldn’t run to my room and hide.

  “Don’t you talk to me that way,” I said. I was so done, so sick of him trying to intimidate and threaten me. “Don’t you ever speak to me like that again.” I would not put up with his bullshit for one more minute.

  I can’t remember his exact words back. Maybe he said “Who do you think you are.” Maybe he called me a bitch or a cunt. Eventually he grew strangely quiet in the face of my long-pent-up wrath. That morning I wouldn’t be stopped. I went further, confronting him with his behavior, my wording harsher and blunter than it had ever been in my therapist-approved, cautiously phrased letters of reconciliation and obligatory, compulsory forgiveness. It was time. I needed him to understand exactly what he’d done to me. And I wanted him to admit it.

  My mother was sitting on the couch, laying low and pretending to read the Sunday paper.

  “You hit me. You hit Josh and Mark,” I said to him. “And you hit her, too,” I added, turning to my mother.

  Now I really had gone too far. My mother couldn’t avoid the confrontation any longer.

  “How many times did I hit you? How many?” he demanded, his voice exploding. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or to me.

  “Too many to count,” she answered. Her words sliced the room in two. I’d never heard her stand up to him like this before. I’d never seen her take my side.

  My father fix
ed his eyes on me. “You were a difficult child,” he said. “You were stubborn. Sensitive. Selfish. You were a brat. You always knew how to push my buttons. It was both of our faults. You and me, we were both to blame.”

  “I was a child,” I begged him to see. “It was not my fault.” It had taken me my entire life to understand that.

  “Jessie’s right,” my mother said, an admission I’d forever longed to hear. “She was two and a half the first time you hit her.”

  Two and a half years old? I didn’t know that. I asked my mother to tell me the story, and a part of me wanted to crawl into her lap to hear it. But she wasn’t that kind of mother. And I suppose I wasn’t that sort of daughter, either.

  “We were heading out on a neighborhood walk,” she said. I’d insisted that we leave the stroller at home. I wanted to walk the whole way myself and promised I could make it. Halfway to wherever we were going, I changed my mind and cried myself into a tantrum, begging to be carried. That was when he’d hit me. That was the first time.

  How could he hit a toddler? How could anyone?

  “Why didn’t you protect me?” I asked my mother. “When it kept happening, why didn’t you leave? You had a job. You make almost as much money as he does.”

  She had three young children. “And I would have lost the house,” she said. “We would have had to move into an apartment in town.”

  I pictured the small apartment in the middle of Rockville Centre where a classmate of mine had lived with his mother after her divorce. How I’d envied him that apartment. I’d wanted my mother to leave, to divorce him. Didn’t she get that? I’d wanted her to take my side.

  “Would that have been so bad?” I said. “We would have been safe.”

  * * *

  Our conversation continued into the late morning and early afternoon, hour after hour of the three of us in the family room, crying and accusing.