Nowadays, as she did when I was a kid, Grandma leans close to me after scolding Sheldon and says, “See? He doesn’t listen.” And I think, Neither would you after years of nagging.
Before moving to New York at age thirty-one, the furthest east I had ventured was the Alabama-Georgia border. For years I proudly proclaimed that if I died without ever visiting New York City, I wouldn’t feel deprived. Only years later did I realize one source of my aversion. The East had come to represent failure to me. East was neurosis. East was the past.
My mother’s family fled Queens for Arizona after my Uncle Howard killed himself. He was twenty-seven years old, a Chemistry PhD student at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and engaged to be married. One day, unprompted by any specific event anyone knows or will discuss, he downed a lethal cocktail in his school chem lab.
After Howard’s suicide, my grandparents fell apart. They took off work. They sought comfort in their neighbors. Had they been religious, they would have sat shiva. No one on that side of the family would ever discuss how else they endured the preceding months of mourning. All I know is that, to take their mind off of the tragedy, my grandparents vacationed in Phoenix in the spring of 1969. They moved the family there the following summer and never looked back. It took my mom thirty-four years to return to the Empire State, and that was for business, not pleasure. Everyone insisted that if I would’ve met Howard, I would’ve loved him. “Everyone loved him,” Grandma says. The mantra seems to comfort her.
After a recent Thanksgiving meal, I joined Sheldon and Grandma in my parent’s bedroom. They’d gathered around a black and white family photo from their years in New York. Arranged in a V according to height and age stood Howard, beside Sheldon, beside my mom and Grandma, then Grandpa holding my grinning Aunt Debbie.
Grandma put her finger on Howard’s gray face. With his straight frame posed stiffly in a suit, he stood, half-smiling. “Here’s the one I miss,” she said. “I’ll never understand.” I used to think, How could she understand? He took his reasons with him. Now I think she knows more than she can bear to admit. I put my hand on her back. She looked up, her eyes clouded pink.
“He suffered from depression,” Sheldon said. He lowered himself on the bed, and his lips tightened as our eyes met. “Manic depression.” Maybe. My mother doesn’t recall Howard being diagnosed, but years of psychotherapy have left Sheldon thinking in clinical terms. Sheldon recalled a weekend where Howard came home from college. The first day Howard was cheerful and happy to see the family. With each day he became increasingly quiet, “crabby” in Sheldon’s words, and spent more time in his old room. To me, that seems more like Howard’s frustration with his relations. Even consecutive years of such behavior hardly resembles mania.
To my surprise, Grandma offered her own theory. Howard got into a couple of heated arguments with his father around that time. Though they later reconciled, she suspects Howard knew things about my grandpa that she did not, dalliances he was having with other women, possibly more. “Howard tried something once before,” she admitted, “and he said, ‘Mom, I’ll never do that again.’” After thirty-three years spent wondering about my fallen Uncle’s suicide, this was the most openly I’d ever heard them discuss the possible cause. She repeated, “I’ll never understand it.” She and I left the room with our arms around each other’s backs. Sheldon tailed behind. She said, “He would have been—”
“Sixty-five,” said Sheldon.
Some of us need reminding. Mom gave me her brother’s name as my middle name to keep his memory alive. Other people never forget.
In my family, Sheldon’s memory is legendary. Wondering whether it was the Brooklyn or the Midtown location of the old E.J. Korvette department chain where Grandpa Shapiro first worked? Unclear about the configuration of the Flushing, Queens neighborhood near 48th Avenue and 190th Street in the late 1950s? Ask Sheldon. “Yah,” he might say, “there was a deli next to that tailor.” When Mom couldn’t remember the names of her elementary school friends, he listed them without pause, completing the picture with their parents’ names, ethnicity, and occupation.
If Grandma comments that Sheldon remembers everything, Sheldon shakes his head. “I do not,” he says.
She says, “You do too.”
The source of his retention might lie in the paucity of his current existence. In addition to his fleeting employment at relatively stress-free jobs, Sheldon isn’t married, has no kids, few friends, and no mortgage. With so little to clutter his mind, it’s as if life demands only a fraction of his cognitive capacity. That and he isn’t creating the future memories that so often replace our old ones. He fills his time in other ways.
“Were you at Borders at the Biltmore last Saturday?” he recently asked me. We were at Grandmas’ getting ready for dinner. Sheldon sat on the couch, legs crossed, reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. We’re both big readers, but as far as scope and variety, Sheldon has me beat. He reads The New York Times, classic novels, obscure Eastern philosophy and self-help. Last spring he gave me a dog-eared copy of philosopher Alan W. Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity. I studied philosophy as an undergrad yet had never heard of Watts.
I admitted I’d been at Borders. I’d been sitting in a cushy pleather chair in the literature section that night, reading magazines in-store so I wouldn’t have to buy them with my meager earnings. That’s my standard relaxation routine. Sheldon has his own. During the week, he reads the paper in Fashion Square Mall in a certain brown leather chair located by the elevator near Crate & Barrel. Borders seems to be his nighttime spot. To be fair, I hadn’t seen him, but if I had, I would’ve hidden. I accept that this makes me a callous person, but I go to Borders to read, not socialize. And as much as I am learning to love Sheldon despite his eccentricities, engaging him would have closed what brief window of opportunity I had to unwind. Besides, he still embarrasses me a little.
“Yah,” he said, smiling, nodding. “I thought that was you.”
For some reason he says “Yah” instead of “Yeah.” I can’t figure this out. Does his partial deafness cause this affect? Can he not hear the mispronunciation? Maybe it’s an attempt at sophistication, the same way some people emphasize the Frenchness of the words memoir or chevre. “I absolutely love this chev-reh,” these people say at parties, not “chev” or “chev cheese,” but “chev-reh.” But you wouldn’t hear the host reply, “Yah, me too.” “Yah” isn’t a habit of the intellectual or refined. It’s a Sheldonism.
Besides the voice, volume, and manners, he has many signature–isms. He doesn’t accept handshakes, for instance, only bear hugs. As a kid, I recognized his hugs as unnaturally firm and lasting far longer than my aunts’ and dad’s brothers’. Wanting to avoid them, I tested a technique. I stood far back while shaking Sheldon’s hand, leaving enough room between us to make an embrace impractical. That never worked. He simply used my hand to pull me into his grip where, with my diaphragm constricted and arms pinned to my sides, it became clear that I was one of the few human beings he had touched all week. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, living a life of severe social deprivation, but sympathy is fleeting when you’re gasping for breath.
Another tick: he communicates in erratic jolts, interjecting unprompted tangential commentary from the margin of the conversation. While my mom tells Grandma and me about her day at work or asks to pass the pepper, Sheldon will blurt:
“People are greedier than they used to be.”
“I saw James Baldwin read once in the sixties, in New York.”
“You know what movie you would like? Love in the Time of Cholera.”
“Quiet,” Grandma will say, “we’re talking.” Then Sheldon will look back down at his folded hands or return to reading the paper.
Once when I was twenty, Sheldon announced to everyone in Grandma’s living room, “Wow, he has pimples.”
I looked down at the coffee table beside me, shaking my head. Slowly I looked up, eyes squinted. Taunting him, I said, “Is
that right? I hadn’t noticed.” I wondered if he had Tourette’s. I’d recently heard him mention that he took medication, though he never said for what. These ticks became a liability as a teen.
When friends came to my house during family gatherings, I always warned them in a fake Jewish grandmother accent that Shelll-don would be there. Then I’d roll my eyes. Girlfriends required more delicate negotiation. With my fragile, questionable sex appeal at stake, I had to preserve whatever cache I imagined I was developing. So I’d fetch these girls sodas and potato chips, and make sure to pepper the conversation with stories about my harrowing skateboarding accidents, cool bands I saw perform, anything to establish deep personality differences between the relative with whom I shared increasing facial resemblances. With as few girlfriends as I had in my youth, I couldn’t afford to lose a single one, and when the time came to introduce them to Sheldon, I always offered a blunt warning while walking over to him: “My uncle is loud and will say some strange things. Just ignore him.”
Then he’d bear hug her and me and say something like, “Did you ever see that movie Sixteen Candles? You look a lot like Molly Ringwald.” My knees would buckle.
Clearly whatever medication he took was not for Tourette’s. It didn’t matter. I was so petrified that looking like Sheldon meant I was fated to live his life of loneliness, ridicule, and introversion, that I failed to recognize how petrified he was in general all the time. He doesn’t function well in groups. Too many people talk at once. Ambient noise muddies the dialogue. Since he can only concentrate on reading one person’s lips at a time, the inherent back-and-forth of conversation frustrates him. So he ends up on a chair in the middle of the room reading, alone. Occasionally you’ll look up and catch his eyes on you. Not awkwardly, leering. Only looking, reaching out.
The day Grandpa Shapiro died, Sheldon stole his jewelry. Grandpa had heart problems. When he failed to answer his phone, Sheldon raced over, ostensibly to check on him. After finding his father dead on the bedroom floor, he called my parents for help. When they and the police arrived, Sheldon shuffled through the living room, past the crowd. “I have an appointment,” he muttered. His pockets were so swollen with bracelets, rings, and necklaces that he jingled on his way out the door.
Sheldon didn’t care that his theft was obvious. He thought he deserved the loot as some sort of cosmic recompense for his unhappy existence. While the police jotted notes and Grandpa lay still, my parents watched Sheldon rush from the condo. They were furious, of course, disgusted and shocked, but they decided it was best to let him go. Yelling wouldn’t have slowed Sheldon’s escape. Confronting him wouldn’t change his way of thinking. My mom loved her brother, and she felt sorry for him. She figured, let him have the jewelry; with no wife, no children, and no job, he had so little already. The valuables didn’t concern my parents; it was the principle: my grandpa had done so much to help Sheldon.
At the E.J. Korvette department store in New York, Grandpa worked as a buyer and merchandiser of jewelry, crystal, fine china, and house wares. In Phoenix, he opened a clothing store called MR Menswear, on Adams Street downtown. He later owned another called the Habber Dasher in Chris-Town Mall. I spent a lot of time at MR as a kid. I ducked behind circular shirt racks, built long chains from the plastic clamps used to secure ties and collars on mannequins. At that child’s elevation, the whole store smelled of powder-fresh carpet deodorizer. One day I pressed a black button under the tall register counter, and firemen in bright red suits soon stepped through the front door. Grandpa had to apologize, telling them false alarm, just the kid. He had me wave goodbye as they left. Then we laughed about it together and he patted my cheek.
Sheldon lived with his parents in New York until age twenty-two. When they moved to Arizona, Grandpa bought Sheldon a house in central Phoenix and employed him at the stores for twelve years. He made sure Sheldon had a car, insurance, and steady income. He never, to anyone’s knowledge, made fun of him or called him names. This wasn’t enough. Sheldon blamed his father for how he turned out, blamed Grandpa for somehow ruining him, Howard, Grandma, and the family.
Howard and my grandfather had a strained relationship. Howard was an intellectual, Grandpa a pragmatist. As the son of Russian immigrants, Grandpa developed a lofty opinion of hard work and an aversion to even the appearance of poverty. He wanted all the material comforts and security America offered its successes, and he forced that philosophy onto his son. Grandpa disapproved of science—what money was there to make? He wanted Howard to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or some clichéd lucrative profession that I can never get a straight answer about because what little info anyone offers often varies. Two facts are clear: Howard the intellectual was sensitive, and that fatherly disapproval burdened him with a weight that he couldn’t shake. Sheldon wasn’t close with Howard, but according to my mother, he privately blamed my grandpa for his brother’s death.
Witnessing the candor that Thanksgiving Day, I asked a question I had never previously asked anyone: how many times did Grandpa stray? Sheldon immediately said, “Serial monogamist.”
“Yeah,” Grandma said, “he fooled around, more than once.” She stiffened her slouching posture, holding her head high, back straight, hands on both hips. “I was young and stupid. Naïve. But—” She shook her head and shrugged as if to say, what’re you gonna do? Grandpa—born William Shapiro, known to everyone else as Bill—regularly went out with his friend Henry to bars, dinners, and shows in the City. Sylvia Greissman, my grandmother, never discouraged him. “I figured, it’s Friday,” she said. “This man worked all week. We have the rest of the weekend together.”
Once, after telling a longtime friend that Bill was out with Henry, the friend told Grandma, “You sure it’s not Henrietta?” In Phoenix years later, when Bill’s brother Irving learned that Bill was leaving Sylvia, Irving told her, “He’ll get what he deserves.”
Grandma always advised her children to never hold a grudge, to forgive and move on. “I had no trouble meeting men,” she told me on Thanksgiving. “Even before Bill.” But after the split, whenever Grandpa heard Grandma was seeing someone new, he appeared—at family functions, on the phone, even her home—often wanting her back. While attending a meal at my parent’s house once, Grandpa met Grandma’s new boyfriend. Feeling threatened, he offered what amounted to the extent of his decorum: he said, “He’s a handsome man.”
“He was very insecure,” Grandma told me. “He had no confidence in himself.” She said it came from his parents. They were matched up very young in life and were never really happy together. Grandpa even felt ashamed of them, partly from their poverty, partly from the way their character—immigrants with accents, unassimilated—affected people’s perception of him.
“I once saw a photo of my father in Puerto Rico,” Sheldon said, “standing beside a gorgeous, tan brunette.”
My grandparents divorced four years after settling in Phoenix. Grandpa died when I was twenty years old. My last memory is of hugging him goodbye in his living room, the grit of his chin stubble rubbing against my cheek, the smell of his woodsy, spicy cologne in the air.
I wasn’t present on the day of Grandpa’s death. I was on vacation. My mother says Grandpa kept tons of cash lying around the house. No one knows how much. Sheldon found it, some or all. Mom insists it doesn’t matter, which is why, a decade later, nobody has confronted Sheldon about the theft.
At a Christmas party when I was eighteen, my half-brother Scot mentioned how much I looked like Sheldon. “You asshole,” I said. “Fuck you,” and stormed out of the room.
As a teenager, I’d seen a black and white childhood photo of Sheldon riding a bike down his Flushing sidewalk, and adrenalinee filled my stomach. Similar eyes, similar nose, similar chin. The sight of these resemblances, the undeniable fact that certain bits of him lurked inside me, made me want to scald my face with acid and scrape my cells clean of DNA.
Some people look at their relatives—an abusive father, alcoholic mother—and vow
never to become them. I looked at Sheldon and wondered if I had a choice. Watching him consume a slice of pizza in three bites as he shuffled across Grandma’s living room was like standing on an icy Chicago sidewalk in a gale force wind: untethered, I feared I might start sliding toward the curb, directly into oncoming traffic. If his was a medical condition, what if it didn’t skip my generation? Considering the way bipolar disorder can strike people in their early thirties—just as they thought they’d escaped the period of greatest risk—my worry seemed justified.
When Sheldon recently told me, “You look more like our side of the family the older you get,” I didn’t know what to say. I looked at him, nodded, and could only conjure a nervous “Thanks?”
He laughed. “We’re the beauties.” He said it with a self-deprecating flourish, then added, “Your grandfather was very handsome in his youth.”
“An Indian came to my door with two containers of beer,” Sheldon said at dinner not long ago, “asking for food. Navajo. Really nice.” He shrugged between spoonfuls of turkey. “People think they’re all drunks, but eighty percent of Indians aren’t like that.”
Sheldon identifies everyone in two ways: what they are and how they act. “A rude Jewish woman cut me off in line.” Or, “I once spent a weekend in Mexico in the seventies, and the people there were very friendly. Not like some of the ones you meet around here. Gangbangers, they call them.” The irony, as my mom points out, is that when the vote came up in the sixties about whether to integrate his Queens high school, Sheldon rallied for integration with local black activists and a few of the teachers in front of the school. He has long been hyper-liberal, a pacifist who quotes Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He strictly votes Democratic and recounts recent Republican victories and environmental set-backs with visible disgust. “Jews have traditionally sided with social causes,” he points out. “We know what it’s like to be vilified.” But what I point out to Mom is that, if you have to qualify any person or their comments with the caveat “not a racist,” then the truth of that statement seems questionable. Sheldon I grant more leeway.
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