“She’s twenty-one.”
Zosia threw him a cutting glare. “A child.”
“She needs to understand there are rules,” he said. “And consequences.” His hand came off the steering wheel and made a karate chop in the air. “If you separate Maria and Lara,” he said, “then you will see.”
“What will you see?”
“Without Maria, Lara will have no one with whom to engage. She will see that she gets nowhere with her tantrums and threats, and she will have to learn self-control.”
I kept quiet, my default mode when my family talked about Lara. I knew that my voice in these matters was irrelevant, that I was better off listening and keeping my opinions to myself.
The sun dropped off the edge of State Street. In the midsummer dusk that gathered outside the windshield, the neon signs of fast-food joints and convenience stores popped to life. At home, I knew, my mother and sister would be speaking softly to each other. My sister would be in bed, and my mother would be sitting at the edge, stroking her hair, reassuring her of her love. This was their time alone, their moment together when they did not have to justify themselves to the rest of the family. They could love each other as they were meant to love: stubbornly, wholeheartedly, without shame or guilt.
* * *
August came. In another month, Zosia would be flying back to Rome, I would be returning to college, and if my parents could pull it off, Lara would return for her senior year. Lara had a knack for bouncing back from suicidal depression to successful scholar in no time flat. In retrospect, I can see the enormous pressure she was under, the rigidity of our parents’ needs, and how impossible it must have felt to Lara to meet them. But at the time, I considered Lara’s versatility in mood swings proof of her resourcefulness, evidence of the calculated power she held over us. Instead of feeling sorry for her, I was furious at her manipulation of us.
In mid-August, Dad and I came up with a brilliant plan.
“You need a vacation,” he said when he picked me up from work one day. “You should get out of the house.”
We were sitting in traffic on Drake Road. “What about you?” I said. “You haven’t had a break all summer.”
We were nearing home, the fun-less zone. It made us want to take care of each other.
“When does school start?” Dad asked.
“The day after Labor Day.”
“How about the week before, then? We could take a trip.”
A wild feeling of danger and hope surged through me. “I don’t know about my job—I told them I’d work through Labor Day.”
“I’ll talk to Conklin,” my father said. “I can get you out of it.”
And so my father and I ran off together.
* * *
The great thing about running away with my father was that it was sanctioned by the family. I could get out of the house without having to assume the label of Selfish Child. I could pretend I was doing it for my father, and he could pretend he was doing it for me.
The bad thing about running away with my father was that I would be stuck with him for ten days. Going on vacation with a sixty-year-old Holocaust survivor and former Gulag prisoner who tends to relive each moment of his six-year incarceration is not for everyone. But consider the alternative. If I had to spend one more minute at home, watching all of us move around Lara like deep-sea creatures, I was sure I would explode.
Dad and I packed a suitcase and two sleeping bags. He picked me up from work the next day and asked to speak with his friend Conklin, the manager. Mr. Conklin was a timid man with thinning hair and a sad little mustache that you had to look at twice to realize it was really there. He wore caved-in shoes and an overall dreariness that made me feel sorry for him. You could see that he revered my father. When Dad appeared before him, Mr. Conklin’s face lit up with wonder. He seemed not to mind my father’s too-short clip-on tie that swung slightly to the right. Conklin’s own fashion sense was not keen either. He wore the same thing he wore every day: a cheap maroon blazer with the Herman’s World of Sporting Goods insignia emblazoned on the pocket. His shoulders swam in it.
“I’m sorry to ask this,” my father said in a tone that suggested pain and dignity. “The situation at home is…” He paused and glanced down at his shoes. “It is extremely difficult.…”
I was curious to know what my father would tell my boss about “the situation at home.” Conklin looked up at my father with genuine sympathy. You could see he would give my father anything he asked for. He would hand him the keys to the store, to the entire stockroom of goods. He would hand over his wallet, his watch, his wedding ring—anything, as long as my father didn’t go into details.
“I know Helen agreed to work through the Labor Day weekend,” my father said. He drew his lips into a thin line. “But the situation at home… I’m sorry that I must ask for Helen to step out of work a week early.”
Conklin was already nodding his head before my father had finished his sentence. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”
My father didn’t stop there. “Someday,” he said, looking wistfully over Conklin’s head at the fluorescent lights gleaming in the Golf Department, “someday I will tell you about it.” He sighed. “But I cannot now.” He glanced briefly into Conklin’s eyes. “It is too painful.”
Conklin patted my father on the arm, a gesture that startled me by its intimacy and sweetness. Conklin barely came up to my father’s tie clip, and the sight of him extending his polyester arm toward my father broke my heart. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry.”
My father nodded. “I cannot talk about it,” he said quietly.
I was suddenly annoyed that my father spent so much time saying what he could not talk about. Our forced silence about “the situation at home” drove me crazy. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops. Of course, it never occurred to me that maybe I could use some therapy myself. That would mean I was mentally ill, and I would sooner have died than see a shrink.
“If there’s anything I can do,” Conklin murmured, his small hand on my father’s elbow, “please call me.” His earnest face, those black horn-rimmed glasses, those broken-down shoes… I was embarrassed to see him give my father such support. And I was somehow ashamed of our performance, which was not a performance—our pain was genuine, yet it seemed so ridiculous played out in public. Did we really need to break my promise to my employer? I would never see Mr. Conklin again, but my father, no doubt, would see him at the Rotary Club luncheons, and would make some sad remark that would tell Conklin nothing and everything, and he would look at Conklin as a man who could not possibly imagine his suffering.
My mother and Zosia seemed relieved to get Dad and me out of the house. Now they could tend to Lara full-time without the nagging interference of my father and me. Lara was all-consuming, and now, at last, they could be fully consumed.
* * *
I let my father dictate our route. We drove north to the White Mountains and hiked in the Presidential Range, then drove south to Boston, where Dad spent a day in Harvard Square and played the Chess Master for a dollar per game. He kept winning his dollar back for hours, till it was too dark to see the board and they had to quit. Next we went to Cape Cod for lunch at a fish shack, and then to Falmouth, where we boarded the ferry for Martha’s Vineyard. Armed with a map of the island, we drove from one cheap motel to another, and I would run into the office, ask the price of a room, and run back to my father. He shook his head if the price was too high. He made a soft whistling sound if the price was completely outrageous. After an hour or so, we found a campground. For ten dollars, they gave us a tent platform with an army surplus canvas tent that was mostly waterproof, albeit mildewed. We had brought our own sleeping bags and unfurled them across the wood-planked platform. Our sweaters and socks were our pillows.
It rained that night, and mosquitoes lined up and bit our necks, our ears, our eyelids. My father snored like a Cossack. I circled the tunnel of my sleeping bag and wondered whet
her I would ever find my way out of my family. I’d been in such a hurry to grow up and get out of high school, chart my course in the open world. But the world was full of mosquitoes and mildew and crap jobs behind a register. It was hard to choose the world when my family knew my name and the words to my heart. They could open and close it with the twist of a key. Would I ever get away?
Dawn finally broke and we went into town for coffee. A mimeographed sheet tacked to a bulletin board advertised a local chess tournament. The name of the contact person was familiar—I’d read a book about a disastrous climb up Everest by a guy named Woodrow Wilson Sayre. I called the number from a pay phone and said that my father would like to enter the tournament.
“Sorry, it’s over,” the man said. “I should take that flyer down.”
“Um, are you, by any chance… Did you write Four against Everest?”
The man’s voice warmed. “Why, yes,” he said. “If you want to come over, I can sell you a copy.” I was elated. “And tell your dad I’ll play him a game, if he likes.”
I hung up and ran back to my father in the car.
“The tournament’s over,” I said quickly, “but it’s the same guy who climbed Everest and wrote a book about it! He said he’d sell me one if we go to his house!”
My father shook his head, unimpressed.
“And he said he’d play you a game, if you like.”
At this, my father perked up. “Call him back and get directions,” he said.
* * *
They played most of the afternoon and into the evening, while I reread Sayre’s book. He happily sold it to me for fourteen dollars. Given his designer house with wall-to-wall windows, bronze sculptures, and family portraits by artists I’d studied in art history, I suspect he didn’t really need my fourteen dollars, but it was well worth it for my father’s six hours of uninterrupted chess.
In the evening we strolled the streets of Vineyard Haven staring at rich people who had puttered in from their yachts in the harbor. Art Buchwald waddled down the main street in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and shorts stretched over his round stomach. My father did not like rich people, whom he suspected of not having worked sufficiently hard or suffered enough (in his opinion) to earn their wealth. But he did like funny people like Art Buchwald, and he was willing to forgive certain funny people for being rich.
It was in Provincetown back on the Cape that he started talking about the Gulag. Stories and memories he’d never told me before. He talked about the cold in a way that made the Arctic take shape as an isolated world of blackened toes and endless ice and wind. He spoke of hunger, a constant drilling against the belly and the skull. Men went crazy from hunger. They daydreamed recipes and visualized beef stews. They salivated from memory and imagination. He told me more about himself than he ever had before, and I drank up his words with awe.
“In the Gulag, I learned to be an idiot,” my father said. “The others tried to engage me in discussions, but I just shrugged and said, ‘I know nothing. I have no opinion.’ ” My father looked so old to me then, more myth than man. I wanted to rescue him from his past, to absorb his pain and bring him back to life.
“I learned not to trust anyone,” he said. “This was the most important lesson I learned. And that is the reason I was able to survive. That, and the fact that I was a doctor. Because as a doctor, I could work indoors. Everyone who worked outside died of starvation and exposure.”
I spoke very little during these walks. I did not want my father to stop talking. I hoped he wouldn’t notice me sucking up his life with a hunger I could not explain. It was important, I thought, for him to be able to unburden himself, and I wanted to be the one in whom he could confide. By the time I returned to school, I felt about a thousand years old. With zero sense of who I was.
seven
English had always been my favorite subject, but now I decided that the most impressive thing I could do for my father was to become a doctor. Never mind that Dad didn’t like practicing medicine (he’d always wanted to be a violinist). He had no patience for people who complained; he hated practicing what he called “an imperfect science”; and he felt personally offended when a patient’s condition got worse. Even so, he liked helping people, was proud of the status and income that his medical degree afforded him, and believed it was an excellent, if stressful, career choice. At eighteen, I didn’t concern myself with the actual job description of being a doctor; I just wanted to pick the direct route to my parents’ hearts. My sister was premed, and despite the fact that I’d never had the least interest in math or science, my scholastic achievement suggested I should be premed too. “Be a doctor,” my mother had always advised us, “don’t marry one.”
“What should I take?” I asked Lara over the phone that September. Now that she and I were both back at school, she seemed to have reverted to her big sister role as fellow hunter-gatherer of good grades, and reliable provider of curricular information.
“Load up on chem,” she said. “And get your physics out of the way. You’ll need calculus too.”
It was reassuring to have my sister back, to have her attention and advice. As a senior, she’d already taken this path, and could warn me of the pitfalls. I pictured us both hoisting our course loads like rucksacks and hiking along the precipitous path to an MD, just as we’d hiked across the Alps the summer I was fifteen, Lara in the lead. Only this time, instead of whining with exhaustion, I would embrace the suffering and conquer it.
The first inkling that I might have a problem was chemistry. I’d signed up for the survey course and took notes like a stenographer. I drew diagrams and graphs and charts with colored pencils, and labeled my beakers in the elegant penmanship for which I had won awards in grade school. My lab notebook could have been displayed in the Museum for the Anal-Retentive.
The problem was not my grades, nor my comprehension of chemistry. The problem was new to me: it was a problem of attitude. Until now, it had been none of my business whether I liked a subject or not; my job was to study my brains out and get an A. Now, for the first time, I had feelings about it. I did not like chem lab. Lab started at one in the afternoon and lasted until nearly five. While I was indoors pouring liquids from one beaker into another, the lake was out there turning its smooth face to the sky, begging to be rowed on. The trails in the woods were just waiting for me to lace up my sneakers and run on them.
Chem lab was, quite simply, a crime against nature. Against my nature. I could feel my soul being sucked dry, one drop at a time. I faced a dilemma. I could strip myself of what I loved by turning myself in to the lab each afternoon, or I could skip lab sciences altogether and row my heart across the lake and back.
Within months, I made a decision that suited my soul: I decided not to be a doctor. The immediate pleasure I obtained by this decision: my afternoons would be free of lab for the rest of my life. I had, with the simple dismissal of a career choice, given myself the gift of light in the afternoons. Ironically, the career that had saved my father’s life by keeping him indoors and safe from Siberian winters was precisely the career I rejected because it kept me inside a lab in eastern Massachusetts.
That semester I was also taking an English lit class taught by a battle-ax of a Chaucer scholar named Helen Corsa. In the middle of a lively discussion of Moll Flanders one day, she stood in front of the class with her fists on her hips and announced, “People always say, ‘Don’t major in English! What can you do with an English major?’ ” She rocked back on her heels and eyed us through thick glasses on her jowly face. “Well, who the hell cares whether it’s useful? Major in it because it’s fun!”
My heart leapt. I made an appointment to see her the following week, and asked her to be my advisor. Would she sign the paper declaring my English major? To my disappointment, she barely glanced at me as she scribbled her name on the document and handed it back to me. “There you go,” she said, and returned to the papers on her desk. I felt foolish for having hoped she might tak
e an interest in me, and I was too ashamed to ask for any more of her time. Despite my timidity, I reveled in Professor Corsa’s belligerent take-no-prisoners attitude about choosing a field of study for fun. Here was someone as strong and opinionated as my parents, but with a completely opposite agenda. Of course, I didn’t have the guts to stand up either to Professor Corsa or to my parents, but I was pretty sure that Helen Corsa could kick their butts, at least when it came to championing the importance of Chaucer in my life. The battle between my English professor and my parents took place in my mind, and I needed her in there.
Unfortunately, unlike Helen Corsa, who was a literary genius, I knew I was majoring in English because it was a breeze—only eight English classes and no lab component! How would I explain this to my parents? Taking the easy road was a felony in our family. Living up to my Potential, I understood, required hard work, pain, and suffering. My parents had talked about this magic Potential of mine from grade school on, as if it were some utopia that had been furnished and prepared for me with fresh linens and modern window treatments, and it was my responsibility to climb the stairs to get to this fabulous future of mine, a special deluxe suite at the top of the world. There was no time for dillydallying, as my father liked to say. If I didn’t race up those stairs, if I didn’t spend every ounce of my time, energy, and concentration on propelling myself upward, my Potential could simply evaporate, leaving me empty, alone, unloved, and worthless in a windowless studio with a Murphy bed.
October 1975
“Hold still,” Harriet said, one callused hand on top of my head, the other holding a pair of scissors. I was sitting on a chair in the women’s room of her dorm, with half of my hair scattered on the floor.
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