This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  If you think a Fruit Roll-Up is going to solve this . . . , I thought, enraged, and almost slipped it back under the door, just to show her what’s what. But then I decided to leave it there, to allow for the possibility that I might, at some point, get hungry.

  Once she left, I kept peeking down the hallway, waiting. Minutes passed like hours, but the door to my parents’ room remained closed. All that I could hear was the sound of my sister watching television in the living room. I walked back and forth down the hall. I put my ear up to the door. I figured that my father would be home from work soon. She’d have to come out then.

  But by the time I got the courage to venture back out, it was ten o’clock, the house was dark, and my sister was curled up, asleep on the couch. There was no answer when I knocked at my parents’ door. I waited, knocked again. I opened the door slowly. “Mom?” I said cautiously, aware of the noise that I was emitting into the silent room. I tiptoed inside. Her bed was made. All clothing had been put away. There was no sign of her anywhere. The bathroom door was closed. I said again, “Mom?”

  “Eve?” she said, in a voice I didn’t recognize. “Come in.”

  I opened the door. She was sitting on the tile floor, in her robe, looking up at me. I’d never seen her sitting on the floor before. Nothing about this scene looked right to me. Nothing about her face looked right to me. It was as if she’d lost all her color, all her defining features.

  “Dad’s gone,” she said. “He left.”

  For some reason, I registered the full extent of what she was saying. I didn’t say But when will he be back? or What do you mean, gone? I could infer from the situation, from the look on her face, that something had transpired. It wasn’t like I was the most insightful kid, but I knew my mother. She didn’t work, and was home with us whenever we were home. We did everything together.

  The first thing I said out loud to her was, “Is it okay if we still live here?” which didn’t exactly make sense, given the circumstances. It must have struck me that the rules could change now, that there was nothing that could be relied upon completely. If my father wasn’t here, where was he? He had no place in the world, if not here.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, and then she started crying. I didn’t cry along with her. I just stood there feeling like I had to do something to take care of her, for a change. I remember feeling deeply inadequate for that task. I handed her a tissue box pathetically.

  I went to the kitchen and looked at the counter and noticed that the money was gone. The forty dollars. It had been lying in the corner, the bills just jutting out enough to be visible. My first crushing thought was that my father had taken it. It was his money, after all. He had this glass jar of change that he kept in his bedroom closet. He filled it every night, when he came home from work. Often, when I was lying in bed, that was how I knew that he was home—by the sound of the coins hitting the glass jar. That brief but jingling noise was how I knew that everything was okay, everyone was home, and it was safe to go to sleep. My sister and I often went into my parents’ bedroom and tried to guess how much money was inside the jar. We’d try to lift it but it was too heavy. Based on height and weight and density, we figured it contained roughly a million dollars. We liked to talk to my father about what we could spend the money on, once he took all the coins to the bank. We weren’t particularly eccentric in our requests—they mostly involved Disney World. For a while, I was obsessed with Minnie Mouse and certain that, upon meeting, she and I would become fast friends. We had a lot in common. We both liked bows. We both tolerated Mickey, though sometimes we felt that he was trying a little too hard. Then, one glorious afternoon, the jar was full and our father took it to the bank. He made a big deal out of it. We helped him transfer the coins into plastic bags. When he came home, he presented the forty dollars to us and then put the money in the kitchen, under the tissue box, where we could all see it, with a promise that one day, we’d use it to do something fun, all together.

  When I saw that the money was gone, I buried all thoughts about it deep inside of me. I’d never ask my mother about it. I talked myself out of thinking that he snatched it on the way out. I said, No he would never do that. He’d never take it just like that. I convinced myself that if he did take it, it was only to spare our feelings, so that we wouldn’t see it and get reminded of the promise unfulfilled. Later on, I decided that it was my sister who took the money; of course it was her, though I never asked, for fear that she would prove herself innocent.

  The great irony, which occurred to me in that moment, was that I was scared of everything. A robbery, a fire, an earthquake—you name the disaster, I lay in bed worrying about it. I even had a fairly specific apprehension about a tree getting struck by lightning and falling on my parents’ car. They’d be driving on the highway, in a thunderstorm, and mid conversation, lightning would hit one of the trees nearby and bam, tragedy. As a result, whenever they left the house to drive somewhere, if there was even the slightest threat of rain, I’d worry about it endlessly, wondering where they were, how far they were from their destination, how long until they came back home. I’d stare out the window at the threatening sky, willing the rain to stop, the clouds to break. A single streak of blue sent relief ricocheting through me.

  But of all the things I worried about, I had never worried that someday my father would leave my mother, that he would leave us, without any warning. That, somehow, didn’t make the list. I suppose that’s part of the reason why, when it happened, I was hit so hard. I didn’t expect it to occur, and I made it my business to expect everything.

  It happened on a bad day that I thought could only get better. I was trudging around, angry that my sister had embarrassed me, as if that was what pain felt like. This was pain. I realized it then, how oblivious I had been. Why hadn’t I ever thought to scrutinize my parents, to listen to the way they talked, to pay attention to the way they looked at each other? Maybe, if I’d been watching, none of this would have happened. I promised myself that in the future, I would be more careful. I would become the world’s most vigilant observer. I would watch everyone and catch catastrophes before they happened. I started keeping a journal. I wrote everything down—details about my sister’s friends, how many times my grandparents came over per week. I had a detailed record of what the weather was like every day for about a month in 1998, in case anyone was interested. When my mother was out of the house, I created an inventory of the items in her closet. I told myself that, in life, you couldn’t just leave people alone.

  After my mother peeled herself off the bathroom floor that night, after she put my sister to bed, after she mixed pancake batter in a bowl, she started analyzing with me at the kitchen table. Secretly, I was finding a bit of enjoyment in sitting there with her, in having a late-night dinner, a “midnight snack” she called it, as we discussed the situation. She’d never have allowed this kind of thing before my father left. Dinner was always at seven, and it was always a variation of the same: meat, vegetable, potato. It felt like we had a secret, at first, something important that was just between us. A resolvable wound that we could make better. She treated me like a friend that night, and not her daughter. I was feeling pretty grown-up, all things considered.

  The analysis of “what went wrong with Dad” began slowly, at first. She said that she couldn’t be sure of anything, but that she knew he’d been unhappy, that there had been some changes at work—a larger company had bought his. There was a new boss, whom he didn’t like. This explanation seemed lacking to me. He wasn’t one of those people obsessed with work. My father worked for a window manufacturer. The only thing I really knew was that the shop was on the Lower East Side, on Avenue D, and that each night, when he came home, he poured himself a glass of Scotch. The smell of it, a combination of wood and Band-Aids, the rattling of ice cubes, that was my father, in essence, at the end of a long day. But he rarely talked about work. He rarely talked about anything.

  My mother said that he’d gotten so quie
t over the past few years, quiet even for him, but that she didn’t know to take that as a sign of his discontent. She said that he’d started drinking more than usual. It was all very vague and confusing, her explanations. It was clear that she didn’t know what to tell us. Then one day, she stopped talking about it at all. I was the kid again, and she only talked about him over the phone with a friend, or to my grandmother at the kitchen table. I heard them talk about his mood swings. My grandmother said something to my mother about a celebrity she’d read about who had some kind of mental illness, but then my mother hushed her and they stopped talking when she spotted me across the room. They said that he might come back, that he would certainly regret this. It was the past fifteen years of his life, that they’d been married. My grandmother insisted that he wouldn’t do well on his own.

  While they were putting it all together in the kitchen, I was looking around a half-empty house. Even though he was no longer physically there, his presence was everywhere. I could see him in the lamp that he switched off every night before he went to sleep, in the hallway outside of my room. That light was him, still up, watching television, standing guard. Who would shut it off now? He was there each time I saw a yellow dandelion in our backyard. He once helped me assemble them into a bouquet for my mother, allowing me to pillage the neighbors’ yards. I felt like we were doing something very mischievous together, stealing flowers from the neighbors. I didn’t realize until I got older that I was not so much committing petty larceny as I was weeding their lawns.

  At night, after my grandparents left, there was only silence. That was the worst part of all of it, I think. My mother stopped talking to me. Sure, she would ask me about school, what my friends were up to, listless questions asked in a half-present voice. But she wasn’t present. She wasn’t there. I’d never been so lonely.

  * * *

  And then one day, I heard something unusual coming from her bedroom. It was a Saturday morning, and there was music. It was Paul Simon. “Loves Me Like a Rock.” I peeked into her bedroom and she was dancing around the perimeter of her carpet. She looked genuinely happy, free of something, though I didn’t know what. Yet again I didn’t see something coming, despite my new resolution to always, always expect everything. I didn’t know how this was possible. It wasn’t like everything was perfect after that, but walking in on my mother, mid dance party—I remember feeling light inside, like I used to feel after school was over on a Friday afternoon, or at the beginning of summer, with nothing but relief and Popsicles ahead. I had the feeling that we had entered into a new phase, and there was no going back.

  The house on 238th Street was suddenly a changed universe. My mother played music every morning. She made more of an effort to turn everyday activities into something exciting—the park, the bakery, a new dress, even the walk to and from school. “Last person home loses!” she’d say, dashing off ahead of us. “Loses what?” we yelled, mouths open and sprinting behind her. She was blonder and prettier and younger-seeming than before. She went to work, as a secretary for a law firm in the World Trade Center. Before my father left, she had always talked about selling the house. It seemed like a half joke that they had together, her nagging him about her big dream to move to Manhattan. Whenever we went into “the city,” she needled him on the way home in the car, about how much fun we’d had, about how much better it would be to get out of this sleepy neighborhood. My father said he liked the quiet. And somehow, she never got any further with her plans. It always remained in the “idea” stage. I knew the reality: we couldn’t afford it. That was the reality that my father knew, and probably told her when my sister and I weren’t around.

  It was even more of a reality now that he was gone. She was more fun, but she also had little patience, got irritated more easily. She didn’t fill the fridge with groceries. She stopped cleaning the house. She let the toilet water go yellow. One time, I was hunting around for odds and ends to make me and my sister dinner, and I found green lumps inside a jar of tomato sauce. I was so stunned by what I saw that I dropped it onto the floor and the glass shattered.

  “Evie, bring me that poem you wrote,” she said to me once. “The one about the bowl that gets left out of the dishwashing cycle. ‘The Lament of the Bowl’? I want to read it.” She always told me that I got overly attached to things because my father wasn’t attached to me, or to anything. He had an inability to attach, she said. She wanted to see the poem, she said, to remind her that I wasn’t like him.

  On Saturdays, she would drag us into the city for the day. We didn’t go to museums or shows, but we walked. We took walks so long that on the way home, my feet were throbbing. It was the only thing that she really loved to do. “Someday, when you’re the president of the United States and you’re the president of Cuba,” she said, to me and my sister, pointing to us in the back of the car with a short laugh, “I’m going to live in Manhattan.”

  I remember thinking, I don’t care where we live, I will still miss Dad. I even said it to her sometimes, but only when I was mad at her, only when I was so desperate for a solution that I had to say it out loud, even though I knew it would hurt her. “Everything changes,” she responded, as if it were that simple.

  When I was really little, I used to mistakenly tell people that my dad was a window washer. The distinction between that and window manufacturer was not clear to me. The first time it happened, he’d found this to be so hilarious and endearing that he told the story to everyone he knew, all about how his daughter thought that he washed windows for a living. He told it with this look in his eyes, this look of pure happiness, like he might cry. There was a time when the story seemed as precious to him as anything. There was a time when it seemed like he’d never stop telling it. Everything changes.

  And it was true. His possessions began to slowly disappear. The framed photographs were the first to go, just the ones of my parents together, without us. Then his sweaters and shirts vanished, then his shoes, and last, his coats. I had no idea where it all went. I wondered, but then stopped myself. The end result was a house that was exactly half-empty. I still felt him there, though. I expected him to walk in, at any moment, and for us to resume normal life. But he didn’t. And eventually, I got it into my head.

  Then one night, several years later, the phone rang. It was a 212 number, followed by a strange man’s voice. Strange men didn’t call our house. My ears perked up. He said his name was Arthur. My mother took the phone into her bedroom and closed the door. She stayed in there for a while, and when she emerged, she said something about him being a friend of a friend and then, “He lives in the city, you know?” And I smiled back at her, tried to share in the excitement.

  I remember coming home from school a few days after the call and finding her all dressed up and sitting in the kitchen with a glass of Scotch. She never drank, especially not in the house, especially not that brown liquid so heavily associated with my father. But she looked to be in a state of contemplation, her eyes a little glazed over, clutching the glass. She told me she had a date with that man in the city. A few weeks later, I met him. He wore a collared shirt with short sleeves and stripes. He was fine. Nice. Not my father.

  Nonetheless, we were treading water. We, as a family, didn’t feel so sunk down anymore, could see the sun, the promise of dry land. After Arthur proposed to my mother, we sold our house in the Bronx and moved into Manhattan. Not just Manhattan. The Upper East Side. Arthur was a stockbroker who worked out of his very nice home on Park Avenue. He had a guest bedroom that Emma and I shared with two twin beds, yellow walls, and a flat CD player that hung on the wall and was so high-tech that it opened up when you walked by it.

  My mother kept her job at the law firm. On Friday afternoons, she’d come home, all exasperated by this or that person. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to get away from that place.” But by Saturday afternoon, she’d be back to talking about her coworkers, all wistful, her voice brimming with affection, filling us in on nicknames, lunch preferences.
Arthur told her all the time that she could leave. “Josie, I don’t know why you put up with it,” he’d always say. But she insisted. Secretly, I think she liked that even though she was living in his apartment among all his things and socializing with his friends at his favorite restaurants, living his life, essentially, she still had something that was hers. Or maybe it was a contingency plan. She was all too aware that not everything worked out as calculated.

  Living at Arthur’s place, at first, seemed exciting and mischievous. Arthur was very lenient, wanted us to feel at home. Emma pushed the boundaries, threw a party once when they were away for the weekend. She was so exhilarated by the fact that in the city, you could order alcohol to be delivered and not get carded. The only catch was that when trying to conceal the fact of a party, it was best not to leave the receipt from the liquor store on the kitchen table. God how I worried about her party while it was going on. I stayed home that night to police the situation, to make sure that none of Arthur’s knickknacks fell over and that no glasses sat too close to the edge of the table. I made sure that when someone removed a sword from a silver statue of a knight, the sword eventually returned back to its sling. I didn’t especially like Arthur, but I didn’t want his antique sword to go missing.

  But the good thing was, once we settled into Arthur’s apartment, life started to become more normal. Life was about friends and other routine teenaged things. And the best part was my mother and I started talking again. Arthur had this small round table in his kitchen where she and I would sit and discuss everything. This table saw it all—the good, the bad. She and I developed a relationship that could be characterized as both wonderful and difficult at the same time. We discussed everything at great length, often astonishing Arthur with the sheer amount of time we could spend just sitting and talking. Most of the time, I enjoyed these discussions. Talking to her was like talking to a close friend who was more invested in the situation. She had a way of being very wise but also, now that we lived in the city, she could be carefree, childlike. She constantly used the phrase totally cool to describe things. She’d look at me in a pair of knee-high boots she was thinking about buying for me and she’d say “Totally cool! Nobody will have boots like yours,” like some sixteen-year-old version of herself. She’d see a black-and-white photograph of a motorcycle in a store window and say “Totally cool. For your bedroom? Let’s get it!”