My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  As concerned as I was for my father, I couldn’t help thinking what it all meant for me. What if I was just like him? Maybe there was such a thing as Late-Onset Failure Syndrome. It was hereditary, just like high blood pressure or cancer, and mine was just kicking in. Sometimes when I watched the way he held his face in his hands or stroked his chin I realized I did the same thing and it always made me nervous, like he was in my blood. When he read the newspaper he sometimes said parts of sentences out loud—like “inverse relationship to fat consumption” or “war of words between the sides is abating”—as though he was trying to follow the train of thought. When I was a kid I used to make fun of him for it but in recent months I’d started doing the same thing. Whenever I caught myself I stopped immediately, terrified, like some evil alien baby was growing inside me.

  Maybe he’d lost his job because he was so devastated by me dropping out. He was my biggest fan, in the worst way. When I was in Hebrew School, he sat in the front row every time I did anything special at services and came all the way to Wesleyan when I led my first Shabbat. And whenever anything bad happened, like the time I got rejected from a summer internship at the National Yiddish Book Center, he’d get this look on his face like he couldn’t take it, like it had happened to him. Maybe I was the reason he was on skid row. And if that was true I was in worse straits than I thought. Not only did I have to worry about getting back on my feet for my own sake, I had to do it for his.

  “So have you been going on interviews?” I asked.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I’m trying really hard to stay positive and Mom keeps telling me to keep an open mind. Yesterday I interviewed at a music company. A rap label.”

  “For a computer job?”

  “Actually, it was administrative assistant,” he said. “Have you heard of a band called Got 2 B Reel, spelled Got, two number sign, the letter B, and then R-e-e-l?”

  “No.”

  “That’s their main client. It may be their only client. I went to their Web site last night. The band members are posed with their fingers in this strange configuration.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “They’re Bloods. Those signs spell out a gang name. You cannot go working at a rap label. You could get shot!”

  “I wish I’d known this before I lowered my salary range.”

  The thought of him working as a secretary made me embarrassed, like he was the black sheep in the family instead of me. “Aren’t you interviewing for any computer jobs?”

  “Sure I am but the market is terrible. And it doesn’t make it any easier that I’m twenty years older than most of the other applicants. Plus my skills are so outdated I don’t know who could use me. Do you think I should shave my beard?”

  He had worn his beard since I was one and a half, which meant I had no conscious memories of him without it. I had seen photos of him clean-shaven, wheeling me in a stroller over the Brooklyn Bridge, looking young and studly in tight bell-bottoms, but he always seemed like a different person. It was the same with the photos of him smoking cigarettes (he’d quit a few months after meeting my mom). Shaved or smoking, he didn’t seem so much like my dad as his stand-in.

  “Well, you’d definitely look younger,” I said, trying to gauge his neck fat through the hair.

  “But what if my bald spot looks more obvious without the beard to offset it?”

  I had lobbied successfully for his switch from a comb-over to a comb-back a few years back and the improvement had been astounding. Right away he started carrying himself with more confidence, looking slick and Cary Grantish instead of dissembling and Rudy Giulianine.

  But I didn’t like the idea of him without his beard. I felt like I wouldn’t recognize him. “The bald spot pitfall is an important consideration,” I said. “You might wind up looking even more dorky and over-the-hill than you do already.”

  His shook his head wearily like he probably should have guessed my response in advance. “Thank you so much, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Why’d they lay you off?” I asked, eating some of his popcorn even though I had my own. “Was it personal?”

  “It’s hard to tell. But I must say, it buoys me that you and I are in the same position.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I have a job.”

  “Not a real one.”

  “It is real,” I said, feeling the kind of insane anger that can only be brought on by a mother or a father. “And I didn’t get fired. I left school because I wanted to. I don’t have any problem with where I am right now. Why would you compare your situation to mine when they’re not the same at all?”

  “Misery loves company,” he said.

  “But Dad,” I said. “I’m not miserable.” He shrugged and turned to the screen with great interest, even though the only thing on it was a word jumble for Matt Damon.

  “You were going to be a rabbi,” he said, “the first in our family. And now you’re mopping tables. Not to mention the fact that Mom told me she saw you with a man twice your age. It’s like you’ve lost all common sense.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. I could never count on either of them to keep anything secret. If I kept quiet about anything they acted like I was being a horrible child but whenever I told them things they turned right around and told the other. In Jewish families information is love. The more you tell your parents, the more it means you love them. This is true even if they take whatever precious, personal stories you have and repeat them at parties to their friends with no thought or care to the shame they might bring upon you.

  “What are you doing cavorting with a middle-aged screenwriter?” he said. “Older men are only interested in one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do I have to spell it out for you? They’re addicted to power! Only a young woman can give it to them. And the relationship never ever lasts. Look how the girl from Modesto ended up. Look at Bill and Monica.”

  “Are you calling your own daughter Monica Lewinsky? That is really low.”

  “It’s not such a stretch! If you’re in awe of his status, I beg you please to be more of an adult! Someone like this is just going to think of you as a flash in the pan.”

  “That’s really generous of you. You don’t think for a moment he might actually have some respect for my brain?”

  “Of course not! You don’t have anything in common! How old is he?”

  “Fifty-one.”

  “What can you possibly have to talk about with a fifty-one-year-old?”

  “Carl Jung.”

  “Carl Jung was a Nazi apologist.”

  “He had a Jewish mistress!”

  “Listen to yourself,” he said, like it was all getting way too surreal. “I can’t believe you have no qualms about dating someone NJ, when just a few months ago you were on your way to the rabbinate.”

  NJ was our family’s slang for Not Jewish, and the tone you used when saying it was similar to the one you might use for “convicted felon.”

  “Look,” I said. “This isn’t any of your business. The only reason you even know is because Mom saw us. If I want to date someone NJ nothing you say is going to stop me.”

  “You used to care about Jewish continuity! When you were fourteen you came back from that intermarriage shul-in and said you’d decided to marry a Jew.”

  “I was fourteen! And they threw those events to brainwash us!”

  “All I can think is that you don’t see yourself having anything long-lasting with this man, which I have trouble respecting, or that you’re in complete denial and have totally lost your head!”

  The hot dog and cheeseburger concession stand ad was coming on, the one where the hot dog looks like a hard dick and if there are teenagers in the theater they giggle loudly.

  “I don’t know what kind of hole you’re sticking your head into, Rachel,” he said, “but I wish you’d yank it out.”

  “Give me a little more credit,” I said.

  “Give yourself a little more credit. You used to
be so ambitious and now it’s like you don’t even care!”

  “I’m still ambitious. I’m just…repositioning. It’s important to take stock once in a while. Madonna takes years in between albums!”

  “Exactly,” he said. “And when was the last time she had a hit?” He shoveled down some more popcorn, the corn spraying out from his hairy mouth.

  BY the time the movie ended it was after two and the sky was bright and sunny. My dad was in high spirits, going on and on about the amazing action sequences and the chemistry between the actresses, like our whole argument never even happened.

  When we got in front of my apartment building he looked down at the stack of supermarket giveaways that had accumulated on the stoop, scooped them up, and deposited them into the recycling bin. He did this every time he came over to visit. “Why do you do that?” I said.

  “Don’t you know about the broken window rule?”

  “I don’t think burglars are going to see my apartment building as a more appealing target just because they saw a stack of newspapers on the stoop.”

  “You can never be too careful.” He put the lid on the bin and then his face brightened. “Hey, Rach. I have an idea. Why don’t we go for a bike ride? There’s a beautiful path by the Verrazano. We could pack a lunch and eat it under the bridge. I went there by myself the other day and watched the sun set.”

  It was a little bizarre: your own father’s not supposed to sucker you into playing hooky. It was like his unemployment had opened him up to a whole new lazy worldview. “Dad,” I said. “I have to get ready for work.”

  He sighed and gave me a grim look like he understood but wasn’t happy. “How ’bout tomorrow, then?” He looked so eager and lonely. Whenever I was around him he made me want to say things like “I need a little space” or “Why don’t we take things down a notch?” But you can’t exactly request a trial separation from your own father. I told him I’d think about it and kissed him on the cheek good-bye.

  The Need to Know and

  the Fear of Knowing

  IT was nine o’clock at work and for the past half hour a Greyhound and a Stella Artois had been dishing about men. In general women customers were less annoying than men but they drank more slowly and tipped worse. Still, given a choice, I liked women better because they left me alone and I didn’t have to worry about fights.

  I was pretty sure Greyhound’s name was Alex, but not positive, so I always made a choice never to speak it aloud. I had mastered the art of the warm, seemingly intimate “He-ey!” when someone whose name I didn’t know walked through the door. She had cateye glasses and bangs and lived on Dean, around the corner from the bar. She told me once that she was a grad student at NYU but I could never remember in what. Her friend had a hot figure and a butterface—great body, but her face—and they were talking about Greyhound’s most recent dating fiasco. She had met this seemingly amazing guy on Nerve.com, a skinny Vespa-riding Web programmer, and after a great first date he completely flaked out. She kept calling him and he lost her cell phone number twice, and when they arranged their next date he showed up on Vicodin because he’d thrown his back out. He wound up passing out in her bed without so much as a kiss.

  “So we didn’t speak for the next two weeks,” Greyhound said, “and just as I was thinking I was over him I ran into him at the theater. He was with a date.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” said Stella.

  “You know what’s worse? She was totally mousy!”

  “Generigirl,” said Stella. “I hate those.”

  “Exactly,” said Greyhound. “Empty smile, no soul. And then he had the nerve to come up to me and introduce me to her. We haven’t spoken since and that was three, no four, days ago. So the question is,” she said, drawing in her breath, “do I call him tonight or wait till tomorrow?”

  Stella and I exchanged a grim look. The girl was a PhD candidate and when it came to love she had no IQ. There was zero awareness. It was as though she was so fixated on it working that she was willing to ignore every single red flag. I had never considered myself the luckiest girl in the world in the man department but now I was grateful that the guys I dated did one thing right: liked me.

  Stella put her hand on top of Greyhound’s. “I don’t think you should call him at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “The guy’s a dick! And he has a girlfriend!”

  “What if she’s just a friend?”

  “Alex!!” she shouted, with a withering look. “You gotta Palmolive.” She rubbed her hands together under an imaginary faucet.

  Greyhound’s face fell as she seemed to accept, at least for a moment, that her friend might be right. “So you think I should just…forget about him?” she asked. Stella nodded somberly. “I guess it’s over,” Greyhound said, trying to look resolute and strong.

  Suddenly her cell phone rang, piercing the relative quiet of the bar. She gave Stella a meaningful look as she fumbled for it and stared down at the indicator. “It’s my mother,” she said, sighing. “How do they always know when you’re at your lowest?” She shut off the ringer and slurped the rest of her drink. “Could I get another?” she said, but I was already on my way to the bottle.

  THE next night around seven, I heard Liz having an orgasm. She wasn’t saying “Fuck my Jew beav!” this time, though. She was moaning something muffled and unintelligible into her pillow. I craned my neck to hear the guy but he was a silent fucker.

  I wondered if it was Shittner, which would have explained the lack of self-hating pejorative. When Liz came it was fast and soft, which was atypical for her: “Oh, oh, oh!” It was so quiet I concluded after some deliberation that it wasn’t a man at all, but her vibrator, The Gun. She had shown it to me once. It was white and shaped like a big water pistol and you inserted it into yourself and turned it on by pressing the trigger. I always felt the symbolism was a little backwards, since she was a female ejaculator.

  In the morning for my Powell rendezvous I opted for a white and red flowered silk dress I bought at the Village Scandal, a vintage store on East Seventh Street. It was cap-sleeved with a V-neck and high waist and it hung sleekly and smoothly around my body. It seemed designed for a sleazy secretary from the 1940s and every time I wore it people said, “That dress looks like it was made for you.” I wore it with knee-high black boots with silver buckles to give it more of a modern feel.

  As I was heading to my door I remembered Powell’s caveat. I slipped my underpants off, feeling very afraid. Although it wasn’t cold I felt that without underwear I needed added protection from any potential leerers, so I chose a 1970s tan trench coat, also high-waisted, with red trim, to wear on top. Whenever I wore it I felt like the Morton Salt girl.

  On my way down the stairs I heard footsteps, high-heeled and aggressive, behind me. I waited at the landing below mine and when she saw me she screamed like she’d seen a ghost, then said, “Oh, hey, Rach.”

  “Are you OK?” I said.

  “I didn’t see you there.”

  “You sounded like you were having fun last night,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Were you diddling the dai dai?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I heard you moaning but I couldn’t hear a guy.”

  “Oh. Yeah. It was The Gun.” She headed down the stairs to the foyer. She blinked rapidly like a squirrel on speed and held the door open for me.

  Outside her eyes looked off balance and nervous. She was acting so moody. Maybe she’d blue-binned with Shittner and didn’t want to tell me.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t Shittner?” I said.

  “It wasn’t Shittner!” she shrieked. “It was The Gun, OK?”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “Don’t be a freakazoid.”

  “You’re the freakazoid,” she snarled, then brushed past me and walked briskly toward Boerum Place.

  I looked down at my dress and party coat. I was annoyed at her for acting strange but I was also insulted that s
he hadn’t noticed my outfit. I was all decked out and she hadn’t said a thing. Something was fishy.

  I headed left toward Court Street and as I passed CVS it occurred to me that it might be a wise idea to go Boy Scout. I walked through the electronic doors, went downstairs to the pharmacy section, and had just pulled a box of LifeStyles Ultra Sensitive off a hook when I heard a voice behind me say, “Rachel? Is that you?”

  I would have dropped the box but it was already in my hand so I clamped it under my arm and turned around. “Stu Zaritsky,” I said.

  Stu Zaritsky was one of my former classmates and represented the worst that the Reform rabbinate had to offer. Though he was not the precise reason I had dropped out he definitely had something to do with my overall disillusionment with the program. He was thirty pounds overweight, wore tight chinos like Pat on Saturday Night Live, and breathed through his mouth. He came from Roslyn, Long Island, and had gone to Brandeis, and like many rabbinical students he had been president of his regional Reform Jewish youth group, which in our world was the equivalent of being homecoming king.

  On the first day of classes, when we gathered in the sanctuary for the welcome speech by President Levine, Stu slipped into my pew and introduced himself. Within five minutes he had informed me that his father was a rabbi and his grandfather too.

  He never asked me out—he had a young wife he’d known since freshman year of college, and a baby boy—but he got under my skin. What bugged me about Stu wasn’t his pomposity, poor rhetorical skills, or tendency to kiss up to professors, but his irritating habit of Halachic one-upsmanship. He was the kind of guy who would ask me what I was doing for the weekend as a way of finding out if I rested on Shabbat, which I didn’t. So if I said, “Studying and going to a party,” he’d raise his eyebrows like I was a bad Jew. I had always felt that observance was more about the spirit than the letter of the law but Stu saw everything as an opportunity to prove his holiness.