by Robin Greene
Once, I watched my grandfather hit her in the hallway of their Brooklyn apartment. Another time, sitting at her kitchen table, she took my hand, squeezed and kissed it—telling me to watch out for men—a warning that struck me as odd and out of context.
But at the end of our outings together, on the way home from some magnificent Manhattan show, we’d descend into the subway to catch the F train, then emerge from subterranean darkness into afternoon light, to slowly walk the five long blocks from the Queens station to the furniture store. We’d pass a large stone church, where the concrete yard was painted green to resemble a lawn. It was the same shade of green as the walls of the subway stations, and I thought that it was the ugliest color in the world.
thirteen
Jake scratches at the sunroom door, wanting to return to the air-conditioned living room. He’s panting. I get up, decide to go inside myself, and as Jake laps water from his bowl, I realize that I’m hungry. I can’t remember if I’ve eaten breakfast.
I assemble a hummus, cucumber, and alfalfa sprout sandwich and sit down at the kitchen table with a recent copy of The New Yorker. But I can’t focus. I’m thinking about Dennis. How my mother’s desperation is a result of his gambling, how his continued stealing from her and the family has destroyed everyone’s life—his, our parents’, his wife’s, his kids’.
I sit down at the kitchen table, recalling how when my parents moved to Florida to retire, my thirty-something brother followed them. He moved into the spare bedroom of their rented condo. For a time in New York, he’d been working as the night manager for a cleaning company at the World Trade Center, but he’d quit. The night schedule had been difficult for him, but it had allowed him to gamble by day. In fact, he’d gotten into so much trouble with some low-level Mafia bookies that he’d left New York to avoid having his legs broken.
Soon after he moved in with my parents, his African American girlfriend, Lydia, joined him. My parents were less than thrilled about Lydia—in large part because she was Black, but also because they felt that she was socio-economically beneath them. She wore tons of makeup, low-cut, tight-fitting clothes, would mispronounce words and snap her gum with her mouth open. But Dennis was in love, and they allowed them both to stay.
Later, when my parents left the condo and purchased a detached townhouse, Dennis left Florida for a job in New Orleans, managing a steak house, and Lydia moved with him. But in less than a year, Dennis had lost that job, and they were back. Lydia confessed to me that he’d been gambling again and was fired because he’d been caught stealing.
Desperate, Dennis and Lydia had moved back into the new townhouse, “temporarily”—or so they promised.
My mother was still working part-time as a psychotherapist. Although she couldn’t find an agency like the one in New York to employ her full-time, she hooked up with a group of private practitioners in Coral Springs and began to develop a small clientele base.
Soon, my dad also wanted something more to do than play duplicate bridge every afternoon at the neighborhood bridge club, so he found some partners through a business broker and purchased a small restaurant—a diner, really—and because Dennis was still looking for a job and the business needed a manager, both the partners and my parents agreed to put Dennis in charge. As manager, he had full access to the cash register. After all, Dennis had experience managing a large restaurant in New Orleans. Of course, no one bothered to mention that Dennis had lost that job because he’d been stealing.
I remember visiting my family right before my parents purchased the business. I reminded my mom that they were breaking every business rule possible—buying a business about which they knew nothing, selecting partners about whom they knew nothing, then putting a thief in charge of finances. But my mom had “good feelings” about these partners, and she thought that the restaurant represented a “closing of the loop”—a fitting end to her life story, which began with her parents’ grocery store in Brooklyn.
“Fitting end”—I hear her words now, echoing insidiously because the purchasing of this business was the beginning of the end—the end to my parents’ dreams of a comfortable retirement, the end to any possibility that my brother would stop gambling, the end to all semblance of honesty in my family.
When my brother was caught stealing—the first, second, and then a third time—my parents failed to give him the tough love he needed. Perhaps they could have forced him into counseling so that he could take responsibility and experience the consequences of his actions. But they didn’t. Instead, after each episode of stealing, gambling, loss, and Dennis’s many apologies, they always forgave him.
With the best of intentions—and with the most profuse and sincere apologies—Dennis couldn’t control his gambling. He stole thousands of dollars from the business, and when the business began failing and the partners found out, they demanded that my family replace the money and sell them their half of the business. But they all couldn’t determine how much had been stolen nor how much my parents’ share of the business was worth, so they all agreed to sell the restaurant, again through the same business broker who’d sold them the business. I don’t think they owned the diner for more than ten months.
When they finally found a buyer, they had to sell the restaurant at a terrible loss—at least that’s what I was told. And my parents’ share wasn’t enough to cover the money they owed to their partners. Dennis’s stealing had not only bankrupted the business but also created debt, which my parents had to pay by liquidating some of their investments.
Then, to make matters worse, my parents decided to liquidate even more of their investments and double down. They purchased yet another restaurant—this time, a modest little bagel shop, called The Bagel Nosh, located in a nondescript strip mall near some dumpy-looking businesses and doctors’ offices. As neighbors, they had a rundown copy shop, a nail salon, a discount dry cleaner, and a UPS store. Again, my parents hired Dennis, who was still unemployed, to manage their new business and tend the register. Lydia waited tables.
But the walk-in traffic wasn’t good, and the small lunch crowd profits couldn’t cover the rent on the place. They tried advertising, new menus, but it was soon clear that they’d been badly ripped off, having paid twice as much as the business was worth.
And Dennis, of course, kept stealing—at first small amounts, then emptying larger amounts of cash from the register, taking long lunch breaks, and driving midday to the dog track. Lydia was left in charge, and she’d often fall asleep in the back office.
My mom continued to see clients, and my father now seemed ready to fully retire and spend his afternoons at the bridge club nearby. Often, after a game, he’d stop at the townhouse pool for a dip before heading to the restaurant to help Lydia close up.
There just wasn’t enough business. After a flurry of orders at breakfast and lunch from the doctors’ offices, Dennis would make early deliveries and cut out to the track. But between the business’s low volume and my brother’s stealing, The Bagel Nosh soon went belly-up.
Meanwhile, Dennis had gotten in trouble with some bookies, and Lydia had become pregnant. She and Dennis married hastily in the Town Hall, without a formal ceremony. The very next week, two large Italian guys showed up at the townhouse, threatening to break Dennis’s knees and throw Lydia down a flight of stairs if they didn’t get the money they were owed.
Soon after, my mother called me up and frantically asked Nick and me for a $10,000 loan so that Dennis could pay his debt. It seems that pregnant Lydia, who’d been walking toward her car as she came out of a client’s home—she now worked as a CNA, or certified nursing assistant—had had a gun put to her head and was hysterical.
It was early spring. We’d moved to Fayetteville the previous summer. Nick had completed his PhD and had been hired to teach English at a small college here. I’d been pregnant with Will and had given up my faculty position in upstate New York. Also, I was finishing up an MFA and working on a manuscript of poems. Will had been born only a
few months earlier, in late October. We had some money saved and earmarked for the purchase of a new house in Fayetteville, so the money we ended up lending my parents to pay Dennis’s debts was supposed to be short-term, a few months at most. My mom swore up and down that after the business sold, we’d get repaid. But when the business sold, we were told that they had had to sell at a loss and that there was no money left to pay us back.
Over the years, we did get some of the money—a few thousand at most, in dribs and drabs and after much pleading with my mom. But most of that $10,000 was never repaid and never will be.
Dennis stole from every job he’d ever had, and for the last two decades, gambling had completely overtaken his life. And through all of this—the losses, the devastation, the humiliation of being lied to and stolen from—my parents, or really my mother—continued to support him and his growing family.
Dennis gambled hard, and after each big loss, he’d promise never to do it again, and my parents allowed him, Lydia, and now their new daughter Julia, to continue living in their townhouse until finally Dennis stole so much money from them that they couldn’t make their mortgage payment and had to declare bankruptcy. They lost the house and most of their retirement savings.
They began renting but were twice evicted because Dennis kept stealing, and they couldn’t make rent. Then, Dennis forged their signatures and cashed in our dad’s retirement fund; big chunks of money, saved over a lifetime, were gone. Soon, my parents were nearly indigent. And my mom, the psychotherapist who understood codependency and tough love, allowed this pattern to continue. Every so often, she or my dad would have to call Nick and me to ask for another “loan.”
Sitting at the kitchen table, I feel numb. I get up, wash my plate of sandwich crumbs and a few strands of alfalfa sprouts, telling Jake, who’s begging for scraps, that there’s nothing, nothing left.
I head upstairs, thinking I’ll read Anna. Jake follows, though he’s unsteady on the hardwood treads. I wait for him, offering a little encouragement.
Then, I’m standing in front of my bedroom closet and am strangely inspired to clean or organize again. Do something productive; you’ll feel better, I tell myself, remembering the hall closet and how good it felt to clean it.
I open my closet’s bi-fold doors and the disarray overwhelms me—clothing double-hung, no order, and there are piles of half-folded sweaters on the upper shelf, along with too many pairs of jeans, most of which I no longer wear. I start with them.
I pull out an old faded pair of Wranglers and put them on—passable but not good enough to wear to school. Possibly okay for yard work. I toss them on the bed, near Jake, now asleep again. I pull on another pair, a sort of cowboy-style jeans, though I’m not sure what exactly makes me think that. Looking at myself in the full-length bathroom mirror, I see the shadow of my teenage self, the one with whom I can neither reconcile nor entirely leave behind.
I plop down on our bed, empty but for a few jeans and Jake, who wags his tail to find me so near.
Then I’m back in jeans and cowboy boots at the dude-ranch summer camp. It’s 1969 again, the year that always follows into the nooks and crannies of my adult life.
That summer we had two bunks with four groups of campers. I worked with the head counselor of the ten-year-old girls’ group. My job was to teach riding basics to those campers who had never ridden and to gather the girls up in the morning so that they all went to breakfast.
East Jewett, New York, was at the time a sleepy small town resting in the cradle of the Catskill Mountains. The air often smelled of the lovely Rambler Roses, planted in rural gardens widespread across the area, and each summer day began with a cool freshness, dew on the grass, and most often a hazy sky that turned either bright blue or into drizzle.
The other Rachel was assigned the group of older girl campers who shared our bunkhouse but not our bunkroom. A nearby building contained wooden shower stalls, with thick rubber mats placed over the wood floor that, as the summer progressed, would become slimy and slick. The toilets were non-flush, outhouse-style latrines.
Although the bath building was fairly close to the bunkhouse, we needed a flashlight after dark so that we could negotiate the rough stone path. We had a lantern-style one hung on a nail by the bunkhouse front door, a simple wood-frame screen door without a lock, and the two groups of campers shared the lantern.
When we first arrived, there were no horses and no cowboys at camp yet—they arrived mid-week in a caravan of pick-up trucks and horse trailers. Rachel and I—known as the two Rachels—were sitting alone on the wood fence as they all pulled up to the corral. Where the campers were, or why Rachel and I were there, I don’t remember. But we were wearing cowboy hats and western boots.
Almost at once, the corral exploded with horses as the large gates opened. Horses backed out of their trailers; cowboys stood, hands raised, whooping them into the corral. They’d driven nonstop from Wyoming, a pack of rough-looking guys right off the range.
Dry dirt rose in clouds of dust, horses whinnied, bit each other, stampeding around the enclosure. By this time, the other Rachel was off the fence, flirting with a couple of the guys. She was clearly having more luck than I, with her swagger and cigarette smoking.
I knew from last year that a few of the more experienced campers would help with breaking the horses, and I was hoping to be among them.
Most of the horses weren’t even green broke. And the rest of the week, before the cowboys left, was designated for getting the horses to take bridles and saddles so that they could be ridden by campers. Being chosen by the cowboys immediately offered status, and I wanted to prove myself early.
Johnny, a youngish man, maybe a teenager—I couldn’t tell—walked over to me, removed his hat, asked my name. When I told him, he laughed and asked again. He’d never known anyone named Rachel, and now there were two of us.
We walked out by the large, faded red barn, filled with new hay in the empty stalls. The middle area, as is typical in horse barns, had cross ties for grooming, shoeing, hoof picking, and saddling up, though some of that was also done by the corral fence.
“You from around here?” Johnny asked. His thin boyish smile made him look young.
“No,” I said. “From the city. Down-state.”
“New York City,” he said. “New York, New York.” He drew out the words, songlike, and I could tell he was impressed.
“Yup,” I said, more relaxed now, playing the game with a bit more of an upper-hand.
“You?” I asked. I could hear the cowboys at the corral, trying to get the horses to settle down.
“Outside Cheyenne. Folks own a cattle ranch.” Two men walked by us, pulling out hay bales from a stack by the tack-room. Johnny looked at them, nodded, and turned to me. “Gotta go. Ponies need to eat. You around for the social tonight?”
“Yup,” I said again.
“See you there, partner.” Johnny winked but both his eyes shut for a moment, and I couldn’t tell if the facial gesture had been a wink or if he’d gotten hay dust in his eyes.
I gave Johnny a half smile, looked at him from head to toe, nodded back, and left. I walked toward Rachel who was now with her bunk campers, wet from swimming by the waterfall, where they’d gone for the morning with another counselor.
fourteen
Bad dream last night. Nick called late, around 9:00, after the retreat readings. And he upset me too close to bedtime.
He’d listened to a couple of poets read—mixed reviews there—read himself, which went okay, then listened to an opera singer perform an aria from La Boehme, and although Nick is not an opera fan, he was moved.
When we spoke, he was low energy, questioning the meaning of everything. Why was he at this retreat? Why did he write the crap he was trying to write? Who needs poetry anyway? He hated having to read his poems. They left a bad taste in his mouth. And nothing was shaking: the creative nonfiction piece he’d begun was going nowhere. He’d only managed to get out one online submission, s
tarted a draft of a new poem, deleted it, went for a hike, then a swim. Perhaps he should have studied opera, he told me.
“But you hate opera,” I countered.
“Not tonight,” he said.
I’d been watching Hit or Miss again and knitting a second slipper. I’d tried to listen to the show and to Nick, but ultimately hit the pause button. Then Nick became silent on his end, and the living room went silent.
Jake slept on the floor, stretched out on his side, and I couldn’t see him breathing. For a moment, I thought he’d died.
I saw myself in the backyard, digging his grave with the big D-handled shovel Nick keeps in our shed—its old wood shank and rough metal grip sweaty in my hands as I located a spot, perhaps near the fence, where there’s no grass and no large tree roots. I imagined myself struggling to carry Jake’s body, deciding to bury him with his dog bed and blanket—and maybe with his old rope tug-toy—a talisman to help set his spirit free. It’s a hard job to dig a big hole, and it would take me hours.
I thought all this in a flash. A wave of hopelessness washed over me. Then I heard Nick’s voice at my ear.
“You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Sounds like you had a rough day. Anyone say anything about your work?”
“Some good comments, I guess, but I felt like hell.”
I paused. “And the singer, where’s she from? Have you gotten to know her?”
“Madison, Wisconsin, I think. And no, everyone here keeps a low profile. Weird. Usually people at these places talk. Here, it’s just basic chit-chat, but no one talks shop. Or says anything about themselves.”
“Maybe that’s what’s getting you down.”
“I just need to write. Get something good going. I guess that woman’s voice… beautiful and sad. She’s got a gig at Carnegie Hall next week, so she’ll be leaving.”
Jake opened his eyes, looked at me, then closed them. I felt a pang of guilt, having imagined his death and burial.
