“Ah, I can finally breathe,” he said. This was the antonym of stuffiness, the balm we all sought.
The next morning we went to the Desert Inn coffee shop for breakfast. My father rated their breakfasts far superior to the Riviera’s; the truly wealthy stayed at the Desert Inn, and you could catch a glimpse of a movie star in the lobby. A pattern of oversized green foliage adorned the walls.
We finished breakfast. My father had consumed four or five cups of coffee. Still he lingered. My brothers were tired of sitting in the coffee shop.
“Let’s go,” Ben said. “C’mon.” He was eager to get to the casino where he could pass for twenty-one and gamble for a while before the marshals asked to see his ID. Paul sighed loudly and looked at my mother for approval. My father glared.
“C’mon, Ira,” Eva said, “aren’t you done?” The coffee shop was supposed to be a preamble to the day’s activities, not a substitute for them. But my father was having too good a time being served off the china with gold-plated rims, drinking coffee poured from a silver pot by a waitress with bounteous cleavage who winked at him, touched him softly on the arm, and treated him with more respect than he got from his wife or sons.
“I’m going,” Ben said. “I’ll find you all later.”
“I didn’t tell you, you could go,” my father said.
“C’mon,” Ben answered, sliding out of the booth.
“Hitchhike here and they might find your body in the desert,” Ira said.
He might have continued to fight with Ben if the waitress had not reappeared to offer yet another cup of coffee.
“Here, honey, let me get you a brand new fresh cup,” she said, “that one’s probably cold.”
“Ira,” my mother said.
“Don’t rush me.”
The waitress returned. “Would you like a piece of coffee cake to go with your coffee?” she asked.
“You know what, doll,” my father said, “I’m saying what they say at the blackjack table—hit me again.”
She looked puzzled.
“Bring me another breakfast, all of it, eggs, toast, the whole schmear. Do you want something, Eva? Have a little something with me. Coffee cake?”
My mother pursed her lips and shook her head, then stared off into the distance, vacating her body.
Ira turned to me. “Are you still hungry?” he said. I had just eaten eggs, hash browns, the forbidden traif pork bacon and sausages that we never brought into our house, toast with grape jelly and butter. I was decidedly not hungry.
“They have steak sandwiches here,” my father said. “The best steak sandwiches ever with onion rings on top. I’m going to have some more breakfast; why don’t you have a steak sandwich with me?”
My mother and brothers had turned on my father. I would be his soul mate, his companion; we would eat together, proudly, defiantly. Didn’t eating a steak sandwich mean that I was healthy, happy, alive? “Despite how many pills I need to function,” Ira often said, “at least I know I don’t have cancer because I still have a healthy appetite.” Eating a steak sandwich while my father ate his second breakfast would constitute a feat of daring, a performance like one of the stage shows that my father and I could put on together.
“Sure, Daddy,” I said. “I’ll have one.”
Stuck in the coffee shop at the Desert Inn, consigned to watch her husband and daughter engage in exhibition eating, my mother seethed quietly, condemning us to each other. Paul put his head down on her arm.
“Why do you have to eat so much?” he said to Ira. “You’re going to get fatter and fatter till you burst.”
Ira ignored him.
When the steak came, my mother’s disapproval made the meat stick in my throat. I pushed past it and ate every last bite. My father was right, the steak sandwich at the Desert Inn was delicious. When I’d finished and the waitress cleared the table, unsure whether to condemn or praise the spectacle she’d observed, my father defined the moment: “I have an exceptional daughter,” he said.
During the afternoon, Paul and I stood behind the red line that barred the entrance to the casino for anyone under twenty-one. If we craned our necks, we could watch Ira and Eva side by side playing the slot machines. We could just about see the discrete cherries, oranges, and bananas on the tumblers merge into bands of red, orange, and yellow, then see the fruit return as the tumblers stopped. When three cherries lined up, Ira screamed and hugged Eva, and then danced, pulling out the front of his trousers and letting the nickels fall into the pouch he had created.
Perhaps Paul and I should have been bored, but we were not; we were relieved to see our parents happy, side by side, united in a mission.
At dusk, Ira put on his trunks, and I my bathing suit, and we went down to the hotel swimming pool. The pool was empty at that hour, the sun about gone, the other hotel guests having exited to dress for dinner and shows.
No one in our family knew how to swim, and Ira refused to let me take lessons, so we were consigned to the shallow end of the pool. I stood on the steps and said, “Don’t let me drown,” and Ira said, “I won’t.” Then he took me in his arms. I gripped my arms tightly around his neck and snuggled my face into his hair, which smelled of burnt almonds and cherries. He hummed the Blue Danube waltz, as he waltzed me around the shallow end of the pool. My father’s fat belly made him more buoyant, and the limp that ordinarily impeded his walking only enhanced the cadence of his waltz.
“Don’t go in the deep end,” I said. “I won’t,” Ira said, “I’ve got you.” I placed my head close to his head and felt the coat of soft black fur on his nearly white chest rub against my body. For those few moments, my father held me suspended and safe, clear in his role as my protector.
As the sky darkened, the breeze came up, and the desert air felt soft against our skin. We both relaxed, and I hummed along with him. Even after the sun had gone down completely, and the air had begun to cool, even after an attendant had come and removed all the towels from all the chaises, we stayed in the pool, waltzing.
CHAPTER SIX
Migraine
My mother sat at the breakfast table, her head in her hands, her face as white as if she had covered it with talcum powder.
“Owwwh, there’s a knife in my head going through my left eye,” she groaned.
From my spot across from her at the table, I could not help but imagine that knife’s polished metal blade slicing through my mother’s head.
“Your mother’s got another migraine,” my father announced from his spot at the table’s head. He was half-dressed in a V-neck T-shirt and Jockey shorts. Unshaven, barefoot, his hair sticking up in clumps, he scanned the movie section of the LA Times, crinkling the pages as he turned them.
I associated my mother’s efficacy in the world with her glasses. They allowed her to see clearly, to plot a reasonable course for our family. She never took them off unless she was sleeping or when fighting with my father had brought her to weeping. Now my mother’s glasses dangled from one earpiece in her left hand, as if she were unwilling to relinquish them. With the other hand, she shielded her eyes from the light. The glasses had left their deep impression on her pale, fragile, skin, and without them, she looked strangely naked. When she finally opened her eyes, they appeared clear and deep green like some forest animal not used to looking at humans. When my mother had a migraine it hurt to look through her glasses, it hurt if even a little glare of light caught her lens. When my mother had a migraine, it hurt to even have eyes.
Impervious, my father sat drinking his coffee in big, boisterous slurps, slamming his cup up and down wildly against the saucer, sloshing coffee onto the table. My mother winced as each slam of my father’s cup reverberated through her body.
She groaned again. “Will someone please shoot me,” she said. At the word “shoot,” I winced, feeling a sharp jolt in my own chest.
Eva had inherited migraines from her mother. She could get one from the glare of headlights, from Paul’s inadvertently shining a fla
shlight in her eyes, from movies, merry-go-rounds, roller coasters, even my twirling before her. Once she had seen the aura of flashing light, the headache became inevitable.
The night before, Ira had taken her to The Luau, a nightclub in Hollywood where they’d eaten Polynesian food and watched a stage show.
“I knew I shouldn’t have eaten those sweet, sticky sauces,” my mother said. “They never agree with me.”
“Maybe you’re allergic to too good a time,” my father said. “Or to watching me have too good a time.”
“Anything for a good time,” she said.
Paul had protested against my mother’s leaving the house. He’d held hostage the cans of chow mein and noodles she’d planned to cook for our dinner. If she could not cook us dinner, she would not leave us, he figured. Paul and I sat on his bed conspiring, the stolen goods under his pillow. My mother stood in the doorway of the boys’ room, at the threshold of the printed linoleum floor’s pandemonium display of cowboys and Indians, the late afternoon sun on her face.
“Paul, cut this out. Don’t make me plead with you. Why can’t you just let me go out with Daddy without making a scene?”
“Why would you want to go out with him?” Paul said.
“Stop it. He’s your father, Paul. Why would you want to make me choose between my son and my husband?”
“He’s the one who makes you choose. He doesn’t like you to give me any attention. He’s so jealous. Ever since I was a little boy, he didn’t like it when I touched you.”
“Paul, you’re twelve now; it’s time to grow up. Why do you bait him? And if your father acts like a baby, do you have to?”
“When you leave us with Ben, he screams at us and makes us watch World War II movies and roller derby. They give me nightmares,” Paul said.
“And he spanks us whenever he feels like it,” I added. “Unless we lock him out of the house and then we’re afraid to let him back in.”
“Give me the food back, Paul,” my mother said, “and if you don’t want him to spank you, behave—and don’t lock him out of the house.” She held out her hand.
Paul relinquished the Chun King. My mother got dressed up, sprayed her hair, turned her head so we could kiss her gingerly on the cheek, and left.
Now at the breakfast table, Eva fought to hold on to the last vestiges of her morning routine, trying to get her coffee down, sip by tiny sip. She swirled the contents of her cup with suspicion, as if she expected something nasty to surface to the top. Then she realized that even that slight movement increased her vertigo.
“Oh, God, I’m so nauseous,” she said, belching.
My father peered over the top of his newspaper and said way too loudly, “Jesus, Evvie, you look white as a sheet.”
My heart started to pound with anxiety; what if the migraine killed my mother this time?
Paul arrived at the table, looking rumpled.
“What’s wrong with Mom?” he asked.
“She’s got a terrible migraine,” I answered.
“Again?” he asked. He glared at my father. “What did you make her eat last night?”
“Paul—” my mother said, “don’t start.”
“When you go out with him, you always get sick.”
“Your mother and I had a wonderful time last night,” my father said.
Paul filled his bowl to the brim with Cheerios and began to eat them with his hands, and then as if he’d suddenly remembered that milk existed, reached across the table for it, and poured it on until it was about to overflow his bowl. He spooned a damp hill of sugar in the center.
My mother got up from the table slowly, holding her head to keep it from jostling and went into the kitchen to get an ice bag. Holding it over her eye, she moved slowly into the bedroom where she lay down on the bed, and Paul and I followed. Paul curled up perpendicular to my mother and clung to her legs. I lay on my father’s side of the bed near her feet. We tried to be perfectly quiet. “Poor, poor Mommy,” Paul said, pretending to be a cat, kneading her legs and purring. My mother kicked him off her.
“Paul, you’re way too old to play cat,” she said. “Take Debbie and go into the other room.”
We sat up on the bed so we weren’t touching my mother’s body but didn’t leave the room. All my mother wanted when she had a migraine was for everyone to keep still, for everything to stop. Absolute silence, darkness, peace. No one to ask anything from her. Not a fly buzzing, not a breeze blowing. Even her own blood coursing through her head hurt. But unless Ira was sleeping, he was incapable of being still or quiet or peaceful. Unless he took a pill.
My father came into the bedroom and I scrunched in as he threw his full weight on the bed. We all quaked from the impact. He lay still for a few minutes, but whatever he was thinking about must have made him anxious because he started twirling his hair and whispering to himself, engaging in a remembered conversation. His weight shifted from side to side, and he twitched the big toe of his right foot against the toe next to it. Twitch, twitch, twitch, as steady and unconscious as an alarm clock’s ticking. Pretty soon he was jiggling the bed, up and down, up and down.
“Ira, stop it!” my mother said, raising her voice, and then gripping her head because the sound only made the pain worse. “Do you even know what you’re doing? Can’t you for once take care of me, or do I always have to be the one to take care of you? I feel like I have four children instead of three.”
“As if you’d know what to do if I acted like a real man.”
“Your idea of being a real man is to yell at your sons and carry on.”
My father got up.
“Take them out of here with you,” she said. I got up to go with my father, but Paul lingered, happy to have my mother all to himself, even if only for a moment, even while she was in an impaired state.
“C’mon, Momma’s Boy,” my father said.
Paul looked at my mother, imploring her to keep him close.
“Go help your father,” she said.
“I’ll make the three of us lunch,” Ira said.
“We just had breakfast,” Paul said.
“I’m hungry,” my father said.
“You’re always hungry,” Paul said.
“We only had cereal,” I said.
In the kitchen my father stared into the refrigerator for a few minutes, then concluded that everything in it would require planning and cooking, and my father neither planned nor cooked. He opened the pantry doors and perused the canned goods while Paul and I hovered on either side of his rotund belly.
“Paul and I want spaghetti,” I said. “Franco-American.”
“Anything else?” My father would never say that certain foods did not go with others, or that two cans were enough when three might be better.
“Hey, we can have our own Las Vegas buffet,” he said. He took out cans of Hormel tamales and Queen Isabella sardines.
“We’ll have a little orgy of flavors,” he said.
He rolled up his shirt sleeves, turned the kitchen faucet on full force, and immersed his hands and arms in a current of steaming hot water. Then he poured detergent on them and rubbed them together till suds emerged and cast-off soap bubbles floated in the air. Pretending to be a surgeon, he held his hands up in the air, cleared his throat theatrically, and declaimed, “Paul, fresh towel, puh-leeze.” We all laughed.
“Yes, doctor,” Paul answered, falling into his part. He handed him a dishtowel, touching only its edges, understanding that “fresh” meant unsullied by human hands. My father wiped his hands, then let the towel drop to his feet.
“All right, ready for surgery,” he said. He took the cans to the sink and blasted them with hot water, spraying the curtains and walls in the process.
“Stop,” Paul said, “you’re getting everything soaking wet.” Ira lined the cans up on the counter for inspection, turning each from side to side, checking the seams for bulges. Even a tiny dent in a seam signaled danger. Signs of rust rendered a can unusable. He hesitated over th
e can of tamales and then thrust it before Paul’s eyes.
“Paul, is it my imagination or is that seam bulging ever so slightly?”
“Hmmm,” Paul said, examining it methodically. “It’s just the way the light is reflecting against it,” he said. “I could go get my magnifying glass if you want.”
“Nah,” my father concluded.
It was time for the most critical test: my father placed his almost-thumb on the top of the can of tamales and pushed down against it. If the top went up and down, the can was no longer airtight and poisonous gases had invaded it. In my father’s universe, botulism was not a rarity; every can was likely to harbor it. We must be ever vigilant against this tasteless, odorless, ubiquitous assassin.
If I were to eat food from a defective can, if I even tasted it, I knew I would die. But I wondered what would happen if I only smelled it or touched it or breathed the air too close to it. When I walked by the shelf of cans, I held my breath. What if the botulism germs could travel from inside the can to inside my body?
My father pushed the lid down again, and it seemed to give just a little. He put the can aside.
“Paul, what do you think?” This was another side of my father’s relationship with Paul; when he wasn’t yelling at him or blaming him, he was calling on his intelligence and technical expertise.
Paul looked uncertain.
“Well, if in doubt, let’s get another,” my father said, returning to the cupboard and throwing the unopened can into the trash. It hit with a loud thud.
“Whoops,” Paul said.
We all laughed again.
Paul took the replacement can from Ira’s hands. He held it very close to his eyes and twisted it slowly, once, twice, three revolutions.
“This one is patent,” he said.
“Very good,” my father answered, taking the can and examining it for himself. “You are a superb surgical assistant.” And my father smiled and cocked his head, lost in self-scrutiny. In the midst of the can-opening compulsion, he realized its absurdity. “You know, Freud would consider this highly neurotic behavior,” Ira said.
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