Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

  “Just put it back,” he said.

  “I’m not sure how,” Paul said. What was lost could not be recaptured, a lesson my father always resisted. Paul turned the knob forward and back. An instant of screen stasis raised our hopes, and then the rolling resumed.

  “Stop teasing me!” my father yelled.

  “I’m not teasing you,” Paul replied. “I’m trying to fix it.”

  “You’re making it worse.”

  “I’m not doing it on purpose,” Paul said. There was just a catch of a taunt in his voice; he had the power to do it on purpose if he wanted to, but out of the goodness of his heart, he wasn’t, and why couldn’t my father appreciate that? Paul could hold his mechanical ability over my father who did not understand how anything worked, and possessed barely the manual dexterity to screw in a light bulb.

  Paul tried the horizontal hold, and the image began to distort in the other direction.

  “What are you doing now?” my father said. “Just leave my fucking set alone.”

  Paul moved back. “Okay, if that’s what you want.”

  “Ira, he’s trying to fix it. Give him a minute,” my mother said. “Patience.”

  Paul adjusted the dials back and forth a few more times, as my father became more agitated.

  “The set needs a tube,” Paul concluded.

  What happened in Mayberry that night was lost in the ether. We were back in our own not-so-friendly small town, with our not-so-loving neighbors, and left to our own not-so-charmingly harmless devices.

  We waited for two nights, in danger that, without the TV’s sedating effects, all hell might break loose among us. On the third day, the local TV repairman, Frank, an apparition in gray—hair, complexion, uniform, metal case full of tubes—arrived with his hangdog expression. Frank moved slowly, thought slowly, reacted in slow motion, while my father, revved up with anxiety, attacked him with apprehensions.

  “Slow down a minute there, Ira,” Frank said. “You need a tube all righty.”

  Frank disappeared into the narrow space between the wall and the back of the mahogany-veneered cabinet. He replaced the tube, and then stretched his lanky frame over the front of the set to see the effect on the screen. The picture had stopped rolling. Perhaps so as to increase the perceived value of his visit, he made a few additional minor adjustments.

  “I gotcha a good picture now,” he said.

  After Frank left, we felt relieved—calming agent in place, status quo recovered. But my father’s agitation did not resolve. The trauma of even this temporary loss had burrowed into his system.

  “That guy reeked of tobacco,” he said. Tobacco gave my father asthma, and Frank’s scent lingered in my father’s territory. In the days after the visit Ira remained pensive. Whether watching Huckleberry Hound cartoons with me at 6:00 p.m., the Jackie Gleason Show, or an old movie at midnight, he twirled his hair and scrutinized the picture.

  “It doesn’t look right,” he said. “That guy monkeyed with my set.”

  “It looks okay to me, Daddy,” I said, carefully gauging the fine line between reassurance and treason. I knew that if it didn’t look right to Daddy, it shouldn’t look right to me. The set’s even temporary untrustworthiness, coupled with a repairman who had not reassured my father in the manner in which he craved to be reassured, had caused a rupture.

  “It looks off,” my father said.

  Off was a quality that, like stuffiness, was difficult to pin down. Food could be off, any of the body’s nefarious organs could be off, and things with moving parts that my father relied on others to fix were particularly prone to offness.

  Offness could occur when a car came back from a tune-up, when a dry cleaner changed the printing on their plastic bags and my father inferred that they had also modified their dry cleaning fluid and its asthma-producing odor. Behind my father’s back, things were always changing, and with change came the potential for offness, and with offness came the risk of bodily harm.

  There were several ways this situation could go: my father’s complaints could burn themselves out, as the TV or car regained his familiar scent; he might be distracted by some other attention-grabbing crisis; or, in the worst case, his complaints could escalate and take on more floridly paranoid dimensions, introducing an element of human malfeasance.

  In my father’s fractured Freudianism, people had subconscious motives that inevitably leaned toward the malevolent. It would be up to Eva to exert a “placebo effect.” Whatever remedy she proposed did not need to have objective efficacy, only a narrative compelling enough to convince my father of its curative powers.

  My mother introduced an alternate theory of causation.

  “I think the aerial may have shifted a little in the wind,” she said. My father considered; it had been windy.

  Ben, shirtless, relishing the opportunity to show off his physique to any neighborhood girls who happened to be strolling by, got up on the roof to adjust it. My father kept his vigilant eye on the TV’s reception. Paul liaised between them, and I followed behind Paul, checking that his communiqués were accurate.

  “How is it now?” he said to my father, running in the front door, the screen slamming behind him. Second slam, and me right behind.

  “I think it could be just a little sharper,” Ira said.

  Paul ran outside, stood on the lawn where Ben could see him, looked up, and screamed, “I think it could be just a little sharper.”

  “Sharper,” I shouted. “Daddy wants it sharper!”

  Ben moved the aerial a bit to the left. He stretched and strutted, a brave guy doing something important at a great height. Paul ran back inside. Screen door slammed again. I followed.

  “I told him, Daddy,” I said.

  “Yes, I see an incremental improvement,” my father said, and then switched from channel to channel. “Maybe a degree in the other direction.”

  “A tiny bit in the opposite direction,” Paul said.

  I ran outside and backed up on the lawn until I could see Ben maneuver the antenna to the right. Neighbors gathered on the street to watch. What were those crazy Jews up to now?

  “No, I was in error; put it back the way it was,” Ira said.

  Paul and I crowded together at the front door. We ran out again to Ben.

  “Put it back the way it was.”

  “What?” Ben shouted.

  “Put it back the way it was.”

  “That’s it,” Ben said. “It’s good enough; I’m coming down.”

  At this point, the aerial was probably in close to the position where the process had started.

  The pageantry of getting Ben up on the roof was enough to assuage my father and purge the malevolent energies from our house. “You were right, Evvie,” my father said. “The reception looks very sharp now, clear as a bell.”

  I would have to wait for reruns to find out what Opie had learned.

  When my father could scarcely cope with a television repair, it’s a testament to either my mother’s optimism or her denial that she undertook a full-blown remodel and addition to our house. In August, Paul would be bar mitzvahed, and my mother’s remaining Detroit family—two sisters, brother-in-law, and nephews—would journey out for the first time in years. She did not want them to find her eight-year-old daughter still sleeping in the bedroom with her and her husband, The Business taking up a room of its own smack in the middle of the house, where a den ought to be, the paint peeling off the kitchen walls, the deep green carpet vomit-stained.

  The remodel would prove that her family had been wrong about my father. She would make our much more modest house look more like her sisters’ (a Colonial on a quarter acre of land). That house had achieved mythic status in our family. My mother described it in worshipful tones, as if it were a baronial estate or a museum. She seemed in awe of its homogeneous white floors, white walls, white drapes, white silk upholstered sofas. “My sisters take a lot of pride in their home and keep it immaculate,” my mother said.

  “
Yeah, but nobody can actually live in that house, or breathe in it, or eat in it,” my father added. “When your sister Clara cooks dinner—inedible, tasteless, meat like shoe leather—she takes your plate away while the fork is still in your mouth!” What my mother’s family called order, cleanliness, routine, respectability, my father called bourgeois, anal-retentive, sexually repressed, and stultifying.

  Where our current house ended, the addition would begin: a long hallway with a master bathroom and two new bedrooms, one which would become the master, and the other the office, freeing the current office to become a family room. Between the current kitchen and the family room, a counter would be built, opening up the flow between those two rooms. As was the fashion of the day, we could sit at the counter on tall stools, conversing with my mother while she cooked. She must have hoped that our remodeled home would come with its own remodeled family, one that would assemble at the counter each morning, drink their orange juice, and scurry off to school—and to work—my father’s new office finally segregating The Business from our domestic life.

  In the backyard, a portion of the concrete patio on which the neighborhood boys roller skated, would be lost to the addition. The portion closest to the house would be dedicated to a screened-in patio for summer dinners outdoors.

  The remodel would wind up being my mother’s most ambitious and most spectacularly failed attempt to normalize our lives. It was to have opposite the intended effect. We never even got the high stools in the kitchen. The Formica-topped counter with its sparkly constellation soon dulled and became one more surface upon which items piled up and collected dust. As a teenager, Paul kept an aquarium on it stocked with angelfish and mollies that lived a little longer than the goldfish of our early childhood, but eventually they too were lost, and the aquarium sat empty on the counter.

  By the time my father died in 1981, the counter had become a place for Paul and my mother’s cats to toss and chase their catnip-infused toy rats, an arena for the cats’ pinball game, kibble and toys pinging off the walls.

  And when my mother died in 1995, you could not even see the surface of the counter underneath the cover of Paul’s randomly hoarded objects.

  My parents hired a Jewish father-son contractor team to execute the remodel. Sam was a five-foot-tall German Holocaust survivor with a heavy accent, a sharp tongue, and a curt manner. His son Herman was a maniacal, perennial adolescent with a snide nasal voice, and a laugh like a crow’s caw. Herman wore his black hair stiffly pomaded and parted rigidly on one side, a brown uniform, and heavy black work boots that made him look like a soldier. A Nazi soldier. He made a recurrent joke by holding a black comb over his lip, clicking his heels together, and pretending to be Hitler. He also liked to sneak up behind my brother Paul, push his ears out, and say, “What, me worry? He looks just like Alfred E. Neuman from Mad Magazine, doesn’t he? Just like Alfred E. Neuman—Caw!”

  For several months, Herman was there every morning when I woke up and often still around when we were ready to sit down to dinner. He had accidentally cut off parts of two of his fingers with a saw, and that crude amputation, along with his jerky, unpredictable movements and strange laugh, scared me. Vampire-like, he’d appear beside you and then hover too close to your body. I shuddered when I saw him pick up food with his mutilated hand. Suddenly I saw my father’s deformity through the eyes of the neighborhood children.

  The construction almost completed, my mother sat in the living room with a book of fabric swatches on her lap, trying to seduce my father into looking at them. “We need something practical,” my mother said, “colors that will hide dirt. Clara says that neutrals are all the rage this year.” If Eva could not have a white house like her sisters’, couldn’t her family at least live with beige?

  “I don’t see why we can’t re-cover the furniture in the same fabrics we have now. Why change what I like?” my father said.

  My father loved bright color. The turquoise walls. The bright red leather armchair. The fanciful dancing horses on the dining room wallpaper.

  “No more delicate fabrics,” my mother said. “Look at what your head has done to the sofa.” Its turquoise, black, and white tweed bore the telltale imprint of my father’s head at one end and the frayed threads produced by the heels of his shoes at the other.

  The fabric book on her lap contained beiges and tans, off-whites and near-whites, and almost-browns. Eva was enamored with newly introduced stain-resistant coatings that would deflect the insults our family put furniture through and erase at least some of the outward signs of our unruly lives.

  “Please, Ira,” she said, “A nice neutral color. It’ll be chic. You always get used to things. Please, just this.”

  “It’ll be dull.”

  “It’ll be practical. For once in our lives, can’t you be practical?”

  “You’re just trying to impress your sisters; you don’t care what I want.”

  “You always get what you want.”

  “I don’t want a touch-me-not house like your sisters’. I’ve already got a touch-me-not wife.”

  When the painting crew moved in, my father insisted we move to a swanky hotel in the city to escape the fumes. My mother would commute back and forth to supervise the work. Ensconced in a suite on a high floor with a view of the city out our window, my father felt in his element. We ordered room service for breakfast. My father and I applauded and shouted voila! as the waiters in starched white jackets removed the silver domes over our eggs and bacon. We went to movies in the daytime and lingered in the hotel’s dining room over multi-course meals. When, after lunch one afternoon, I spilled hot fudge on my dress, my father made no effort to remove the stain, only took me into a high-end clothing store at the hotel and bought me two new white blouses of the softest fabric I’d ever felt.

  The only problem came one afternoon after lunch when Ira and Paul and I had lingered in the restaurant. I had to pee. My father refused to let me go into the ladies’ room alone. Was he afraid I’d be kidnapped or just sit on a dirty toilet seat? Either event held equal peril.

  “We’ll just take her into the men’s room,” he said to Paul.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Paul said.

  I was curious to see the men’s room but I really didn’t want to pee there. The three of us barged into the cavernous room with its bank of urinals, marble walls, and roomy stalls. But it smelled strongly of urine in a way that ladies’ rooms did not smell. An attendant in a white uniform stood near the entrance of the room at a stand, shining shoes. Another attendant stood at the sink, handing out towels.

  I saw the backs of a few businessmen in suits who quickly vacated the urinals.

  My father took us into one of the stalls.

  He improvised a seat cover by draping toilet paper all over the seat. It hung down over the toilet like streamers.

  “Hold her up over the toilet, Paul,” my father said. “I don’t want her sitting on that germy seat.”

  Paul attempted to make a sling out of his arms; I placed myself gingerly in it.

  “I’m not strong enough,” Paul said as I wobbled. “I can’t hold her up alone.”

  “I can’t pee with you holding me up,” I said.

  My father went over to my other side. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and attempted to hold up one side of me while Paul held up the other. My legs trembled.

  “Don’t let your dress get in the toilet,” my father said. Their hands trembled; my legs trembled; I wobbled more. The attendant could not help but look over and quickly looked away. Paul and I started to laugh. We laughed harder. I almost fell into the toilet. My father laughed too. More highly neurotic behavior. He knew, but he could not control it.

  “I can’t pee like this,” I screamed. “Just let me pee.”

  “Okay, okay,” my father said, exiting the stall along with my brother, “but squat, don’t make contact with that seat.”

  The furniture came back covered in durable off-whites and tans. The dining room
wallpaper’s lithe horses had been replaced with a checkerboard pattern of variegated browns and beige. It had no depth of field, nowhere to lose myself. My father lamented the loss of the horses. I stared at the walls, imagining that underneath the new paper, the horses still pranced.

  In what became the children’s bathroom, the tub received a sliding glass door with an etching of fishes swimming merrily. On the door of my parents’ new stall shower was an image of a topless mermaid. That was one of the gifts to my father, along with a shower head at pelvic height. My father made no end of bawdy jokes about that appliance. “A head for my other head,” he said.

  When my mother told me I would get my own bedroom, and I could choose its color, I told her pink. I visualized the hot pink of the pansies in our side yard. The hot pink my father’s preferred sexy women wore on their toenails. When we returned from the hotel, the whole house smelled of paint, and my bedroom had been turned a sickly faint pastel. Washed out, barely pink at all. My mother waited to hear my cries of delight.

  “This is a very feminine color,” my mother said, “and you can get a bedspread to match.”

  I was instantly enraged.

  “This isn’t PINK,” I said and began to sob. Once again, my mother had hurt me by being blind to the passionate, intense per son I was. “This isn’t what you promised me,” I cried, and began to ruminate on every exchange in which my mother had misunderstood me.

  There was the time my mother had read in a magazine about ways to handle a “difficult child.” She’d presented me with a mood chart. It had drawings of a smiling face, frowning face, frightened face, angry face.

  “Point to the face that tells me how you’re feeling,” she said. I pouted.

  “Is it the angry face?” she said.

  I screamed. I wanted to rip that chart from her hands. How could I begin to describe the mismatch between what I felt and the simple-minded expressions on the chart? My mother should not need a chart, I thought. My father did not need a chart. The chart only accentuated the chasm I perceived between my interior life and what I could perceive of hers.