“This isn’t PINK,” I declared again. “You lied to me. You knew I wanted HOT pink. You did this on purpose to hurt me.”
“I’m not even going to try to talk to you when you’re unreasonable,” my mother said. “I’ve worked so hard to make our house nice for us, and you reject it.” She started to cry.
I threw myself down on the bed and sobbed, and my mother slammed the bedroom door. My father came in and sat down on the bed next to me and stroked my hair. “Your mother can’t grasp us,” he said. “She doesn’t feel the deep things we feel.”
“Why wouldn’t she just give me the color I asked for?”
“She’s jealous of our bond,” he said. “She’s jealous of when I buy you pretty things. She’s jealous of how pretty you are, how sensuous you are.”
“What are you telling her?” my mother stormed back into the room. “You’re pitting my own daughter against me. Most little girls would be thrilled to have a room this color. If I’d gotten a room all to myself as a child, I would have been thrilled. You’ve turned her into a selfish, spoiled brat.”
My mother wept. “Do you like being a wedge between me and your father? Does it make you happy? All I tried to do was make everything better for all of us, and this is the thanks I get.”
“Daddy, why do you let her talk to me like that?” I said.
He exploded. “Why did we have to get this goddamned remodel in the first place? To impress your sisters? How much did you spend to turn my fucking house beige?”
Screaming and crying. All of us screaming and crying.
Paul came into the room. “Stop yelling at my mother,” he said. My father pushed Paul out into the hallway. “Don’t start with me. She was my wife before she was ever your mother. Faggot. Fairy boy.”
“Stop it,” she said. “This is always what happens. Everyone has to get into it!” She grabbed Paul and pushed him back into his bedroom and slammed the door.
“I’m not staying in here,” Paul yelled from behind the door. “I’m going to tell him the truth! Somebody needs to tell the maniac the truth.”
“It’s useless to try to make anything nice around here. You don’t want anything to be nice or calm or normal,” my mother yelled. “You don’t want to live like everyone else. Just stop carrying on, Ira,” she shrieked. She held her chest and collapsed on the bed weeping.
Paul was still shouting from behind his bedroom door, and my father wasn’t through. He broke through the barrier my mother had erected with her arms and went after Paul. I could hear him hitting Paul, and Paul hitting back. My mother ran to Paul. Screaming and yelling. All of us. I shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears not to see it or hear it. My mother got my father off Paul. She slammed Paul’s bedroom door.
“Get out of here, Ira,” she said. My father retreated.
My mother came back into my room, grabbed me by the arm and threw me down on my bed. “Do you see what trouble you’ve started,” she screamed. “Over pink? You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re a bad, bad girl.” She slapped me across the face, then on the back, the sides of my ribs, anywhere she could reach. I tried to anticipate her hands and protect myself, but she moved my hands away and kept hitting. I cowered, rolled into a fetal position, cried and screamed. She sat on the edge of my bed and broke down into sobs again. “Why must you be so impossible?” she said. Helpless, defeated sobs.
I was torn between anger at her, shame at what I’d done, and the growing feeling that I needed to take care of her. Between us, what if I were really the stronger one?
Instead of being on the quiet backyard side of the house, the remodel moved my parents’ bedroom to the side of the house adjacent to Briggs Avenue which, over the years, had become a busy thoroughfare. You could hear the whoosh of the cars rushing by even at one or two in the morning.
“You put my head right in the car exhaust,” Ira berated Eva. He could find no peace with the constant noise of the cars whizzing by. That, he explained, was the reason he had to increase his dosage of barbiturates.
I was also restless at night, alone in the bedroom I was used to sharing with my parents. Midnight, a few months after the completion of the remodel, I woke up, heart in my throat, chest congested, generally terrified. The house felt stuffy. Everything felt off. Dissonant music played in my head. The only possible salvation resided with my parents, who had abandoned me in an impotently pink bedroom across the hall from Ben and Paul’s room, which Paul had recently decided was haunted. “It’s those Indians whose burial ground this house must have been built on,” he said. “They’re after us.”
To get to the safe harbor of my parents’ bedroom, I would have to race from my room through a dark, stuffy hallway, then into the newly christened family room, and into another dark hallway, this second one even scarier because it was always cold, Sam and Her man having convinced my parents that the addition did not need central heating. In the hallway was the door to the new screened-in patio with a high window. I imagined burglars and marauders hiding in the patio. They crouched in wait for me and would pop up in the window as I ran past. I could just about see them. I shut my eyes, held my breath, and raced through the hallway. What if the burglars broke in and grabbed me before I could reach safety? The saddest part was imagining that I might just disappear without my parents even knowing that I had been on my way to them.
Having endured this treacherous journey, I wished that my mother would pull down the covers and welcome me into her bed. When I’d made it just inside the doorway of my parents’ room, I was trembling from the cold of the hallway. I paused for a minute, my stomach quivering, to push my bottom up against the wall heater. This was the only heating element for the entire room and I had to gauge the distance right or I would singe my flannel pajamas. Once before I’d been standing before the heater when my mother called out, “Is something in here burning?” and I’d realized that it was me.
“Are you asleep?” I whispered.
My father answered in much louder than a whisper, “What’s wrong?” He was wide awake, his sleeping pills not kicking in till two or three in the morning.
“I don’t know,” I whimpered. “Something. I feel something bad. In my body. I’m scared.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” my mother’s voice, immediately stern, rose from her prone mass. “Go back to your own bed.” She covered her head with the blankets.
“Are you ill?” my father said.
“I don’t know . . . maybe,” I said. “Something feels . . . off.”
“For God’s sake, she just needs to learn to stay in her own bed,” my mother said. “Most children learn this at age three. She’s trying to come between us again.”
Between them, of course, was exactly where I yearned to be, in that spot in the bed’s dead center, the place where I could get a whiff of my mother’s sweet, talcumy flesh, and draw in the heat from my father’s pungent, comically hairy body, my toes not quite touching either of their feet, which descended so much lower in the bed than my own. In the middle of the night, that place—despite the fact that my wanting to be there created so much friction between them, despite the fact that my mother wished me ejected—that place still represented the safest spot in our household.
“Daddy,” I whined more dejectedly. “Don’t make me go back in there. I feel . . . nauseous.”
“She’s terrified, Ev, can’t you see that she’s terrified? And she looks pale.”
“She’s manipulating you,” my mother said. “Of course, she’s pale; it’s the middle of the night.” My mother always imputed ulterior motives to the intense emotions I manifested. They seemed so unnatural to her, so inconceivable that they could only constitute some form of show. And the more self-conscious she made me of them, the more of a performance they seemed, even to me.
“Why do you say that to my daddy?” I said. If she was going to try to turn my best ally against me, I was going to fight back. My mother pulled the blankets in tighter around her, locking her
self off.
“I’m going back to sleep,” she said. “I’m exhausted from taking care of all of you.” She turned as far away on the bed as she could get and pulled the pillow over her head. All I wanted was the security and warmth of my parents’ big ship-like masses, the solidity of who they seemed to be in the dark.
When my father patted the spot beside him in the bed, I leapt.
“We’ve both got those middle-of-the-night heebie-jeebies,” he said. He cleared his throat, instantly back on stage, declaiming. “Florid imaginations can get people like us in trouble in the dark,” he said.
“I feel like what’s inside my head is too big for my body,” I said. “Like it’s going to explode.”
“Let’s distract ourselves. Tell me about what you’re studying in school.”
I began to talk about our social studies unit on California history. The teacher had just shown us an educational film that featured a smiling Mexican woman in an embroidered white shirt making tortillas on a rock. That year in La Crescenta, we watched movies in class of a lot of colonized women and slaves preparing food, seemingly content with their fates. As I described the Mexican woman’s rhythmic passing of the dough from hand to hand, I calmed down. She felt like a surrogate mother.
My father and I lay in bed quietly for a few minutes. He reached over to his nightstand and took another sleeping pill.
“You know when you get scared like that, it’s your own mind that’s making you afraid. I’m the same way. For example, look over there.” He pointed to a pile of his hats and scarves on the open closet shelf. The venetian blinds that my mother had put up instead of drapes—they were more modern and attracted less dust, she said—were not completely closed, and the light they let in cast patterns over the folds of fabric that shifted every time a car roared up the hill. “Whenever I look into the closet in the dark like this,” my father continued, “I see a skull. Can you see it?”
“Not really,” I said, not wanting to.
“Look,” he said. “There are the eye sockets, the hollow where the nose used to be, and the grinning teeth . . . can you make it out? A memento mori,” he said. “A reminder of our own mortality. See it?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“Now, I know there’s no skull; it’s my own preoccupation with death that puts a skull there.” He was both inducing me to see something terrifying that I never would have seen without him, and instructing me not to be scared by it. Seeing the skull was scary, but seeing it with my father, a kindred frightened soul in the night, warmed by his body heat and nursed by the dulcet tones of his voice was . . . comforting?
I sensed even then that another father wouldn’t be saying this, that this was not a conventionally reassuring thing to say to a child, but I was no ordinary terrified child, and he was no ordinary father. Who wanted to be ordinary? We were superior, highly intelligent, and sensitive beings.
“Now go to sleep,” he said. He’d begun to slur his words. I jarred him awake again. “I’m still scared,” I said, not yet willing to give it up. “Stay up with me.”
“Just lie down and shut your eyes,” he said. “I’m right here.” I nestled up close, my flannel pajamas touching his flannel nightshirt. My breathing slowed. Before long I heard my father’s resonant snoring, my mother’s more widely spaced deep breathing punctuated by an occasional sigh.
When the sun started to rise, I said to no one, “I’m going back to my own bed now,” crawled out from under the blankets, and got out at the foot of the bed. The skull had become a stack of my father’s beautiful East Coast-weight woolens, the burglars had absented the hallway, and the house had begun to warm up.
In August, my mother’s family came out on the train for Paul’s bar mitzvah. We met them at Union Station. On the way home Uncle Roger gave Ben his first cigar. Ben stuck his head out the window to keep the smoke away from my father and sucked it down like a man. As soon as we got home, he ran for the bathroom and threw up.
My mothers’ sisters inspected the paint job in the living room and admired the new wallpaper in the dining room. They ran their hands over the smooth stain-resistant upholstery. Aunt Clara volunteered to cook dinner one night, one of her specialties, Swiss steak. She stood over the stove for hours. The meat was tenderized cube steak in a wan brown sauce that matched the beige wallpaper.
“What did I tell you?” my father said, when we met in the kitch en mid-meal. “It’s like shoe leather. Not even suitable for dogs. Thank God your mother is the one in that family who learned how to cook.”
We did not have to clean our plates. As my father predicted, Clara whisked them away mid-chew. Ira, Paul, Ben, and I exchanged looks and suppressed our laughter.
“Very tasty,” my mother said.
Though my mothers’ sisters applauded the neutral tones of our remodel, they found other aspects of our lives to condemn. They registered their disapproval of my nail-biting and screaming, my father’s excessive weight and continuous eating, and Paul’s generally nervous demeanor. They heard the rumble of chaos underneath all of Eva’s efforts to tame it.
The Friday afternoon before the bar mitzvah, my mother, her sisters, and I went to the local beauty parlor. My mother fell into lockstep, getting her hair set in small rollers, just like her sisters. The three occupied a wall of dryers, my mother in the middle, obedient, once more the baby. Afterward, her sisters nudged her into a bouffant hairdo sprayed only slightly less stiff than their own.
At the ceremony, Paul chanted his haftarah with deep feeling. “That boy should become a cantor,” more than one of the congregants said. He made a speech thanking his teachers and family. My father stood on the bimah next to him, beaming. But the service was led by a young, brash student rabbi. In the prior months, the congregation had voted to affiliate with the Reform movement which had assigned this fledgling rabbi to our outpost. They would no longer need my father to conduct services.
“He’s way too cocky,” my father said of the new rabbi.
In Sunday school, Paul and I had been taught a catchy new anthem that didn’t sound like any Jewish song we’d ever sung. It sounded more like the Christian hymns our classmates in La Cres-centa sang: expansive, optimistic, written in a major, rather than the soulful minor key of traditional Jewish music. God is in his holy temple / earthly thoughts be silent now / while in reverence we assemble / and before his presence bow. My father heard us singing it one afternoon.
“Jews don’t bow down, except on Yom Kippur,” my father said when he heard us, “and they don’t assemble in reverence. Reverence is a goyishe word. The next thing that putz is going to do is bring in a church organ.”
Paul and I started the song again.
“Maybe he thinks we should just assimilate too. Make the same mistake the Reform Jews in Germany made. If we just blend in, everything will be fine. Bullshit. We should have learned our lesson from the millions who converted and probably went to the ovens singing church music.”
At Rosh Hashanah the cocky young rabbi chastised the men in the congregation for wearing tallises and yarmulkes. “Throw off those trappings of superstition,” he said. “It’s time for Judaism to come into the modern age.” When he heard a few elderly men muttering in Hebrew at the back of the congregation, he scolded, “Our services are going to be mostly in English from now on, not in some antiquated language from another world.”
My father jumped up and shouted, “You’ve spit on my grandfather’s grave. You’ve spit on the graves of all our grandfathers.” We followed my father out of the sanctuary and never went back. Ira had lost his stage.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Party Crasher
For my tenth birthday, I invited a group of my friends from school to our home for the first time. The remodel fresh, the magazines, newspapers, and other detritus of our family’s life had not yet reaccumulated to pathologic levels. The newly recovered furniture had repelled any signs of our use.
My father stashed the Jewish ceremonial objects—Shab
bos candlesticks with clots of wax built up around their bases, his grandfather’s engraved kiddush cup, and our three Chanukah menorahs—out of sight. In response to my mother’s pleading, my brother Ben stacked and hid his Playboy magazines in the bathroom cupboard, along with my father’s Over Sexteen: Prudes Won’t Think It Funny! cartoon anthologies.
When I woke up the morning of my party and cast my eyes upon the living room outfitted in purple and pink streamers, balloons that Paul had rubbed on his pant legs to create the static electricity that kept them on the walls, I felt as if the markers of my difference from the other children in La Crescenta had at least temporarily been banished.
Maybe today I could pass.
The girls I’d invited were not the alphas, not the star athletes or standout students. Each had some quirk that kept her on the outskirts of the rigidly stratified school society. Robin was overweight; Jenna had wild red hair and stood too close to others while speaking in an outdoor voice; Susan suffered from always flushed cheeks and over-smiling. Darla’s rambling, punch-line-free jokes left her classmates looking puzzled at their conclusion. And Wendy didn’t have a lot of friends because she had moved to La Crescenta recently from another community. Her father was an itinerant pastor, and her family lived in a rented house.
Birthday parties in La Crescenta had to adhere to certain conventions, and my mother made every effort to comply. Of course there was one inescapable deviation—my father’s fervid presence in the room. An ordinary father’s role in these proceedings was circumscribed: he greeted the children at the party’s onset and then reappeared at the end to eat a modest piece of cake while standing inconspicuously in a corner. He might be cajoled into taking photos, but whatever he did would be with an air of cool and sober indifference.
Ira was incapable of affecting any such air. He’d been anticipating the party since early that morning, his black hair brushed and combed and pomaded back. He was not only dressed—meaning, as it did in the nomenclature of my family, that he had his pants on—he was fully dressed, wearing a white dress shirt, black dress pants with suspenders, a tie, and his shoes. I’d helped him put on my favorite pair of his cuff links—two carved silver faces. On the right cuff, the face bore upturned eyes and a smiling mouth to represent Comedy, and on the left, the downturned eyes and frowning mouth of Tragedy.
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