He sat by the front door, delighting in each girl’s arrival, as we performed the ritualistic admiring of the party dresses. We considered each confection in all of its details, its ruffles and embroidery, rows of tiny pearl buttons and cap sleeves. Mine was a fine specimen, in a shimmering color somewhere between aqua and turquoise, with puffy sleeves, and many rings of starched white petticoats. We set up impromptu competitions, standing on our tip toes and twirling side by side to see whose dress had the most lift, half-believing that if we twirled spectacularly enough, we just might ascend. Cheerleader and judge, Ira spurred us on, imitated our movements with a finger in the air, smiled and fawned, tracing each girl’s trajectory with his eyes.
“Whee,” he said, and then, “More, more, don’t stop. Keep going,” until we grew dizzy and collapsed on the sofa. As my father leaned forward from across the room in the armchair, and strained his ears to be in on our jokes, my mother shot him concerned looks as if they could erect the electrically charged fence that might keep a dog prone to erratic behavior at bay.
We began the games with Pin the Tail on the Donkey. After my mother put her hands on our shoulders and spun us, we staggered, hands out like Frankenstein’s monster, doubling over in laughter. The first of us attempted to pin the tail on the donkey’s backside, but when one of our efforts landed instead on the underside of his belly and my father laughed his odd one-syllable “Har” laugh, approving of our subversion, we failed on purpose. We put the tail over his eye, at the tip of his ear. Soon, we could no longer even remember the purpose of a tail.
The party was going well. If it had ended there I could have called it a success; I would have been home free. But just as we were about to sit down at the dining room table to have cake and ice cream, my father placed his mouth close to my ear and said, “You know, I could put on my little boy suit and provide some entertainment while your guests enjoy their refreshments.” Patterned after Little Lord Fauntleroy, my father’s little boy suit matched the apparel worn by the youth in the painting Blue Boy. It consisted of a blue velvet jacket and shorts with a cream-colored, ruffled shirt, white ankle socks, and black Mary Janes decorated with grosgrain ribbon fleurettes.
I contemplated Ira’s proposal. I remembered what had happened when my father had worn his little boy suit to a prior costume event at the Jewish Center. He’d buried his head in the chest of one of the members, rubbed his face back and forth and proclaimed, “Little boys love buzoomies!” She let him get away with it, his performance convincing her that he was a harmless boy. Ira had not had the chance to dress up and perform for a crowd since our falling out with the Jewish Center. He had shown such remarkable self-control during the party that I felt he deserved a reward.
Though by the time I was nine, my father’s roar of a laugh in a movie theater or his farting in a store, or singing the Internationale under his breath at the back of an auditorium during a community assembly, could embarrass me, I also took pride in just how amusing and unique he was. My classmates’ stiff fathers resembled Hugh Beaumont’s self-righteous pontificating patriarch of Leave It to Beaver, whom my father called a “fascist prick.”
I’d been having so much fun with these girls; wouldn’t they be able to appreciate my daddy the way I did? Red Skelton and Milton Berle dressed up like little boys on television, and everyone laughed. I had my own Jackie Gleason at home; why shouldn’t I show him off?
“I won’t do it if you don’t want me to,” my father said.
“Put it on, Daddy,” I said. “I want you to; it’ll be funny. Please, Daddy, do it.”
So in the midst of the singing of Happy Birthday, as we were just about to eat cake and ice cream, my father made his entrance, all 220 pounds of him in his blue velvet little boy suit. The exertion of changing clothes rapidly had caused sweat to pour down his face. His wig of blonde banana curls looked dusty and matted. When the girls caught sight of him, most of them laughed. This was going to go well; my daddy was going to be a big hit.
Spurred on by their laughter, my father began to inhabit his character more fully. He sucked on a finger and began to speak baby talk.
“I’m a widdle boy,” he said. “A very spoiled widdle wich boy. Do you widdle girls wike to play with a widdle wich boy like me?”
As my father fluttered his long dark eyelashes, and pouted out his fat lower lip, he seemed as much little girl as boy. Having an audience energized him, and he grew more petulant, parading around the table. My classmates howled.
Then he pulled one of Darla’s curls. Pulled it hard enough to hurt. She recoiled, and a few of the girls looked startled, either by the act itself or by seeing his deformed hand up close. They stared at their plates or adjusted the napkins in their laps.
“I want cake!” my father said, growing into his character. “Cake! Cake! Cake!” He took his fork in his fisted hand and struck the table. “Give me some cake right now!” he growled at my mother, a child fueled by an adult’s manic energy.
“Ira,” she said, “remember where you are and who you are with.”
Alarm appeared on the faces of some of the girls. Okay, Daddy, time to sit down now, I thought. My classmates didn’t have a category to put this in; I suddenly realized the difference between Milton Berle or Jerry Lewis safely encased in the TV, and someone’s daddy touching them in a dining room.
Jenna was not intimidated. “You’re a very naughty boy, aren’t you?” she said. “Maybe you just need a good spanking.” She held up her hand.
“Nobody’s gonna give me a spanking!” Ira said. Taunting her, he took the pink rose from off my cake, my rose, and stuck it on the middle of his nose.
“Ira,” my mother said again, and shot him her sharpest look of reprimand. It only heightened his rebellion. And then I saw fear in the eyes of some of the girls, who began to cross their arms and pull their bodies away, casting critical glances at my father, and then at me, and then at one another that excluded me. My father had his fat tongue extended and was trying to lick the flower off his own nose, when I tried to catch his eyes. Daddy, it’s time to put back on your father costume, I tried to communicate. This isn’t working out. But when his eyes met mine, no one but a willful, angry, self-centered child stared back. The look said that the show was no longer for me, if it ever had been. I’d had my fun, and now it was time for him to have his.
For his slapstick finale, my father picked up his plate of cake, buried his face in it, and surfaced with white frosting on his nose and his lips and chocolate cake covering his face. With his Shirley Temple wig askew, he seemed a fat and depraved child of the prior century.
I wasn’t invited to any more parties that year, or the next. In fact, I don’t remember ever being invited to another party during elementary school. Nor in junior high. And only one during my two years of high school in La Crescenta. I am still unsure how much my father’s display figured in my exclusion.
CHAPTER NINE
Perfectly Empty
The enemas began as so many events in our household did, with my father’s body. If mechanical objects were prone to breakage, and rendered untrustworthy ever afterward for having revealed their true propensity for ruin, how much more so the body. The body—an indecipherable trickster whose recovery from even the slightest injury could never be assumed.
So Ira was not surprised when he did not recover from what should have been a temporary gastrointestinal affliction, and found himself with what he described as a “paralyzed gut.” For most of my childhood, my father had relieved himself with ease, often with the bathroom door open so he could converse about the morning newspaper’s account of the state of the world. But now he struggled to produce and could not. This was no ordinary case of constipation, Ira said. His gut was dead. Dead. Part of your body could be dead even while you were still living, death beginning its stealthy invasion, organ by organ, piece by piece.
Ira spun theories of causation. Like any good scientist, he could hold competing hypotheses in his mind. Unlike a sc
ientist, Ira felt no need to resolve the contradictions. He traced his illness to a foray into Mexico with my cousin Stewart, who had come to visit. Stewart found his uncle Ira a fearless flaunter of convention, master orchestrator of fun—fun being something his immediate family did not go out of their way to have. To live up to this reputation, Ira—though terrified of the food, the water, the air, the people (and the germs they carried)—took Stewart over the border to Tijuana, where they attended a bullfight, drank bottled Coke, and used a public restroom.
A week later, Ira lay on the couch, holding his abdomen, beset by diarrhea, fevered and writhing and regretting. I sat at his feet, vigilant.
“It must have been the Coke,” he said. “They must have made it with water right out of the tap. Swimming with bacteria.” One finger stroked his eyebrow as he mentally revisited each stop on their tour. “The ticket taker at the bullfight had probably wiped his ass with his hand. He had a look on his face like a man who had just wiped his ass with his hand.” I wondered: how exactly did a man who had just wiped his ass with his hand look?
The doctor prescribed a bowel relaxant to stop the diarrhea. It abated, but normal bowel function did not resume. Ira collected his stool in a foil pie pan, and the doctors cultured it. They found no parasites. They X-rayed his intestinal tract after he drank a tall glass of chalky gray barium; they gave him barium enemas to visualize the other end; they stuck a scope inside his colon. They found no explanation for his problem but could not cure it either. He began to rely on daily enemas administered by my mother to move his bowels.
His alternate theory of causation revolved around a Sunday afternoon when Uncle Nathan—my father’s brother—and his family had come to visit. I was excited to see my first cousin Joey. We spoke nearly every day on the phone, but that wasn’t the same as being together. When he came over, we’d retreat to my room and only emerge for dinner. As we waited for their arrival, Ira lay on the living room couch catching a brief anticipatory nap. Meanwhile, my mother asked Paul to dust the furniture. Eager to please her, he knelt by the cocktail table in front of the sofa, armed with a can of Pledge. As soon as the fumes entered my father’s olfactory awareness, he rose up coughing and spewing phlegm. Once he caught his breath, shouting ensued.
“You sprayed that down my throat. Are you trying to kill me?”
“I didn’t spray it down your throat. I sprayed it on the table.”
“You know my system can’t tolerate sprays like that.”
“It was a mile away from you. Mom told me to do it. Mom!” Paul screamed. “Tell him I was just doing what you asked.”
“I did ask him to dust, Ira. I’m sure the spray was nowhere near you.”
I stood on the sidelines, heart pounding, watching.
“He sprayed it deliberately into my throat. I can taste it. You think it’s okay for a son to torture his father. You encourage his sabotage.”
My father began to hack again in an attempt to bring up the Pledge. My mother tried to move him out of the room.
“Let’s go wash out your mouth,” she said.
“What’s wrong with you, Paul,” I said. “Why did you try to hurt my daddy.” My parents were halfway out of the room when Paul started to shout.
“Your daddy, your daddy. You can have him. He’s probably not even my real father. Do you hear me, Ira? Uncle Nathan is probably my father. Let’s ask him when he gets here. Where do you think I got my blue eyes, Ira? And my light-colored hair? Do I look like your son, Ira? Isn’t that the truth, Eva? Huh? Huh? Tell him you shtupped Nathan. Tell him Uncle Nathan is a real man with real hands, and a real dick to go with them.”
“Paul, you know that’s ridiculous,” my mother said. “Why do you want to bait your father this way?” Paul ignored her.
“Have you seen how she looks at him, Ira? She likes him better than you, just like your own mother does.”
“Paul, stop. Just stop,” my mother said.
Ira threw my mother off him and lunged for Paul. “You goddamned fairy, mother-loving bastard. Why don’t you go home with Nathan and see if he treats you any better? Wait’ll he takes his belt to you. Somebody should have taken their belt to you a long time ago. Wait’ll he takes out his gun.”
Paul put his elbow up in defense, and then retreated again behind my mother.
“Stop!” she shouted at the top of her lungs and began to sob. Everyone froze. I felt dizzy and nauseous.
“A little Pledge isn’t going to hurt you, Ira. Let’s just go wash out your mouth,” she said.
“You’re refusing to see that your son did this on purpose to make me sick.”
“Maybe I should have,” Paul said.
“You better sleep with one eye open,” Ira said.
The doorbell rang.
“You better too,” Paul said.
Nathan and his family’s arrival curtailed the fight. I grabbed Joey, and we made it to my room and slammed the door.
When Ira wasn’t blaming the ticket taker in Mexico, or Stewart for seducing him into going, or himself for giving in to impulse, or his own thirst for making him drink the Coke, he would be blaming Paul and saying that the Pledge in his system led to the freezing of his bowel.
Constipation was not an entirely foreign visitor to our doorstep. It had plagued my grandmother Rebecca, Ira’s mother, all her life. Open a cupboard in her house, and boxes of prunes, bottles of milk of magnesia, and giant canisters of Metamucil would tumble out. And I suffered too, intermittently, perhaps having inherited my grandmother’s problem, and also having been born with an abnormally small, tight rectum that no amount of manual stretching from our pediatrician had opened.
Though no one ever determined that my father’s illness had resulted from a contagious agent, I caught what he had. Or so he asserted. And so I believed. Within weeks of his return from Mexico, I developed a similar illness with a spiking fever, searing diarrhea, and abdominal cramps so bad they made me crawl across the floor, unable to stand up. The diarrhea and fever persisted for more than a week, and then constipation arrived in their place. Intractable constipation, as if nothing inside would ever move again. I heard my father’s words: frozen, paralyzed, dead. Death had made its way into my body.
How much of the problem was physical and how much psychological? After years of consulting experts, two rectal surgeries, and continued struggle with the problem, I’ll never know the answer to that question, or even if that distinction has any meaning. Perhaps I had channeled into one organ all my father’s free-floating anxiety and negative energy devoted to the body. All my own conflict over holding on like my mother, or letting go like my father. Only, now, the irony was that my father was the one who could not let go. Perhaps all his exhibitionistic displays of gorging and performing simply covered up a deeper rooted refusal to let go.
“Let your mother give you an enema,” my father said.
“It’s just to get you started,” Eva said.
And so a ritual began: in the dark of night, while other parents in our neighborhood had sex, while our neighbor Mrs. Finch prayed, and other children dreamed in the sanctity of their twin beds, my mother and father and I did this. There was something vaguely vampirish about our nocturnal activities, something incestuous about fluid flowing from the conduit of my mother, first up my father’s ass, and then up my own.
Every night, after my brothers went to bed, my mother gave my father and me each an enema. We had matching enema kits. White enamel cans, heavy red rubber tubing, pale yellow rectal tips. A giant shared jar of Vaseline.
Every night, in my too-pale pink bedroom, I lay on my side, on a towel, on my bed, my nightgown pulled up, my lower body naked, as my mother stood beside me, holding the can aloft. I looked away from the can, the tube, my mother’s face, and stared up at the dark outlines of the moths that had gotten trapped inside my overhead light fixture. I pretended that what was happening wasn’t. I pretended that what was happening to me had nothing to do with my father. Otherwise, it would feel in
tolerably incestuous.
My mother wore a long sheer nightgown and hoisted the heavy can up over her head. She shifted its weight from one arm to the other, and complained about how hard it was to hold it up, how late the hour, how tired she was. I felt the warm water rush in, meet an impediment, surge past it.
The longer the enemas went on, the more shameful they became, the more rules I developed about the surrounding ritual. Ira had to get his first. My brothers had to be asleep or feign sleep so they would not witness the act, could not hear the mortifying sound of all that water rushing out of me. I had to have a movie magazine to read in the bathroom. The first year I read about Liz Taylor stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, and Rock Hudson, the handsome bachelor who would not settle down with any one woman, and Suzanne Pleshette, the rising star!
My enema might begin at 11:00 p.m. or not until 1:00 a.m. if I was too anxious or upset or if Ira insisted on watching The Tonight Show first. Sometimes my mother would go to sleep, and I would fall asleep and then wake up panicked, realizing I hadn’t had an enema and would have to go to school the next day feeling plugged. I’d wake her, and she would refuse to get up and tell me to wait till the next day, and I would scream and cry and lock myself in her bathroom, her only sanctum, and pound on its door, and take her eyebrow pencil and draw ugly black streaks on her mirror. After my enema, filled with shame, I would clean her mirror until it shined.
Eleven p.m. on what should have been a school night for a fifth grader. I had stopped going to school, too exhausted and ashamed and devastated about what was happening to face my classmates. Ashamed that my body failed to perform even this most basic function, ashamed to be tied to my mother when other girls were achieving independence.
Don't Go Crazy Without Me Page 11
