I inched as far away from him as I could on the sofa and made one last attempt to rescue him with reason so that I could restore him to his rightful place as my rescuer.
“How could they have left something in your penis?” I said. “Wouldn’t you be bleeding?”
At the least I was hoping he might recognize that he should not be burdening his fifteen-year-old daughter with this particular story. The next thing, he would be asking me to look at his afflicted member with a magnifying glass. I’d seen it in too many states already, as he lay around with his dirty nightgown riding up, his big floppy balls ruddy and lifeless as he spread his legs obliviously before me.
“The body forms a cyst around a foreign body after a while, and the bleeding stops. I know what they did, and I know why they did it. If you’re a loyal daughter, you’ll believe me.”
I had pretty much pushed aside my obsession with my dead grandmother, when something else happened that got me obsessing about dead people again. On the first day of tenth grade, I got a textbook that had belonged the year before to a girl who had died in an auto accident. I hadn’t known her but had seen her often in the hallways. A girl I had stared at as I stared at everyone who seemed to have a social life, a boyfriend, who seemed to belong to the school society of which I felt an outcast. Anyone who seemed to be growing up, since growing up felt unnavigable to me.
The summer before tenth grade, while my father spent his days conjuring images of metal in his penis, I was over at Sally’s, Wendy’s neighbor’s house. Wendy was on vacation with her family, and it was an unbearably hot day. We’d closed the door to Sally’s bedroom for some privacy, and the air felt stultifying. In the darkened living room, her mother, an artist, was painting religious pictures. She kept the living room dark and only illuminated the canvases. Against dark backgrounds, Jesus’s face glowed with an otherworldly light.
My friend lay on her stomach on her bed, looking at our junior high yearbook. She’d come upon the dead girl’s photo and had begun to talk about her. She pored over it, as if to detect any signs that broadcast the girl’s untimely doom. She wanted me to look too.
“Oh, look at her, she was so cute. Isn’t it sad? It’s so sad,” she said. “I can’t believe a girl our age, in our school, died.”
After all that staring at the girl when she’d been alive, now I refused to look. I’d looked at my grandmother in her coffin, and for years I hadn’t been able to get that image out of my mind; I didn’t need another recurring loop. If I looked at her, I knew I would identify with her, think about what it must have felt like to have been in the car during the accident. I would put myself too much into her. I had to protect myself from my own suggestibility.
“It’s kind of spooky, isn’t it?” Sally said.
Did I just fear the power of my own imagination or was I afraid something supernatural would transpire? I know I felt guilty for having envied her while she’d been alive, and I still wondered if death might be contagious. I just wanted the conversation to stop. There was so much death and disease at home; this visit with a friend was supposed to be an escape. In my head I kept hearing a song they’d played on the radio a couple of summers before called “Strange Things,” an awful, maudlin song about Laurie, a dead girl who came back for one last school dance on the anniversary of her birthday. A boy falls in love with her and lends her his sweater, which he finds later lying on her grave. I couldn’t get the song out of my mind.
“It’s too sad,” I said. “I can’t bear to look.” I tried to change the subject, to get back to gossiping about the boys we had crushes on, and the new Beatles album, and going into Montrose to try on bathing suits, and every possible refuge of the normal—to stop talking about even the possibility of girls our age dying.
I forgot about that afternoon until the first day of tenth grade, when I got the textbook. It had the dead girl’s name on the sticker in the front of it, written in her own hand. Written when she had no idea that she would soon be dead, that her textbooks that year would be her last. When I saw her name, a chill went through me, and I thought about that day with Sally, and how I had refused to look at her picture. I knew now that the dead girl was pissed at me and out to seek revenge.
I started to hyperventilate. My heart hammered. The room went out of whack. I felt like I was going to throw up. The book nearly leapt out of my hands. I thought about just abandoning it on my desk, or on some other desk, of asking the teacher for another, about trying to refuse what I regarded now as my fate, but I felt too timid to take any action. If the dead girl had given me her book to get back at me for refusing to look at her picture, wouldn’t giving it back anger her even more? What if she were trying to send me some kind of message? Get me to do something? She might be operating in cahoots with my grandmother and the other dead people. I needed to keep the book, or something worse would happen to me. Yet I couldn’t bear the thought of keeping the book either, and having to look in it every day of the next school year.
“Put your names in the front of your books right now, so you won’t lose them,” the teacher instructed. “Take them home tonight and put covers on them. If you don’t have them covered by tomorrow, you’ll get a demerit.” It was too late to trade the book in. I could not bear to write my name under that dead girl’s. I wasn’t sure if the dead girl was behind this; maybe other evil spirits were using her image to drive me crazy.
That night I told my mother and Wendy what had happened. They agreed that I should just give the book back and ask my teacher for another one. The next day, after school, Wendy and I went back into the classroom, where my teacher was working.
“Go on, tell her,” Wendy urged.
She squeezed my shaking hand for support. The teacher looked annoyed at our interruption. “What is it, girls?”
I hung my head down and gasped out the words while I handed the book back to her: “Having Julie’s book scares me.” I had tried to speak her name with kindness and respect, so that if she’d heard me she wouldn’t get any madder. The teacher muttered something like “silly girls” under her breath and ripped out the label in the front of the book, eradicating the girl’s signature, her linguistic existence. I felt responsible for killing her all over again.
The teacher gave me another book, and I vowed to forget what had happened. But in the days that followed, the book, and the girl’s name, and the horrible details of the accident, and the book’s number, and the date I had received it, began to converge in an obsessive swirl in my brain. I would be thinking about a word and at the same time would hear someone say the exact same word. I started to notice strange coincidences between numbers and objects and events, what was in my head and what was outside.
I began to pay too much attention to numbers, way too much attention to numbers. Once I’d begun to pay this kind of attention, I could not help but notice eerie, inscrutably significant confluences of numbers. On every can and package of food—numbers that might not bode well for the food inside them. Numbers on license plates; phone numbers; ID numbers; numbers on books; and on forms and tests and price tags and receipts. The world had become a riot of numbers, indecipherable and loaded.
And then there were words. Because they mattered so much to me, because they had once seemed my salvation, in some ways, words were worse. It began with the girl’s name. I would think it, or say it in my head, and then have to unthink it, unsay it. And then I would feel guilty for my own negation, as if I had killed her all over again, so I would have to resay it, and then saying it would scare me, and I would feel compelled to unsay it. And then that meant that if I wouldn’t say her name, I had to do penance and give up some other words I really wanted to say.
Instead of feeling possessed by an unconscious torrent of words and rhythms of language when I wrote, I became self-conscious about writing and frightened of the energy in words. Writing—even saying or thinking—the wrong words could hurt me or someone I loved. I began to engage in a practice I called notting. I would write a
word and immediately feel a compulsion to negate what I’d written. In the beginning, the “bad” words were those that were negative or associated with death or disease: death, coffin, grave, cancer. Then the contagion spread to words that smacked of hubris: pride, success, happiness. And of course, any word that pertained to the girl who had died and the way she had died set off the loudest alarms.
I’d write a word, say the word, accident, and then have to cross it out, all the while saying in my mind, not accident, not accident. I’d have to find another word, a word that reversed the other word, a word that the language gods condoned. As with any compulsion, notting was self-perpetuating. The more I gave in to it, the more territory it took, spreading into more and more areas of my daily life. The more I tried to appease the gods, the more they demanded. I was rendering myself mute. Writing, always a source of pleasure and identity, became as tortured as the ongoing daily ministrations to get my bowel to move. My schoolwork became a jumble of doing and undoing, crossing out and moving forward, expressing and renouncing, self-assertion and self-negation in a continuous, exhausting war. I had always longed to be an easy channel through which words flowed, but I had become terrified of being such a channel. I longed to express myself, to be autonomous, to assert my own will, and I felt guilty for that desire, torn between fear and the wish to just let go.
Torn between feeling bound to my father and yearning to free myself from him and all his mishegoss, I had only replaced his mishegoss with parallel mishegoss all my own. And I could not confide in my father, try to sort out any of my new beliefs and fears with him; he was too lost in a sticky web of delusion that was growing thicker by the minute.
My father felt the need to tell his tale—which began with his mother’s death and proceeded through his first symptoms, then through every doctor’s visit and procedure along the way—to anyone who would listen. That anyone had grown in an ever less discriminating circle from family to friends to clients and then, in only slightly censored form, to the very insurance company representatives upon whose good will we depended.
“Your father’s not going to be happy until he’s put us on the street,” my mother said. “He’s lost all judgment. We have to keep him off the phone.”
The problem was we also had to keep him on the phone to talk to the insurance companies and clients. So we needed to censor him, monitor his activities, and pull the phone from his grasp if he deviated from the necessary scripts. Since Ira felt compelled to tell the story to someone, he required a dedicated listener who could hear it over and over again and prevent him from seeking a broader audience. I was the perfect candidate—the one who still did not know how to stop believing him. Afternoons, when I came home from school, my mother enlisted me as Ira’s babysitter.
“Bring me the phone,” he said one afternoon, “and lock the door.”
“Who are you going to call?” I said.
“Never mind,” he said, “that’s not your business.”
My father had added a new contact to his phone list, the FBI. One day Eva had found him on the phone with them, saying, “I need to report a conspiracy.” She’d yanked the phone out of his hands, screaming and sobbing. My job now included keeping him from calling the FBI.
His capacity to tell the same story over and over again proved inexhaustible. For a sick man living on soft boiled eggs, he had incredible manic energy. He would ramble on, requiring little encouragement beyond an occasional uh-huh. The drone of chronology and details, as well as his utter self-absorption, left me numb.
I was sitting in a chair near the foot of the bed one day while he declaimed from his usual prone position.
“Come here,” he said, “I need to talk to you.”
“I’m right here,” I said. “I can hear you just fine.”
“No, I need you to come closer,” he said, whispering and making a crude hooking gesture with his finger.
I walked over to the bed. “Okay, what is it?” He sat up and leaned in close, seductively.
“It’s not just the doctors anymore,” he said. He hadn’t shaved in days; his hair was sticking straight up, his pupils dilated, and something about him emitted a bitter smell. As he spoke, he sneered and twisted up his face. Rebecca was right, I thought. He is a wild animal.
“Your mother and your Uncle Nathan are in on it now—they’re plotting to do me in.”
My heart went into full throttle at the words. “What?”
“They want me out of the picture,” he said, “I’m causing too much trouble. Your mother has always been afraid of antagonizing the powers that be, and here I am standing up to the whole American medical establishment.”
“She says she’s just trying to keep the business afloat.”
“She’s a patsy for those doctors. Show her a white coat and she goes weak in the knees. She’s never been able to stand up to anyone in a position of authority, you know that.”
As usual, there was just enough truth in what my father was saying to get me to listen.
“You’ve seen how your mother is always cowed by powerful people.”
“Okay, okay, but trying to kill you?”
“Ah,” he said. “It happens all the time.”
I thought about Hamlet. Hadn’t his mother plotted with his uncle to kill his father, the king? The ghost of his father had pled with him to avenge the murder, but Hamlet had been too confused and beset by inertia to act. I didn’t want to make Hamlet’s mistake. I wavered between reassuring myself that my father was deluded and picturing exactly how my mother and uncle would carry out the plot if he were right. Either my mother and uncle were murderers, or my father had gone completely mad. To hold on to whatever good father I had left, the former possibility, however unlikely, seemed preferable.
My father’s words drew images in my head: my mother donning her rubber kitchen gloves and meting out a dose of that arsenic ant poison she kept under the sink. Hadn’t I seen the coolness with which she killed the ants when they threatened the cleanliness of her kitchen? My uncle Nathan had a wicked temper. He’d chased Joey, hitting him with his belt and threatening to take out his revolver. Paul said that Uncle Nathan had had sex with Eva and was Paul’s real father. If that were true, it might well provide a motive for murder. I could see him going to the closet, taking down his revolver, and loading it.
Now I had two missions: to babysit my father for my mother, and to spy on my mother for my father. I was a double agent. When my mother phoned Nathan from the office next door to the bedroom and spoke in a low voice so my father couldn’t hear, I stood at the closed door and strained my ears. I could only guess at my uncle’s side of the conversation. She peppered her side with Yiddish. “Il ganzen meshuggeneh [he’s totally crazy, not just a little],” she said. “He’s fer dreit in kopf [his head is a mess].” But then she reached an emotional crescendo and the English fell completely away.
Still I’d heard enough. She was at her wit’s end. He was growing ever more delusional. Strung out on drugs. Destroying the business. She didn’t know how to pull him out of it.
When Nathan seemed to agree that my father should be committed to a mental hospital, my mother backed down. Maybe Ira was just being dramatic. He’d talked himself into this. Nathan should keep trying to talk him out of it. If they could just get him off the sleeping pills, his head would clear. If only Rebecca had been there, she’d know what to do.
My father was right; my mother and my uncle were talking about him behind his back. In a sense they were conspiring.
“They’re just trying to help you, Daddy,” I reported back. “Everyone is very worried about you.”
“Ah, don’t be naive,” he said. “They both want me dead.”
“Mommy is worried about what’s going to happen to the business, Daddy. She doesn’t know what to do.”
“The business! The business! All she cares about is the fucking business. What about me? Your mother has a ruthless streak. An icy Russian heart. You didn’t know her family. They
never cried. They never touched each other. If you tried to touch her sister, she’d shudder and push you away. Does your mother ever hug you the way a normal mother would?”
“Mommy loves you, Daddy.”
“Don’t kid yourself about love,” he said.
My espionage continued. When my mother gave my father one of her characteristically vague, impossible-to-read looks, I tried to discern the relative proportions of pity and exasperation. She was weary of everything he had put her through, but did she really want him dead? Even if she wanted him dead, did she have the resolve to kill him?
“I can’t believe Mommy would try to kill you, Daddy,” I reported back a few days later. “I can’t believe it.”
“Nathan talked her into it. My brother’s always been jealous of me,” my father said. “We’ve been split ever since the divorce. You know that he took our father’s side, and I sided with Zayde. He resented it when Rebecca sent me money. I’ve made him feel guilty about not getting Rebecca medical treatment at the end, so he’d rather just finish me off. Your mother’s going along with it.” He was getting more and more distressed, sweating and pulling at his hair.
“Calm down,” I said. I was afraid he was going to have a stroke. High blood pressure was one of the real afflictions the doctors had identified. “I’ll keep an eye on them,” I said. “I’ll keep watching them for you. I won’t let it happen. Don’t worry.”
One afternoon after school, I was babysitting Ira while my mother prepared dinner. He had worn himself out with one of his long, repetitive conspiracy monologues, worn me out with the circles his mind got trapped in. He had swallowed a handful of pills, and I was watching over him as he slept his sloppy, drug-induced sleep. Suddenly he lurched from the bed and staggered to the window. His sudden movement put me on alert.
“What is it, what is it?” I said, my heart throbbing.
My father was hunched over and pawing at the window. He screamed, pointing at something in the distance, and then started to shake the venetian blinds, shrieking a jungle bird’s high-pitched shriek.
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