We left New York and moved north to Arlington, a quiet Boston suburb. Dad went to night school on the GI Bill, paying the rent with a series of odd jobs. He smoked heavily; his other addiction was music. In 1963 we left Arlington and bought one of the tract homes springing up among the potato fields of Plainview, Long Island. One evening Dad brought home our first record player: a box-shaped object with a white plastic handle and single three-inch speaker. He’d also bought three LPs: Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt; The Divine Miss V., by Sarah Vaughan; and Sheer Ecstasy, by the Cesana Strings. Sheer Ecstasy’s cover featured the naked Diane Webber, lounging on a cane recliner: an image that would inspire countless pubescent fantasies.
For a while he worked as a salesman at Pergament, a household and hardware store. When Jord and I dropped in, he’d run the paint mixer for us. Dad was amazed that human civilization had created a machine for the express purpose of mixing paint, and he mused about the scores of designers and engineers involved in the project: the foundries and molding machines and assembly lines called into action for this monumental effort. We didn’t share his awe, having grown up in an era when machines, like meat, simply appeared on the shelves.
My father had a red crew cut, marsupial eyes, and a huge nose that became, with his soulful profile and self-effacing jokes, an asset. He was charming, and enormously popular. Mom was equally attractive, a sparkling and articulate art teacher with an hourglass figure. They found plenty of time for their friends. At least two nights a week, the Plainview split-level was filled with loud laughter, jazz, and the comingled smells of scotch and cigarette smoke. Jordan and I lay in our beds in an upstairs room, listening to our father’s jokes, our mother’s laughter, the loud voices of their friends. I was ten; my brother, seven. Our baby sister slept in a separate room.
As soon as the guests left the kitchen and moved downstairs to the recreation room, Jordan and I would dare each other to perform “impossible” tasks.
“Good evening, Mr. Greenwald. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to sneak out of our bedroom and into the living room, returning with a handful of M&Ms, Raisinettes, or pretzels. If you are caught or killed, I will disavow any knowledge of your actions.”
I could never resist these dares. I’d slither out of bed, open the door, and move catlike down the hall. A short flight of uncreaking steps led almost directly into the living room, with its silent carpet. Crystal bowls blossomed with candies; lacquer trays overflowed with chips and dip. Poised amid this cornucopia, a super-spy in pajamas, my life was thrilling.
JORDAN FELL ASLEEP long before I did. Reading in bed was not an option; the room had a single overhead lamp, two 75-watt bulbs beneath a glassine shade decorated with hand-painted rodeo cowboys. Burrowing under the covers with a flashlight made me claustrophobic. I tossed and turned, full of reckless energy.
I was able to distract my brother with inane word games. My favorite of these was “Make Me Laugh,” a bedtime ritual with a game show format and its own theme song:Make Me Laugh
Make Me Laugh
Make . . . Me . . . Laugh
The challenge was simple: Jordan and I took turns telling jokes, or mouthing absurdities. The first one to make the other laugh was the winner.
“Who goes first?”
“I will.” Jordan shifted in bed. “Okay. Ready? Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Penis.”
I thrust my face into my pillow until I recovered. “Penis who?”
“If you don’t know penis, I feel sorry for you.”
This was ingenious, but I was out of the danger zone. “Okay,” I countered, “why can’t witches’ husbands give them babies?”
“I give up.”
“Because they have holloweenies.”
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Ash.”
“Ash who?”
“Gesundheit.”
I leaned on my elbow. “Did you just make that up?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Here’s a good one.” I smacked my lips, preparing for the delivery. “Two deaf men meet on the street. The first one says, ‘Are you going fishing?’ The second one says, ‘No . . . I’m going fishing!’ To which the first one replies: ‘That’s too bad—I thought you were going fishing!’”
I waited, but there was no hint of laughter.
“You forgot to say their names,” Jordan declared.
“What?”
“The deaf men. Don’t you know their names?”
“What difference does it make?”
“It’s a part of the joke.”
“It is not.”
“It is.”
“Not.”
“You think that because you don’t know.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
Jordan sighed. “I’m going to sleep.” Silence.
“Okay,” I conceded. “What are their names?”
“Who?”
“The deaf men!”
“What difference does it make?”
“You said it was part of the joke!”
“I lied.” He yawned. “No. Actually, one of them had the same first name and last name.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The first deaf guy. He was Chinese. He had the same first name and last name.”
“What name?”
“Hee.”
“Hee Hee?”
“You laughed. Good night.”
ONE SUMMER MORNING I woke up and saw that my brother was gone. He wasn’t in the bathroom, the living room, or the kitchen. His sheets were askew; it was as if he had fled the bed and vanished. I found our mother, who searched the house frantically. The neighbors were alerted. Twenty minutes later, as Mom picked up the phone to call the police, I heard a muted cough from upstairs. We ran back into the bedroom. Another cough. My mother dropped to her knees. Jordan was beneath his bed, curled into a fetal position. He was sleeping peacefully and sucking his thumb. Mom put her forehead on the carpet and began weeping softly.
I wondered, even then, what her reaction would have been if it had been me who’d gone missing, whether she would have searched at all. Because Jordan and I were not loved equally. While I was loud and resilient, a hyperactive comic who rarely shut up, there was a quiet translucence about my brother. Like an ancient Egyptian vase, he seemed both fragile and immortal.
Our parents captured a few scenes from our childhood with an eight-millimeter movie camera. I’d watched these films as an adult. He is the beautiful one, with the curly hair of Dionysus, his dark eyes wide as an owl’s. And there I am, a snaggletoothed clown, prancing and posturing. We were an odd pair—but during those early years, at least, I was the difficult one.
DAD BEGAN SENDING out résumés, and was hired by General Electric. He rose through the ranks of their data processing division. I have a snapshot of him in his office, lounging in an executive chair, laughing into a phone. His legs are outstretched, crossed on his mahogany desk. He’d made it: left the sewers and the flaming cats behind.
His career provided us with a level of security that made the years of paint mixing and door-to-door sales seem like a brief aberration. We were riding the new wave of middle-class affluence. Jordan and I collected Spider-Man comics, played soccer, and eviscerated dead birds with the stainless steel dissecting kits we’d bought, eons ago, at Pergament.
Dad traveled a lot on business. Postcards arrived from any number of exotic destinations: Chicago, Houston, the Los Angeles International Airport. These jaunts didn’t satisfy his well-concealed wanderlust. He was one of those guys who’d married too soon and rushed into parenthood, at the cost of an inner longing he’d been too young to define. He did define it, eventually. He wanted to see the world, sleep with Swedish girls, smoke weed with his hip, young nieces. Resentment simmered inside him, never reaching a boil. One afternoon when I was a teenager, we were driving through New Jersey—my dad and I—on a two-lane blacktop
bordered by fields and farmhouses. A dirt road snaked off toward the south, leading God knew where. Dad craned his neck.
“I was in the Army, in Texas, when your mother was pregnant,” he said. “I drove out to see her. It was about an hour, from the base into San Antonio. I was listening to the radio. Texas was all open country, just tumbleweeds and snakes. Along the way, I saw a little dirt road. No idea where it went. I stopped at the junction. And I said to myself: ‘Bob, you can drive on into San Antonio—or you can take that turnoff, and live your life as you please.’ To this day, I wonder what might have happened, where I’d be today, if I’d made that turn.”
Take it, Dad, I wanted to say. Take it with me. Let’s have an adventure. But that wasn’t the kind of adventure he wanted.
IN MASSACHUSETTS, MOM had made pocket money teaching art classes on the porch of our duplex: macaroni collages and block printing with sponges. When we bought the house in Plainview, she did a remarkable thing. Our plastic lunch plates were decorated with an Oriental design of a flowering plum tree. Mom transferred this motif to an entire wall of our kitchen. She copied the drawing exactly: every color, every branch, the shape of each blossom. Completed, it dominated the room. It was a daring and self-confident act, executed with a level of skill that even a ten-year-old could recognize.
But for many of those years she was essentially a single mother—and despite her many talents, she couldn’t cope with Dad’s absences. I now understand that she suffered from monophobia: an acute fear of being alone. To a child, though, her panic attacks were inexplicable and terrifying. She shouted at us unpredictably, often in front of our friends. She sobbed, alone, in the bedroom. She was subject to fits of rage. On one occasion she threw a pair of scissors at the kitchen wall; they stuck, scarring her masterpiece. When my father returned from his trips she’d yell at him, too, behind the closed doors of their bedroom. We listened, our hearts pounding, as she damned the trap her life had become.
But the tempest always passed. Life settled back to normal. Our parents resumed their whirlwind social schedule, entertaining during the week and going out every Friday and Saturday night, returning long after midnight. Alone in the house, Jordan and I staged “cowboy” fights, emulating bar-room brawls. We’d use folding bridge tables and picnic chairs as props, throwing ourselves over the furniture in stuntman fashion. We taught ourselves how to roll down short flights of steps, as if we’d been shot. We made planks out of balsa wood and broke them over each other’s heads.
When I entered high school Dad partitioned the downstairs recreation room, walling off an eight- by ten-foot space adjoining a half bathroom. This tiny suite became my domain. I filled my shelves with science fiction and travelogues, Estes rockets, and an amateurish rock collection with specimens chosen more for their sex appeal than their rarity. The very fact that I thought rocks had sex appeal speaks volumes about the geek I’d become by fifteen.
The lower floor of our split-level was sunken, and my new bedroom’s windows were level with the backyard lawn. During the summer, water from our oscillating sprinkler drummed against the glass. The warm evenings were spent in my room, burning incense and listening to Ravi Shankar, the Supremes, and the soundtracks from Z, 2001, and Lawrence of Arabia.
Our house had a crawl space: A dim and dusty storage area reached through a tiny door, hidden in a corner of the recreation room. The floor was packed dirt, with a three-foot-high clearance of wooden beams, protruding nails, and spiderwebs. No one ventured into that creepy cave, no one but me. I transformed a corner of the dreary recess into my secret den. Sheets of aluminum foil, suspended with thumbtacks, formed a partition. Though crude, the sanctuary was private: a place to meditate in silence, and smoke pot with friends as my mother’s tirades thumped through the floorboards.
It all seems so emblematic of the age: the bong smoke, my space-age fascinations, my symbolic hideout from the draft board. I imagined myself a cipher, but this was a vain conceit. I was exquisitely typical.
Not Jordan. He behaved more like an alien exchange student: a member of a highly advanced species who, late for class, had been forced to accept Earth as the subject for his anthropological studies. Like me, Jordan was deeply inspired by Star Trek’s Mr. Spock: the unflappable Vulcan who reluctantly suffered the crew of the starship Enterprise. But while my parents could at least react to my rebellion, they were bewildered and intimidated by Jordan. His self-containment gave them no purchase. Retreating into a cerebral solitude, he shielded himself from an emotional connection with either of them.
“A boss drives his secretary to a woodsy place and begins to fondle her,” my father declared in a rare show of dinnertime levity. “‘What are you doing?’ she asks, obviously upset. ‘I thought you were taking me to Florida!’ ‘Not at all,’ her boss says. ‘I just said I was going to Tampa with you.’”
“His poor locution proved an asset,” Jordan observed. “Please pass the schmaltz.”
My brother was not above goading our parents for his own amusement. Swearing, for example, was forbidden in our household. Jordan would arrive at table, protrude his upper jaw, and cross his eyes, like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
“Who says I have fuck teeth?” he’d ask, turning to me. “What’s wrong with fuck teeth?”
Dad would set down his fork, red as a caged bull: “What did you say?” My brother would glance at me, his crossed eyes squinting with glee. “The fuck stops here.”
Jordan quietly despised our father: not just for being a weak and clumsy parent, but for suppressing his passions and venting his frustrations on the rest of us. The two rarely spoke. When they did, their exchanges were monosyllabic. There was no violence, no yelling, nothing to shatter the tension between them, just an icy détente.
I spent as much time as possible outdoors. Trees fascinated me. I carved a walking stick out of an elm branch and took the air like an English lord, trekking to the public library. There was no need of a cane on the groomed sidewalks of Plainview, but I liked the feel of wood in my hand and the tapping of the tip on the pavement. The walking stick had a hook on the end, a natural nub that fit perfectly over my thumb. If anyone attacked me, a mugger or a mad dog, I would grapple a tree branch and hoist myself out of danger.
Jordan and Debra were too young to flee the house. I didn’t consider their fate during my sojourns around the neighborhood or my frequent flights to the library. As a teen, I sought only my own pleasure: sitting cross-legged on the floor between the high metal stacks, devouring novels by Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.
My brother found diversions of his own, immersing himself in an alternate world that kept him away from home as much as possible. An adolescent Renaissance man, he showed high aptitude in all the classic disciplines: athletics, music, and especially language. He became president of the Junior High German Club, qualified for track and soccer, and played trumpet in the band. He was brilliant, but the only light our parents saw was the thin crack of illumination that escaped from beneath his bedroom door.
My grades were awful. I had little talent for music and none for sports. I dreamed only of travel, preferably by spaceship, to some faraway corner of the galaxy—or to the equally alien mesas in my Navajo Wildlands book. Toward my brother I felt increasing ambivalence. On the one hand, he amazed me. I was envious and admiring of his intellect and independence. But there was an unmet hope that simmered into resentment. With no parental role models, nor any reliable compass to orient myself toward maturity, I needed Jordan. I needed him to be like the younger brothers I’d seen on TV: someone who would seek advice, and honor me with a mantle of responsibility. At the very least I needed him on my side, as an ally in our increasingly tense household.
But as my hair got longer and my reading list angled toward Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson and Hermann Hesse, Jordan began to shun me as well. He installed himself on a pedestal of classics and athletics; I climbed onto a magic mushroom. I wondered if I’d ever wi
n his respect, or share again the pranks and banter that had kept us awake as kids.
“EXCUSE ME, SIR?” The Nanglo patio, with its underage waiters, reclaimed its place in my sensory sphere.
“Hajur?” I replied instinctively.
“You are having something?”
“Fresh lemon soda, please. And one chili chicken, boneless.” I slipped Jordan’s letter into my daypack. My Nepali neighbors were scooping up their dal bhat with appreciation, enjoying the luxury of a prepared meal, as their kids doused french fries in spicy green ketchup. I wondered where their lives would take them.
7
Otherwise Engaged
GRACE HAD SAID “after four.” Not wanting to seem overeager, but unable to help myself, I called at 5:10. A chill was penetrating the air, as the sun descended toward a premature eclipse behind the spine of Nagarjun Hill. She was editing, immersed, and there wasn’t as much wisecracking as we’d allowed at the strike. She asked distractedly if I’d written my story, and I wondered if she was having second thoughts about getting together. But when I asked her to suggest a dinner date, she replied eagerly: She was free tomorrow, Thursday, after six.
We met at Ras Rang, a dimly lit new Chinese restaurant near the Shankar Hotel. I pulled a couple of cushions next to the fire pit, and we spent the better part of three hours drinking Star beers out of thick brown bottles, eating mu shu chicken, and telling our stories. She was skittish, but adorable: bright, animated, and very quick. Testy, but I liked that too.
Grace Modena was twenty-eight; she’d grown up in Rolla, Missouri, where her dad taught physics and astronomy at the university. Her mother, the daughter of an Argentinean diplomat, had moved to Washington DC at the age of fourteen. Her parents met in high school. According to Grace, they still passed notes to each other at concerts and lectures.
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