by Jan Cherubin
After I finished the cards, a few girls and some of the counselors complimented my work, which felt good, but very quickly camp was over, everyone packed her Cab card (except me, there wasn’t anybody to make one for me, of course) and we left. I never did anything as successfully again. When I got home at the end of the summer, Susan couldn’t stop talking about this cool new teacher named Johnny Dolan they made friends with while I was away, how good-looking he was, how Johnny took Susan in his sports car for ice cream at Price’s Dairy.
I lay on my back with my arms folded behind my head. Next to my cot, my father lay in his bed smoking peacefully.
“You should finish The National Dog,” he said after a while.
“The screenplay?”
“Yeah, the screenplay I started about Hoffman,” my father said. “You should finish it, Joanna.”
“I thought Fred was working on it with you,” I said. “He’s the screenwriter.”
“You always say that. Fred’s the writer. What about you? What were you doing at that paper out there?”
“I was a copy editor, that’s all. I’m not a writer. No one publishes my short stories.”
“You’re a throwaway person. That’s what you are,” he said. His voice was strong. He had these bursts of energy when he seemed almost normal.
“Yeah, I know. I’m a throwaway person. You’ve said that before.” I wasn’t sure what a throwaway person was; it might have been something he made up, but I figured he meant that I shrugged off milestones. I remembered he said it when I passed the driving test on the first try and I didn’t jump for joy. It was unusual for him to characterize me, so the comment stood out in my memory. Even though it was negative, I still appreciated seeing myself through his eyes. “Have you ever thought about why I might be a throwaway person?” I said. This was a stab at confrontation.
“What? You think it’s my fault?”
“You’re the one who always told us there’re no great women composers, no great women anything. Why would you say that to a daughter?”
“I was trying to get a rise out of you,” he said. “Can you give me some of that Anbesol?”
I found the little brown bottle on the window ledge and unscrewed the top. I was thinking I’d like to continue the conversation, but at a more leisurely pace, maybe over the next ten or fifteen years. Oh well. I poured a drop of the caramel-colored liquid onto his finger. He rubbed it on his gums. “Feels good,” he said.
“All that negative talk about women had consequences,” I said, looking at him through my lashes to see if he could take the criticism in his weakened state. “Sometimes I think those comments hurt me more than anything else.”
“C’mon. Don’t be so sensitive. You had a nice childhood, didn’t you?” he said.
“Yeah, sure. I’m like you. I idealize it. Cedar Drive was the best place on earth.”
He smiled. “Yeah, you’re like me that way. I was lucky, I really was. I had a Currier & Ives childhood—horses hitched up to a sleigh in the snow, all the kids you wanted to play with. You know, at the orphanage, we were only deprived in conventional ways. Like no mama tucking us in bed. I’ll tell you something, though. You wanna know something?”
I was annoyed that he’d switched the subject to himself yet again, but I was also painfully aware I would not be asked that question many more times. I propped my pillow against the wall and lay back on it. “Sure. I wanna know something.”
“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “We escaped the Freudian problem of identifying women with our mothers and then not being able to fuck those women.”
I cringed. I hated the word fuck used to mean sex except when you were actually having sex, as in fuck me. In that charged situation, the word was OK. But I hated it casually. The word was also OK as a curse, as in fuck, I forgot my wallet, or I can’t get this fucking TV to work. But clearly, he was more comfortable talking about sex than I was. “Yeah, so you escaped Freud’s madonna-whore thing. Great,” I said. I tried turning the conversation back to me. “You know what? I think I would have been better off growing up in an orphanage. Look at all the mentors you had. Whereas they fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That usage was OK, too, especially since it was from a Philip Larkin poem.
“You know Larkin?” he said.
“The cat?” I said, with a smirk.
“Not the goddamn cat.”
“Yeah, I know Philip Larkin. You fucked me up, but I’m not completely illiterate.”
“OK, so listen. We escaped that problem, the Freudian problem,” he said, looking at his cigarette thoughtfully, then taking a drag, exhaling a plume of smoke. “We escaped the madonna-whore problem,” he continued, “by not being brought up by a mother. The result is, we fuck anything that moves.”
I laughed, but there was that word again, and when he used it that way my stomach tightened. Fuck was pictures of Nola with perky breasts sitting on the piano bench naked, my piano bench, picking out a tune on my piano. A few years after the camping trip, he and I visited colleges just like fathers and daughters across America, and shared a motel room. I remembered standing stiffly between the two beds wearing a childish suit with puffy sleeves and a flared skirt that was all wrong for the interviews. “Don’t worry,” he said, sensing my anxiety. “I won’t touch you.”
Now in his hospital room I laughed and he laughed. Not everything was a fucking tragedy. He escaped that Freudian problem. “No mama to tuck you in, though,” I said, as I straightened his covers.
“Listen,” he said, “kids get over all kinds of shit. Look at me.”
“Yeah, look at you.” Sometimes I wondered if he had put Johnny up to it himself. Incest by proxy.
“You know that friend of yours, of your family’s?” said Donna Landau, this girl I knew.
“Johnny?”
“Yeah. I saw his car up at Milford.”
“When?” Milford and my high school were rivals.
“Last week. After school. He was picking up Jody Auslander. She’s in 11th grade.”
“How do you know he was picking up Jody Auslander?”
“I saw her getting in his car,” she said. “He has a red Triumph, right? Besides, that’s not the first time he’s been up there.”
Donna Landau knew nothing. She was nobody. Her big rear end bounced on the springy seat as she rode away on her bike.
“Don’t touch me,” I said when Johnny came to the house next. I felt ill. I had no control over it. The revulsion was a reflex, coming from a place that was much smarter than I was. He was upset, although he was smiling, acting mock wounded when he was really wounded, the way my mother did sometimes. “Don’t be hostile,” Johnny said. I noticed he was getting a paunch.
He was unhappy. He and Linda were getting divorced and he’d moved into a house with a bunch of people. He was sleeping with a college student living there. They set up a dark room in the garage and he developed pictures he’d taken of me at the swim club in the purple bikini. My father didn’t like the girl. She and Johnny drank too much and smoked too much pot.
My father blamed Johnny’s death partly on what happened at City, their collegial workplace ruined, the loss of his band of brothers. It wasn’t just his violent upbringing, my father said. It wasn’t just the new girlfriend, the drink and drugs, or the underage girls. It was work. Johnny had no purpose. “If you have meaningful work you can survive all kinds of other shit,” my father said.
The last time Johnny came over to Cedar Drive he got out of the car holding a goblet with a red stain in the bottom.
“I can’t talk to you anymore,” I said. “It’s like you don’t know me.”
His brow furrowed. He leaned in close, his lips brushing my ear. “When will we be lovers again?” he whispered.
I didn’t answer, but when he stretched out on the sofa after dinner, I let him put his head in my lap. He started talking like he was on psychiatrist’s couch. “The kids don’t listen to me anymore,” he said. “It’s pathetic. I’m path
etic.” It was cold in the house, but Johnny was so drunk he was sweating. “It’s not the same as when you were there, Clyde.” My father was teaching at the community college now. “The art teacher wears a knife in his sock,” Johnny said.
“Johnny, dear, did you call the therapist’s number I gave you?” my mother said.
“I will, Evie. I promise. You’re not there, Clyde. You don’t know how bad it’s gotten. Remember how it was, how we were? That’s lost.”
“It goes back to the great fight,” my father said. “They didn’t listen to the union leadership. We said keep the A-Course at City. Give these poor black kids a chance.”
“It’s over,” Johnny said. “That’s all over.”
I was startled by the tap tap of my tears dropping onto the writing paper I held open in the college mailroom. A letter from my father. Who is left to walk into my house without knocking, and I into his? Johnny had taken an electric lawnmower cord and hanged himself from the garage rafters. How could he? This tortured boy, never to see a winter sunset again. The college girl found him. For weeks he hadn’t been able to sleep. He wandered the house all night. He was a symbol of golden youth to me. Before he went out to the garage, he baked biscuits and left them cooling on the counter. He was thirty-three. There were times when I envied him. Life is diminished. When I see you, we’ll talk. Love, Daddy.
I took the train home even though there was no funeral or memorial service. Just a small gathering of shell-shocked friends passing around a joint. At home I sat and watched goldfinches and chickadees flutter around the birdfeeder outside the dining-room window. Susan came in. “What’s the matter with her?” she asked.
My father leaned across the table and put his hand over mine. “Joanna feels the way I do,” he said. He and I were bound together. He said in his letter we would talk, but my father and I didn’t talk. What we had to say was unspeakable.
“Kids survive all kinds of shit,” he said, sitting up in bed now under the no smoking sign, but what shit, specifically, did he mean? For instance, why did he have false teeth when he told us volunteer dentists came to the Home twice a year? Was he punched in the mouth by the supervisors?
Did older boys force themselves on him?
During those surreal nights, questions floated on the periphery of my mind, but not in coherent sentences. Maybe if I’d had those extra ten or fifteen years with him, grown older, I’d have known what to ask and how to ask it.
“You said you were just baiting me, you know, with the chess, the no great women chefs bullshit, but you don’t realize how your sexist messages affected us.”
“You wanted to be a chef?”
“No!” I said. I laughed, but just for a moment. “You know what I’m talking about. Susan claims it didn’t bother her, but I felt left out of the world. I still do.”
“You feel left out? Try going to high school with rich kids who know you’re from the orphanage.”
“Yeah, OK. But as a man, a white man, you walk down the street now and nobody knows you came from nothing. A woman can’t hide from who she is. A black woman gets a double whammy. We don’t have the freedom to reinvent ourselves like a white man does.”
“Ah, bullshit. Plenty of women succeed. Look at you, working on newspapers and magazines. Did you ever think you would do that?”
“Not really.”
“I always thought it was strange, since you never even tried out for your school paper.”
“I was a hippie. I was antiestablishment. And you didn’t encourage me one single bit.”
“I used to recommend books you never read.”
“Gulliver’s Travels in third grade! I’m not as smart as you.”
A nurse came in and took his temperature and wrapped a sleeve around his arm. “Your blood pressure is excellent,” she said cheerfully, then wheeled away her equipment.
“I remember you gave a lecture at Baltimore Hebrew College about Saul Bellow and I was curious so you took The Adventures of Augie March off a shelf and from the first sentence, that great sentence, what is it? ‘I am Chicago born.’”
“I am an American, Chicago born,” my father said.
“Yeah, from the first sentence he’s puffing up his chest. He’s a real American, even though he’s a Jew, that’s the subtext, right? Well, I read it and I felt excluded. I felt like the world didn’t belong to me in the same way. I didn’t have the sense of entitlement he had and I was jealous.”
‘“Chicago that somber city.’ You know, there’s nobody more patriotic than immigrants and their children.”
“He made himself larger than life the way you do.”
“Yeah, well, me, not so much . . .” He patted his hat to make sure it was on.
“I’m a girl,” I said. “I’d be laughed at if I made myself big.”
“What, did I raise some kind of victim?”
“No! You know that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I felt shut out. I didn’t have a lot of confidence. I don’t.”
“If that’s so true how did you have the guts to live in New York and work in journalism?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t a plan. I just landed there.” I molded my pillow so I could lean back on my cot and see my father at a better angle. He was listening, waiting for what I had to say next. I savored the moment.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” I said. “I had no particular ambition. But I did start to write stories in college. I can pinpoint the exact moment that happened. Grace Paley came to campus to read and I had this revelation. I think it’s common, this revelation about Grace Paley. It sounds familiar, anyway, part of the collective unconscious—for women writers, at least. Like that article in the Times about how so many women dream about Woody Allen. Remember that?”
“Do you dream about Woody Allen?”
“I have, a few times. Not lately. So I had this revelation about Grace Paley. I had never heard of her and I’m sitting in a lecture hall in 1974 listening to her read and thinking, wow, you’re allowed to write about things like that? I’d read plenty of Philip Roth, and I actually got pretty far into Augie March before I gave up, and I’d read Malamud, but it was only when this Jewish woman was standing up there making herself larger than life that I thought writing was something I could do. I left the lecture hall and went back to my room and started my first story.
“So what are you talking about then, not being a writer?”
“You said it yourself. I’m a throwaway person. I’m not ambitious. I don’t value my accomplishments.”
“Can you gimme more of that Anbesol. Pour some water in my glass first. No, no, not with a straw. I wanna wet my lips. Listen, kiddo, you can sit around blaming other people, your parents, whoever, but the truth is you make your own life.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You gotta go out there and do it. And then you get to decide if you’re going to be miserable about it or happy about it. It’s up to you. It’s all attitude.”
He might have added, while you’re making your own life avoid trampling on anybody else’s. Still, I thought his advice was decent. In spite of everything, he had me convinced life was good. You wanted to be around someone like that. You’d put up with a lot for it.
CHAPTER 48
“Do you know what I found in your father’s esophagus when I went in there with the scope?” Dr. Morales asked like a stern schoolmaster. He had the biopsy results.
Brenda, my mother, and I were squeezed together on a sofa in an alcove next to the nurse’s station, the two of them still in their winter coats like armor. “What did you find?” said Brenda.
“Pills of all colors sitting there whole,” the doctor said.
Come on, now, swallow. Be a good boy, Mr. Aronson, take your medicine.
I imagined phoning up Dr. Cromwell. Guess he wasn’t faking, I’d say. Childish, I knew, but I was a child. Brenda’s lip twitched.
“Did you find out what cell the tumor is?” I said.
“You know what
it is,” said Morales.
“No I don’t. No one told me.”
“But you already know.”
“You mean, it’s adeno?” I said.
“Very rare in that part of the esophagus.”
“How long does he have?” my mother asked.
Dr. Morales estimated between two weeks and two months. I asked if he could shuffle the numbers when he told my father, because how could a person comprehend having two weeks to live? Two weeks left him hanging from a ledge. It was presumptuous, too. Morales wasn’t God. The doctor agreed to an adjustment, waved his wand, and said that instead of two weeks to two months, he would give my father two months to two years.
