Estranged Read online

  Weekday mornings, while he listened to Don Imus on the radio, my father got out the cereal, Cap’n Crunch or Frosted Flakes or Raisin Bran, and if my mother didn’t have time for my braids or barrettes, he did my hair himself. Mark took the bus or rode his bike to middle school. Josh and I walked, or got a ride from our father when the weather was bad. We were on our own in the afternoons until our mother came home. When I was old enough, I’d wear a house key on a loop around my neck and let myself in. For now, my brothers were in charge. Josh, who was in fifth grade, walked me home from school, and afterward he and Mark, who was in seventh, took absentminded care of me, heating us up Ellio’s pizza in the toaster oven before running off with their friends to play catch or basketball in the driveway, or Ping-Pong in the basement, or, later on, poker in their bedroom.

  In Ms. Doctor’s second-grade class at Wilson Elementary, I was the new kid, and I wasn’t sporty and preppy like the Waspy girls, or freckled and spunky like the Catholic girls, or doted on and indulged like some of the other Jewish children. I was growing out a Dorothy Hamill haircut, and my unruly hair would never fall straight past my shoulders. Plus, I’d become chubby. Pleasantly plump, my father said. A cute, mean boy named Mike called me “Bubble Burger” and got some of the other boys to call me that, too. Dave G. broke my pencil right in the middle of class, and my teacher said it was because he had a crush on me, but even though he had red hair and glasses, I knew that couldn’t be true. A boy named Val wouldn’t stop calling me names.

  I told my parents, who told Josh to teach Val a lesson. It happened on the way home from school, right where kids and the crossing guard could see. Val started taunting me, and Josh told him to shut up. When he wouldn’t, my brother punched him. Val was tough, but only for a second-grader. Josh was older. Self-defense, my mother called it. My parents were certain we’d done the right thing, even though my mom could get in trouble because she taught in the same school district. You had to stick up for yourself. You couldn’t go like a lamb to the slaughter.

  Josh was my hero, my mother said when my brother returned from school with blood on his shirt and a note from the principal. “Thank your brother!” she instructed me.

  * * *

  But at least my parents were home each night, packing lunches and making sure we had clean laundry and school supplies. My father chaperoned my class field trips (the only dad who did), and when I was younger, he gave me piggyback rides high up on his shoulders. If I needed something xeroxed for class, I left it on top of his briefcase. He sat on the couch with his sewing kit during 60 Minutes and stitched up the loose neck of my stuffed Sherlock Holmes dog, pretending he was a dog doctor. When I was sick, he moved a television into my room. In the summers, he put an air conditioner in my bedroom window and let me blast it, even though it was expensive to run.

  He took me to a dance store to buy ballet slippers, and we left with a pink pair that fit just right, and a wisp of a dance skirt in black, and two leotards. One time my father let my brothers and me come to his office on a school holiday, and I ran and slipped in my rain boots. Blood poured everywhere. Fuck, he said, racing me to the car and carrying me in his arms like a baby. The emergency room doctor said I needed a dozen stitches on my forehead, right below where my scalp met my hairline. My father held me down and whispered reassurances into my ear as the doctor sewed me up.

  Of course, I never talked about it with my father. I’d never dare.

  A day or two after hurting me, my father would approach me with a wordless apology. He’d bring home Chinese takeout for dinner. My mother got her favorite egg rolls. He’d ladle extra wontons into my soup. We’d eat our chow mein. And fried rice, too—a splurge, since white rice came free with the meal. He’d caress my cheek with the back of his hand.

  You’re my favorite, he’d whisper.

  I turned to him like a dying plant turns to sunshine.

  You’re the apple of my eye. You’re my sheyne meydele.

  * * *

  And so afterward, when it was all over, we pretended nothing had happened. We went back to normal. I pushed down my fear. I acted like I was fine. I sat in synagogue wearing a drop-waist Gunne Sax dress. I worked on my poetry report. I studied the words on my spelling list and let my mother quiz me on them. My father made my mother a dinner salad with boiled eggs and baby potatoes and lots of oil and vinegar and garlic powder. On Sunday mornings he cooked up home fries and omelets or chocolate-chip pancakes. He told me I was smart and special.

  My mother never spoke of the violence in our house, which made me think I might be crazy. Though some days, after she came home from her new job, I found her sitting on the toilet in her bathroom upstairs, crying, with fistfuls of wadded-up toilet paper. I didn’t ask why. Other times she was sick or had a crushing headache or felt faint and hypoglycemic and would call in for a sub and spend the day in bed, and we weren’t to disturb her. Maybe she hated herself for not being brave enough to leave him. Maybe she thought he would change. But for the most part she was stoic and stony and seemed resigned to her life.

  Once, when I was five, our parents saved up and found cheap tickets and took my brothers and me on a dreamlike trip to Spain and Portugal. We visited castles and climbed up winding stone staircases through ancient turrets. During breakfasts on the patio at small family inns, my brothers and I ran and played on the grass while our parents drank their café con leche, and we ate dinners together at outdoor restaurants as the sun set, way past our bedtimes. At a bullfight, I made my family walk out because I couldn’t stand to watch the gore, to hear the crowd cheering as the matador pushed his sticks into the bull. One afternoon my mother lingered in a shop in Madrid and bought two embroidered silk shawls and delicate lace-trimmed fans, one for her and one for me. Even though my father got pissed off when he couldn’t find his way around the city, and screamed at my mother when we almost missed our ferry in Portugal, that shawl and fan became for me treasured totems, representing all my family could be.

  Proof that I wasn’t crazy or making all the bad things up were the planets of black and blue up and down my arms and legs and across my back. My father marked my body. He stamped me. A few times he even made me bleed, but never enough that I needed to go to the doctor. He never gave me a black eye or a broken bone, nothing that would alarm my mother’s teacher friends and make them call child welfare services. The bright imprint of his slaps on my cheeks always burned off by the time I was ready to go to school the next day. It’s possible no adult ever noticed anything.

  My parents said I bruised easily. They said I was clumsy. And it was true that I bumped into edges and angles of household furniture that others might maneuver with a thoughtless grace. I was anxious in that house. When I knocked into something, a reminder of the accident would almost instantly appear on my pale skin. Too sensitive, my parents said.

  Small things worried me. My mother asked me how many times a day I changed my underpants. Once, I answered, having never thought about this question. She said I should be changing twice at a minimum, in the morning and at night. Sometimes she changed hers in the afternoon, too, she told me. She was only trying to teach me things, but I felt stupid and dirty. It was difficult for me to have a sense of proportion.

  There were times when I was happy. Roller-skating to a good song at Hot Skates. Riding my bike. Pumping myself high on the swings at the elementary school playground. I made wishes. On the way home from school, I sang “Maybe” from Annie to myself. I jumped on certain crispy leaves and wouldn’t step on sidewalk cracks. I hoped things would change.

  TWO

  ON THE WAY to Maine, my brothers and I took turns stretching out in the “back back” of our father’s 1976 blue Toyota Corolla station wagon. Mark was five years older than I was. Joshua—Josh—the middle child, was three years older, and then there was me, Jessie. It would have been August. My father, Martin—Marty to my mom, Daddy to me—was at the wheel, and my mother, Sheila, sat beside him in the passenger seat. Mark and Josh pas
sed Mad Libs back and forth. We counted how many different state license plates we could spot during the drive from Long Island to the cabin our parents had rented on Rangeley Lake. We played the geography game.

  “Alabama,” my dad suggested.

  “Alaska!” I shouted, proud to be the littlest and still right.

  “Arkansas,” said Mark.

  “This is boring,” said Josh.

  Even though Mark and Josh fought sometimes, they shared a room, baseball bats and catchers’ mitts, a Boy Scout troop, and a gang of neighborhood friends. Our mother wasn’t the sort to play with us. She’d read to me or take me clothes shopping. She’d even taken me into the city a couple of times to see a Broadway show. But she wasn’t there to entertain me, or to be my friend, and she told me as much. My father was the one who liked to spend time with me, who cared about what I thought and enjoyed the way my brain worked.

  “Let’s play twenty questions,” Daddy said, knowing this was my favorite car game.

  “Is it bigger than a bread box?” I asked.

  Back then his hair was more pepper than salt, and he sported a reddish-brown mustache that tickled when he kissed me. My mother tried to get him to shave it off, but he wouldn’t. He wasn’t vain, but he was determined and intractable, stubborn about doing things his way. On warm-weather weekends and summer vacation days like this, he wore old plaid Bermuda shorts and white tube socks stretched taut all the way from his sneakers to his dry, flaky knees. He had on thick-framed glasses, a velour short-sleeve shirt with a generous late-seventies collar, and his aqua fishing cap with a leaping fish on the front and mesh on the sides. With the steering wheel in one hand, he balanced a thermos of coffee in the other, putting it down between his legs or handing it over to my mother to hold when he needed to use the stick shift. She couldn’t drive a stick, but this model had been cheaper.

  By the time we pulled up to a Howard Johnson’s for dinner, it was getting late, and we were all starving. The hostess grabbed the oversize laminated adult menus and the smaller, paper children’s ones from the stand and showed us to our table. I slid into the booth closest to the window, and the backs of my sweaty thighs stuck to the vinyl. I got to draw on my menu with the restaurant crayons, and after dinner we were allowed to have ice cream for dessert because it came free with the meal. Then it was time to climb back into the car for the final push to the cabin.

  Mark let me rest my head on his lap, and I curled my legs up underneath myself so that I could lie down. It was getting late. Out the window I could see the summer sun setting and the sky turning dark blue and then black as the stars appeared. The moon followed us. We turned off the highway, where we could smell the sea, onto country roads, passing general stores and seafood shacks until I fell asleep and we made our way inland. My father must have carried me in from the car slung over his shoulder. I woke up early the next morning, tucked under a sleeping bag on the lower level of a bunk bed, needing to pee. The log cabin reminded me of the Lincoln Log sets my brothers sometimes built.

  The days passed peacefully. My father was happy in Maine, which was why. We went to sleep by nightfall, and I stirred when the light came in under the children’s bedroom door. My father would have put water on for instant Folgers before setting out early into the cool, misty morning in his mustard-yellow flannel shirt and Wrangler jeans, heading to the lake with his tackle box, my brothers following close behind.

  My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was in the cabin with my mom and me. She must have driven up from her apartment in Queens. She and I played cards, war and crazy eights and go fish, on the screened-in porch while my mother read. After lunch, we’d all go for a swim. The bottom of the shallowest part of the lake was mushy and rocky and pebbly all at once, and algae jammed between my toes. I could see tiny fish swimming all around me. I stayed in the water, wading, while my brothers practiced their jumps off the dock. “Watch me, Mommy,” I said.

  Back at the cabin, I peeled off my swimsuit, and my mother took out her bottle of calamine lotion and smeared the pink cream on my mosquito bites. I had more than anyone else in the family. Dozens. “That’s because you’re the sweetest,” my father said.

  The night before our last full day of the trip, I begged to go fishing, too. Why should I always be left behind just because I was a girl? I’d listened to my Free to Be You and Me album so many times the record had warped, and I knew that wasn’t fair. Besides, it was boring to always be stuck with my mother and grandmother, to miss out on all the adventures the boys got to have.

  My father agreed. He said he’d teach me how to put a worm on a hook. I’d be his first mate, his special helper.

  “Marty,” my mother said with a tone of warning in her voice. “She doesn’t know how to swim. It’s too deep. It’s way too dangerous.”

  “She’ll wear a life jacket,” he replied in a tone of his own that said, What I say goes, and that’s final. Which meant I could come.

  The next morning he woke me up early, and we walked down to the rowboat fitted with a small outboard motor rented for our stay. I sat in the middle row, wearing my borrowed salmon-colored life preserver. My father let me help paddle for a while, until he started the motor. After what seemed like a long time but was probably no more than five or ten minutes, he killed the motor and reached for the can of worms resting in a puddle by my feet, grabbing a live one for his rod and one for each of my brothers’ rods. His thick fingers nimbly curved the wriggly worms through the hooks. He should have been a surgeon, he said, or at least a plumber. Should have worked with his hands. Should have made money. I was little but already familiar with his regrets.

  We were quiet on the boat, waiting for something to happen. I pulled my sweatshirt around my bare legs to stay warm.

  My father got the first tug. “We have one. Come over here,” he said. “Feel this.”

  He placed my hands on the rod under his, and I felt the pull, the force of the fish fighting back for life. Daddy dug his feet into the sides of the boat and reeled in his catch. By morning’s end, we had three fish flopping on the bottom of the boat. Not bad. It was sunny now, and hot. I stripped off my sweatshirt and shorts and wore just a one-piece bathing suit under my life vest. I ran my fingers through the water next to me, letting them glide and float and create ripples. We ate our tuna and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and then my father said it was time to drive around the lake some more and for my brothers to have a swim. He turned on the motor and we went fast, making a sharp path through the dark blue water, white surf misting my face. We came to a stop. Josh jumped like a cannonball, and Mark dove in, while my father stayed on the boat with me. For a few minutes my brothers circled us, swimming freestyle, showing off with the breast- or sidestroke, or back-floating when they got tired.

  They must have decided to swim out a bit. Maybe they were having a race. Or maybe we’d simply begun to drift, or they did, or maybe it just looked to me like the space kept widening between my father and me in the boat and my brothers in the water.

  “How deep is the water here?” I asked my father.

  “Maybe a hundred feet? I’m not sure. Very deep,” he said.

  As my brothers receded from view, I became more and more nervous, and my father was worried, too. My mother’s warnings clanged in my head. My brothers were good swimmers, but they were young, and we were in the middle of a vast lake. I imagined the lakebed to be the very bottom of Earth. An inconceivable distance away, like space itself, only in the opposite direction. Would I ever see my brothers again?

  This was like a game we played in the family room back at home, where the couch was a ship and the carpet was the water and there were sharks, and as long as you were in the water, you weren’t safe. You had to get back to the couch/ship. But this was for real. I started to cry. “Come back!” I hollered.

  Josh started teasing me, swimming even farther away. Mark was my protector, but Josh was close enough to my age to torment me. They couldn’t have been very far from the
boat at all, but it felt like they were.

  “Get back in this boat now,” my father yelled. He was angry. His skin was turning red and blotchy. My brothers began swimming back in our direction, exhausted and out of breath, able to manage just a doggy-paddle toward the end.

  But it was too late. Even though they were inches from us, my father was furious. As Josh treaded water and tried to explain himself, my father grabbed the wooden oar off the boat and, reaching down to my brother in the lake, smacked him with it squarely across the body. The blow was brutal in its purposefulness. Josh’s howl echoed on the lake, skimming the surface of the water. My brothers climbed back in the boat and shivered under a shared towel. And then there was nothing but still water. We were as quiet as we’d been when fishing, only now the silence rang in my ears. We motored home without saying a word. I never told my mother what happened, and I wouldn’t discuss it with my brothers, or anyone else, for twenty years.

  That afternoon we fried up the fish in an iron pan for a snack. We showered off, and my mother rinsed out my hair with No More Tears baby shampoo, and we all dressed up and went to a lobster dinner in town. I had on a white and navy sailor dress. There were homemade dinner rolls in a basket, and packets of butter. My mother covered my dress with two cloth napkins on my lap and a plastic bib over my chest. She showed me how to crack open the lobster claw and reach in for the meat with a tiny fork. My father didn’t say much. His anger lingered like a hangover.

  * * *

  One weekend my father and I were watching The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, a show about an innocent man on the run from the law who takes to the wilderness and befriends a bear. I thought about running away all the time. Sometimes I daydreamed about opening a dog hotel. Or living in New York City with artsy divorced parents who’d learn to become friends, like in my favorite Norma Klein novels. Then I’d have to see my father (though he wouldn’t exactly be my father but a calmer Alan Alda type) only on the weekends, and I was pretty sure we could get along then.