Estranged Read online

  During the commercials, a public service announcement came on the television. A boy with sandy-blond hair and a dirty T-shirt stood in a dimly lit alley. The announcer spoke: “It shouldn’t hurt to be a child. Stop child abuse before it starts.” A hotline number flashed, disappearing before I could memorize it.

  I didn’t dare look at my father. I didn’t dare move a muscle. My skin was on fire. That was me! I knew that much for sure. But I didn’t know what it meant. Should I call that hotline after school, when my brothers were playing catch in the driveway? And if I did, what would happen? Would a social worker with her gray hair in a bun show up at my door one day, carrying a clipboard with my name on it? Would my father go to jail? Did I want him to? (And if he did, what would he do to me when he got out?) I considered keeping a pencil and paper hidden in the family room so that the next time the commercial came on, I’d be ready and could take down the number, but the truth was, I couldn’t decide if I wanted my father to get into trouble.

  How could I explain to a judge and jury the complicated ways in which some of our best moments as a family were knotted together with some of our most shameful ones?

  * * *

  Another summer came. My father was talking on the kitchen phone, excitedly jotting notes on a pad of paper. Something was up.

  “Sheila!” he said as soon as he hung up the receiver.

  A summer camp had called. An expensive Jewish sleepaway camp in the Catskill Mountains, the kind my parents couldn’t afford, where kids packed trunks with Izod shirts and days-of-the-week underwear from Bloomingdale’s, all with their name tags sewn in or ironed on. Where parents mailed weekly goody bags gift-wrapped at fancy stationery and candy stores. After a last-minute staffing cancellation, an old acquaintance of my father’s had phoned to see if my parents might be interested in coming up for the summer to work as unit heads. The July session was beginning in a few weeks. They wouldn’t get paid very much, but my brothers and I would get to attend the camp for free.

  “Where will we stay?” my mother wanted to know. No way was she going to sleep in a bunk with her charges, she said. “I look forward to my summers all year long. I am not going to be a glorified camp counselor.”

  “Don’t be such a prude,” he answered. “It’s like getting thousands of dollars in camp tuition for free, and the boys will love it.”

  “What about Jessie?” Yeah, what about me? I wondered. I was pretty certain I wasn’t old enough for sleepaway camp, even if my parents were nearby.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  My brothers and I were in the kitchen, following the debate like one of Mark’s tennis matches. My mother put her hands on her hips.

  “We’re going,” my father said.

  “Upstairs.” She pointed Mark, Josh, and me to our bedrooms. “Now.”

  Since this was all last-minute, they had to tell the camp that day. My brothers let me sit in their room while our parents fought.

  By the time we were called down to eat, she’d finally agreed. But later, after my father phoned back and accepted, he revealed more of the details. From what I could gather, he had initially made it seem like the job would be administrative, when really they’d be working directly with counselors and young campers.

  “You lied to me,” she said when she found out. “You’re going to pay for this.”

  “It’s too late,” he said smugly. “We’re going.”

  A few weeks later, we loaded up the car. We left early in the morning, because my parents had to be there for staff orientation. My mother was coming, but she was not happy about it, and sat with a magazine on her lap, flipping through the pages.

  She and I had spent the days since school ended making our way through the long camp checklist for girls. We’d needed to gather a summer camp trousseau: seven to ten pairs of shorts, ten T-shirts, sweatpants and sweatshirts and long-sleeve shirts, twelve pairs of underwear, two or three bathing suits and six towels, a flashlight, and an assortment of other summer camp paraphernalia. That morning I put on a new outfit and fixed my hair in a high ponytail. Out the car window, I saw the organized houses and lawns of our town turn to bridges and tree-lined highways and then the hills of the lower Catskills.

  We reached the camp, parked, and got out to have a look around. There was green everywhere. Josh and Mark wanted to run to the lake. First things first, our mother said. She wanted to see where she’d be sleeping. It wasn’t as bad as she’d imagined. They’d have a tiny but quaint one-room cabin just big enough for a double bed and dresser, a short walk from the campers and counselors they’d be supervising. Pacified, my mother helped me unpack my things and arrange them into neat piles in my cubby. That night I’d sleep in the bunk with my new counselors. The next day, the rest of the campers would arrive.

  When camp began, I was on my own for the first time ever. Part of me liked being separated from my parents, sleeping in a bed far from them. I wanted to feel carefree. But what I really felt was scared to be alone, and more afraid than ever that we’d be found out. It seemed dangerous to let my father live among all of these strangers. While making key-chain lanyards and ceramics and trying to get out of swimming lessons, I worried. During meals, I waved to my parents on the other side of the dining hall and drank as much bug juice as I wanted. I ran into my brothers at the canteen or during Friday-night services by the lake, but mostly, when not in activity after activity, I sat on my bed reading, or on the porch, impressing the other young campers with my ability to forecast the rain by my headaches. At night, I cried myself to sleep. I didn’t know why. A counselor came over and rubbed my back. She wanted to know what was wrong. I couldn’t say. I couldn’t even explain it to myself.

  A week or two into the eight-week summer, the counselor woke me in what felt like the middle of the night. A cool hand on my arm, a gentle shake. My mother was waiting for me on the porch.

  “We’re leaving,” she said, her arms crossed against her chest. She shushed me when I tried to ask what was wrong. “Pack your clothes. Don’t let anyone hear you. And do not wake anybody up.”

  “Now?” I asked. I didn’t know if it was closer to bedtime or morning.

  Mark and Josh and my father were waiting in the car. Nobody said a word. My mother handed my brothers and me a banana each. They didn’t explain why we had to leave. Mark and Josh were pissed. I was mostly confused. I wondered whether we were going home because I cried in the middle of the night, or because my mother really was a prude and a priss, like my father said. But then we drove away before the camp woke up, without saying goodbye to the other campers or counselors, which made me think we had to leave. I could only imagine my father had done something wrong, something shameful. Or who knows, maybe they quit. Maybe my mother decided to stand up to him just this once, when it counted the very least. I never did find out.

  * * *

  My father was offered a research job at a university upstate. SUNY Oswego, I think. The five of us drove up to check out the town. Out the window, I saw cows and horses. The country! My mother pointed out two smokestacks in the distance and the swath of gray sky as we rode closer to the college.

  “Where will they go to Hebrew school?” she asked my father from the passenger seat. “The nearest temple is an hour away.”

  He turned down the job. We remained on Long Island and adopted a dog from the animal shelter, a shaggy and sweet mutt. (Our old dog had died back in Plainview.) Snoopy would sniff my hair and play catch with a tennis ball and go swimming in the pool, jumping off the side and doggy-paddling to fetch the ball, shaking water off his back as he climbed the ladder to get out. We just walked him around the block for a few minutes two or three times a day to pee and poop, and so every once in a while he’d run away, free, upending the neighborhood garbage cans and roaming through back alleys toward the expanse of shared green grass on the other side of our fence.

  * * *

  When Mark was about to start high school, it sank in that my mother would be teaching in the
same building, and he packed an old steamer trunk we had in the garage and wheeled it over to his friend’s house. My parents let him stay the night. We all knew Mark had every right to be upset. Having your mother teach in your school was embarrassing and unfair, and it was something we’d all have to go through eventually. The next day, after our father went to pick Mark up, our parents said he could move a bed into the attic, Greg Brady–style, and take a small black-and-white TV with him. He lasted just a few weeks up there. Fall came and the attic wasn’t heated. And he missed Josh. But his aborted attempt at freedom made an impression on me. Sometimes I’d pretend to run away, too, tying a red bandanna to a stick and taking Snoopy for a walk and playing hobo.

  My brothers were getting too old to be hit, or maybe they were better behaved than I was, or maybe my father liked them more because they were boys, or maybe it was simply easier to hit a girl. Josh and Mark would play ball in the driveway for hours with a baseball and bat. They’d play basketball using a hoop attached to the front of the garage. Sometimes my father would join them. Snoopy would be tied on a leash to the chain-link fence between the driveway and pool. My brothers usually knew how to stay out of the worst trouble. But one day, out of nowhere, my father was chasing Josh and Mark through the house. I don’t know what started this particular argument, but I was in my room when I heard him roaring. I felt relieved that it wasn’t me this time and guilty for feeling that way. Then they were across the hall in my brothers’ bedroom. I stayed put but watched through the few inches of my cracked-open door. My father was beating them up like a schoolyard bully, giving each boy a turn as they cried out. He had one of them on the ground and was holding him down. One brother, I can’t remember which one, fought back. I never fought back.

  They were athletes. Not just in the driveway. They played on basketball and baseball and tennis teams. I watched them from the bleachers. They were boys, I thought. They were lucky. They would outgrow him, I realized that day, but I never would. He’d always be bigger than me. What would happen if the three of us, Mark and Josh and me, came together and turned on him? An insurrection, a revolt—maybe we didn’t even need our mother. Surely the three of us could take him on. If not right away, then one day.

  Because when our parents’ arguments escalated, when the yelling wouldn’t stop, when it became unbearably bad, we did come together. A threesome at last, we watched from the upstairs landing, huddled together with Mark’s protective arms slung over our shoulders.

  He was calling her names. She was a stupid bitch. Like me.

  She cried out in fear, trying to escape him. “Marty, don’t!”

  We saw him slam her against the peeling yellow of the refrigerator. Hard.

  She started crying harder; I knew that would only make him angrier.

  He threw his arm up, a threat and a promise.

  “No!” she cried. I heard the fear in her voice. Like she was afraid for her life. Not that he would kill her, but that all she knew and depended on would collapse around her.

  “IN YOUR ROOMS! NOW!” our father thundered, catching us watching him.

  We hid in Mark and Josh’s room, not nearly brave enough to stay for what came next. Did he hit her? Did he slap her? We heard yelling and screaming and the sound of hurled objects and then the deadly quiet, but I couldn’t be certain.

  Mark locked the door and got out his record albums, and we played Sergeant Pepper’s and The Wall and Billy Joel’s The Stranger and 52nd Street and Glass Houses, turning the volume all the way up on the stereo that he’d bought with his own money. We stayed up there for hours. I sat on Mark’s bed. The three of us let Billy Joel and Pink Floyd do the talking.

  Later on, when my mother said that my brothers and I could only rely on one another, it was those moments that made me think she was right.

  * * *

  My father only left once.

  “I’m done,” he said. I stood in the doorway of their bedroom and watched him throw an old suitcase at the foot of their bed, grabbing clothes and a toothbrush and his round plastic military comb. It was a Sunday night, and he’d been shouting at my mother for over an hour. But now he ignored her, which worried me even more.

  “You’ve never paid a bill in your life,” he said. “Good luck.”

  The bedroom door slammed behind him. Then we heard his car starting up. He peeled out of our driveway. We were alone, abandoned. My mother was crying. We’d lose the house. What would we do? Where would we go? I pictured us at a battered-women’s shelter.

  The next day he came home from work like nothing had happened.

  * * *

  I couldn’t make myself stop hating my parents. So instead, I wanted to make everything stop. I fantasized about slitting my wrists. I imagined slicing them with a knife in the bathtub, where I would sink down into the warmth of blood and bubbles. I liked to picture myself floating away.

  But the truth was, I avoided physical risk and injury. I never broke an arm or leg or sprained an ankle. I went on one rec-center ski trip and clung to the bunny slope’s rope pull and never went back. I quit gymnastics when we had to practice backbends; I didn’t go out for soccer or any other team sport. I couldn’t manage the monkey bars. I stayed close to the rails during ice-skating lessons. I resented dodgeball in gym class. I hated getting hurt. I didn’t even like to make my muscles sore.

  During recess, instead of playing kickball with the other kids, I’d sit on a tree stump and read. Reading was my version of running away. I read the Anne of Green Gables series and The Good Earth and Little Women and Heidi and Jane Eyre. I read all of the Judy Blume books (sneaking Forever . . . , which my mother forbid), Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and Blubber and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, and Norma Klein novels like Mom, The Wolfman and Me, even though my mother said I wasn’t really old enough for them. I heard about psychoanalysis and started seeing any willing children in my class as “patients” for my idea of therapy sessions. I found an out-of-date appointment book in the attic, created homemade Rorschach inkblot tests, and asked my classmate-clients to remember and bring me their dreams. I kept a journal by my bed and wrote down mine.

  I loved Mister Rogers when I was young, because he liked me for me. Once I got older, I graduated to Happy Days and The Brady Bunch and Eight Is Enough and especially Little House on the Prairie, which my mother would sometimes watch with me. I sat in front of the TV hour after hour, watching the easy way family conflicts could develop and be resolved in an episode. I identified with Laura because she was brave, and her family had more than its fair share of hardships, even though my father was no Pa. On Saturday nights, when my parents went out to dinner parties or restaurants, I got to eat a TV dinner and stay up late and watch all night long. First Solid Gold and then The Love Boat and even Fantasy Island, which my mother said was also too mature for me.

  Just like my mother did, I worried about my weight, even as I snacked on potato chips and rocky-road ice cream while watching TV or reading before bed. On weigh-in day at school, the girls in my fifth-grade class lined up in the nurse’s office and climbed on the doctor’s scale one by one, the nurse announcing our weight as she marked the number on a Presidential Fitness form. When it was my turn, she had to slide the top metal marker almost all the way to the right. I was one of the shortest children in class but weighed more than almost any of the other girls: 88 pounds, or 93, or maybe it was 97. I was old enough to know how ashamed I should be, how wrong my body was, how only adults thought I was cute. When my mother took me to Chwatsky’s, a clothing store we couldn’t afford, she had to get me a size fourteen, just like Josh had to wear husky jeans, just like my mother had to go to the plus-size department for herself when she wasn’t being good. My weight was the most disgusting thing about me, or so I thought, and everyone could see it.

  When my birthday came, my mother took me to the pediatrician for my annual physical. We made the trip all the time. I missed a lot of school. I had a steady stream of sore throats and ear infect
ions, and the doctors were always willing to prescribe me the bottle of sticky pink penicillin my mother wanted for me, even though they told her I didn’t really need it, I had a virus, that was all, but if it made my mother feel better . . .

  When the nurse had me step on the scale, I took my shoes off, and my mother pretended to look away. But when we sat together in the doctor’s office after the exam, he brought up the number. It was important to be active, he said. Perhaps I could join a sports team or go back to gymnastics.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you today?” he asked, looking at me.

  I had those black and blue marks along my arms and legs, and the headaches that had me vomiting in the nurse’s office at school, and I hated myself so much I wanted to die.

  “I get headaches,” I said. “They’re really bad.” I wanted him to make my mother leave the room. I wanted him to demand that I tell him what was really going on at home. Instead he looked away and checked his watch.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for those,” he said. “Take Tylenol.”

  “I can’t swallow a pill,” I said.

  “Chewable baby aspirin.” He nodded to my mother. “She can take four at a time.”

  THREE

  I STOOD HIGH on my tiptoes and reached up to a shelf above the television to pull down a cream-colored album filled with luxuriously thick pages of photographs. Sitting on the family room couch, the nubby blue fabric digging into my bare legs, I carefully studied the images. I could spend hours sinking my feet into the shag carpet while looking through the handful of photo albums my mother had compiled of our babyhoods and birthdays and family trips, but I prized this, my parents’ wedding album, most of all.