Estranged Read online

  It was Leo who’d originally contacted my father and was trying to piece the family back together. We drove to Manhattan to see him. Once again, my brothers and I came along and my mother stayed home.

  Leo lived in a large, mostly empty apartment deep on the Lower East Side. My father said that it was rent-controlled and taught me what that meant. I’d never heard the word rent before, though when I played with my friends, we liked to pretend we were models or dancers or actresses living in New York City. This wasn’t that New York. We walked up a dark and dank staircase and down a long hallway.

  “Come in, come in,” Leo said, opening the heavy door wide. “My darlinks! You are here.”

  Leo was an old, skinny, dear man with hollow cheeks and a worn suit jacket and trousers. There was poetry in his humble manner and not a hint of big-city glamour. The way he wore a newsboy cap and tucked a cigarette in the crook of his ear moved me. He smelled like cigarettes, in the best way, and of sour pickles and smoked fish. He had stacks of newspapers around, and was playing music on the radio when we came in. His fingers were yellow with tobacco stains, and he put his hands out to cradle my face and stare into my eyes. I loved him from the first moment.

  That February, or perhaps the one after, Leo came to Josh’s bar mitzvah. Edna’s family was invited, too. (My mother wasn’t thrilled about that, but what could she do?) Mark’s bar mitzvah celebration two years earlier had been a small reception at home after services with an accordion player and catering and rented tables. For Josh, who had more friends and cared about these things and begged to have a “normal” party, my parents threw a big reception at a country club with a DJ and photographer. My mother seated my father’s relatives at a table in the back, far from her teacher friends.

  After the family reunion, Edna called my father every week and then every couple of weeks. He didn’t call her, and then, after a while, he stopped returning her calls. She moved to Texas with her family a few years later. We never saw Edna or our cousins again.

  We kept in touch with Leo, though. One early fall day a year or two later, my father and I were supposed to go see him. We hadn’t been in a while, but this visit had been planned for a long time. That morning the girl who lived across the street from us called and asked if I wanted to walk into town. We’d hang out in the summer and catch fireflies or rehearse our next talent show or dance in her bedroom to “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League, but she hardly ever asked me to do anything during the school year, much less take the very public walk into town, because she was one of the popular girls and I wasn’t. I covered the receiver with my shirt and asked my father what to do.

  “Go with your friend,” he said. He knew I struggled with fitting in at school. But I hesitated, thinking about Leo alone in his apartment.

  “No, that’s okay,” I decided, saying goodbye to her and hanging up the phone. I wasn’t trying to be a saint, but I knew it was the right thing to do. Besides, I missed Leo. We drove in and sat in his bare rooms and cracked walnuts. Leo let me interview him for an oral history report for Hebrew school, using a cloth handkerchief to wipe away the tears that fell down his face like cigarette ash as he talked about his past. Then we went over to visit Bertha. We met her in the recreation room. She was using a wheelchair and smelled like hospitals, like the way the inside of my mouth tasted when I needed a drink of water. I sat next to her until my father made me stand up in front of the room and sing. I chose “My Favorite Things” but worried over the crisp apple strudel and schnitzel with noodles lines, wondering if that brought back bad memories. After that I sang the theme song from the movie Fame: I’m gonna live forever / I’m gonna learn how to fly / High! I ended with “Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof because I figured the Jewish residents would like that one.

  FOUR

  BEING JEWISH MATTERED to my parents, and it mattered to my brothers and me, too. Israel, the Holocaust, and Hebrew school were our holy trinity. When we’d moved to Rockville Centre and it had come time to pick a temple, my parents had gone back and forth between the Reform and Conservative synagogues in town, weighing the theological pros and cons. At Central Synagogue, the Reform temple a few blocks from our house, women read from the Torah, and some of them even wore kippot, yarmulkes, pinned onto their wavy hair and tallit, prayer shawls, around their shoulders. I liked Central because the mothers in the congregation seemed thoughtful and laid-back in their loose skirts and clogs, because the sermons were more peaceful and hopeful-sounding, and because the older boys were cuter and some of them paired their High Holiday rumpled shirts and ties with Converse sneakers. Much of the service was in English, though, and the Hebrew songs and prayer melodies were different from what my parents, especially my father, were used to hearing. He and my mother said they felt like they were in church.

  My mother hadn’t been brought up especially observant and didn’t know how to read Hebrew. Like many Jewish women of her generation, she hadn’t had a bat mitzvah or much of a Jewish education. But she gravitated to the moral absolutes that religion can provide, and she felt flattered that we were the chosen people. We weren’t kosher and didn’t keep Shabbat, but we celebrated the High Holy Days and Hanukkah, and observed Passover with two seders at home and no bread or pasta for a week, and we went to the annual Purim carnival put on by my Hebrew school. When we ate out at Ben’s Kosher Delicatessen, my mother knew enough to be embarrassed when Josh tried to order a cheeseburger. The important thing, she said, was having Jewish children and making sure they married Jews. She told me she had three because the rabbis said it was necessary to replace yourself and your husband and then add an extra Jew for those who’d been killed during the Holocaust.

  B’nai Shalom, the Conservative synagogue that my parents decided to join, was a totally different scene from Central. Women wore panty hose and pumps and expensive outfits and had their hair done, and some had furs. Girls wore frilly dresses and shiny patent-leather shoes. Men and boys wore dark suits and dress shoes. Women of the congregation could come up to the bimah, the synagogue podium, for readings or to make announcements, but they weren’t allowed to read from the Torah—though girls could for one day only, on their bat mitzvah. I figured we weren’t considered one hundred percent equal before the eyes of God or even the eyes of the rabbi. For one thing, women didn’t count toward the minyan, the daily prayer quorum made up of Kaddish-reciting mourners and a few devout everyday religious men who met in the small auxiliary chapel.

  The High Holidays meant new outfits, and expensive admission tickets to raise funds for the synagogue, and sermons about Israel or Russian Refuseniks and marathon day-into-evening services with overflow crowds. I liked that my father wore a tallis. During the long, drawn-out services, I’d lean my head in the crook of his arm and braid the strings dangling from the cloth. With the prayer book open between us, he’d move his index finger from right to left underneath the Hebrew words so that I could follow along. When I got bored, I’d escape to the women’s lounge and fish old cigarettes out of the ashtrays, holding the red-lipstick-stained butts to my mouth in front of the gilded vanity mirrors while nobody was looking.

  I went to Hebrew school on Sunday mornings and two days after school. We studied Hebrew, prayer and Torah, Jewish history, and biblical interpretation. We committed to memory prayers like Ma Tovu and Adon Olam and the Ashrei and learned to read (but not understand) enough Hebrew to hopefully one day get through our bar and bat mitzvahs. When our teachers were overwhelmed or absent, we’d watch Raid on Entebbe or Hester Street, the teacher covering the screen with her hands during the sex scene.

  The best part of Hebrew school, as far as I was concerned, was library time. Once a week we lined up and walked down the hall from the classrooms, being shushed by our teacher the whole way and warned not to disturb the other classes, though there was no quieting us. The same children who were teachers’ pets in regular public school turned rowdy and arrogantly dismissive here. In class we ignored the lectures on Talmudic tea
chings while boys tipped back their chairs, cracked jokes, and snapped the bras of the few girls who needed them, making fun of the rest of us. But when we entered the corner library, a miraculous hush fell over the room. This was the one truly holy place in the entire school. We settled quietly on the carpeted floor and took our spots by the feet of Mrs. Avner, the librarian. She perched her petite frame on a stool and read from classic Jewish children’s literature like The Adventures of K’Ton Ton and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Stories for Children when we were little, and now that we were older, the All-of-a-Kind Family series about the adventures of five sisters growing up with poor but loving immigrant parents on the Lower East Side. We closed our eyes and traveled with her to faraway places. Israel, Europe, New York City.

  After she was done reading, we had a few minutes to browse the small but expertly curated collection and make our selections before heading to the parking lot and waiting for our rides home. We could check out two books each. Combing the familiar shelves, I accumulated a fast and greedy pile of maybes, and made sure to ask Mrs. Avner for help deciding. She’d steer me toward more challenging titles or a guilty pleasure I wouldn’t have found myself. One day she let me and another devoted reader named Stefanie—a girl I’d hoped to befriend since the second grade—stay after the other kids had left, and gave us permission to take a whole stack home over a school vacation.

  Over the years Mrs. Avner handed me, among other titles, Summer of My German Soldier, which blended Holocaust YA lit with a thrillingly steamy interfaith romance, and Anne Frank’s Diary and then Night by Elie Wiesel. I devoured them and came back asking for more. Maybe it was because bad things were happening to me at home that I was drawn to Holocaust literature, stories of events and a time unimaginably, immeasurably, worse than Long Island circa 1984. Maybe it was because of Leo and Bertha; maybe it was just what Jewish girls do. But, above all other subjects, I read obsessively about the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz and the train rides to the concentration camps, and about children being separated from their parents at the gates, and about the death walk to the gas chambers.

  * * *

  My father was late to pick me up one evening, and I stood shivering and hungry in the darkening parking lot with my two new books in my hand and my regular school things, Trapper Keepers and hardcover textbooks and spiral subject notebooks, weighing down my backpack.

  Was there a God? It was a question I thought about a lot, especially when I was at B’nai. Most days I believed there was, because when I sat next to my father in services braiding his prayer shawl, I felt something well up in my chest—a presence, an energy, a sort of comforting hand on my forehead. When I studied the stained-glass synagogue windows, and sometimes when I lay in my bed at night and prayed, I imagined there was someone on the other end of those prayers. But the rest of the time I felt completely, horribly, terribly alone. When my father hit me or yelled. When my parents fought. And what about the Holocaust and the photographs we’d been shown of the dead children’s shoes? What of Anne Frank? What about Leo and Bertha? And the children starving in Africa? What about my mother sitting on the toilet crying, with wads of toilet paper in her hands?

  “Sorry,” my father said, pulling up next to me in the lot and reaching over to unlock the passenger door. I was usually one of the last kids to be picked up, but he was almost twenty minutes late, which was unusual. I didn’t like having to wait for him in the cold. “Traffic.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, settling into the passenger seat and changing the radio station. “Do you believe in God?” I asked, throwing my backpack and books on the seat behind me.

  “No,” he said, sighing and turning out of the parking lot. “Not really. But there’s no way to be a hundred percent sure. That’s why I’m more of an agnostic than an atheist.”

  “I know what that means. We talked about it in Hebrew school. Being an atheist means you definitely don’t believe in God, and agnostic means you can’t decide,” I said.

  “There probably isn’t, though,” he answered.

  I looked out the window and drew two intersecting triangles on the thin layer of frost and breath, one upside down and the other right side up, a tiny Star of David.

  “But there might be,” I said, because that should be the last thing in the conversation, just in case God was listening.

  Mrs. Avner eventually left our small suburban synagogue library, taking a position as a children’s librarian at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. When she said goodbye, she promised we’d stay in touch, but I was surprised a few months later when she invited me to the Y for the day. One morning she picked me up in her car and we drove to the Upper East Side. She gave me a tour of the grand-seeming building and library, and I sat in on story hour with the younger children. At lunchtime, we went out for kosher Chinese food. Walking briskly and purposefully through the city streets, as it seemed everyone did in Manhattan, was the very best part. I was floored by Mrs. Avner’s cosmopolitan, intellectual career and by her knowledge of books. I sat on the banquette, sipping my wonton soup, working my chopsticks over chicken and broccoli, and thinking, Why can’t my mother be more like this? I so wanted to tell Mrs. Avner about my father.

  * * *

  When Mark was in eleventh grade, he regenerated worms for a science fair project, cutting them in two and observing them as they grew back. He taught the intact worms a behavior, using food for a reward and a shock for punishment, and then halved them to see if their new selves remembered their training after the severing. He started the experiment in science class but kept the worms at home in his bedroom before taking them to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search semifinals. I remember being struck by the cruelty of the project, yet fascinated by the idea that we could be sliced in two and somehow come back new and different and whole, retaining something of our old selves. My brothers seemed like those worms to me. They appeared indestructible and resilient, not easily wrecked by the harm inflicted by our father, where I was vulnerable and easily harmed. When I was sliced, I split and became broken.

  * * *

  By then Mark and Josh were too old for me. They were never home. Or they were home but all of their friends were over. I would go into my brothers’ room and listen to their records by myself, but it wasn’t the same. They were two years apart but had different roles in the family. Josh was exuberant and fun-loving, always after a good time, and surrounded by a loyal crew of friends. Mark, like my father, was supposed to be the smart one. He seemed to have everything going for him. He earned top grades and was nice-looking, too, with dark hair and eyes. On top of being a Boy Scout, Mark was on the newspaper and yearbook.

  Plus, he had a head for business. We called him Richie Rich, after the boy-millionaire cartoon character, and later, Alex P. Keaton, when the sitcom Family Ties came on. My parents trusted Mark to be in charge of Josh and me when they weren’t home, and my father confided in him about the family finances and his work problems. My parents pinned their hopes on him like one of his Boy Scout merit badges. Mark would be the one to be successful. He was the child they didn’t have to worry about. They looked to him for advice even when he was in high school. They joked that he would take care of them financially when they were older, but you could tell they weren’t necessarily kidding.

  My parents were in their early forties, stressed about bills and college prices and retirement funds. After the gas lines and the hostage crisis and the sweater-wearing Carter years, they’d split their vote (I think) between Carter and Reagan in 1980, my mother sticking with the Democrats. Now, four years later, it was “morning in America,” according to the political commercial that gave me goose bumps, although I despised Reagan. Like the rest of the country, my parents were growing less liberal on social issues and more conservative on the economy and foreign policy. They both voted for Reagan’s reelection that fall.

  My brothers announced that they were Republicans, too. They wanted pastel Polo shirts and Sony Walkmans and stereos
and sushi dinners and foreign exchange trips to the Soviet Union and Spain, and one day their own cars, and they were willing to work for them. What mattered, Josh and Mark decided, was to make money. Money equaled freedom.

  But Mark worried about not having “connections” when it came to the real world, and he complained that our parents couldn’t help him land an eventual job or even a summer internship because they were middle-class suburbanites with no ties to Manhattan elites.

  Josh didn’t care about a fancy degree or job the way Mark did. He wanted to make money, too, but he liked Long Island and wasn’t in a hurry to leave. Josh could be fun to hang out with, when he wasn’t teasing or ignoring me, but I was in awe of Mark, who was old enough to seem impossibly mature. We all knew Mark was going places. He would become the success our father should have been.