Estranged Read online

  Despite how tough that must have been on Josh, my brothers were best friends. Mark got better grades, yes, but Josh was more likable and popular, and that helped even things out. They hosted Ping-Pong tournaments in our garage and eight-ball pool games in our basement and summer pool parties in our backyard. They started busing tables at a Japanese restaurant in town called Taiko and sometimes worked winter weekends at Taiko’s sushi bar on a ski mountain. They drank beer (mostly Josh), and worked hard in school (mostly Mark), and played sports. The pure boy smell of their room was made up of dirty white tube socks and an overflowing laundry hamper. Change jars sat on top of dressers, team uniforms were slung over desk chairs, backpacks jammed with homework and textbooks lay on the floor, and Penthouse magazines were buried deep underneath their beds.

  Because I was the only girl, and the youngest, I felt left out. I objected to being grouped with my mother, whom Mark loved but thought prissy and straight-laced and lacking self-control about her weight and not intellectual enough. He and our father and Josh had all the good times.

  But Mark and I were close, too, and emotionally tied in our own way. I was no boy genius or wunderkind like him, but I got good grades, and he saw me as (almost) his intellectual equal. What really separated us from the rest of the family, though, was our shared desire to get out of Rockville Centre. Mark made me feel that, in this way, I was like him. We were potential sophisticates stuck in the wrong town, but not for long. Together, Mark and I were haughty and unabashedly judgmental about our surroundings, the homecoming floats and football games. We felt we were different, and we wanted more than what we saw around us. We would never raise our kids in a place like Rockville Centre. We would travel and see the world.

  What I remember most about Mark is the way he would protect me, the way that, when I needed him, he was there for me. He could make me feel safe, which was all I ever really wanted. We’d cuddle in bed together. I remember how his comforter was blue on one side and red on the other. I loved how warm he was, how good he smelled.

  * * *

  My father had started his career working for the New York City Department of Education straight out of college. His first job was as a math teacher at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn. We had a photo of him in the classroom, young, skinny, and bright-eyed, with a short-sleeve white button-down shirt and black Buddy Holly glasses, posing and smiling between desks of students who looked almost his age. He told us stories about being a rookie teacher, just a couple of years older than his students because he had skipped a grade. There was a funny one about the time he split his pants during class. And another about when he asked his students how many of them had been to Manhattan, which was a straight shot on the L train. Only one or two raised their hands. This was a sad story, because it meant they didn’t take advantage of the city like we did, driving in a few times a year for museums or Yankees games or a Broadway show or Chinatown dim sum.

  He’d gone on to study for a Ph.D. in educational psychology at Hofstra, finishing his dissertation, “The Effects of Time of Informative Feedback and Type of Interpolated Learning on the Retention of Meaningful, Connected, Verbal Material,” in 1975, when I was three. He’d been a researcher at LaGuardia Community College for as long as I could remember.

  But one day I started hearing grumblings around our house. Phone calls and hushed, worried conversations between my parents. My father was in danger of losing his job. I tried to eavesdrop and figure out exactly what was going on. It sounded like my father and some others in his office had been accused of falsifying research results. I thought I overheard something about playing around with the numbers. The whole thing was bullshit, according to my father. He said the college had asked him to manipulate the research data to prove their programs were successful. But we weren’t supposed to know or talk about any of it.

  I didn’t know what to believe. I was embarrassed, worried, and scared about my father losing his job, and of course I was ashamed, but I wasn’t surprised or shocked. I was used to the little lies and cheats and ways to steal things and save money where we could. When people in the neighborhood started getting cable, my father wanted to watch the fights on HBO but not pay for them. One Saturday he put my brothers on lookout while he climbed up a telephone pole behind our yard and did some fiddling. Bingo! We had cable. A few years later Josh brought home a descrambling device he’d bought from a guy who knew a guy. My mother didn’t like it, but my father said it was staying. Why should we give our money to Cablevision? That kind of stealing didn’t count. We needed the money, and those companies had enough already. We got every channel, including late-night porn that my brothers would sometimes sneak, all for free. I was guilty, too. With my father’s blessing, my brothers signed up for those eleven-cassette-tapes-for-a-penny music clubs using fake names, and they taught me to do the same. When we eventually made it to Disney World, my father made me pretend to be under twelve to get the discount. At Friendly’s, where we went for my favorite chicken-tender dinners, he had me lie about my age to get the children’s meal. The system is working, my father and brothers would joke whenever we got away with something.

  Those were small lies, though. So small they hardly counted. Everyone stole cable, my father said. Besides, he had never gotten caught before, not that I knew about. This time was different; this time was serious. My father was fired from the college. (We weren’t supposed to say fired, we were supposed to say let go.) It could have been worse. A severance package was offered. A small buyout. He’d get to collect his pension. But he was out of a job and a career, too. He would never go back on the academic job market. As an excuse to her teacher friends, my mother murmured something about budget cuts. But as far as I was concerned, my father was a cheater, and because of it, our world was about to end. Without his salary, we couldn’t pay the mortgage, much less college for Mark and then Josh two years later.

  Frantic, my father called his old math department chair, Len, who had long ago stopped teaching and owned a direct-mail magazine subscription service specializing in selling discounted subscriptions to doctors and dentists and teachers’ associations. Len said that my father should run a small business. This sounded about right to my father. Your own business meant freedom, he explained to my mother. He wanted to be his own boss. He met with a business broker who helped people buy and sell small businesses like a real estate agent sells houses or apartments. I went with my parents to look at a storefront candy and newspaper store in a nearby town, similar to what his father and uncles once owned.

  It was too much of a risk, my mother thought. The hours! And what would we do when it didn’t work out? We had a mortgage and bills to pay and three kids to send to college.

  Instead, my father tried out the idea of becoming a business broker himself. He’d work on commission. That lasted a few more months, while my mother’s panic increased on a daily basis. Mark was worried sick, too. You couldn’t count on commissions. How were they going to afford tuition? Even with loans and financial aid, parents were expected to make a sizable contribution. Things got worse around the house. There were raised arms and voices and slammed doors, except when my father made a sale, and then, like gamblers after a big win, we celebrated. And for a few weeks everything was okay. But when a sale fell through, we were the ones who paid.

  Eventually my father persuaded Len to give him a job at the subscription firm. His Ph.D. looked good in the signature of sales letters. He could go to trade association meetings and schmooze like he was one of them. Nobody would need to know the truth about why he’d left academia.

  * * *

  Late spring. Time to weed the front and side yards and trim back the bushes. My brothers and I were supposed to help our father with this job, but I didn’t like the sight of him with a hedge trimmer in his hands.

  I was supposed to follow him around and fill the yard trash can with cuttings. My brothers always had the more difficult chores, vacuuming the pool or weeding or raking leaves or shoveling snow, b
ut I had to do my share, too. After a few minutes I started sneezing and couldn’t stop because of my allergies. My father scowled at me.

  That was pretty fucking convenient for me, wasn’t it? I was always trying to take the easy way out, wasn’t I?

  When my mother came outside, he told her I was trying to get out of my chores again.

  This time, I remember distinctly, she tried to reason with him. “She’s allergic to the grass and pollen.”

  “She’s a little spoiled brat, is what she is. There’s always an excuse when it comes time to work.”

  I kept sneezing. I sneezed five and six times in a row. I wasn’t making up the sneezes, but I made a show of them. Sometimes I rebelled by pushing back against the fear, by pushing back against him. I couldn’t help my allergies, could I?

  He told me to go into the kitchen to take some Dimetapp. I returned to my post by the bushes with a wad of tissues and complaints about the heat. I had a headache, I felt like throwing up.

  He took off his yard gloves and turned off the hedge trimmer but held on to it while he let me have it. Ungrateful. I was a priss, just like my mother, he muttered half to himself and half to me. He had to be careful because we were outside, where the neighbors could hear. It was safer in the front yard, but I ran into the house to get away from him anyway. Fuck him.

  I ran up the stairs. I was sick of being terrified of my father and how much he might hurt me. I didn’t care anymore if he hit me. Let him. My daily vigilance had exhausted me. Nobody loved me, I told myself. I was certain nobody ever would.

  * * *

  Josh and Mark’s Scout troop met in the basement of Central Synagogue, where they hoisted the American flag before every meeting, wearing their olive green and tan uniforms, sashes festooned with merit badges. Once every year or two they went on a wilderness adventure trip, usually camping in eastern Canada or canoeing or tubing upstate. Both my brothers were serious about scouting, especially Mark. By the time he was seventeen, he was a couple of badges away from becoming an Eagle Scout. Eagle Scout was a big deal. It could help you get into college and get scholarships, and it meant you were an upstanding and moral citizen, a model young man. There’d even be an article about you in the Rockville Centre News and Owl. You could get the most merit badges in the shortest amount of time at Boy Scout camp, and every summer my brothers would drive up with their scoutmaster and some other boys from their troop. They swam across the lake and practiced survival skills and lifesaving and tying rope into knots and archery and whatever else went on in the woods. It wasn’t unusual for a father to join the troop as a chaperone and sort of senior counselor. They needed volunteers. One summer when my brothers were in high school and I was in middle school, our father signed up. They’d all three be gone for two whole weeks in August.

  Two weeks! I wanted those weeks to last forever. All summer long, I lay in bed in the mornings, fantasizing about taking care of my mother and showing her how good I could be. I counted down the days until we’d be alone. I wanted to prove how nice things would be if she would gather the strength to leave him, even if it did mean selling the house and moving to an apartment, an idea that was sounding better and better to me. I’d bike all the way to Brower Avenue for bagels and make her breakfast. She would play with my hair and I would rub her feet. We would read at the table. I would bring her flowers.

  When my father and brothers took their army-navy-store duffel bags and backpacks and pulled out of the driveway, my mother sat in the kitchen and called her friend Madeline to make a date for shopping and lunch. Then she brought her magazines and novel to the chaise lounge in the backyard. We had two wood patio deck chairs that reclined at three different positions. The yellow cushions were waterproof, but my father made sure to bring them into the garage every night, so they’d stay nice longer. With him gone, there’d be a chair for each of us. But my mother wasn’t thinking about me. She was exhausted. Did I know how hard she worked? She deserved this time to herself with an almost empty house. She shooed me away.

  I was crushed. On an afternoon walk with a friend, I brought home a sad bunch of yellow daisies from a vacant lot, but my mother was allergic and had to leave them on the back stoop, and the next morning, when I threw out Snoopy’s poop after taking him for a walk, I found them in the garbage.

  A few days later, without warning, my father and brothers came home early. Josh and Mark looked sweaty and dirty and sunburned and spent, but not in the normal just back from sleeping in the woods tired and satisfied and ready for a good night’s sleep and a hot meal kind of way. It seemed like they were hiding something. My father was pissed off. They dropped their bags in the laundry room and went upstairs to shower. Nobody explained why they were home unexpectedly. Nobody said anything. I wouldn’t find out until years later, when I went to a diner with my brothers to try and talk to them about the abuse. Mark confessed to me that my father had been kicked out of Boy Scout camp for hitting Josh and another camper.

  * * *

  His senior year of high school, Mark started going jogging, which meant he was sneaking out to have sex with his secret non-Jewish girlfriend who lived a few blocks away. She was blond and pretty and got good grades, and I was jealous of her. My mother didn’t want to know anything about it. He wasn’t allowed to take her to the prom or even bring her over. Mark let this injustice go. He was busy applying to colleges and determined to get into the University of Pennsylvania, where he hoped to major in business at Wharton. He and my father had argued about the amount to fill in on the financial aid forms under suggested parental contribution. My father wrote in five thousand dollars. Which Mark said was a joke, and the reason he didn’t get accepted early decision. But Mark would end up with a full-ride academic scholarship to the undergraduate business program at Washington University in St. Louis.

  With Mark gone, I gave up on the idea of being rescued. Instead, I started biking around my neighborhood in the late afternoons and on weekends, trying to get lost. I’d ride along the familiar streets, zooming left and then right and then left again, until I confused myself and didn’t know how to find my way back home.

  FIVE

  BY EIGHTH GRADE, I spent most of my time at home by myself. It was a relief. My parents stayed downstairs, and I stayed in my room. Josh was in eleventh grade and avoiding our parents, who were on his case about grades and SAT prep. When he was home, his friends were usually over. They’d rent movies from the video store or play poker or pool, and I would hang around the family room or basement until Josh kicked me out. Sometimes I’d call Mark at college and talk to him with the door closed, but there was only so much I could say. Not being able to confide in anyone about the truth of my home life, I started a diary. One middle school entry: My dad’s such a jerk. He blew up at me. He didn’t hit me, but he called me bitch and every other curse word. Dad’s a dick. What else can I say about it?

  But I was afraid of what would happen when my mother found my diary and read it. (She didn’t hesitate to search my brothers’ room for contraband.) I soon quit writing down what was happening, and instead, hidden away in my bedroom, I’d escape by cheating on my diet and eating pistachios and rereading my favorite paperbacks. I devoured Seventeenth Summer, the 1942 novel chronicling a chaste summer romance in Wisconsin; and Flowers in the Attic, about an abused and incestuous brother-sister couple; and a retro girlie romance-laden take on the Choose Your Own Adventure books; and Sunshine by Norma Klein, a love story about a young mother dying of cancer; and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

  In Ascent, our school’s gifted program, I lip-synced to Madonna and wrote and directed a soap opera–style short featuring my drama club classmates. (My new friend Kathy and I were loyal viewers of Santa Barbara, starring Robin Wright.) For a book report in language arts, I decided to do my project on Sybil, a book I’d borrowed from my mother that told the supposedly true story of a sexually, physically, and emotionally abused girl who grows up to suffer from multiple personality diso
rder. Reading in bed with my feet tucked inside a blanket, I devoured the abuse scenes. What Sybil went through was far worse, I assured myself, than what happened to me, yet I found myself relating. On the other hand, since her abuse was so much more serious, maybe mine didn’t count. Sybil’s mother had tied her up and given her forced enemas and stuck fingers inside her. All my father did was yell and hit. All my mother did was stay.

  The assignment was to construct a diorama depicting an important moment from the book we’d read. Using my mother’s old shoe box that once housed her good black leather boots, I spent a weekend on the floor of my room, reconstructing one of the sexual abuse scenes. I wasn’t very crafty, and perhaps the teacher didn’t get what I was going for, but in my mind, at least, I tried to stay faithful to the book: Sybil, symbolized by a Little People figure, hanged by a lightbulb cord from the ceiling while her mother, a smiling yellow-haired Barbie doll, pointed a kitchen knife in the direction of her vagina.

  Our dioramas were displayed in the classroom for weeks. My classmates looked at me funny when they saw mine. I got an A+.

  When I wasn’t reading, I watched too much TV. I watched The Best Little Girl in the World and wished I could have the discipline to become anorexic and weigh under 100 pounds so I could go live in a nice hospital. I watched The Day After and fantasized about a nuclear holocaust putting an end to my problems. I wished my parents would break up, like the parents in Kramer vs. Kramer. Or else I wanted to divorce my parents, like Drew Barrymore did in Irreconcilable Differences.

  When Mommie Dearest was first shown on broadcast television, I somehow got away with staying up to watch it. Kitschy as it might seem looking back, Faye Dunaway as the actress Joan Crawford screaming, “No more wire hangers!” at her daughter, Christina, was by far the closest, most realistic depiction of my home life I’d ever encountered. This was pretty much what was happening to me. I recognized it all: the occasional, unpredictable violence and name-calling, the hurling of everyday objects, and the importance placed on keeping up appearances. For years I watched that movie every time it came on. Once or twice on a weekend afternoon my father came in the room and watched with me for a few minutes, not saying much.