“Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?” my father asked as he reached over to pour a cup of coffee for me from the old-fashioned percolator.
I had just told my parents over Entenmann’s crumb cake that I planned to quit my job at a children’s publishing company in Manhattan. I yearned for windows with a view and air that had not been recycled through ventilation systems.
“For once in your life would ya just stick with something?” My father banged his fist on the table for emphasis, though not particularly hard.
I traced my fingers along one of the pink and blue flowers on the kitchen wallpaper in the house where I had grown up. “I haven’t found anything I like just yet.” I shrugged.
“You quit everything.”
“I do not quit everything. I just try a lot more things than most people.”
My mother stood up from the table. “Is this going to be like the time you quit Brownies? Robin Schumaker’s mother said there was no more room, but she finally agreed to squeeze you in. And then you quit.” She pulled out a chair, climbed up, and began rearranging glassware on the top shelf of the cabinet.
“I was five! They made me dunk for apples. All those little mouths reaching into that big bowl like piranhas.”
“How about Arizona?”
“Let’s just make a list,” I said.
Some people pick a college based on academics or sports programs. I looked at a map and picked the farthest possible point from my parents’ house. My college experience in Arizona lasted all of five minutes before I did an about-face back to the East Coast. My dormmates had never met a Jewish girl before, and when I referred to pizza as a pie, they had no idea what I was talking about. I knew I’d never fit in.
“Do you ever think about getting married?” my mother asked, looming over me on the chair.
I looked up at her. “How could I not when you’ve been asking me that question since I was four years old?” I reached to grab a Macy’s catalog from a pile of mail on the flaking yellow radiator and began flipping through.
“Nice Jewish girls go to college, get married, and have babies. Tell her, Richard.”
“It’s true,” my father said, nodding.
Getting married and becoming a mother was my fate. It had been drilled into my head since I was a preschooler and my mother made me practice swaddling my Holly Hobby doll. Now here I was at twenty-six listening to how I had failed to live up to my parents’ grand plans.
“Do you want me to find you someone?” my mother asked as she turned back to the cabinet. Perhaps she’d find someone up there.
“No, I don’t want you to find me someone.” I folded down a page of the catalog, noting a pair of Steve Madden boots.
My father shook his head, taking a sip of coffee. “Boy, do I feel sorry for him,” he murmured into his cup. As if this “him” was just waiting in the wings to take over my parents’ burden of dealing with me. This hypothetical man I was to marry and procreate with had been talked up and personified so much it began to feel like a Where’s Waldo? game. I just had to find him among a plethora of funny-looking characters and striped shirts.
“This quitting your job nonsense—bad idea, Kabeen,” my father continued, and I could tell the lecture was almost over. He had been calling me Kabeen all my life, and when he said it now, I knew he was resigned. My father worried that whatever decisions I made would either kill me or, worse, mean I’d have to move back into their house.
“Hebrew school!” my mother shouted out as though she had just solved the final puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. She turned to face me, nodding triumphantly, still on the chair and holding the Shabbat candlesticks she was preparing for Friday night’s dinner.
“Yes, Mom. I’m a Hebrew school dropout. I will carry that shame for the rest of my life.”
My father leaned in. “I was actually proud of you for that one,” he whispered. “Saved me on the bat mitzvah.” He winked at me. We were observant Jews at my mother’s insistence, but my father only begrudgingly went along.
“I dropped out of Hebrew school because Mark used to beat the daylights out of me on the walk home.”
“I really wish you and your brother got along.” My mother sighed.
She hopped off the chair, set the Shabbat candles on the stove top, and began scooping out the melted wax from the previous week with a butter knife.
“Think this through, Kabeen,” my father warned, taking the last forkful of crumb cake.
So that’s what I did.
While trying to sort out this latest dilemma, I booked a trip to Alaska to clear my head. While there, I strapped on crampons for the first time and climbed a glacier. On that massive chunk of ice, two older Canadian men with thick beards, whom I had just met moments before, offered to suspend me over a deep, plummeting crevasse so I could peer into oblivion. Each took one of my arms, and with total trust, I leaned all the way forward. The frigid wind whipped my hair around, the cold stinging my eyes. I could see the hard, unforgiving ice and the blue water rushing beneath. I could see both the permanent and the temporary, the sharp edges, the sacredness of it all. The very second I was upright I knew that I would never work in an office again. I had looked into the depths of eternity, and there were no cubicles down there.
I had never considered leaving the city, but now I could see the grandness of nature, which I was clearly missing, surrounded instead by lunch trucks, orange and white steam pipes, and relentless jackhammers. After Alaska I began looking for a way out of my comfort zone and back into the sense of reverence I had felt on that glacier. Perhaps there was a life for me beyond the city.
I signed up for an outdoor educational program through AmeriCorps (what I thought of as Peace Corps lite) that would take me to the wilderness of upstate New York. I would be educating children, building trails, and doing completely unglamorous things like shoveling piles of rocks out of trailers. My father was livid. He couldn’t believe I was quitting my job “to live in the woods with the freaks,” as he put it. He stopped talking to me and refused to help me move out of my Victorian Bay Ridge apartment, a rare find. Affordable, an open floor plan, original sconces—I knew I’d never rent another one like it. After handing the keys over to my landlord, I spent the night celebrating my twenty-seventh birthday dancing on the bar at the famous Hogs and Heifers Saloon in the Meatpacking District, my girlfriends and I tossing our bras into the crowd. I stayed at my parents’ house for the next three days before heading into the woods. Each time I passed my father in the long hallway, he gave me a sidelong look of exasperation, mumbling under his breath. His disappointment broke my heart.
On the first day of the AmeriCorps program, I showed up to the trailhead in a pair of bright red Urban Outfitters corduroys and hiking boots with two-inch platform heels.
“Weintraub, you’re going to need to be waterproof. Get yourself some GORE-TEX,” snapped the corps leader, a rugged thirtysomething backwoods boy.
“What’s GORE-TEX?” I whispered to the girl standing next to me. She gave me the once-over and then lifted the collar of her jacket as if that were supposed to clear the whole thing up. The next morning I overheard a discussion about frost warnings and black ice; the former sounded ominous, while I assumed the latter was just country-speak for dirty snow. I was definitely outside my comfort zone.
By the end of that week, I started to get with the program, rising at dawn for early morning hikes, donning thermals and trail runners, and tying back my unruly blond curls into a sensible ponytail. By the third week I was slamming my very own pickax against concrete to refurbish a Habitat for Humanity house. The corps leader walked by and whispered in my ear, “You surprised me. Figured you would have flagged down the first Greyhound and hightailed it out of here by now.”
I went home for Rosh Hashanah wondering if my father was talking to me yet. He refused to go to synagogue, so we went without him. While my mother, brother, and I were Conservative Jews, he had been raised Reformed and didn’t feel a spiritual pull to sit in temple for three hours listening to prayers in a language he didn’t understand. This stratification of Judaism is confusing, so I’ll explain it as it relates to bacon. In Judaism the major players are: Reformed—eat bacon and love it; Conservative—eat bacon only in diners; Orthodox—never touch bacon but secretly wonder what it tastes like; Ultra-Orthodox—no way, feh, it’s treif; and Chassidic—what is this bacon of which you speak?
On a few occasions my mother had caught my father practicing his own special version of Judaism in the house, like cooking steak in a frying pan instead of in the broiler. (According to Jewish law, meat cannot be cooked in a pan unless it has been soaked and salted to make sure the blood has first been drained.) If my mother unexpectedly came home while my father was cooking steak this way, he’d yell to me and my brother in code, “We’ve got to paint the house,” and we’d all scramble to hide the evidence, opening windows and spraying Lysol to get rid of the fumes. My mother was never fooled.
After returning from morning prayer, I sat down on the floor next to him while he watched football, or maybe it was hockey.
“You like it up there?” His cigarette burned a thin thread through the air.
“It’s okay.” And that was it.
My father was my best friend, and it weighed on me when we disagreed. I was relieved we were past this latest quarrel. That evening, after stuffing ourselves with egg salad, kneidlach, tzimmes, and other holiday fare, I sat on his lap in his Archie Bunker chair while we gathered in the living room. He was soft and rounding with age, and when I placed my head on his shoulder, I could feel his flesh give.
The next morning, before I left to go back upstate to my AmeriCorps post, I went into my parents’ bedroom to say goodbye. My mother had left for work, but my father was still sleeping. He always slept on his side with one hand resting under his stubbled cheek. He had a partial grin as though his dreams were lovely. I kissed him on his brow and then gently patted down his too-long, brownish-gray hair, which he always insisted was blond.
A little over a week later, I received a voice mail from my mother that my father needed emergency stomach surgery. No biggie. The stomach isn’t near any major organs. I’d talk to him in the morning. Still, I sat vigil by the phone waiting for word that he was okay. At midnight my mother called again. Everything was fine, she said, but I could sense a commotion in the background. She quickly hung up. I felt sick. A deep instinct pushed me homeward. I gathered a few corps members to give me a ride back to the city, a four-hour drive in the middle of the night. Cell service didn’t yet exist in that part of upstate New York so I had no way to get updates.
When I arrived my brother opened the door to my family’s two-story brick house. Standing on the red stoop, the same stoop where my father had taught me to button up my crimson faux-fur coat that he had designed himself while working in the garment industry, the same red stoop where he had shown me how to hit a baseball with my plastic bat and years later snuck me my first drag of a cigarette, that was the place where my brother looked at me and sobbed, “He’s dead.” Somehow I had already known.
My father had been on blood thinners, and they “just couldn’t get the blood to clot.” An aneurysm, the doctor had said. The surgeon told my mother that he kept pouring and pouring blood into my father, but nothing worked. I didn’t know exactly what he meant by “pouring,” but I envisioned him standing over my father’s open body with measuring cups. My mother invited the corps members who’d driven me home into the house to eat, but I knew better and asked them to give us privacy. I shut the door, climbed up the long flight of steps to our house, and pressed my wet face to the hallway wall to keep from collapsing on the floor, where my mother and brother were wailing in each other’s arms. “I wasn’t finished. We weren’t finished,” I cried over and over, slamming my hand into the wall. We had so much more to talk about; I had so much more to learn from him.
It is tradition that Jews bury their own dead. Most of the time, it’s through a symbolic gesture in which each mourner takes a turn shoveling a small amount of dirt over the casket. Whatever is left, the gravediggers complete. “It means we take care of our own,” my mother told us. I was in the front row during the graveside service, and when I turned to take the shovel, I saw that over a hundred people had shown up, no small surprise since my father was a pretty solitary guy who hated just about everyone he met.
I threw a pile of dirt on my father’s coffin and put the shovel in the ground for the next person. And then I noticed, after each person had taken a turn, instead of going back to their cars, they stayed. They kept shoveling. I looked around at the faces of the friends I had grown up with, their parents, and cousins I hadn’t seen in years. We would do the job ourselves.
I climbed to the top of the big dirt mound and began shoveling heavy loads of earth, rain pouring down, streaks of mud not only on my face but on the faces of all the mourners. This was what it meant to have community. More shovels appeared, perhaps from the gravediggers standing discreetly off to the side. The hole was almost filled, the wet ground devouring the simple maple coffin, when my mother’s shriek pierced the quick cadence of dirt being heaped into the grave. “Wait! I can’t find my keys!” she yelled. We all stopped and looked at her, then toward the grave. She rifled through her purse. “They may have fallen in!” I looked down at my clothing, my red shirt stained brown. My father’s good friend Paulie, his suit ruined and his yarmulke sliding off his head, stood next to his grown sons, and all were poised to either start digging or continue shoveling. “Okay, okay,” my mother called out, “I found them. Thank God, we don’t have to dig him up. Keep going.”
Her friend Zahava came up beside her. “Gail, we’ll get through this together.” And then she wrapped my mother in her arms.
After the funeral, we sat Shiva for a week. I couldn’t relate to the ritual of sitting on wooden boxes while people streamed through our home offering us chunks of babka and other cakes, paying awkward condolences. By the third day, my best friend from childhood, Rachel, an Orthodox Jew who had married right out of college and already had two kids, told me to take a break and come over to her house, where she handed me a big bowl of ice cream and led me to her couch. “Cry. That’s what you need to do. I’m going shopping for Shabbat.” After she left with her kids in tow, I put the bowl with the already melting ice cream on the end table and stared at a small crack in the wall for the next two hours.
I stayed in AmeriCorps for another two and a half months, trying to pretend it was no big deal, his death. But I cried every night, and familiar Brooklyn was calling me home. I packed my duffle, wondering if my father would be disappointed in me for quitting. Or would he understand this time? I moved in with my mother, who was now alone in a big house, and began focusing on my freelance-writing career.
Then two months after my twenty-eighth birthday, a little over a year after my father died, I headed back to the country, this time taking both my North Face GORE-TEX and my Tahari evening wear, feeling that I had some unfinished business left “in the woods with the freaks.” I wanted to be outdoors again, to hike, to gaze upon fall colors and expansive views. Alaska had crystalized that for me. I was born in Brooklyn. I came from Brooklyn, but that borough’s deep vibration of elevated subway cars and flashing neon signs no longer felt right. This time I wouldn’t be heading back to the camaraderie of AmeriCorps. Now I would find my own way.
As I was packing the last of my belongings, standing in my childhood bedroom, I began to understand why my father had been so against my leaving Brooklyn. He didn’t want me to go. It was as simple as that. It wasn’t because he was afraid I’d never make enough money to support myself or that I’d be eaten by bears; it was that he wanted me to stay close to home. I don’t know that it would have stopped me, this knowledge, but it would have made me understand how deeply he loved me. I stood there for a moment longer, forgetting the task at hand. There is a saying that a boy becomes a man when he loses his father. But what about a girl? What does she become?