With my sister and me away at college, my mother and father took long hikes in the woods together and went to chamber music concerts and treated each other to dinner when either of them could afford it. They still fought, of course—one night she kicked him out of the house and didn’t let him back in until the weekend was over—and she was still getting used to buying two little bags of groceries rather than four full ones, but that would change. He’d fall asleep early, snoring in the living room with a magazine folded across his chest, and awake at sunrise to run around the block a few times before he went to work. She’d stay up late, watching PBS and writing letters—to me, to my sister, to historians at Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA who corrected errors in the articles she now wrote for the state historical society’s monthly magazine. My parents would see each other at dinner, though, and often had long and heated conversations about philosophy or politics or money, which usually ended in both of them leaving the house and stomping around the front lawn until it got dark.
She saw no point in going to all the bother of making a lavish dinner for just the two of them, so she’d bake a few blintzes or scramble some eggs or warm up leftovers and he would say, “This is dinner?” He’d throw down his napkin and, according to my mother, drive to the most expensive restaurant in town, where, while correcting page proofs for the suburban weekly he edited, he’d wolf down the specialties of the house and charge it to his business account. Or, if he stayed and they didn’t argue, they’d stare at their plates and nibble their food. Hardly a word would pass between them: only the sounds of chewing and swallowing, the dog padding through the house, coughs filling the silence, the cold clank of utensils doing their routine work. After dinner they’d fight like siblings about who would clean the table and who would scrape the dishes. Who would rinse? Who would stack? Who would take out the garbage? Who would wipe the table? Who indeed? And every night this absurdity was enacted.
Weekends they’d rake, water, and mow the lawn and trim the hedges, but he’d always leave the water running and flood the lawn, or he’d cut the grass so unevenly that it looked like an aerial shot of the midwestern states. My mother would march onto the front lawn and say, “See, Milt, this is how you rake. It’s very simple. You rake the leaves off the lawn into a pile in the gutter, then you put them in a barrel. Any idiot can do it.” Or she’d drag the hose from the backyard, attach it to a spigot underneath the front porch, and placing her thumb over the nozzle, spray the water low and full through the top of the grass so the lawn looked cool and fresh. “See, honey,” she would say, “is this so hard? Why is this so difficult for you?” He never had any answers, so they’d swear at each other or shake their heads or shake each other. Sometimes, my father said, they’d fall to their knees together and pound the earth, tearing out grass.
All day Saturday, she’d clean the house and he’d track mud across a carpet she’d just vacuumed. She’d scatter newspapers—often copies of his newspaper—across the waxed linoleum, and he’d be very careful to walk in the spaces in between the pages. Never would he think to come in the back door or notice that the kitchen floor had been mopped and was wet. Sometimes she’d get so mad she’d throw the mop at him. Sometimes she simply screamed.
Saturday nights they’d disagree about which movie to see and then disagree about the movie. He’d get lost driving there, then park on the wrong side of the street. After going to the bathroom, he’d lose his ticket stub and forget to zip up his zipper. He’d walk up and back in the aisle because he wouldn’t be able to find the row and she’d have to whisper, “Over here, Milt.” He’d squirm in his seat, ask her questions about the plot, play with his false teeth, hold his head when he got tired. “Milt,” she’d say, “do you have to do that? Would your head really fall off if you didn’t hold it?” If he liked the movie, she’d find it manipulative and sentimental; if he disliked it, she’d think it was original and provocative.
Or if they didn’t go to a movie, they’d go to a party, where my father would back into a corner whomever he could and talk about the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss or Sacco and Vanzetti or Alfred Dreyfus or the Hollywood Ten. If he got drunk enough, he’d tell stories in Yiddish, but no one would listen because this was my mother’s crowd. These weren’t recent Eastern European immigrants; these were American Jews who had made it a long time ago—lawyers and journalists and professors and psychiatrists who didn’t want to hear about the old country. My mother would laugh and gossip, and my father would wander away from the crowd and collapse on a bed in the guest room with Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd at his side. She’d wake him when the party was over, and driving home, she’d accuse him of being socially illiterate, which was an exaggeration with some basis in fact: he had a way of standing very close to you and talking very loud and poking his finger into your chest to make sure you got the point.
Sunday, though, provided a respite from all this ugliness. She’d make a big breakfast for him and he’d let her have the sections of the newspaper she most highly prized. Then they’d change into their tennis whites. She’d wear a big, floppy hat to protect her skin from the sun, and he’d wear a tight cap to cover his bald head and prevent the sun from blinding him when he hit overhead smashes. Hand in hand they’d walk to the park, where they’d reserved a court, and they’d rally back and forth to get warmed up. She could neither bend low nor move more than a few flat-footed steps in any direction, but put a ball waist high and in front of her and she could sock it, so he’d try to hit the ball directly at her, and if he hit it a few inches too high or half a step out of her way, she’d wave at it with her racket and glower at him. Usually they’d play mixed doubles against another couple, and he would want to win so badly he’d rush onto her side of the court to take shots away from her. Whenever this happened, she would take extraordinarily long water breaks.
My father would send me every issue of his weekly newspaper, which I was supposed to read thoroughly, mark up with my comments, and mail back to him. His paper consisted almost exclusively of advertising, and what few stories he wrote were usually features about local merchants who were not yet advertising. He wrote long windy sentences that recalled, he said, early Mencken. For instance: “With the city fathers giving their official blessings—and some 250 mothers and fathers seated in the bleachers, giving their partial blessings and vociferous cheers—the city soccer players launched their season on Saturday with a bang or, more accurately, a boot.” He’d take photographs for the paper with his Polaroid camera, but he never learned how to roll on the gloss or when to peel off the backing, and the pictures always turned out fuzzy and faded, like very late Mencken.
My mother didn’t send me the articles (which were always odes to the Watts Towers or John Steinbeck or the Donner Party) that she wrote for the historical society magazine. Instead, she’d type up passages from novels she was reading and mail them to me. The passages would always be extremely pejorative summaries of a male character who reminded her of my father; this paragraph from Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird is a perfect example: “Joe Allston has always been full of himself, uncertain, dismayed, dissatisfied with his life, his country, his civilization, his profession, and himself. He has always hunted himself in places where he has never been; he has always been trying to thread some needle with a string that was raveled at both ends. He has always been hungry for some continuity and assurance and sense of belonging, but has never had ancestors or descendants or place in the world. Little orphan Joe, what a sad case.”
Paula, a sophomore at Berkeley, and I would write letters to each other in which we expressed our pity for people such as our parents who thrived on chewing up the furniture; our determination to avoid similarly disastrous entanglements in our own lives; and our certainty that our correspondence would someday be valuable because both of us were destined to become famous in the fields of politics and literature, respectively. What did we know? We were twenty and nineteen, respectively, and knew nothing yet of love.