CHAPTER ONE

Gotchernose

Isang in my four-year-old voice: “Carrots grow from carrot seeds, I planted them, I grew them, I watered them, I pulled the weeds, carrots grow from carrot seeds.” My father’s sudden entrance interrupted my music. He limped in, barefoot, fat stomach preceding him, one hand twirling his thick black curls. Tummel, my mother called the psychic commotion that attended him. The Yiddish word for turbulence, energy, chaos, excitement. Noise and hilarity, noise and calamity. My mother trailed in his wake, a head taller, broad-shouldered, long-necked, dignified, her light brown hair pinned back from her pale and tender face. Underneath her modest shirtwaist dress, the boned girdle that kept her, she said, from “falling apart.”

“You remember Roy?” my father’s black eyes flashed and bore into me.

“Ira, zug gornisht,” my mother said. “Shah. You never know when to leave well enough alone.” She was worn out from years of serving as my father’s missing censor.

My ears pricked up like a dog’s; my heart began to race with agitated excitement. I was a tuning fork resonating to my father’s pitch.

Roy was the counter man at the La Crescenta post office that played a crucial twice-daily role in the running of The Business, the insurance agency my parents operated out of the third bedroom of our house. At the beginning and end of each workday, my mother took me with her on her runs.

I’d hang on her slippery, stockinged leg until she’d pick me up and seat me on the worn wooden counter, where a panorama of sights would open before me: men in bluish-gray uniforms wheeling massive bins of mail. A medley of scents: Vitalis, sweat, and tobacco; ink, glue, paper, and paper dust. Then Roy—bald but for a few strands of hair, his face craggy but sweet. He looked like Jimmy Durante to me. They seemed the same person, or rather iterations of some common breed, in the same way the cocker spaniels in our neighborhood looked mostly alike.

“You’re just going to upset her, and who’ll be the one trying to calm her down when she’s running around the house tonight hysterical? Let her be a child,” my mother said.

“Eva, she’s no ordinary child. She’s very precocious—”

“—and has an overactive imagination you feed. Shah! Zug gornisht.”

“What?” I said. “Daddy, tell me. Tell me!” My mother was always trying to keep my father’s special secrets from me. I wanted to be in on everything.

“You know, Roy, the man at the post office who fools around with you?”

Roy would swipe his thumb, coarse and reeking of tobacco, its whorls embossed with the blue ink used to stamp packages, against the side of my nose. He’d make an abrupt snatching gesture and I would startle, just as I did when the striped clown sprang out of my jack-in-the-box at Pop! goes the weasel, the tension between predictability and surprise culminating in pleasure. Then Roy would display the same thumb poking out between two fingers.

“Gotchernose,” he’d say. Then he’d sweep his hand back across my face and reveal his empty palm to suggest no harm done! and put my nose back on. Roy’s trick said that even the most dire loss could be reversed. You could make time go backward.

My mother shook her head and gave up. She was deluding herself to think that any speech of my father’s once begun could be aborted. She sank into the quiet splendor of her own defeat.

“Roy has died of lung cancer,” my father declaimed in his faux British stage actor’s voice. His professorial mode—formal and at the same time, intimate—implied that the dispassionate imparting of knowledge constituted his highest parental obligation.

“You’ll never see him again.”

A rush of unease started at my feet and settled in my stomach. Never. The unease swam up into my chest.

“He’s gone forever.”

Forever? I held my breath, sensing the possibility of some monumental loss, and instinctively tensed every sphincter in my body to avoid it.

My father’s black eyes riveted on mine. I looked back with equal intensity. I had my father’s dark hair and eyes, his full lips, and round expressive Semitic face. We matched.

In a flash, my father’s mood shifted the weather again, as he revved back up to excitement. “This is your very first death,” he said, “the first person you’ve known who’s died.”

I tried to take this information in. Death was what happened to my nine-year-old brother Paul’s fish when we found one of them floating in the bowl, belly up, bloated, scales sloughing off. With Paul crying in protest beside him, my father would snatch it with a net, carry it across the green living room carpet (my mother scolding him for dripping filthy fish water all the way) and flush it down the toilet.

If I didn’t comprehend fully that death could happen to people, my father’s words got my attention. First meant that other deaths would follow, and yours that Roy’s death belonged to me.

Whether through genes or upbringing, I was a child already overly attuned to loss. I grieved the duck’s head the handyman cut off my wooden potty seat to accommodate my growing legs; I felt sorry for metal railings gone to rust. If my mother disappeared from my sight even momentarily, I wailed, feeling like she had disappeared forever.

My mother saw the growing distress on my face and shook her head.

“Ira! Will I ever get through to you about how suggestible she is?”

At which point, my father repeated a typical pattern: after terrifying me, he rushed in to offer fatherly succor. “Roy will live on in your memories,” he said. “You can keep him alive in your memories.”

Great. Now I was a four-year-old responsible for keeping a dead man alive.

Even before Roy’s death, my father had begun to instruct me in the marvels and burdens of memory. He was dressed in his usual outfit—Jockey shorts—and in his favorite position, on the living room sofa with an infant’s splayed thighs and bent knees, two fingers poised over his eyebrow as if to physically trap the thoughts that moved too turbulently through his brain.

“Debeleh, wait.”

I startled and stopped.

“Something about how you walked by me just now reminded me of myself one day when I was a child. It was an ordinary day just like this, and I was sitting in the kitchen of our apartment in Detroit. I decided to conduct an experiment. Could I will myself to remember a random moment? And out of the blue, that moment came back to me, clear as a bell. You can do it too; you can will your memory.”

I wanted to be in on the experiment. “Okay, Daddy, show me,” I said.

“Look around the room. Take everything in.”

I panned the living room: the picture window that faced Teasley Street, the aqua walls, the deep green carpet, the red leather armchair, the open display shelves dividing the living room from the dining room. Their contents posed a challenge—all those figurines. My favorite: a painted ceramic squirrel that my mother brought down sometimes so I could touch him, and then put back on a high shelf so I could not break him.

“Okay, shut your eyes and make sure you’ve captured everything in the room.”

I concentrated. “Okay, Daddy, now what?”

“Say it along with me: Remember this moment, remember this moment.”

If innocence is freedom from regret about the past and worry about the future, I was innocent still, residing like a dog in a perennial present tense. The future extended no further than the next meal, or the next day, or the next birthday, or some vaguely imagined day when I would be grown up. What my father said thrust me simultaneously forward into my future and back into my past, and then even further back to the time when my father was himself a child, a yaw of time before I existed. Just realizing that I had not been there, had not existed, made me queasy. Hadn’t everything begun with me? Suddenly I realized: this moment, the very moment we were living, would soon be past, gone, lost. We were helpless to stop it. All we had was memory.

“Remember this moment, remember this moment,” I chanted along with him, beginning that day to tell the story of myself in my head.

One morning. I remember it as a time before my father’s lesson about death. I hopped from my single bed into my parents’ double and snuggled into the space between them. My mother wore her slinky, sky blue nightgown. I wrapped my arms around her neck and abandoned myself to the earthy sweetness of her just-waking body. Lush, hairless, porcelain. The hug only lasted a moment. “I have things to do,” she said.

My father held back, inviting me to play. Heavy stubble framed his fat cheeks, his full round lips. He held out his hands to me. He had been born with three fingers on one hand and two on the other, a short arm that did not rotate, and a short leg that required a built-up shoe. Although other children in the neighborhood sometimes reacted with skittishness to my father’s physical deformities, I did not find them disturbing; I found my father’s body wondrous.

I regarded the vast countryside of his chest and abdomen covered by a forest of soft black fur. Two hillocks of pink nipples protruded from the dark mass. He pushed a birthmark on his stomach and stuck out his tongue. “Pfffft,” he said. I laughed and examined the pinpricks of white on his enormous pink tongue that resided in a mouth cavernous enough for me to crawl into.

“Pfffft,” he repeated. I touched the whitish mole on the left side of his stomach and his tongue darted in; I poked it again, and his tongue darted back out. My father’s body had turned into another of my battery-operated toys, like the dog who barked and stood on his hind legs or the bunny who drank from a cup of carrot juice. Daddy’s body: personal funhouse amusement.

A sudden impulse sprang my father up from the bed and across the room. He turned back to me, now wearing his gorilla mask. Hunched over, he grunted, scratched under his arms, and hijacked my mother as she walked back into the room. She shrieked as he grabbed at her bottom, at her breasts, in between her legs. She jerked forward and back, batting his hands away.

“Cut it out, Ira,” she said, laughing at first. But he kept clutching, as if what resided between her legs was a small animal eluding his grasp.

“Stop it already, Ira,” she said, turning cold. “You never know when to stop.”

He turned to me, and I scrambled across the bed to escape him. He pushed his gorilla face next to mine and whimpered. We both froze for a moment, and then he began to bounce up and down and shake the bed. I scampered away to the wall, cornered. Enraptured. Afraid. One minute he was just my father wearing a mask, and the next, he’d turned into a gorilla.

That was the shape-shifting father I had at age four—would-be actor, teller of dark truths, funhouse amusement, sexy gorilla, and his favorite role: lay rabbi of the La Crescenta Valley Community Jewish Center.

In our overwhelmingly Christian, far-right Republican community, a motley assortment of families with varying degrees of Jewish identity built a modest cinderblock synagogue. Its walls became a target for swastikas; vagrants broke in and spilled the sacramental wine. Itinerant clergy performed brises, bar mitzvahs, funerals, and weddings. My father led Sabbath services, taught Sunday school, and officiated at Shivas, leading week-long nightly prayers at the homes of the bereaved. He’d learned the Jewish liturgy from his maternal grandfather, Abraham. When Abraham was struck and killed by a train shortly before Ira’s bar mitzvah, Ira declared himself an atheist. Thirty years later, he got on the bimah each week and dared God to make an appearance. The pulpit offered a stage; a good enough performance might even restore his faith.

Friday night Sabbath services. I perched on the edge of my metal folding chair and looked up at the carved wooden Jewish stars, the only adornment on the plain concrete walls, and at the gold embroidered Jewish stars on the satin cloths that covered the three podiums, and then at my father who presided behind the center podium, his unruly curls slicked back under a yarmulke. Behind him twin lions on the doors of the ark protected the sacred Torah scrolls inside.

Ira looked over the top of his reading glasses and scanned the room. He cleared his throat and began, “The Lord reigneth; may the earth be glad; let the multitude of islands rejoice. Clouds and darkness surround Him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne.” This was his rabbinic voice, fervent and rousing. The room stilled. Under his mother’s direction, five-year-old Freddie Hindberg lay down across two folding chairs and shut his eyes. All the energy in the atmosphere converged in the lush cadences of my father’s voice. He made love to each word, intoning, gesticulating, swaying forward and back. I slipped under its sweet seductive trance. By the time I heard him pronounce, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God,” any distinction between him and the God he spoke for was lost.

For the Purim carnival that spring, my father exchanged his rabbi costume for drag. He wore a wig of platinum blonde banana curls, crimson lipstick, a demure white blouse, and a chambray floral printed skirt constructed from a tablecloth. His bra, of faded tan industrial strength cotton, looked like surplus from a World War II WAC. My mother wadded up old nylons that smelled of the floral sachet that lined her lingerie drawer and stuffed the cups. He stuffed more till his breasts could compete with the girth of his belly. If he was going to be a woman, he would be the über version.

The skirt’s four rows of deep pockets extended around his middle. The night before the carnival, he filled those pockets with prizes. For one ticket, I could reach into the capacious pockets of my father’s skirt and get a rubber airplane, a paper fan, a miniature man with a nylon parachute, or a little wooden dog who danced. I reached into my father’s pockets again and again, until I got what I wanted most, a ring with a glittering ruby red rhinestone.

Surrounded by screaming children, my father became Mae West. Hands on his hips, he proposed to one of the temple’s teenagers, “Hey, big boy, why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” He threw a kiss. The teenager blushed and looked away. With a shift of his hips and a glance over his shoulder, he became Marilyn Monroe, winking and preening and throwing kisses to her adoring fans. “Well, hello,” he said in her baby soft voice, “Wouldn’t you like to get to know me better?”

Sashaying around the Jewish Center auditorium, he became an all-forgiving, all-accepting Mother of Infinite Bounty. Unlike my mother who doled out her affection as if always in danger of running out, Ira in drag had an unlimited store.

For the talent show that day I performed too. My father put me in one of his white shirts that reached down to my ankles, and my mother held me as I stepped into his black wingtip shoes. As Ira hovered in the wings, I stood in front of the small crowd who began to titter. I looked down and recognized the temple’s youth, dressed up as Queen Esther, Mordecai, and Haman, their mothers in a row, with their stiffly sprayed hair.

I channeled Ira’s stage persona and in a booming voice recited the poem he had written: “I want to be my daddy / a big old fatso man / I want to be my daddy / ‘cause I’m his Number One fan. Yay!”

I had rehearsed the poem so many times that I almost felt as if I had written it, and for a time afterward—too long a time—I remained confused: whose poem was it, and whose desire?

Present, Bedroom, Midnight

I’m in bed with my husband, Gary, in a nest of books and papers of my own making. He’s reading a book about politics on his iPad. I’m writing notes on my Antioch students’ essays for a course on childhood trauma memoirs. They’re writing about before and after, how traumatic events can divide one’s perception of the world into life before and life after.

“Hey, be careful with that red marker,” Gary says. I have a tendency to inadvertently brand everything around me, pajamas, pillows, sheets, my arms, as if I’m trying to mark myself, create some outward sign to correspond to my inward defects.

“Tell me a joke,” Gary says.

Jokes are Gary’s version of a bedtime story. He has an encyclopedic recall and could tell himself a million of them. What he wants is to hear one in my voice.

“I don’t know any jokes,” I say.

“Unless they feature cute little animals,” he says.

“You mean, the one with the bunny or the one with the penguin?”

“Cute little animals pooping. Or humping. Those are the only jokes you can remember.”

“We all have our obsessions,” I say.

Gary is fond of the jokes his grandfather used to tell, with their old men new to this country eating smoked fish on park benches. To tell them well requires a Yiddish accent. My Yiddish accent is decidedly lacking, even though I heard my father tell the bawdiest possible versions of these jokes, reverting to Yiddish for the punch lines. Everyone who knew my father remembers his jokes, and his Har Har laugh that sounded like a comic strip rendition of a laugh. In a movie theatre, it could evoke a startle reflex in the surrounding patrons. I can still hear his voice as he told those jokes, the accelerating intensity, his trouble containing his own laughter along the way, his glee at the punch lines, the distinctive jarring cadence of his laugh. But I can’t remember a single joke. The accent and the jokes were something of my father’s I never picked up, and try as I might, I just can’t remember what was so funny.