CHAPTER FOUR

The Kindergarten Papers

Imade a name for myself in kindergarten by crying the entire first day. While the other children stood up together for the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, I pledged my allegiance to my mother by refusing to let go. When I would not stop crying, the teacher, Mrs. Bell, old and gnarled and severe, her skin and stiff hair both bluish gray, segregated me from the rest of the class in a chair by the window. “If you won’t stop crying, you can just sit here all by yourself,” she said.

In fact, I wasn’t strictly alone. From the chair I could see my mother—or more precisely—my mother’s car. Eva sat out in front of the school in our blue Desoto for the duration of that first day because she had promised to, and feared that otherwise I might go “berserk.”

My mother’s almost-presence, her being so near and yet out of reach, invisibly hidden inside the car, only increased the intensity of my grief. If I cried loud enough, I wondered, would she hear me? Would she know I had refused to let her go? Would she recognize it as proof of my love? I kept up a steady, nearly unbroken stream of my torment, my cries a string connecting us whether my mother could hear me or not.

At first, I was among a small chorus of kindergarten criers. Ultimately, the other children proved pushovers. Tom with the bristle brush haircut held out the longest. Cagey Mrs. Bell knelt down beside Tom and in a sing-songy voice that barely masked her impatience, told him everything his mother would be doing while he was in school.

“She’ll go to the store and buy food for you and Daddy,” she said. “She’ll clean and dust and vacuum the house, and then she will pick her big boy up and will be so proud of him for not crying, and you and Mommy will go home together and wait for Daddy to come home from work. Won’t that be nice?”

Tom whimpered two final, tiny whimpers, wiped his eyes with his fists, and was vanquished.

I couldn’t place myself in Mrs. Bell’s wholesome tableau. If Eva had not been sitting out in the car, she would not have been cheerfully cleaning house or shopping for dinner. She would have been in the office tending to my father. While I cried, I imagined the scene: all three phones ringing at once. Ira half-dressed in suit pants and a white V-necked t-shirt with one suspender falling over a shoulder, paced the office floor. Barefoot, twisting a strand of his curly black hair, he answered one phone and spoke jovially to a customer, while my mother held out the receiver of another. My parents mimed frantically to each other; she passed him a note; he wrote a furious note back.

If I were not being held prisoner in kindergarten, I would have been in the middle of it, “under foot,” as my mother called it, making impromptu beds for my dolls in the drawers of my father’s desk. I lay the doll in gently over a stack of phone books, covered her with a towel-blanket, and shut the drawer. My father, needing the phone book, flung the doll and its blanket across the room. I retrieved her, waited until he had moved on, and restored the doll to her rightful chamber.

“Debbie, please go in the other room and play or listen to records,” my mother would say. Jerry Lewis singing “Never Smile at a Crocodile” from the Disney cartoon “Peter Pan” was one of my favorites. I spent a lot of time in the bedroom alone, plotting plays in which my stuffies starred, and in which they all, from pandas to poodles, struggled to get along.

While I sat in the chair in kindergarten and cried, I kept reliving the moment of separation: me clutching at a fold of my mother’s taupe wool coat, burying my face and sobbing into its downy surface, angry at the affront of being parted. The harder I clung, the more my mother stiffened and withdrew.

“Stop it, you’re making a scene,” she said.

For one sweet moment, when Mrs. Bell was out of earshot, she stroked my head and said, “Oh cookie, shush,” softening her body against me, a small concession to solace. I wanted that moment to go on forever; hearing her call me cookie was the best thing, the only thing in the world that mattered. More cookie, more cookie, more hugging, I thought. But my mother was shamed by the rawness of my desire for her, the voltage of my longing.

My mother’s absence bore a hole through me—there was no me without her—nothing but what was missing. After a few minutes, the pain lessened a bit, but I made a decision to keep crying. To stop was to give in. If I acceded to the separation, my loss would become absolute. The only way I could hang on to any piece of my mother was to not let go, and to not let go was to keep on crying.

So I sat in my chair by the window for the remainder of the day. When the sobbing exhausted me, I kept my spirits up by whimpering, howling, hyperventilating, and making little animal sounds in the back of my throat. Mrs. Bell alternated between glaring at me and pretending I wasn’t there. When the other children looked at me with pity, she instructed them, “Just ignore the little crybaby.” They did not stop looking, but curiosity and compassion devolved into smug superiority.

The last half-hour of the day, Mrs. Bell told a story by moving figures on a felt board. The story lured, promised escape from the unresolvable tension between where I was, and my mother’s car, where I longed to be. Sammy, the seal, became separated from his family in the ocean but he recovered by joining the circus and becoming a star. Sammy balanced a ball on his nose, flapped his flippers on demand, and barked. The trainer rewarded him with sardines. The story held out a promise of independence. I could be like Sammy the seal; I could leave my mother and join the circus and be a star, too. But to commit to Mrs. Bell’s story felt like a form of giving in, so I gave up the story because I could not listen and cry at the same time.

When class was over and I was finally freed to return to the sanctity of our blue Desoto, I stopped crying. On the way to my mother, and then once I had seen her face, I felt relief and the inklings of happiness. Yes, this was what I wanted, this was exactly who I needed. “I cried all day,” I told her. “I couldn’t stop crying for you.” My behavior had shown a certain resolve and tenacity, I figured.

“Oooh,” she said, laughing. “You silly, silly girl. I bet none of the other children cried like that.”

She hugged me, but the fervor of my passion was not met by equal fervor on her part. Shame washed over me. And in the midst of hugging her, I was still longing. Longing as she held me. Longing as I looked beyond her for that other perfect mother, the mother who loved me the way I loved her, the mother she became as soon as we were separated.

After a while my mother stopped walking me all the way into the classroom and said goodbye at the front gate. She kept trying to wean me, coaxing me to say goodbye and let go of her sooner, as if there were some virtue I could not perceive in my needing her less, in increasing the distance between us.

Dusk. I was in the front yard, playing one afternoon after I’d come home from kindergarten, when I nearly tripped over something. At my feet, at the base of one of the tall cypress trees that flanked our house, lay a broken nest.

Bending down to examine it, I saw four baby birds inside. These were not the cute birds of my children’s books, not the fluffy chicks of Easter baskets. These didn’t look like any birds I’d ever seen. Bony bodies naked, their feathers not having come in yet, they trembled, shivering all over. Their dark eyes bulged, and I could see the blood pulsing blue in the vessels of their chests, in their throats, throbbing up in their bald heads. Their mouths were wide open, open so far that looking into them was like looking into the pink-lined flesh of an open cut. Like the cuts on my arm or knee that my father doused with Merthiolate while I sat on the bathroom counter and screamed. “Bactine isn’t strong enough.” Ira explained. “It has to hurt to kill the germs.” My father was hurting me to save me, and if I screamed loud enough I would probably get another stuffed animal later.

Nothing I’d seen had ever looked quite this exposed and been alive. I wanted to throw a blanket over them. If I hadn’t looked down, I might have missed them, might have kicked the nest out of my path or stomped on their heads without even knowing it. These birds were so small I could almost not see them, their cries so weak I could almost not hear them. But once I had heard them, their cries became the worst part—high-pitched, plaintive chirps; signals of distress. As I bent down, I understood exactly what they were pleading for. It was the same way I had cried for my mother the whole first day of kindergarten.

Trying to override my own panic—a mixture of exhilaration, shock, disgust, and compassion—I improvised a plan for their rescue. My mommy will make them a new nest, I thought, a nest of soft cotton. She will protect them, take care of them, keep them warm. She will let me feed them; we will feed them together. We have to feed them right now, I thought. We have to do something to get that chirping to stop, to get those raw, open wounds of their mouths to close. My mommy will be their mommy, I thought; together we will take care of them until their own mother comes back.

I raced into the house so excited I could barely get the words out: “Mommy, mommy, there’s baby birds that fell on the ground,” I said. “And they are crying, and the mother is gone, and they are so hungry.” Her head was in the oven, as she stirred stew in her blue speckled cast iron roasting pan.

“I’m trying to get dinner ready now,” she said, “before your father gets over-hungry.” When my father got “over-hungry” he exploded. The worst fights always happened around the dinner table, where everyone was captive to the appetites that brought them.

“Go and get Daddy,” she said.

I found my father on the bed, dozing in his undershirt with his gray suit pants unbuttoned. He snored and a dark shadow of stubble covered his round face. “There’s baby birds outside,” I said, jostling his fat upper arm. “Get up, come on, come see them.” He finally stirred, looked confused, then took a long minute to raise his mass from the bed. He put his white dress shirt back on over his undershirt and a long black overcoat over that, and his scarf, and his shoes. All the time, I was at his side, trying to hurry him along.

“Is it cold outside? I don’t want to catch a chill,” he said, as I took his hand and pulled him toward the front door. All I could see were those little open mouths crying.

My mother was already standing beside the nest when we arrived at the base of the tree. The birds had not given up, had not altered the alarm-like pitch of their cries. My mother looked at the birds and then at my father. Some understanding passed between them; my mother went back into the house and my father started muttering to himself. He sounded the way he did when he got off the phone after a business call and repeated everything he’d said and everything the other person had said, tilting his head from side to side to indicate the shift in speakers, and even laughing over his own jokes a second time.

Then we began to move quickly, trudging around the side of our house, up the hill toward the garage. He kept tugging at my wrist, until I had to almost run to keep up with him.

“Where are we going, Daddy? What are we doing?”

My father completely intent, eyes cast downward, lost to me. We trudged into the garage, where he reached into the dark corner (where the black widows crawled) and got a shovel. Then we were moving again, the fingernail of his almost-thumb digging into my wrist. Then down the side yard through dirt and rocks and dead ivy, breathing hard with our effort, until we were back in the front yard again.

My father held me back while he crudely scooped the shovel’s blade under the nest. Then we were in motion again, the birds’ nest precariously balanced at the edge of the shovel’s blade, bouncing as we went, birds still chirping. I worried that the nest would fall, but I could not get around to the other side to protect the birds, my father held me so tightly in his grip.

“Where are we taking the baby birds, Daddy?” I asked. “Where are we going?” I had seen Mr. Wizard on TV feed a bird with an eyedropper. But we were not going toward the house, toward safety and warmth and my mother, toward the soft cotton lining, toward mushy bread and warm water put into an eyedropper. We were ascending the rocky hill at the edge of our property, behind the garage.

Up here, there was no grass, only dirt, rocks, and weeds, rusty tin cans, an ant hill that swarmed with red ants, and a rusted, off-kilter clothesline. At the very edge of our property, marked by a barbed wire fence, stood our cement incinerator. Up here, it always smelled of burning garbage.

Before what was happening could register, my father had let go of my hand and was holding open the door of the incinerator. He propped the shovel blade in the open door and pushed hard until the nest with the baby birds inside it slid down the chute. The birds, mouths still open, fell down into the incinerator, where the hot coals burned.

The birds slipped the same way I slipped down the slide at kindergarten, no stopping once I had started—easy and smooth and quick. Gone. Forever.

Had I really seen what I thought I’d seen? I tried not to picture those birds’ open mouths filling with red heat but I inched forward instinctively, and my father put his hand across my chest to stop me.

It was the same reflexive gesture he’d used the day of our car accident. My father had been driving the way he always drove, alternately distracted and vigilant, prone to what my mother called “sudden stops.” Gas pedal to the floor as if he were going to accelerate forever, and then, amazed that a red light or another car had appeared in his path, he would push the brake to the floor. No sooner would he brake than he would be accelerating recklessly again.

His hand that day had not stopped my forward momentum. We were late to make the post office’s last pickup, speeding through a narrow alley when we sideswiped a car coming in the other direction. I had been sitting on my knees on the front bench seat and flew forward. As my front teeth hit the unforgiving cold metal dashboard, a hard shock of pain vibrated up into my teeth and then through all the soft places in my mouth.

My father jumped out, incensed to confront the other driver. “Can’t you see I have a child in the car?” he said as he slammed the door. I sat frozen in my seat crying hysterically, as blood, saliva, and tears mingled in a pink stream from my mouth and nose onto the dashboard, onto my hand, onto the brand new baseball jacket with a tiger embroidered on it that he had just bought me. The same day he’d taken me to the barbershop with him and impulsively gotten me a boy’s haircut. I’d been stroking the short hairs at the back of my neck at the moment of collision.

My father banged the incinerator door shut and dropped the shovel. “Did you know your cousin Stewart got a high fever just from touching a sick bird? Birds carry terrible diseases,” my father said. His own words ignited a spark in his brain. “You didn’t touch them, did you?” He shook me hard by the wrist. The spark from his brain jumped to mine. Did I? I could imagine touching them; I could imagine exactly what they would have felt like.

“How close did you get to them? Tell me!” He was trying to shake the answer out of me. “Oy Gevalt, did you put your face down next to them?” The pictures flashed in my brain: my hands patting their heads, my mouth breathing their air. What happened to them might be contagious; I already felt sort of sick, sort of bad; was I sad or was I sick? Could I even tell the difference? Something sank hard in my stomach and then fluttered up again.

“I don’t think I touched them,” I said, and my father didn’t wait for any more of an answer. He dragged me toward the back door of our house, screaming Eva’s name until she came out the back door and stood on the stoop.

“Shhh,” she said, “Gotteniu, the neighbors are going to hear you and call the police.”

“Wash her hands,” he said. “She got close to those filthy birds.”

When we reached the door, my mother asked him a question with her eyes, and he shrugged his shoulders and said one word in Yiddish, “Fertig [It is finished].” My mother did not ask me how the birds were. She was not waiting with soft cotton to make them a nest. Instead she took me into the laundry room and stood behind me, in front of the oversized stained-gray laundry room sink. I rest ed my head against her white apron, against her soft, full, warm body.

“Wash them thoroughly,” my father said, standing behind us, supervising.

My mother worked her fingers between each of my fingers, glided her thumb over my palms, and into the tender pads on the inside surface of each hand. She maneuvered our hands so she could pick up the soap again, resting it in my hands that were resting in her hands. Then as she moved her hands over mine to make the suds, I gave up all volition, let her move my hands as she would, allowed my body to sink into her body, allowed myself to sink into her.

“You know, the mother would never come back for them. Once they fell out of the tree and became contaminated by the smell of human beings, she would never take them back. And they were too little for us to take care of them.”

The birds’ mother abandoned them because of something they’d had no control over. I wondered if it had been my smell that condemned them.

We went into the dining room, where my father and brothers were waiting at the dinner table, forks in hand.

“You look like a bunch of lions at the zoo waiting for the zookeeper to throw a slab of meat into the cage,” Eva said.

I had seen protection and destruction in my father mixed in a combination I could not reconcile. It should have made me wary, I should have begun to wonder more about the contradiction between his recklessness and his obsession with outside contamination. But I was only five; I could not afford to question. Whatever my father did, he did to keep me safe, I told myself.

Still, that night, for perhaps the first time, I could not bear to look at him.

Present, Kitchen, 9:00 a.m.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, watching the birds at my backyard feeder, when anxiety rushes over me. Is it the product of too much caffeine too rapidly ingested, or of too much rumination? I can never tell what’s physiological and what’s induced by what I’m thinking. For me the feedback loops are endless.

I attempt mindfulness meditation; focus on the breath coming in, the breath going out, stare at one neutral spot on the wall, slow down my breathing, follow my breath. As I do so, everything calms down, and I find stillness. Then my anxiety is replaced by a wave of sorrow. Longing, longing for all that is lost, longing for what I never got, retrograde longing. I call my brother Paul.

“I had a dream I was back in the house again,” I say.

“Whenever I dream about Ira, he’s tormenting me,” Paul says.

“Whenever I dream about Eva, she’s starving me.”

The old alliances remain entrenched. To Paul my father was a villain, a maniac, a sadist, my mother a hapless martyr. To me, it remains much more complicated. Despite everything, I still love my father. But I do not miss him the way I miss my mother. Every day, the longing. My unabated mother-hunger remains insatiable.

Paul and I reminisce. About the house, the neighbors, minor events that we may well be the last people alive to remember.

“How can we be nostalgic for our childhood when so much of it was terrible?” I ask Paul. “We’ve fetishized our childhood, even the terrible parts,” I say.

“It wasn’t all terrible,” Paul says. “Besides it’s the only childhood we’ll ever get.”