CHAPTER FIVE

Storytellers

It was Saturday morning and my father had promised to take me to the library. I’d been trying to coax him out of the house since early morning but by the time he shaved, and stanched the bleeding—he was a reckless shaver—and took a shower, and lay down to recover from its enervating effects, and combed his hair and admired his own image in the mirror, and ate lunch—all the effort of getting ready had left him famished—and lay down for another brief rest to aid his digestion—it was mid-afternoon. We were finally in the car when he complained of an onslaught of debilitating thirst that necessitated his running back into the house for a slug of the Vernor’s ginger ale he’d grown up drinking. “I don’t know what it is about Vernor’s,” he said, “but it always has a revivifying effect.”

The La Crescenta library resided in a dilapidated old clapboard house a few miles from ours. As we rode, I felt obligated to read every street sign and billboard we passed. Words had ceased being decorative markings, as indecipherable as trees. Everything around me, everything in the human world, cereal boxes with their coupons to be mailed in for toys, the labels on my clothing, even the insignia on our car, had revealed themselves as assemblages of letters demanding to be sounded out phonetically, their meanings released.

A flash of unexpected movement at the right side of the car startled my father out of his reverie, and he came to just in time to slam on the brakes. STOP on the red sign screamed in my brain. A group of girls walked in front of us in the crosswalk, oblivious to the near miss, on their way to Monte Vista’s playground. This crosswalk was the same one I had walked in on my way to school on those rare occasions I was ready to leave when our neighbor Lucy and her siblings knocked on our front door at the remarkably early hour of 8:00 a.m. These children in front of us now walked just as Lucy and I had walked. They were in the same place now that I had been in then. I traveled instantly into their bodies and could feel the breeze on my legs, sense the car’s hot breath, smell the groves of olive trees that surrounded us. At the same time, I observed them from the elevated vantage of our car, buffered by thick glass windows. My perspective shifted back and forth: in the car observing, inside the girls walking through the crosswalk. Time slowed, and the girls came into sharper focus. I saw the fine blonde hairs on their legs, imagined I could smell the Juicy Fruit gum on their breath.

The split of consciousness brought forward a torrent of words: There was the I who experienced and the I who described. The I who could travel beyond the self into another. The I who could travel backward and forward in time through language. The sentences raced ahead as I struggled to keep up. I memorized each in turn so I would not forget it, and then repeated it, along with the next one, and the next one, until I realized my descriptions had become a story. When we reached the library, I hesitated to get out of the car—what if my story could not survive against the roar of language inside that building? Would I forget it when tempted to read all those other stories?

As soon as my father and I got home, I bounded out of the car. As my mother greeted us at the door, I announced, “I’ve written a story: A Girl Goes to the Library.” I began to recite: “A girl was in the car with her father on the way to the library. They stopped at the crosswalk for some other children. It was the same crosswalk the girl had walked to school in with her friends.” My father then instructed my mother, “Evvie, get a pad, quick, write it down.” My mother sat in her office chair, my father paced—their daily working mode—as I stood and dictated it.

Creating the story carried the joy that came from slowing down time, from being simultaneously inside experience and separated from it through language. In my story, the I became a she; the story allowed for the possibility of multiple perspectives, of different narrative versions of reality. But quickly the innate pleasures of story were conflated with the rush that came from outside approval. My father’s grandiosity fed my own: I was a genius just like him; we would be rich, famous. I would no longer be different-strange from the other children in La Crescenta; I would be different-special. My father quickly took possession of A Girl Goes to the Library. He got on the phone and read it aloud to Rebecca and Uncle Nathan.

While he bragged and fantasized about the incipient fame and fortune that would come from being the genius father of a genius child prodigy, I set out to illustrate what was going to be my first storybook. Books had to have pictures, after all. Though I could not duplicate the fleshly three-dimensionality of those girls’ bodies in the crosswalk, could not render depth of field, or even come close to representing the elegant bulges and curves of our new white Buick station wagon, that flat block of white that I drew to represent the car pleased me. The crayon’s red came close to the red of the stop sign. When I looked at my drawing, the girls’ practically stick figures with brightly colored triangles for skirts, the crosswalk represented by stark black lines across the bottom of the paper, I saw through the drawing to the reality I remembered.

The act of drawing felt nearly as exhilarating as writing, the pleasures of creation not bound to the quality of the final product. I approached my father eager for more praise. He was still on the phone when I shoved the drawing in front of him. He pushed it away. I pushed it in front of him again, held it right up in front of his face.

“Daddy,” I said.

He ignored me.

“Daddy, look what I made,” I said, “I’m illustrating my book.” Without pausing a beat in his telephone conversation, he held the drawing out before him, and then cast it back to me again. “This looks like any ordinary child could have drawn it,” he said.

That summer Ira convinced Eva that we needed to break in our new car by driving to Las Vegas, a place high in his affections for its singular dedication to hedonistic fantasy. While the other children in La Crescenta came back from summer break reporting on family camping trips to Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, we returned every summer to Las Vegas, to the girly shows and slot machines and 24-hour buffets my father loved.

Years later, in the midst of my father’s mental decline, thinking it might “turn him around,” my mother would orchestrate a trip there that would prove to be our last as a family. It was disastrous; Ira threw dishes at Ben in a restaurant and then refused to leave the hotel room.

In the summer of 1960, my mother drove the entire way. She and Ben loaded the car, making me a bed in the back, where I lay wedged between our suitcases. I grew drowsy, watching the shadows of the city’s lights move across the ceiling over my head, and listening to my father’s gleeful anticipation of the plush rooms, the glitzy shows, the garishly lit casinos, the tummel outside that would finally match the tummel within.

As we drove on through mile after mile of dark, empty desert, the headlights illuminating only cacti and billboards promoting the turnouts for roadside attractions, Ira sat in the passenger seat, scanned a newspaper, and lay out our itinerary: “If we can get there in time, we can still see the Folies Bergère at midnight, and tomor row night we’ll take the kids to the dinner show of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé.”

As the number of miles till Las Vegas steadily diminished on the highway signs, my father began to sweat. “We’re going to go through Death Valley,” he said, “the lowest place on earth.” The road blackened ahead of us as the sky filled with stars. At about midnight, we reached the sign that read Death Valley.

“Pull over, Eva,” Ira said. The combination of being wound up by the prospect of all that fun, and then frightened by the thought of Death Valley, demanded a ritual purge. My father opened the car door, got out, and vomited. The hot air blasted us, his retching the only sound in the empty desert. He got back into the car, wiped his mouth, blew his nose, and took a swig of Coke. He looked more rejuvenated than ill, his cheeks pink, and his skin less clammy.

“The low altitude gives me asthma,” he said. “It makes it hard to breathe.”

“Seems like the gunk sitting in your lungs from the smog gets loosened here,” Eva said.

At 2:00 a.m., we checked into the Riviera, a then-swanky hotel on the strip that my mother briefly protested was beyond our means. Our suite had white French provincial furniture accented in faux gold leaf. My father took a bath in the oversized bathtub, wrapped himself in a plush white bath towel, ordered food from the 24-hour room service, and then stood on the outdoor terrace. With the desert air blowing on his face, he experienced what appeared to be a moment of contentment.

“Ah, I can finally breathe,” he said. This was the antonym of stuffiness, the balm we all sought.

The next morning we went to the Desert Inn coffee shop for breakfast. My father rated their breakfasts far superior to the Riviera’s; the truly wealthy stayed at the Desert Inn, and you could catch a glimpse of a movie star in the lobby. A pattern of oversized green foliage adorned the walls.

We finished breakfast. My father had consumed four or five cups of coffee. Still he lingered. My brothers were tired of sitting in the coffee shop.

“Let’s go,” Ben said. “C’mon.” He was eager to get to the casino where he could pass for twenty-one and gamble for a while before the marshals asked to see his ID. Paul sighed loudly and looked at my mother for approval. My father glared.

“C’mon, Ira,” Eva said, “aren’t you done?” The coffee shop was supposed to be a preamble to the day’s activities, not a substitute for them. But my father was having too good a time being served off the china with gold-plated rims, drinking coffee poured from a silver pot by a waitress with bounteous cleavage who winked at him, touched him softly on the arm, and treated him with more respect than he got from his wife or sons.

“I’m going,” Ben said. “I’ll find you all later.”

“I didn’t tell you, you could go,” my father said.

“C’mon,” Ben answered, sliding out of the booth.

“Hitchhike here and they might find your body in the desert,” Ira said.

He might have continued to fight with Ben if the waitress had not reappeared to offer yet another cup of coffee.

“Here, honey, let me get you a brand new fresh cup,” she said, “that one’s probably cold.”

“Ira,” my mother said.

“Don’t rush me.”

The waitress returned. “Would you like a piece of coffee cake to go with your coffee?” she asked.

“You know what, doll,” my father said, “I’m saying what they say at the blackjack table—hit me again.”

She looked puzzled.

“Bring me another breakfast, all of it, eggs, toast, the whole schmear. Do you want something, Eva? Have a little something with me. Coffee cake?”

My mother pursed her lips and shook her head, then stared off into the distance, vacating her body.

Ira turned to me. “Are you still hungry?” he said. I had just eaten eggs, hash browns, the forbidden traif pork bacon and sausages that we never brought into our house, toast with grape jelly and butter. I was decidedly not hungry.

“They have steak sandwiches here,” my father said. “The best steak sandwiches ever with onion rings on top. I’m going to have some more breakfast; why don’t you have a steak sandwich with me?”

My mother and brothers had turned on my father. I would be his soul mate, his companion; we would eat together, proudly, defiantly. Didn’t eating a steak sandwich mean that I was healthy, happy, alive? “Despite how many pills I need to function,” Ira often said, “at least I know I don’t have cancer because I still have a healthy appetite.” Eating a steak sandwich while my father ate his second breakfast would constitute a feat of daring, a performance like one of the stage shows that my father and I could put on together.

“Sure, Daddy,” I said. “I’ll have one.”

Stuck in the coffee shop at the Desert Inn, consigned to watch her husband and daughter engage in exhibition eating, my mother seethed quietly, condemning us to each other. Paul put his head down on her arm.

“Why do you have to eat so much?” he said to Ira. “You’re going to get fatter and fatter till you burst.”

Ira ignored him.

When the steak came, my mother’s disapproval made the meat stick in my throat. I pushed past it and ate every last bite. My father was right, the steak sandwich at the Desert Inn was delicious. When I’d finished and the waitress cleared the table, unsure whether to condemn or praise the spectacle she’d observed, my father defined the moment: “I have an exceptional daughter,” he said.

During the afternoon, Paul and I stood behind the red line that barred the entrance to the casino for anyone under twenty-one. If we craned our necks, we could watch Ira and Eva side by side playing the slot machines. We could just about see the discrete cherries, oranges, and bananas on the tumblers merge into bands of red, orange, and yellow, then see the fruit return as the tumblers stopped. When three cherries lined up, Ira screamed and hugged Eva, and then danced, pulling out the front of his trousers and letting the nickels fall into the pouch he had created.

Perhaps Paul and I should have been bored, but we were not; we were relieved to see our parents happy, side by side, united in a mission.

At dusk, Ira put on his trunks, and I my bathing suit, and we went down to the hotel swimming pool. The pool was empty at that hour, the sun about gone, the other hotel guests having exited to dress for dinner and shows.

No one in our family knew how to swim, and Ira refused to let me take lessons, so we were consigned to the shallow end of the pool. I stood on the steps and said, “Don’t let me drown,” and Ira said, “I won’t.” Then he took me in his arms. I gripped my arms tightly around his neck and snuggled my face into his hair, which smelled of burnt almonds and cherries. He hummed the Blue Danube waltz, as he waltzed me around the shallow end of the pool. My father’s fat belly made him more buoyant, and the limp that ordinarily impeded his walking only enhanced the cadence of his waltz.

“Don’t go in the deep end,” I said. “I won’t,” Ira said, “I’ve got you.” I placed my head close to his head and felt the coat of soft black fur on his nearly white chest rub against my body. For those few moments, my father held me suspended and safe, clear in his role as my protector.

As the sky darkened, the breeze came up, and the desert air felt soft against our skin. We both relaxed, and I hummed along with him. Even after the sun had gone down completely, and the air had begun to cool, even after an attendant had come and removed all the towels from all the chaises, we stayed in the pool, waltzing.