CHAPTER SEVEN

Remodel

Sheriff Andy Taylor imparted a homespun, by-the-fishing-pond bit of wisdom to his young son, Opie.

The Lott family watched the Andy Griffith Show assembled in our usual places around our beloved Admiral TV. My father, wearing his Jockey shorts and a T-shirt, lay sprawled on the sofa, my mother perched on a straight-backed chair behind him, a bowl of Cheetos on the cocktail table at the couch’s side. My mother ate her Cheetos shyly, surreptitiously, one at a time, while my father opened his mouth wide like a whale so she could sweetly jam handfuls into his gullet.

Ben and Paul clustered around the TV close up, in chairs. I bounced between the small space at the end of the couch next to my father’s feet and my mother’s side where I could get to the Cheetos.

Earlier that summer, when it grew smotheringly hot in the living room, we’d assembled on the front porch and watched the TV through its reflection in the front window. With the sound turned up all the way, we could just about follow a show. When we tired of straining to hear, we took Paul’s binoculars and watched the bats, their flying in the foothills sky over us, eerie in the illumination of the porch light.

Gathered around the TV now, we felt almost congenial toward one another, as if under the soft glow of Mayberry, La Crescenta would become another friendly, albeit all-white, small town, and our family, the town’s group of charmingly harmless eccentrics. As Andy summed up the moral of the story, the picture began to roll.

My father roared, “Fix the set.”

This was intended for Paul, who had taken apart nearly everything in our house that had a plug and succeeded in putting almost all of it back together. Paul knelt down, opened the display panel on the front of the set, and attempted to stop the rolling by adjusting the vertical hold. Andy and Opie flipped by even faster. Paul shrugged.

“C’mon, Paul,” my father said, “I wanted to watch this show.” Note the operative word wanted; my father’s unmet desire increased the tragic irony of the TV set’s determining to fail at this moment. The greater my father’s desire, the greater he perceived the universe’s need to exact its revenge. It was our job to protect my father from that retaliation.

“Just put the set back the way it was,” my mother said, her hand now stroking my father’s cheek, as she sought to extricate Paul from the center of the bull’s-eye beginning to form around him. But what she suggested was no easy task; how could he remember exactly where the knob had been or how quickly the image had been rolling? Paul stopped and pondered. My father escaped my mother’s grasp and sat up on the couch.

“Just put it back,” he said.

“I’m not sure how,” Paul said. What was lost could not be recaptured, a lesson my father always resisted. Paul turned the knob forward and back. An instant of screen stasis raised our hopes, and then the rolling resumed.

“Stop teasing me!” my father yelled.

“I’m not teasing you,” Paul replied. “I’m trying to fix it.”

“You’re making it worse.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Paul said. There was just a catch of a taunt in his voice; he had the power to do it on purpose if he wanted to, but out of the goodness of his heart, he wasn’t, and why couldn’t my father appreciate that? Paul could hold his mechanical ability over my father who did not understand how anything worked, and possessed barely the manual dexterity to screw in a light bulb.

Paul tried the horizontal hold, and the image began to distort in the other direction.

“What are you doing now?” my father said. “Just leave my fucking set alone.”

Paul moved back. “Okay, if that’s what you want.”

“Ira, he’s trying to fix it. Give him a minute,” my mother said. “Patience.”

Paul adjusted the dials back and forth a few more times, as my father became more agitated.

“The set needs a tube,” Paul concluded.

What happened in Mayberry that night was lost in the ether. We were back in our own not-so-friendly small town, with our not-so-loving neighbors, and left to our own not-so-charmingly harmless devices.

We waited for two nights, in danger that, without the TV’s sedating effects, all hell might break loose among us. On the third day, the local TV repairman, Frank, an apparition in gray—hair, complexion, uniform, metal case full of tubes—arrived with his hangdog expression. Frank moved slowly, thought slowly, reacted in slow motion, while my father, revved up with anxiety, attacked him with apprehensions.

“Slow down a minute there, Ira,” Frank said. “You need a tube all righty.”

Frank disappeared into the narrow space between the wall and the back of the mahogany-veneered cabinet. He replaced the tube, and then stretched his lanky frame over the front of the set to see the effect on the screen. The picture had stopped rolling. Perhaps so as to increase the perceived value of his visit, he made a few additional minor adjustments.

“I gotcha a good picture now,” he said.

After Frank left, we felt relieved—calming agent in place, status quo recovered. But my father’s agitation did not resolve. The trauma of even this temporary loss had burrowed into his system.

“That guy reeked of tobacco,” he said. Tobacco gave my father asthma, and Frank’s scent lingered in my father’s territory. In the days after the visit Ira remained pensive. Whether watching Huckleberry Hound cartoons with me at 6:00 p.m., the Jackie Gleason Show, or an old movie at midnight, he twirled his hair and scrutinized the picture.

“It doesn’t look right,” he said. “That guy monkeyed with my set.”

“It looks okay to me, Daddy,” I said, carefully gauging the fine line between reassurance and treason. I knew that if it didn’t look right to Daddy, it shouldn’t look right to me. The set’s even temporary untrustworthiness, coupled with a repairman who had not reassured my father in the manner in which he craved to be reassured, had caused a rupture.

“It looks off,” my father said.

Off was a quality that, like stuffiness, was difficult to pin down. Food could be off, any of the body’s nefarious organs could be off, and things with moving parts that my father relied on others to fix were particularly prone to offness.

Offness could occur when a car came back from a tune-up, when a dry cleaner changed the printing on their plastic bags and my father inferred that they had also modified their dry cleaning fluid and its asthma-producing odor. Behind my father’s back, things were always changing, and with change came the potential for offness, and with offness came the risk of bodily harm.

There were several ways this situation could go: my father’s complaints could burn themselves out, as the TV or car regained his familiar scent; he might be distracted by some other attention-grabbing crisis; or, in the worst case, his complaints could escalate and take on more floridly paranoid dimensions, introducing an element of human malfeasance.

In my father’s fractured Freudianism, people had subconscious motives that inevitably leaned toward the malevolent. It would be up to Eva to exert a “placebo effect.” Whatever remedy she proposed did not need to have objective efficacy, only a narrative compelling enough to convince my father of its curative powers.

My mother introduced an alternate theory of causation.

“I think the aerial may have shifted a little in the wind,” she said. My father considered; it had been windy.

Ben, shirtless, relishing the opportunity to show off his physique to any neighborhood girls who happened to be strolling by, got up on the roof to adjust it. My father kept his vigilant eye on the TV’s reception. Paul liaised between them, and I followed behind Paul, checking that his communiqués were accurate.

“How is it now?” he said to my father, running in the front door, the screen slamming behind him. Second slam, and me right behind.

“I think it could be just a little sharper,” Ira said.

Paul ran outside, stood on the lawn where Ben could see him, looked up, and screamed, “I think it could be just a little sharper.”

“Sharper,” I shouted. “Daddy wants it sharper!”

Ben moved the aerial a bit to the left. He stretched and strutted, a brave guy doing something important at a great height. Paul ran back inside. Screen door slammed again. I followed.

“I told him, Daddy,” I said.

“Yes, I see an incremental improvement,” my father said, and then switched from channel to channel. “Maybe a degree in the other direction.”

“A tiny bit in the opposite direction,” Paul said.

I ran outside and backed up on the lawn until I could see Ben maneuver the antenna to the right. Neighbors gathered on the street to watch. What were those crazy Jews up to now?

“No, I was in error; put it back the way it was,” Ira said.

Paul and I crowded together at the front door. We ran out again to Ben.

“Put it back the way it was.”

“What?” Ben shouted.

“Put it back the way it was.”

“That’s it,” Ben said. “It’s good enough; I’m coming down.”

At this point, the aerial was probably in close to the position where the process had started.

The pageantry of getting Ben up on the roof was enough to assuage my father and purge the malevolent energies from our house. “You were right, Evvie,” my father said. “The reception looks very sharp now, clear as a bell.”

I would have to wait for reruns to find out what Opie had learned.

When my father could scarcely cope with a television repair, it’s a testament to either my mother’s optimism or her denial that she undertook a full-blown remodel and addition to our house. In August, Paul would be bar mitzvahed, and my mother’s remaining Detroit family—two sisters, brother-in-law, and nephews—would journey out for the first time in years. She did not want them to find her eight-year-old daughter still sleeping in the bedroom with her and her husband, The Business taking up a room of its own smack in the middle of the house, where a den ought to be, the paint peeling off the kitchen walls, the deep green carpet vomit-stained.

The remodel would prove that her family had been wrong about my father. She would make our much more modest house look more like her sisters’ (a Colonial on a quarter acre of land). That house had achieved mythic status in our family. My mother described it in worshipful tones, as if it were a baronial estate or a museum. She seemed in awe of its homogeneous white floors, white walls, white drapes, white silk upholstered sofas. “My sisters take a lot of pride in their home and keep it immaculate,” my mother said.

“Yeah, but nobody can actually live in that house, or breathe in it, or eat in it,” my father added. “When your sister Clara cooks dinner—inedible, tasteless, meat like shoe leather—she takes your plate away while the fork is still in your mouth!” What my mother’s family called order, cleanliness, routine, respectability, my father called bourgeois, anal-retentive, sexually repressed, and stultifying.

Where our current house ended, the addition would begin: a long hallway with a master bathroom and two new bedrooms, one which would become the master, and the other the office, freeing the current office to become a family room. Between the current kitchen and the family room, a counter would be built, opening up the flow between those two rooms. As was the fashion of the day, we could sit at the counter on tall stools, conversing with my mother while she cooked. She must have hoped that our remodeled home would come with its own remodeled family, one that would assemble at the counter each morning, drink their orange juice, and scurry off to school—and to work—my father’s new office finally segregating The Business from our domestic life.

In the backyard, a portion of the concrete patio on which the neighborhood boys roller skated, would be lost to the addition. The portion closest to the house would be dedicated to a screened-in patio for summer dinners outdoors.

The remodel would wind up being my mother’s most ambitious and most spectacularly failed attempt to normalize our lives. It was to have opposite the intended effect. We never even got the high stools in the kitchen. The Formica-topped counter with its sparkly constellation soon dulled and became one more surface upon which items piled up and collected dust. As a teenager, Paul kept an aquarium on it stocked with angelfish and mollies that lived a little longer than the goldfish of our early childhood, but eventually they too were lost, and the aquarium sat empty on the counter.

By the time my father died in 1981, the counter had become a place for Paul and my mother’s cats to toss and chase their catnip-infused toy rats, an arena for the cats’ pinball game, kibble and toys pinging off the walls.

And when my mother died in 1995, you could not even see the surface of the counter underneath the cover of Paul’s randomly hoarded objects.

My parents hired a Jewish father-son contractor team to execute the remodel. Sam was a five-foot-tall German Holocaust survivor with a heavy accent, a sharp tongue, and a curt manner. His son Herman was a maniacal, perennial adolescent with a snide nasal voice, and a laugh like a crow’s caw. Herman wore his black hair stiffly pomaded and parted rigidly on one side, a brown uniform, and heavy black work boots that made him look like a soldier. A Nazi soldier. He made a recurrent joke by holding a black comb over his lip, clicking his heels together, and pretending to be Hitler. He also liked to sneak up behind my brother Paul, push his ears out, and say, “What, me worry? He looks just like Alfred E. Neuman from Mad Magazine, doesn’t he? Just like Alfred E. Neuman—Caw!”

For several months, Herman was there every morning when I woke up and often still around when we were ready to sit down to dinner. He had accidentally cut off parts of two of his fingers with a saw, and that crude amputation, along with his jerky, unpredictable movements and strange laugh, scared me. Vampire-like, he’d appear beside you and then hover too close to your body. I shuddered when I saw him pick up food with his mutilated hand. Suddenly I saw my father’s deformity through the eyes of the neighborhood children.

The construction almost completed, my mother sat in the living room with a book of fabric swatches on her lap, trying to seduce my father into looking at them. “We need something practical,” my mother said, “colors that will hide dirt. Clara says that neutrals are all the rage this year.” If Eva could not have a white house like her sisters’, couldn’t her family at least live with beige?

“I don’t see why we can’t re-cover the furniture in the same fabrics we have now. Why change what I like?” my father said.

My father loved bright color. The turquoise walls. The bright red leather armchair. The fanciful dancing horses on the dining room wallpaper.

“No more delicate fabrics,” my mother said. “Look at what your head has done to the sofa.” Its turquoise, black, and white tweed bore the telltale imprint of my father’s head at one end and the frayed threads produced by the heels of his shoes at the other.

The fabric book on her lap contained beiges and tans, off-whites and near-whites, and almost-browns. Eva was enamored with newly introduced stain-resistant coatings that would deflect the insults our family put furniture through and erase at least some of the outward signs of our unruly lives.

“Please, Ira,” she said, “A nice neutral color. It’ll be chic. You always get used to things. Please, just this.”

“It’ll be dull.”

“It’ll be practical. For once in our lives, can’t you be practical?”

“You’re just trying to impress your sisters; you don’t care what I want.”

“You always get what you want.”

“I don’t want a touch-me-not house like your sisters’. I’ve already got a touch-me-not wife.”

When the painting crew moved in, my father insisted we move to a swanky hotel in the city to escape the fumes. My mother would commute back and forth to supervise the work. Ensconced in a suite on a high floor with a view of the city out our window, my father felt in his element. We ordered room service for breakfast. My father and I applauded and shouted voila! as the waiters in starched white jackets removed the silver domes over our eggs and bacon. We went to movies in the daytime and lingered in the hotel’s dining room over multi-course meals. When, after lunch one afternoon, I spilled hot fudge on my dress, my father made no effort to remove the stain, only took me into a high-end clothing store at the hotel and bought me two new white blouses of the softest fabric I’d ever felt.

The only problem came one afternoon after lunch when Ira and Paul and I had lingered in the restaurant. I had to pee. My father refused to let me go into the ladies’ room alone. Was he afraid I’d be kidnapped or just sit on a dirty toilet seat? Either event held equal peril.

“We’ll just take her into the men’s room,” he said to Paul.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Paul said.

I was curious to see the men’s room but I really didn’t want to pee there. The three of us barged into the cavernous room with its bank of urinals, marble walls, and roomy stalls. But it smelled strongly of urine in a way that ladies’ rooms did not smell. An attendant in a white uniform stood near the entrance of the room at a stand, shining shoes. Another attendant stood at the sink, handing out towels.

I saw the backs of a few businessmen in suits who quickly vacated the urinals.

My father took us into one of the stalls.

He improvised a seat cover by draping toilet paper all over the seat. It hung down over the toilet like streamers.

“Hold her up over the toilet, Paul,” my father said. “I don’t want her sitting on that germy seat.”

Paul attempted to make a sling out of his arms; I placed myself gingerly in it.

“I’m not strong enough,” Paul said as I wobbled. “I can’t hold her up alone.”

“I can’t pee with you holding me up,” I said.

My father went over to my other side. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and attempted to hold up one side of me while Paul held up the other. My legs trembled.

“Don’t let your dress get in the toilet,” my father said. Their hands trembled; my legs trembled; I wobbled more. The attendant could not help but look over and quickly looked away. Paul and I started to laugh. We laughed harder. I almost fell into the toilet. My father laughed too. More highly neurotic behavior. He knew, but he could not control it.

“I can’t pee like this,” I screamed. “Just let me pee.”

“Okay, okay,” my father said, exiting the stall along with my brother, “but squat, don’t make contact with that seat.”

The furniture came back covered in durable off-whites and tans. The dining room wallpaper’s lithe horses had been replaced with a checkerboard pattern of variegated browns and beige. It had no depth of field, nowhere to lose myself. My father lamented the loss of the horses. I stared at the walls, imagining that underneath the new paper, the horses still pranced.

In what became the children’s bathroom, the tub received a sliding glass door with an etching of fishes swimming merrily. On the door of my parents’ new stall shower was an image of a topless mermaid. That was one of the gifts to my father, along with a shower head at pelvic height. My father made no end of bawdy jokes about that appliance. “A head for my other head,” he said.

When my mother told me I would get my own bedroom, and I could choose its color, I told her pink. I visualized the hot pink of the pansies in our side yard. The hot pink my father’s preferred sexy women wore on their toenails. When we returned from the hotel, the whole house smelled of paint, and my bedroom had been turned a sickly faint pastel. Washed out, barely pink at all. My mother waited to hear my cries of delight.

“This is a very feminine color,” my mother said, “and you can get a bedspread to match.”

I was instantly enraged.

“This isn’t PINK,” I said and began to sob. Once again, my mother had hurt me by being blind to the passionate, intense per son I was. “This isn’t what you promised me,” I cried, and began to ruminate on every exchange in which my mother had misunderstood me.

There was the time my mother had read in a magazine about ways to handle a “difficult child.” She’d presented me with a mood chart. It had drawings of a smiling face, frowning face, frightened face, angry face.

“Point to the face that tells me how you’re feeling,” she said. I pouted.

“Is it the angry face?” she said.

I screamed. I wanted to rip that chart from her hands. How could I begin to describe the mismatch between what I felt and the simple-minded expressions on the chart? My mother should not need a chart, I thought. My father did not need a chart. The chart only accentuated the chasm I perceived between my interior life and what I could perceive of hers.

“This isn’t PINK,” I declared again. “You lied to me. You knew I wanted HOT pink. You did this on purpose to hurt me.”

“I’m not even going to try to talk to you when you’re unreasonable,” my mother said. “I’ve worked so hard to make our house nice for us, and you reject it.” She started to cry.

I threw myself down on the bed and sobbed, and my mother slammed the bedroom door. My father came in and sat down on the bed next to me and stroked my hair. “Your mother can’t grasp us,” he said. “She doesn’t feel the deep things we feel.”

“Why wouldn’t she just give me the color I asked for?”

“She’s jealous of our bond,” he said. “She’s jealous of when I buy you pretty things. She’s jealous of how pretty you are, how sensuous you are.”

“What are you telling her?” my mother stormed back into the room. “You’re pitting my own daughter against me. Most little girls would be thrilled to have a room this color. If I’d gotten a room all to myself as a child, I would have been thrilled. You’ve turned her into a selfish, spoiled brat.”

My mother wept. “Do you like being a wedge between me and your father? Does it make you happy? All I tried to do was make everything better for all of us, and this is the thanks I get.”

“Daddy, why do you let her talk to me like that?” I said.

He exploded. “Why did we have to get this goddamned remodel in the first place? To impress your sisters? How much did you spend to turn my fucking house beige?”

Screaming and crying. All of us screaming and crying.

Paul came into the room. “Stop yelling at my mother,” he said. My father pushed Paul out into the hallway. “Don’t start with me. She was my wife before she was ever your mother. Faggot. Fairy boy.”

“Stop it,” she said. “This is always what happens. Everyone has to get into it!” She grabbed Paul and pushed him back into his bedroom and slammed the door.

“I’m not staying in here,” Paul yelled from behind the door. “I’m going to tell him the truth! Somebody needs to tell the maniac the truth.”

“It’s useless to try to make anything nice around here. You don’t want anything to be nice or calm or normal,” my mother yelled. “You don’t want to live like everyone else. Just stop carrying on, Ira,” she shrieked. She held her chest and collapsed on the bed weeping.

Paul was still shouting from behind his bedroom door, and my father wasn’t through. He broke through the barrier my mother had erected with her arms and went after Paul. I could hear him hitting Paul, and Paul hitting back. My mother ran to Paul. Screaming and yelling. All of us. I shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears not to see it or hear it. My mother got my father off Paul. She slammed Paul’s bedroom door.

“Get out of here, Ira,” she said. My father retreated.

My mother came back into my room, grabbed me by the arm and threw me down on my bed. “Do you see what trouble you’ve started,” she screamed. “Over pink? You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re a bad, bad girl.” She slapped me across the face, then on the back, the sides of my ribs, anywhere she could reach. I tried to anticipate her hands and protect myself, but she moved my hands away and kept hitting. I cowered, rolled into a fetal position, cried and screamed. She sat on the edge of my bed and broke down into sobs again. “Why must you be so impossible?” she said. Helpless, defeated sobs.

I was torn between anger at her, shame at what I’d done, and the growing feeling that I needed to take care of her. Between us, what if I were really the stronger one?

Instead of being on the quiet backyard side of the house, the remodel moved my parents’ bedroom to the side of the house adjacent to Briggs Avenue which, over the years, had become a busy thoroughfare. You could hear the whoosh of the cars rushing by even at one or two in the morning.

“You put my head right in the car exhaust,” Ira berated Eva. He could find no peace with the constant noise of the cars whizzing by. That, he explained, was the reason he had to increase his dosage of barbiturates.

I was also restless at night, alone in the bedroom I was used to sharing with my parents. Midnight, a few months after the completion of the remodel, I woke up, heart in my throat, chest congested, generally terrified. The house felt stuffy. Everything felt off. Dissonant music played in my head. The only possible salvation resided with my parents, who had abandoned me in an impotently pink bedroom across the hall from Ben and Paul’s room, which Paul had recently decided was haunted. “It’s those Indians whose burial ground this house must have been built on,” he said. “They’re after us.”

To get to the safe harbor of my parents’ bedroom, I would have to race from my room through a dark, stuffy hallway, then into the newly christened family room, and into another dark hallway, this second one even scarier because it was always cold, Sam and Her man having convinced my parents that the addition did not need central heating. In the hallway was the door to the new screened-in patio with a high window. I imagined burglars and marauders hiding in the patio. They crouched in wait for me and would pop up in the window as I ran past. I could just about see them. I shut my eyes, held my breath, and raced through the hallway. What if the burglars broke in and grabbed me before I could reach safety? The saddest part was imagining that I might just disappear without my parents even knowing that I had been on my way to them.

Having endured this treacherous journey, I wished that my mother would pull down the covers and welcome me into her bed. When I’d made it just inside the doorway of my parents’ room, I was trembling from the cold of the hallway. I paused for a minute, my stomach quivering, to push my bottom up against the wall heater. This was the only heating element for the entire room and I had to gauge the distance right or I would singe my flannel pajamas. Once before I’d been standing before the heater when my mother called out, “Is something in here burning?” and I’d realized that it was me.

“Are you asleep?” I whispered.

My father answered in much louder than a whisper, “What’s wrong?” He was wide awake, his sleeping pills not kicking in till two or three in the morning.

“I don’t know,” I whimpered. “Something. I feel something bad. In my body. I’m scared.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” my mother’s voice, immediately stern, rose from her prone mass. “Go back to your own bed.” She covered her head with the blankets.

“Are you ill?” my father said.

“I don’t know . . . maybe,” I said. “Something feels . . . off.”

“For God’s sake, she just needs to learn to stay in her own bed,” my mother said. “Most children learn this at age three. She’s trying to come between us again.”

Between them, of course, was exactly where I yearned to be, in that spot in the bed’s dead center, the place where I could get a whiff of my mother’s sweet, talcumy flesh, and draw in the heat from my father’s pungent, comically hairy body, my toes not quite touching either of their feet, which descended so much lower in the bed than my own. In the middle of the night, that place—despite the fact that my wanting to be there created so much friction between them, despite the fact that my mother wished me ejected—that place still represented the safest spot in our household.

“Daddy,” I whined more dejectedly. “Don’t make me go back in there. I feel . . . nauseous.”

“She’s terrified, Ev, can’t you see that she’s terrified? And she looks pale.”

“She’s manipulating you,” my mother said. “Of course, she’s pale; it’s the middle of the night.” My mother always imputed ulterior motives to the intense emotions I manifested. They seemed so unnatural to her, so inconceivable that they could only constitute some form of show. And the more self-conscious she made me of them, the more of a performance they seemed, even to me.

“Why do you say that to my daddy?” I said. If she was going to try to turn my best ally against me, I was going to fight back. My mother pulled the blankets in tighter around her, locking herself off.

“I’m going back to sleep,” she said. “I’m exhausted from taking care of all of you.” She turned as far away on the bed as she could get and pulled the pillow over her head. All I wanted was the security and warmth of my parents’ big ship-like masses, the solidity of who they seemed to be in the dark.

When my father patted the spot beside him in the bed, I leapt.

“We’ve both got those middle-of-the-night heebie-jeebies,” he said. He cleared his throat, instantly back on stage, declaiming. “Florid imaginations can get people like us in trouble in the dark,” he said.

“I feel like what’s inside my head is too big for my body,” I said. “Like it’s going to explode.”

“Let’s distract ourselves. Tell me about what you’re studying in school.”

I began to talk about our social studies unit on California history. The teacher had just shown us an educational film that featured a smiling Mexican woman in an embroidered white shirt making tortillas on a rock. That year in La Crescenta, we watched movies in class of a lot of colonized women and slaves preparing food, seemingly content with their fates. As I described the Mexican woman’s rhythmic passing of the dough from hand to hand, I calmed down. She felt like a surrogate mother.

My father and I lay in bed quietly for a few minutes. He reached over to his nightstand and took another sleeping pill.

“You know when you get scared like that, it’s your own mind that’s making you afraid. I’m the same way. For example, look over there.” He pointed to a pile of his hats and scarves on the open closet shelf. The venetian blinds that my mother had put up instead of drapes—they were more modern and attracted less dust, she said—were not completely closed, and the light they let in cast patterns over the folds of fabric that shifted every time a car roared up the hill. “Whenever I look into the closet in the dark like this,” my father continued, “I see a skull. Can you see it?”

“Not really,” I said, not wanting to.

“Look,” he said. “There are the eye sockets, the hollow where the nose used to be, and the grinning teeth . . . can you make it out? A memento mori,” he said. “A reminder of our own mortality. See it?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“Now, I know there’s no skull; it’s my own preoccupation with death that puts a skull there.” He was both inducing me to see something terrifying that I never would have seen without him, and instructing me not to be scared by it. Seeing the skull was scary, but seeing it with my father, a kindred frightened soul in the night, warmed by his body heat and nursed by the dulcet tones of his voice was . . . comforting?

I sensed even then that another father wouldn’t be saying this, that this was not a conventionally reassuring thing to say to a child, but I was no ordinary terrified child, and he was no ordinary father. Who wanted to be ordinary? We were superior, highly intelligent, and sensitive beings.

“Now go to sleep,” he said. He’d begun to slur his words. I jarred him awake again. “I’m still scared,” I said, not yet willing to give it up. “Stay up with me.”

“Just lie down and shut your eyes,” he said. “I’m right here.” I nestled up close, my flannel pajamas touching his flannel nightshirt. My breathing slowed. Before long I heard my father’s resonant snoring, my mother’s more widely spaced deep breathing punctuated by an occasional sigh.

When the sun started to rise, I said to no one, “I’m going back to my own bed now,” crawled out from under the blankets, and got out at the foot of the bed. The skull had become a stack of my father’s beautiful East Coast-weight woolens, the burglars had absented the hallway, and the house had begun to warm up.

In August, my mother’s family came out on the train for Paul’s bar mitzvah. We met them at Union Station. On the way home Uncle Roger gave Ben his first cigar. Ben stuck his head out the window to keep the smoke away from my father and sucked it down like a man. As soon as we got home, he ran for the bathroom and threw up.

My mothers’ sisters inspected the paint job in the living room and admired the new wallpaper in the dining room. They ran their hands over the smooth stain-resistant upholstery. Aunt Clara volunteered to cook dinner one night, one of her specialties, Swiss steak. She stood over the stove for hours. The meat was tenderized cube steak in a wan brown sauce that matched the beige wallpaper.

“What did I tell you?” my father said, when we met in the kitch en mid-meal. “It’s like shoe leather. Not even suitable for dogs. Thank God your mother is the one in that family who learned how to cook.”

We did not have to clean our plates. As my father predicted, Clara whisked them away mid-chew. Ira, Paul, Ben, and I exchanged looks and suppressed our laughter.

“Very tasty,” my mother said.

Though my mothers’ sisters applauded the neutral tones of our remodel, they found other aspects of our lives to condemn. They registered their disapproval of my nail-biting and screaming, my father’s excessive weight and continuous eating, and Paul’s generally nervous demeanor. They heard the rumble of chaos underneath all of Eva’s efforts to tame it.

The Friday afternoon before the bar mitzvah, my mother, her sisters, and I went to the local beauty parlor. My mother fell into lockstep, getting her hair set in small rollers, just like her sisters. The three occupied a wall of dryers, my mother in the middle, obedient, once more the baby. Afterward, her sisters nudged her into a bouffant hairdo sprayed only slightly less stiff than their own.

At the ceremony, Paul chanted his haftarah with deep feeling. “That boy should become a cantor,” more than one of the congregants said. He made a speech thanking his teachers and family. My father stood on the bimah next to him, beaming. But the service was led by a young, brash student rabbi. In the prior months, the congregation had voted to affiliate with the Reform movement which had assigned this fledgling rabbi to our outpost. They would no longer need my father to conduct services.

“He’s way too cocky,” my father said of the new rabbi.

In Sunday school, Paul and I had been taught a catchy new anthem that didn’t sound like any Jewish song we’d ever sung. It sounded more like the Christian hymns our classmates in La Cres-centa sang: expansive, optimistic, written in a major, rather than the soulful minor key of traditional Jewish music. God is in his holy temple / earthly thoughts be silent now / while in reverence we assemble / and before his presence bow. My father heard us singing it one afternoon.

“Jews don’t bow down, except on Yom Kippur,” my father said when he heard us, “and they don’t assemble in reverence. Reverence is a goyishe word. The next thing that putz is going to do is bring in a church organ.”

Paul and I started the song again.

“Maybe he thinks we should just assimilate too. Make the same mistake the Reform Jews in Germany made. If we just blend in, everything will be fine. Bullshit. We should have learned our lesson from the millions who converted and probably went to the ovens singing church music.”

At Rosh Hashanah the cocky young rabbi chastised the men in the congregation for wearing tallises and yarmulkes. “Throw off those trappings of superstition,” he said. “It’s time for Judaism to come into the modern age.” When he heard a few elderly men muttering in Hebrew at the back of the congregation, he scolded, “Our services are going to be mostly in English from now on, not in some antiquated language from another world.”

My father jumped up and shouted, “You’ve spit on my grandfather’s grave. You’ve spit on the graves of all our grandfathers.” We followed my father out of the sanctuary and never went back. Ira had lost his stage.