CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Grief Fails to Stop Time

Despite our efforts, my father and I failed to stop time. Another birthday arrived on the anniversary of my grandmother’s funeral, and I entered ninth grade. My dead grandmother rituals faded as they had to compete with homework, and crushes on boys, and muffled telephone conversations, and my drive to have a regular teenage life. Wendy and Joey and my writing sustained me.

Writing had become the way I shored up an otherwise shaky self. I wrote poems in my head during PE, after the baseball team captain sent me so far into the outfield—to avoid the likelihood of any balls requiring my services—that I encroached on another class’s game. I wrote poems in my bedroom at night when I felt wounded by what I perceived as my mother’s betrayals; I wrote about the unseen-by-others deeper meaning in things. My poems rallied in support of the underdog, the misunderstood: Laugh at my wet eyes / Cry out abnormity / I’ll spit on your gray / And answer non-conformity. They reeked of my obsession with death and possessed a fair quotient of adolescent melodrama.

I wrote in the persona of an orphan, inspired by the cheesy Keane print of a huge-eyed, sad girl harlequin that adorned my bedroom wall as my patron saint. The girl in the painting, like the speaker in my poems, was an unloved, misunderstood waif. I wrote in the persona of a child grieving and then turning away from her mother, whose true state she finally recognizes: Look up at me, mother, and feel a moist eye / look up at me, mother / for mother I cry / . . . so bury your face / and I’ll cover your head. I must walk alone now / for mother you’re dead. I wrote as the confused, estranged girl who, à la some episodes of The Twilight Zone, suddenly realizes that she is dead herself: Don’t hate me / Don’t hate me with wet eyes / Talk to me / Don’t let me cry / . . . . I’ll never know why you were that way / Why did you have to go? / Because I’m dead, you wouldn’t stay?

Death had become the deus ex machina, the surprise punch line in my poems. When I wasn’t already dead in my poems, I was contemplating it, as a suicidal girl who drowns herself in the ocean and attains merger with the All: And could a meager no one hope for more / than living to reflect the sky . . . . / My skin turned to cold, I felt no chill / Around great ships and in the small meek bays / I floated with the sea’s unchanging will. I felt alienated, but I also felt aloof and superior—a teenager willingly getting soaked in a downpour while her shallow, plebeian classmates congregated under a protective awning, or a girl dissecting a worm in her biology class and seeing the beauty her classmates missed: Was there beauty in its living / Was there beauty in its dying / Would I ever know the beauty anymore?

At around this time, another “I” began to emerge in my writings, not an orphan or a defiant child, but an oppressed, noble black man. As my mother ironed yet another endless stack of my father’s handkerchiefs one night in the living room, she and I watched CBS news reports on the integration of schools in the South. Surrounded by federal marshals, neat and well-dressed black students entered the schools amid jeers and taunts.

“It’s not right that they should have to go through this just because their skin is a darker color,” my mother said. “Those white people are just ignorant and cruel.” My mother deplored injustice, especially that wrought by stupidity and selfishness. Though my father claimed to be a champion of the downtrodden, he had a blind spot for the plight of black people. Recounting his childhood in Detroit, he’d claim, “Those shvartze children tyrannized me.”

My father’s racism sickened me; from the mid-1960s on, I had begun to identify with the black children we watched on TV, and with the civil rights cause. Of course, I didn’t really know anything about being black; apart from a housekeeper who’d come for a time to help my mother with the cleaning and spoke with a thick, sludgy Southern accent, and the smiling, obsequious man in Montrose who shined shoes and made keys from a wooden shack at the back of a parking lot, I’d never even met any black people. The only encounter I’d had with any African American community was when we drove through the segregated shantytown of Pasadena on our way to my pediatrician Dr. Hoffington’s office. From the car window I could see ramshackle houses and barefoot children playing on peeling stoops. During the 1960s and long afterward, La Crescenta remained without a single black resident.

Not knowing any black people did not stop me from projecting all my outrage, indignation, rebelliousness, and anger into their cause, nor from appropriating their images for my own personal use. I felt Othered and, in La Crescenta at least, they seemed the ultimate Other. If I was going to feel outcast anyway, it seemed far preferable to be a strong black man who could scare my La Crescenta neighbors than to be a timid, awkward little Jewish girl who kept trying to fit in. If I were black, I would no longer have to agonize over whether I was being rejected because I was Jewish or because I was unattractive, because I was crazy, or because I had a weird, deformed father who put on a little boy suit at my only birthday party, because I could not shake the reputation established by crying the entire first year of school—as well as large parts of first and second grade. I could stop wondering if my classmates would accept me if I were more athletic, or ever got real boobs, or were somehow more like them. If I were black, I could not pass no matter what I did, so would be relieved of the burden of trying to. Ironically, imagining myself as an oppressed black man liberated me.

Ninth grade homeroom: 9:00 a.m. The teacher called me up to the front of the room. I was having my period and was convinced that when I stood up, every boy’s eyes in the class would be riveted on the telltale triangular outline of my sanitary belt and bulky pad, perhaps even a misshapen stain of blood seeping through my skirt. There was that old problem of things not coming out when you wanted them to, and rushing out all over when you didn’t.

At the sound of my name, two boys, one of whom sat beside me, the other behind, pals who relished heckling and hounding me, began to confer. I stood up, sensed a warm gush of blood, reflexively put my hand on the back of my skirt to hide any seepage, and heard the boys whisper and laugh.

I felt a hot acrid blast of shame. What did they see? What did they know? One of them spoke under his breath, but pointedly loud enough for me to hear. “Nigger lover,” he said. The other snickered and put his hand over his mouth to hide his laughter from the teacher.

Nigger lover? It took a moment to sink in. It wasn’t a term I’d ever heard. At first, all I felt was relief that they weren’t making fun of my leaking female body. They hadn’t spied the thick, growing-ever-soggier pad stuffed between my legs. After that first flush of relief, though, the vileness of the slur soured in my ear. But then I felt a rush of a different sort of feeling. This accusation was novel—different from the “kike” and “penny pusher” and “Christ killer” that Paul and Ben heard more often than me. Outrage surged through me, and then turned into righteous pride. Being hated for what I believed, for who I loved, for a cause I embraced, gave me a potency that did not come with being hated for something essential and unchangeable about me.

There was a whole political movement growing in the world outside of La Crescenta that these doofuses knew nothing about. I’d watched it on the television news and sensed it in the music. I would be part of this big, powerful new family of social activists, black and white together, locking arms, singing “We Shall Overcome” and marching fearlessly through the streets. I could choose this, as I had not chosen being Jewish, or small or unathletic, or anxious.

I turned back on my heels and glared. “What’s wrong with you guys?” I said.

Change was afoot for my father too. Not only could he not stop time, he couldn’t even keep his own grief frozen. I thought of Great Expectations and the way time had stopped for Miss Havisham at the instant her betrothed abandoned her. And yet nothing could keep her wedding gown from turning to dust around her. My father’s grief had transmuted into a pervasive hypochondria. Whereas vague and ever-shifting symptoms—my father’s, but also my brothers’ and mine—had always provided the background noise for our family’s life, now my father’s hypochondria intensified into an agitated preoccupation with every sensation that came with being in a body. According to his moment-to-moment reports, it hurt to walk, pee, talk, breathe. It hurt to be. He felt nauseous, dizzy, “on fire.” Pain shot through his head; reverse peristalsis threatened the meager forward momentum of his digestion. When he retched theatrically and ran for the toilet, I screamed and held my ears. When he said he felt fire in his loins, I saw the flames.

For many months my father had cried out repeatedly that all he wanted was to die and be reunited with his mother. Now he seemed terrified at the prospect of his wish being granted. Feeling himself destined to develop the cancer that had taken Rebecca, Ira read every minor twinge as its harbinger. The more inward he turned, the more amplified the sensations he perceived. He could feel wayward cells mutating, tumors taking up residence in his colon, his bladder, his brain. He could see them.

“It’s cancer, I know it,” he said. “I’m just not sure where it is.”

Thus began my father’s odyssey from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist to confirm the dire diagnosis. It wasn’t as if there were nothing wrong with him; the doctors found plenty—allergy and asthma and irritable bowel and prostatitis and borderline diabetes and high blood pressure, not to mention obesity, and his ever-worsening addiction to painkillers and sleeping pills. Today I think they might well diagnose fibromyalgia or an autoimmune disease. At that time the doctors chalked up all his symptoms to hysteria. They tried to reassure him that he wasn’t dying, and their dismissal only made him more depressed and paranoid. Since the doctors had nothing else to offer, he medicated himself with more and more painkillers and sedatives, which he obtained through a sympathetic and equally addicted local pharmacist.

“I don’t think anyone can really save me at this point,” he said, “but don’t I at least deserve some relief from the pain?”

“This isn’t the first time he’s done this,” my mother said. I sat across from her at the family room table while we drank tall glasses of milk and ate pieces broken off from the giant bar of Hershey’s chocolate she always kept in the refrigerator. My mother and I could bond over food—sweet, then salty, then sweet again.

“Your father had a similar episode a couple of years before you were born,” she explained. It had started, she told me, when a client had jabbed my father in the ribs after he’d told her a joke.

“Was the joke dirty?” I asked.

“Does your father tell any other kind? I don’t think she was all that offended. It was a playful jab. Gornisht mit gornisht.” [Nothing from nothing].

The typical pattern: an expression of unbridled impulse followed by regret and the fantasy of retribution.

“Your father couldn’t let go of it; he magnified it in his head.”

After the jab, Ira began to complain of a diffuse assembly of symptoms: shortness of breath, pain across the chest, weakness, and the conviction that he was dying. He stopped working and took to his bed. For months, he went from doctor to doctor, telling them the story of the joke and the jab. They examined him and X-rayed him and tried to reassure him. Maybe it was a bruise; it would likely go away.

“He checked himself into the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara for a head-to-toe workup. Your father loved head-to-toe workups,” my mother said. The more the doctors denied that anything was wrong with him, the more the woman’s offending hand swelled in his mind, her finger huge and taunting, sharp as a knife, aimed at his vulnerable internal organs. Whatever the doctors said, he knew he had been violated.

Finally, my father wound up at the Beverly Hills office of a cranky old orthopedist. The doctor took another chest X-ray and announced that my father’s rib had been “knocked off the breastbone.” He put him in a chest-stabilizing corset. The treatment afterward consisted of my mother’s bathing and powdering my father’s chest every day before swaddling him like a baby in it.

“It’ll take a few months to get better,” the doctor said. “Trust me, Ira, this will do the trick; just give it the tincture of time.”

“So was it true? Was his rib knocked off the breastbone?” I asked my mother.

“I don’t know if that’s even a real condition,” she said. “His rib might have been bruised or inflamed. I think the doctor just understood what your father needed to get better. He gave him a diagnosis that sounded dramatic. Your father is very susceptible to the placebo effect.”

“So you don’t believe there was anything really wrong with him?”

“Mit gornisht,” she said. Apparently the doctor had found a placebo with the right metaphorical weight. A rib knocked off the breastbone provided a vivid image of violent injury, yet Ira could also picture the process of its mending. It freed his hypochondriacal fixations from the narrative they got bound up in and fixed them to a story with a happy ending. After a few months of wearing the brace, he announced that the rib had melded back into position; he could feel it.

My mother explained that she and Ira celebrated his recovery by having long-deferred sex.

“My diaphragm had been sitting in the medicine cabinet for so long it had a hole in it,” my mother said. “And that’s how you were conceived.”

On the heels of a breakdown, Ira’s sperm slipped through that tear and found her egg, and the combination became me.

My mother laughed and bit into another piece of chocolate. If my father hadn’t gone nuts, her diaphragm wouldn’t have sat around, and if it hadn’t sat around, it wouldn’t have torn, and if it hadn’t torn, I never would have been born. So, in a sense, my father’s insanity was implicated in my very origins. It had spawned me.

This time, apparently none of the doctors had found the metaphor that could contain Ira’s free-ranging sense of disease. Nevertheless, his obsession finally settled into a couple of specific loci, his lower right abdomen and his penis. He never took a hand off one or the other of them.

In the spring of ninth grade, my English class read Shakespeare. “Ask Daddy to help you with your homework,” my mother prodded. “It’ll get his mind off his problems. You know, he’s very good at Shakespeare.” The tragedies had always called out to him—the poetry, the grandeur, the betrayals, the pageantry, people done in by their own fatal flaws, lots of blood on the stage, and scarcely anyone getting out alive.

I brought my homework into the living room, where my father paced as my mother ironed. The smell of the steam infusing the cotton fibers filled the room. There was already a foot-high stack of white handkerchiefs on the board. Ira would take a new one whenever he needed to blow his nose or wipe his mouth.

I sat on the sofa and began to read a section of Romeo and Juliet aloud. “I don’t understand all the words, Daddy,” I said. “Daddy, help me, you’re good at this.”

My mother coaxed, “Ira, help her. You’ve always been a whiz at Shakespeare.”

This captured my father’s attention enough to get him to stop pacing and to settle in on the sofa next to me. He was wearing Jockey shorts with the leg holes stretched out so that his floppy testicles peeked out on one side of the pouch. I tried not to look, even as I could not look away, drawn to and repelled by my father’s overexposed, overripe body. I had begun to blame that body—much as he did—for all the troubles besetting my family. If I avoided his bottom half, then my gaze could get stuck on his hands, whose appearance seemed odder and more disturbing the older I got. For years I had accepted them as normal, but with adolescence, the forked nails, and the way the bones protruded, as if trying to find their way to a normal architecture, made me queasy. I’d look at his contorted fingers and feel as if I might as well have been looking at his genitals, and if I moved up from his hands, there were his always too-invasive eyes.

“Romeo, O, Romeo / Wherefore art thou Romeo?” I read. Distracted, my father inserted his hand into the waistband of his underwear and massaged a two-inch area on the lower right side of his abdomen. Massaged is probably not the right word exactly—demonically, relentlessly, and yet unconsciously, he dug his fingernails into his flesh until he bore a red hole in the skin. As blood started to ooze out of the wound, my mother shouted at him.

“For god’s sakes, leave yourself be, Ira.”

“I’m not doing anything,” he said calmly. “Can’t you see it’s the parasites?” Often the more insane the content of my father’s words, the more elevated and refined his presentation.

“What parasites, Daddy?” I asked.

“You’re encouraging him,” my mother said, holding the iron aloft in her hand.

“Why don’t you look for yourself, Ev, if you’re so certain I’m imagining things? A good wife would believe her husband, stand by him, but not you. No, you have to discount me.”

“Oh, please,” my mother said. “Do you think anyone else in the world would have the patience with you that I’ve had?” She pressed down hard with the iron until it sizzled.

My father got up from the sofa and returned with the magnifying glass he used to read the fine print on insurance policies. He stood before my mother, thrusting his massive belly too close to her, and attempted to hand her the glass.

“Ira, get away from me. You’re going to get this hot iron on you if you’re not careful, and then you’ll have a real problem.”

“If you would just look with an open mind, you would see them crawling,” he said.

My mother turned her head and refused to take the glass. “Just stop,” she said, slamming the iron down in an upright position on the board. “I can’t take any more of this. Please just help your daughter read her Shakespeare.”

“Your mother’s never liked to face reality,” my father said. “She always turns away when things get unpleasant. Shuts her eyes to the truth. Go ahead,” he shouted. “Retreat. Be an ostrich sticking your head in the ground instead of helping your husband when he needs you.”

“You keep finding new ways to break my heart,” my mother said, pulling the iron’s cord out of the wall, and turning her back on him.

My father walked over and held the glass out to me. He smiled, full of sudden charm. I could not turn away from my father. And what if he was right? There was some truth in what he said; my mother could be oblivious, refusing to see whatever she didn’t want to see.

I remembered the day when, as a toddler, I’d gotten red ants in my pants from sitting on a branch of one of the old pine trees in our backyard and riding it like a horse. I could feel them biting me and I kept running into the house, and my mother would take off my pants and say, “There’s nothing there. It’s your imagination.” She’d put my pants back on, and I’d go back outside to play. By the time she found the ants, I’d been bitten multiple times.

So was it really impossible that my father had parasites on his skin? I put my Shakespeare down and took the magnifying glass from his hand. I moved my head in closer to survey the area of inflamed skin. This close proximity to my father’s round abdomen still signified a certain homey, comic comfort. I remembered playing with him on the bed when I was small, when touching each birthmark or freckle evoked a different physical response. I looked in his face for the familiar indications that what we were doing now was a game, a private performance that would bind us closer, even as it drove my mother away. Yes, it might be a little crazy, and yes, there was always the risk that we might go too far, and the situation would grow too frightening, but it had always felt good to be in it together. And if I gave my father this, just this moment of reassurance, then we could return to the Shakespeare together.

In my father’s eyes I saw resigned panic. I moved the glass in closer and then farther away to get oriented. I squinted before the forest of curly black hairs that blanketed his fat belly. In between the hairs wove a map of red and blue lines, blood vessels, bumps, scratches, and a trickle of darker red blood. If there was something perverse, something grotesque about this encounter, there was also something so . . . intimate.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

“I’m not sure what I’m looking for, Daddy,” I said.

“See that black spot,” he said, pointing to one area.

“Maybe.” I saw a lot of black spots.

“That’s the head of the paramecium.”

He said it with tremendous clinical authority. I looked closely. What were those specks of black? Hair follicles? Birthmarks? Dirt? As always, my imagination rose to the level of my father’s conviction; for just a moment, I saw the paramecium. It looked almost the way it had under the microscope in my eighth grade science class. A moment later, it had swum or hidden or dissolved away.

“I think I saw it,” I said. “How do you know for sure it’s a paramecium?”

“I can feel them burrowing around inside,” he said. “I can feel them. You believe me, Debbie, don’t you?”

I knew that paramecia didn’t burrow but, as with fidelity to the tenets of any faith, my beliefs did not rely on reason. I made the leap once more, and instantaneously parasites crawled not only on my father’s flesh but on my flesh as well. I felt them. First, just an itchiness on the surface of my skin under the waistband of my pants, and then, the insistent pressure of their burrowing.

“Daddy, I think they’re on me too,” I said. “I feel itchy. Like there are worms crawling on me; is that what they feel like . . . like worms?”

“Have I given them to you too, already?” he said gently. “You always get whatever I’ve got.”

“Gotteniu, there are no paramecia; there are no parasites; there are no worms on anyone,” my mother said, shouting and ripping the glass out of my hand.

“Ow,” I said.

“When are you going to stop being so suggestible to your father’s mishegoss? Or are you just doing this to antagonize me? You’ve always loved getting in the middle between us.”

“Give me the magnifying glass back,” he said. “Or are you afraid that I’m going to see something that’s going to discredit those all-holy doctors?”

My mother glared at me for having once more engaged in some illicit Oedipal collusion.

“You told me to ask him to help me with my homework. And now you’re blaming me.”

“Just stop it,” she said. “Both of you, stop it right now. I don’t have any more patience for this.” She handed the magnifying glass back to my father.

“Go, go and look at what you’ve done to yourself. You’ve torn up your own flesh. All this—done to yourself.”

He looked at her as if he were an enlightened being condescending to some lower order of mortal.

“Don’t you see? I’m only digging at my skin to allow the parasites a portal of escape.”

“Vey iz mir, your mother would be ashamed of you,” my mother said, walking away.

“I’ve got to do my homework now, Daddy,” I said. “Please, can you just listen? ‘And what love can do, that dares love attempt.’ What does that mean, Daddy? Can you help me figure out the lines, please?”

There was no bringing him back. He sat on the sofa, head down, magnifying glass in one hand, trying to see over the mass of his own belly to the black spot below.

“I can’t worry about your petty school assignments right now,” he said. “Can’t you see I’m a very sick man?”