• MARCH—JULY 1976 •
On July 4, 1976, my mother, sister, and I celebrated the bicentennial at the Long Island summer home of Abe Zelman, a sixty-year-old married man who had been trying for years to get my mother into bed. We found ourselves in this position because back in March I had told Hortense to go fuck herself. Of course I had wanted to say that to her for as long as I had known her, and I finally had the opportunity after my wisdom teeth were pulled. I told the oral surgeon to send the $175 bill to my father, but when the bill arrived at his house, Hortense opened it up and immediately phoned me, demanding to know why my college health insurance didn’t cover the expense. I told her I was only covered if I went to the University of Chicago clinic. Hortense asked me why I hadn’t done that. I explained that the procedures were done there by residents in oral surgery and I had wanted to go to a real oral surgeon, adding that my friend had gone to the clinic and the resident had pulled the wrong tooth. Hortense told me that she was sending the $175 bill to my mother; they were already spending enough money on my tuition. I reminded her that my father was required to pay all of my medical expenses until I was twenty-one. Hortense pointed out that she had been to France only three times in fifteen years because of all the money they had spent on me and my siblings. I replied that maybe she ought to have thought of that before she began having an affair with a married man with three young children. Hortense said she would have her revenge against me when I had my own ungrateful children. Then she added that I was too much of a child myself ever to have children anyway. That’s when I told her to go fuck herself.
The next day my father called and told me that I needed to apologize to Hortense. I refused, insisting that Hortense owed me the apology. My father replied that Hortense didn’t owe me any apologies, and, if I looked at things honestly and dispassionately, I would realize that Hortense had always wanted the best for me. “Really?” I said. “What about that time she refused to give me a clean plate until I ate my leftover jam?” My father said that he had no idea what I was talking about.
At the end of May, I received a letter from the bursar’s office informing me that I would not be permitted to enroll for classes in September until my outstanding tuition bills were paid in full. The total came to $4,800. I called up my father and asked him why he hadn’t paid my tuition. “When you apologize to Hortense, then I’ll pay your tuition,” he answered. I told him that he was required to pay it. “That remains to be seen,” he said.
I had a 4.0 GPA. Surely the university would give me a scholarship once I explained my circumstances to the dean of admissions, a man I believed was keenly invested in my success. In high school, I had been a C student, and my SAT scores were mediocre. I had no realistic chance of getting into the University of Chicago, but I applied anyway, hoping for an intervention of divine justice. I idolized Saul Bellow, and for my one-page personal statement
I had written a ten-page essay about how I had fallen in love with Chicago through its literature. I had read The Adventures of Augie March in tenth grade, which led me to the novels of Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Meyer Levin, and Richard Wright, and the poetry of Carl Sandburg. I concluded my essay by stating that, although I had never seen Chicago, the city’s great literary tradition had provided me with a map of the city’s soul. By the end of March of my senior year, I had already been rejected by a number of colleges, including Rutgers, the school my father was hoping I’d get into because the tuition was so much lower than at the other schools where I’d applied. Then, on April 1, I received a letter from Scholastic Magazine informing me that my story “Two by Two” had won first prize in their national high school short story contest. I still hadn’t heard from Chicago, so I immediately called the admissions office to let them know about my prize and put a copy of “Two by Two” in the mail to the dean of admissions. Three days later the dean called me. He told me that the fiction prize was a great achievement, but they were in a quandary about my application. Everyone on the committee felt my essay and my story were brilliant. Could I help them understand the gap between my mediocre grades and my other achievements? “I don’t know,” I replied. Actually, I did know, but in a way that was too inchoate and personal for me to easily articulate. How could I explain to him that nothing felt real to me except the novels I read—not the other books I was supposed to read for school, not the grades I received, not the things I said to people—that something was always lost in translation between my feelings and actions, that, except for books, everything about my life felt alien to me. Then the dean asked me what my home life was like. “My home life?” I repeated. The dean said that he noticed on my application that my parents were divorced and that certainly couldn’t be easy. “Oh, right, my home life,” I said, finally understanding. “Yes, my home life is really bad. I’m sure I would do a lot better in a different environment.”
After I received my first-quarter grades, the dean had sent me a gracious note congratulating me and expressing his pride that I had validated their admissions decision. So when I went to see the dean about the possibility of a scholarship, I decided to emphasize the home-life factor and told him a story of great woe about my cold, remote father and cruel, resentful stepmother. The dean was sympathetic, but not really. He explained that, regrettably, my situation wasn’t unique and that the university couldn’t provide financial aid for every student who had a falling-out with his or her parents. He said that just the week before a student had come to see him because his parents had disowned him after they learned he was homosexual. “Now that,” said the dean, “breaks one’s heart.”
I HAD A GIRLFRIEND, MORE OR LESS—well, really less than more. We had never progressed beyond the occasional hand job. Jane and I had met my first quarter when we were in two classes together and lived on the same dorm floor. She was raven haired, olive skinned and small figured but with breasts that pressed fully and roundly against her shirts. For years afterward, I would think of Jane every time I read the word “Jewess.” Of course I was hopelessly in love with her, and, of course, she had a boyfriend, a senior named Jeremiah. When he broke up with her in October, Jane turned to me for comfort and solace. We spent all our time together, cuddling on her bed when we studied together or watched television. One night I kissed her. Jane told me she liked me just as a friend, but she supposed it would be all right if we kissed once in a while. In November, she gave me a hand job on my birthday. She let me kiss her breasts and go exploring with my hand beneath the elastic of her underpants. When I asked her if she and Jeremiah had had oral sex, she said yes, but told me that she wasn’t into oral sex anymore when I proposed that we graduate from hand jobs to blow jobs.
Jane was sympathetic to the fact that I was still a virgin at age nineteen. When I proposed to her that we have sex just one time, she told me she would consider it, but I had to remember that it would be a one-time deal, that it was something she would do for me as a friend. Encouraged, I said, “Of course! In fact, I think I it would be easier for us to be friends if we had sex just one time.”
The night I told Jane about my conversation with the dean of admissions, I was so despondent, and Jane was so clearly appalled by my father’s cruelty, that she told me to take off my clothes and get into her bed. She went over to her bureau and extracted a small box from the top drawer. Then she lay down next to me and rolled off her jeans and underpants, keeping her top on. I had never seen her nude below the waist, but this business was too gynecological for me. She removed a diaphragm from the box and squeezed jelly from a tube around its rim. Then she hiked her legs up in the air and inserted the thing into her vagina, a look of intense concentration on her face as she felt for the right fit. “All right. I’m ready,” she said.
I lay on top of her and she guided me in. Just as I was registering the divine sensation of being inside her, I felt a sudden spurt from the center of my body.
“Did you come?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“See,” she said, “it’s really not that big of a deal.”
Still, for the next couple of days, I let myself feel hopeful. If Jane became my girlfriend for real, if I could look forward to having sex with her all the time, I wouldn’t care about what happened with my father or with school. I’d support myself through my job at a Hyde Park bookstore. I’d rent a small room, become a famous writer by twenty-one, and marry Jane. I wouldn’t need my father or anyone. But reality set in after a week. Not only was the sex not that big of a deal, I realized, per our agreement, that it really was a one-time thing, and that, before I became famous and married Jane, I would have to tell my mother that I might not be returning to school in the fall. I had put it off because I knew she would try to emotionally leverage this falling-out with my father. So I called up Sarah in her dorm room at Rutgers and asked her if she would tell Ruth for me.
“Not a chance,” she replied.
“Sarah, I’ll do anything for you if you call her for me. I’ll write every one of your English papers until you graduate.”
“Seth, don’t you think it would be easier just to apologize to Hortense?”
“I know, I know, but I can’t do it. It’s difficult to explain.”
“You’d prefer to live at home with Mom than apologize to Hortense?”
“SOS,” I said, using our secret code: “Save our Shapiro.” Sarah and I would say it to each other when our problems became too overwhelming, when one or both of us felt we were going under emotionally.
“I’m not calling Mom for you, but I’ll call Dad and see what I can do.”
Sarah called me back the next day.
“Dad said he’s happy to pay your tuition after you apologize to Hortense.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that Mom would probably get a lawyer to enforce the divorce agreement, that he would have to pay your tuition eventually, and that the only thing all this would accomplish would be to cause you to miss a semester or two of school.”
“You told him Mom was going to get a lawyer? What did he say to that?”
“He said that if you’re so concerned about missing any school, you can transfer to Rutgers and pay your own tuition.”
“Do you think that’s why he’s doing this? To get me to transfer to Rutgers?”
“No, I think he really believes you owe Hortense an apology.”
When Sarah and I had been applying to colleges, our father had tried every means of persuasion and pressure to get us to go to Rutgers, where the tuition was so much lower than anywhere else because we were residents of New Jersey. Sarah was admitted to a couple of small liberal arts colleges—Macalester in Minnesota and Union in upstate New York. Our father had pointed out that Rutgers was just as good academically as either of these schools and half the cost. Sarah had told him that she preferred a small liberal arts college and that she really wanted to get out of New Jersey.
“What’s so bad about going to college in New Jersey?” our father had said. “I went to college in New Jersey. In fact I had to live at home when I went to college because money was tight.”
“But aren’t you happy that I have more options?” Sarah had asked. Then he offered Sarah a deal: If she went to Rutgers, he would give her five thousand dollars when she graduated. She could use it for anything she wanted—graduate school, a trip to Europe.
“But wouldn’t you pay for graduate school anyway?” she replied.
“That remains to be seen,” he said.
WHEN I CALLED MY MOTHER to explain my situation, she crowed with delight after I told her what I had said to Hortense. “I tell you, Seth, I surely did something right with you children!”
My mother had said the same thing—“I surely did something right!”—when I received all As my first quarter at the University of Chicago. I had asked Sarah, “Do you think it would be too cruel to remind Mom that I had to get one thousand miles away from her before I finally did well in school?”
“What about that dean of admissions?” my mother asked now. “Maybe he can do something for you?”
“No, Mom, he can’t do anything.”
“Why not? I’m sure you’re quite a feather in his cap.”
“He just can’t. I know.”
“What about Saul Bellow? Can he do anything for you?”
“Mom, I’ve told you a hundred times: I don’t know Saul Bellow.”
At the beginning of winter quarter, I had landed a job at the most popular bookstore in Hyde Park. One day my prince came in to buy some books. As I was ringing up Bellow’s purchases, the great man asked me if I was a student at the university. Then he asked me what I was studying and where I was from. A zillion things were going on in my mind. Bellow could tell I was star-struck, and I appreciated the kindness and the attention. I badly wanted to tell Bellow that I had written my college application essay about The Adventures of Augie March, but I didn’t want to frighten him off. Would his mood suddenly curdle if I mentioned one of his novels? I wanted to tell him that if I had not read Augie March and Herzog, I would probably be at some third-rate college, not at the University of Chicago. Actually, seeing Bellow I was reminded that I owed him a much more direct debt for my admission to Chicago, but it was a connection I felt extremely self-conscious about. My prize-winning story, if not exactly plagiarized from, was deeply influenced by a Bellow story titled “The Old System.” “Two by Two” was based on an incident from my own life—when I was ten, my grandfather had used me as a go-between to let my mother and aunt know that he had decided to be buried next to his second wife, Rose, not next to his first wife, Esther, the mother of his two daughters, and a huge family uproar had ensued, a drama of poisoned feelings and betrayal—but the style and most of the premise was directly borrowed from “The Old System.” In Bellow’s story, as in mine, the Jewish soap opera is filtered through the memory of a geneticist named Isaac, a relative of the feuding parties. I had been vaguely aware of being under the spell of “The Old System” when I was writing my story, but seeing Bellow in person, I became conscious of how directly I had appropriated it. I felt as if I had something belonging to Bellow in my pocket, something he didn’t even know he was missing.
Then I noticed a small, delicate, iridescent feather pleated into the band of Bellow’s fedora. A feather in his cap. I finally understood that dumb expression my mother always used. It was a vanity, a sign of pride, the famous author in all his splendid plumage. As I was handing him his change, knowing it was now or never, I readied myself to tell Bellow that his novels had literally changed the course of my life. “Mr. Bellow, I like your hat,” I said. Bellow put his head back and laughed. “Thank you very much. So do I.”
I was so excited about the encounter that I told everyone I knew, including my mother. By the time Ruth had finished telling everyone she knew, I had become Bellow’s protégé.
“Seth darling,” my mother continued on the phone, “I just want you to know that everything’s going to be all right. Maybe we can get a loan from the bank, and I know Abe Zelman will be happy to help with legal advice. I’ll do anything I can to help you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I love you, darling. We’ll get that bastard.”
When he decided not to pay my tuition, my father didn’t really anticipate how much my mother would welcome the chance to nettle him, to impose herself in his life—and he couldn’t have known about Abe Zelman. My mother had met him when she needed a lawyer to handle her divorce from Eddie. She was a second-grade teacher and deeply in debt from all the loans she had co-signed for Eddie. Abe had offered her a summer job in his law office at a surprisingly generous salary, and she had worked there every summer since. As part of his campaign to get her into bed, Abe gave her bonuses and bought her expensive gifts. She accepted the money and gifts, though she had no intention of sleeping with him. She had an on-and-off-again lover, Jimmy Conroy, the married principal of the school where she taught. Besides, she found Abe physically repulsive—he had a pug nose, elephantine ears, and fingers like sausages. When Ruth told Abe about my father defaulting on the divorce agreement, he immediately drafted a letter, threatening my father’s with various legal actions, including charging fourteen percent interest on the unpaid tuition. He also said that he had reviewed the thirteen-year-old divorce agreement, and its terms were thoroughly unacceptable to his client.
My mother was so thrilled with the letter she read it to me over the phone.
“Mom, don’t you think this is a little excessive? Suing to change the terms of the original divorce agreement? Charging interest on the unpaid tuition?”
“Look, thirteen years ago your father played hardball with me. Now it’s my turn. Besides, Abe’s not charging me for his services.”
“Don’t you think he’s going to expect something in return?”
“Honey, I appreciate your concern, but I can handle Abe. I’ve been doing it for years.”
The year before, my mother had told me about Abe’s most ludicrous attempt to seduce her. She and Abe had been the last two people in the office at the end of the day. Abe had gone into the bathroom and come out completely naked. He had opened his arms and said, “Please, doll, just one kiss.” Ruth had burst out laughing. She told me his penis looked like a snail, barely visible beneath his huge belly. I was scandalized when my mother told me this, but she said that Abe was harmless.
After my mother told me about Abe’s letter, I received another letter from the bursar’s office informing me that my tuition had been paid in full. I knew I would have to call my mother and share the news with her, but she beat me to it.
“I tell you,” she said, “that Abe Zelman is some lawyer. Honey, you really ought to write him a letter to thank him.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You know, sweetie, Abe would like very much to see you. He’s so proud of your success, and he hasn’t seen you in years.”
“All right,” I said.
“Abe’s invited us all to his summerhouse for the Fourth of July. I told him I didn’t know if you could come, but it would mean a lot to him if you did.”
“Sure, I’ll come.”
“Oh, sweetheart, that’s wonderful! Absolutely wonderful. I’ll send you the money for the plane fare tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You won’t forget to send him a thank-you note?”
“No, Mom.”
I was more thankful for the plane ticket home than I would have ever admitted to Ruth. Ten days before, Jane and I had gone to a party together, and she had left with another boy. A boy with an earring! The next morning I knocked on Jane’s dorm door. I decided to pretend that everything was normal, that Jane and I would go to breakfast in the dining hall as usual. She didn’t answer the door, but I knew—I just knew!—she was in there with the boy from the night before. I went back to my room, waited an hour, and then knocked on Jane’s door again. No answer. I went to the dining hall and saw the two of them at a table together. When we finally talked that evening, Jane told me that I was too needy, that she wasn’t attracted to me, and that she didn’t think of me as her boyfriend. I began crying and told Jane how much I loved her. She looked at me sadly and apologized for hurting me.
“Just tell me one thing,” I said.
“All right.”
“Did you have oral sex with him?”
For the next two weeks I barely slept. Lying in bed at night, I couldn’t stop myself from imaging Jane having sex with the boy from the party. Oral sex. I tried everything to dull my thoughts. I masturbated five times a day. I drank from a bottle of vodka until my bed was whirling around the room like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz. But nothing helped. My mind was deteriorating. I couldn’t read, couldn’t write my papers, couldn’t think. My 4.0 GPA was in the toilet. My brain was emptied of everything but the image of Jane going down on the boy with the earring.
ON JULY 1, SARAH, RUTH, and Seamus met me at Newark Airport. I surmised that Seamus had come at my mother’s request so that she could foster the illusion of a close, happy family. Sarah had come because I phoned her the night before and pleaded with her, claiming that I was in no condition to ride alone with our mother in the car for thirty minutes. Then I asked her if she could get me a job at the telemarketing company where she was working for the summer. “Sure,” she said. “You want to spend the summer at home, though?” I told her I needed to get out of Chicago for the summer. “You love Chicago, Seth. Is everything all right?” I said I was fine. Just fine.
Sarah drove home from the airport. I sat next to her in the front. Ruth was in the back, the hand holding her lit cigarette in the vague vicinity of the window. Seamus was sitting next to her, a knitted kippah bobby-pinned to his head. Since his bar mitzvah, Seamus had become more and more observant. Our mother began keeping a kosher house to accommodate him, but my indifference to the rules of kashrut created tension between us. On my last visit home, he had discovered me eating a slice of pepperoni pizza on a dairy plate and had stood over me like a yeshiva-boy version of the Grand Inquisitor, his arms folded tightly across his chest, his eyes welling up with tears but still blazing with condemnation. Later he had removed the plate from the drainboard and dropped it in the garbage.
Seamus and I did have one thing in common: He wasn’t speaking to our father either. Six months before, Seamus had read in the local paper that Elliot Shapiro was scheduled to deliver a lecture at a hospital just down the road from our apartment. Seamus was sure he would call and had waited all day by the phone, but never heard from him. The day after the lecture, Seamus called our father at home and asked him why he had not bothered to visit when he was only five minutes away. Our father replied that he had come to town just to deliver the lecture. He had gone directly to the airport after he was done. Seamus told him that was no excuse and then proceeded to deliver his own lecture about what a bad parent he was.
For about five minutes no one in the car said anything. Then Ruth said, “Seth, you’re very quiet. Is everything all right?”
The ashtray in front of me was overflowing with lipstick-stained cigarette butts.
“I have a deal for you, Mom. If you can go the next two months without a cigarette, I’ll answer any question you want to ask me about my life.”
“Ha, ha, very funny,” Ruth said, and took a deep drag on her cigarette. She exhaled the smoke out the side of her mouth in the direction of the window. In the rearview mirror, I caught Seamus glaring at me. He didn’t approve of the way I treated our mother. I rolled my window all the way down, and the sudden blast of air lifted Seamus’s kippah. He clapped it down with one hand.
“Seth, please close your window,” he said.
“I’m being asphyxiated up here,” I replied.
“All right, I’m putting it out,” Ruth said, dragging deeply on her cigarette one more time and then letting it jet away out the window.
“So how’s your girlfriend Jane?” Ruth asked.
“Fine.”
“Why don’t you invite her out to visit this summer? You can see some Broadway shows, go to museums.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The two of you can share a room if you want,” Ruth added. “You know I’m very open-minded about these things.”
I was still silent.
“What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”
“No, Mom,” I said. “Besides, I’m not sure Reb Seamus would approve.”
“I’m going away. Remember?” my brother said.
In two days Seamus was going to Israel for a month with Young Judea.
“So you’ll invite her to visit then?” Ruth repeated.
“We’ll see,” I said.
“You’re not still a virgin, are you?”
“Jesus Christ, Mom!” I exclaimed.
“Your sister is still a virgin, but I think it’s different with girls.”
Sarah turned around and looked hard at Ruth. “You just said something wrong.”
“Look at the road, for God’s sake,” Ruth said.
Ruth lit another cigarette. “Why? Why did I say something wrong?” she said defiantly. “You and Seth tell each other everything.”
Actually, I hadn’t known—and didn’t particularly want to know—whether or not my sister was a virgin. I felt extremely uncomfortable, as if I had accidentally seen Sarah in the nude.
“I think it’s wonderful that you and your brother are so close. That’s one of my proudest achievements as a mother.”
I SPENT MOST OF THE next three days watching television and drinking my mother’s liquor. None of us were drinkers, but Ruth kept some dust-coated bottles of scotch, gin, and brandy behind the steel-wool pads in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Sarah worked from 6:00 p.m. until midnight. On my second night home she came in at twelve thirty. I was sitting on the couch, watching an old movie, and drinking a bottle of B&B brandy. I asked her if she’d like some of it.
“I don’t like the taste of alcohol,” she replied.
“Neither do I,” I said, “but this is different. This bottle is over thirteen years old. Mom told me it was left over from her wedding. Try a sip.”
I held out my glass to Sarah.
“Oh, this is amazing!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never tasted anything like it.”
“Go get a glass.”
Sarah sat next to me on the couch and I poured her a drink. She asked me when I had begun drinking so much. I told her that Jane had left me.
“Oh, Seth, I’m sorry. Did you see it coming?”
“Yes and no. We had some problems, but she had invited me over to her house in Highland Park for Passover and her family really loved me, especially her mother.”
“Did you ever think that might be the problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“Most nineteen-year-old girls don’t want nice, safe boys their mothers would love.”
“Maybe so.”
I knew that Sarah was right, but we shared the impulse to court other families as if we were hoping to be adopted by them. Both of us, in our own ways, had spent our lives looking for substitute families. In high school, Sarah had put a great deal of energy into being popular—it was her ticket out of our apartment and into the houses and lives of the many wealthy families in our town. Virtually every weekend she slept over at a friend’s house, sleeping in their clean, comfortable homes, swimming in their pools, eating their expensive food. Of course she knew her friends’ families had their own problems—divorces, bankruptcies, wayward children—but any family seemed like a reprieve from our own.
“Jane was too beautiful for me anyway. Girls that beautiful don’t want to go out with boys who are just average looking.”
Sarah pursed her lips, as if she wanted to disagree with me but knew I was right and was perhaps relieved that I was being realistic.
“If you’re average looking, then what am I?”
“Prettier than me.”
“Thanks,” Sarah said, laughing.
“Do you think I’m too needy?” I asked her.
“Everyone is needy.”
“As needy as Mom?”
“Don’t do that to yourself, Seth. No one is as needy as Mom.”
We laughed, but of course we were both terrified by the possibility that one day we might be as needy as our mother.
“God, I’m really dreading going to Abe Zelman’s tomorrow,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because his son, Aaron, is going to be there. Mom once tried to set me up with him, and I told her I wasn’t interested, but she gave him my phone number anyway. When he called me up, I lied and told him that I had a boyfriend.”
“What did he say?”
“He was actually very nice. He apologized and said that his father and my mother probably misunderstood each other. I said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ He laughed and said, ‘Probably not.’”
“So don’t go,” I said. “I’m the one who has to go, not you.”
“No, I have to go,” she said. “When I told Mom I wasn’t going, she began crying, telling me that I needed to do this for her, that Abe really wanted me to meet Aaron, and that she would be so embarrassed if I didn’t go because of all the free legal help that Abe had given her.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Forget about it.”
“Look . . . Sarah . . . about what Mom said in the car the other day.”
“What? About my being a virgin? I don’t care.”
“Neither do I. I guess that’s all I’m trying to say.”
We sipped our brandy, looked at each other, then away. I was actually surprised that she was still a virgin. I knew she’d had lots of boyfriends and had presumed she had slept with some of them.
“How did she know anyway?” I asked.
“How does she know anything? She asked me.”
“You told her?”
Sarah yawned. “Sometimes it’s just easier that way.”
WE SET OUT FOR EAST HAMPTON after lunch the next day, July 4. Seamus had left for Israel the day before. After we crossed the George Washington Bridge, Ruth told us that she had some news: Abe was pursuing a suit against our father to change the terms of the thirteen-year-old divorce agreement.
“Mom,” Sarah said, “we got what we wanted. He paid Seth’s tuition. I don’t see the point in being vengeful.”
“Oh, and he wasn’t being vengeful when he refused to pay Seth’s tuition?”
“Maybe he was,” Sarah answered. “But we still need to have a relationship with him. How can we do that if you’re suing him?”
“Say, look here,” Ruth said, “I’m doing this for the two of you.”
“Mom,” I chimed in, “can’t you at least be honest and admit you’re doing this for yourself? Suing Dad is just a way for you to get your jollies.”
Ruth lit a cigarette. “Fine, then why don’t you go live with your father for the summer?” she replied, exhaling smoke in my direction. “I’m sure he’d be happy to have you sit around all day and drink.”
I turned around and looked at Ruth. “Mom, can you tell me, on your word of honor, as God is your witness, that in the past two weeks you have not used the phrase ‘I have that bastard by the balls’ or some variation thereof?” She didn’t answer. “See,” I continued, “this is about your interest in my father’s balls. Nothing more.”
Since returning home from Chicago, I had felt ill in the heart over demolishing my relationship with my father—and all because I couldn’t bring myself to apologize to Hortense. After years of indifference, he had finally begun paying attention to me during my senior year of high school. When I was writing “Two by Two,” I had called him for help with some of the scientific details I was using in the story. Of course he had been happy to discuss science with me. I sent him a copy of the story after I won the Scholastic Award. He wrote back a letter that began: “EXTRAORDINARY!” Despite his lobbying so intensely for Rutgers, he was actually very proud when I was admitted to a prestigious university, and I could sense he regarded me differently afterward. I sent him copies of the papers I wrote for my classes with the high grades and the professors’ comments on them, and he wrote back with his own comments and questions about the essays. During the winter quarter, he had come out to Chicago to give a lecture at the medical school, and the two of us went out to dinner at Morton’s. Sitting among the businessmen, enveloped in the manly scents of cigars and charred beef, sharing an expensive bottle of wine, we had talked for hours, mainly about my studies and the books he was reading. I realized that my father hadn’t paid attention to me until I was well credentialed, but I excused it by rationalizing that he simply wasn’t interested in children, and now that I was on my way to becoming an accomplished adult, he could appreciate and love me as his son. After dinner, we went to see Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon at a movie theater in Water Tower Place. Throughout the movie he kept his hand on my knee, and I felt like a boy again: Alone, just the two of us, with no Hortense, no Ruth, and no siblings, he was finally free to love me, as I had always believed he would. Less than two months later, I had told Hortense to fuck herself.
WHEN WE ARRIVED AT THEIR HOUSE, Abe and his wife, Marcy, kissed Ruth on the cheek. Sarah extended her hand to avoid a kiss, but Abe just looked at her hand and said, “What? No kiss?” Sarah leaned in and let him kiss her on the cheek.
“How’s the genius?” he said to me, and pressed my hand.
“What? No kiss?” I said to him.
Ruth looked stricken, but Abe burst out laughing.
“I’ll give this handsome boy a kiss,” Marcy said.
Abe and Marcy gave us a tour of the premises: It was more like a compound, with a huge main house, a guest cottage, an in-ground pool, and tennis courts. The three of us each had our own room in the guest cottage, which also included a living room and a small kitchen. Abe told us to put our suits on and meet them at the pool.
As we walked toward the pool, Ruth asked me if I had remembered to thank Abe.
“Thank him for what? Suing my father?”
Abe and Marcy were sitting at a table by the pool, both of them in their bathing suits and deeply tanned. Abe’s huge brown belly was as round and tight as a balloon; Marcy’s hair was an unnatural shade of black, and her lips were smudged with electric pink lipstick. Her nails were painted the same color. A gold Star of David was enshrined deep within her seared and corrugated cleavage. Sarah and I wore T-shirts; Ruth had on a terrycloth bathrobe she had found in the guest cottage. Abe asked us what we would like to drink.
“I’ve already had two scotches and I’m feeling no pain,” he said. Ruth said that sounded good to her.
“Me too,” I added. Sarah said she’d have a ginger ale. On the table was a platter of shrimp, colossal and gleaming. Rich people’s shrimp, I thought. I immediately helped myself to one. Ruth said that both of them looked like they had been enjoying the sun.
“Oh, I know,” Marcy replied. “Don’t you think my hands look just like a Negro’s?”
She showed us her white palms and then the brown backs of her hands.
“You could definitely pass for Sammy Davis’s sister,” I commented, and helped myself to another shrimp.
“Sarah,” Marcy said, “I’m so glad you’re finally going to meet Aaron. He just graduated from Harvard Law School and is joining Abe’s practice at the end of the summer.”
“You know, I do have a boyfriend,” Sarah said to her.
“Since when?” Ruth exclaimed. “You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend!”
“Oh, well, Aaron has a girlfriend too,” Marcy said. She placed her electric pink fingernails on the table and leaned forward conspiratorially. “A Puerto Rican girl,” she said. “But we don’t think it’s serious, thank God.”
“Just what every nice Jewish boy wants,” I said, “a not-so-nice Puerto Rican girl.”
“Seth, let’s go for a swim,” Sarah said.
“I’m a little dizzy from this scotch,” I answered. Sarah stood up and pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Come on,” she commanded. “You’ll feel better once you get in the water.”
“Your daughter has some body,” Abe said to Ruth.
Sarah dove into the water and stayed under as long as possible, no doubt to drown out any more comments about her body. She surfaced at the far end just in time to hear Abe declare that her breasts were going to make some young man very happy one day. I reluctantly got up and took off my shirt. My mother stared at me, her eyes already a little bloodshot and woozy. “All my children have beautiful figures,” she said.
I swam over to Sarah at the far end of the pool. “Try to keep a lid on it,” she said quietly.
“I’m only providing cover for you.”
“Bullshit. You don’t like them because they’re rich and obnoxious and suing Dad. Besides,” she added, “we wouldn’t be here right now if you had apologized to Hortense.”
I dunked myself under the water and stayed there until Sarah yanked me up.
“What are you doing?” she exclaimed.
“Drowning myself in guilt.”
Just then we heard a car drive up. “Aaron’s back,” Marcy said.
The prodigal son kissed Ruth and Marcy, then stripped off his polo shirt. His body was golden and muscular. Sarah looked at the grotesque bodies of his parents and then back at Aaron as if she had missed something. He dove into the pool and swam over to us. I stood straight up and shook his hand; Sarah stayed crouched under the water and gave him a little wave.
•••
DINNER WAS SERVED OUT ON the deck overlooking the ocean. The setting sun turned the sea a beautiful shade of lilac. Aaron brought out a kettle of steamed lobsters and placed one on each person’s plate. Marcy served corn on the cob and a salad made from Jersey tomatoes. Abe poured everyone wine. Apparently, Sarah had suddenly developed a taste for alcohol, because she drank the wine with a smile on her face.
Sarah and I were studying our lobsters.
“Do you like lobster?” Marcy asked Sarah.
“Yes. Thank you.”
Neither of us had ever eaten lobster before, and we were furtively looking at the three Zelmans to see how it was done.
“Of course she likes lobster,” Abe said. “What nice Jewish girl doesn’t like lobster?”
“Aaron, honey, help Sarah with her lobster,” Marcy said. Then, turning to Sarah, she added, “Aaron’s an expert at this.”
Sarah and I both watched Aaron break the back of her lobster; with a long two-pronged fork he skillfully extracted the plump white tissue from the red carcass. Then he used a nutcracker and a fork to break the claw and slither out a pink slab. “Would you like me to help you with yours, Seth?” he asked.
“I’ve got it,” I said, and tried to fit my nutcracker around the torso of the lobster.
“Darling, let me help you,” my mother said.
I squeezed the nutcracker and the lobster went skidding into my lap. My mother laughed uproariously. Eating her lobster, Sarah looked as if she was in ecstasy.
As Marcy blathered on about yachting into New York Harbor to see the tall ships, I finally extracted a morsel, dipped it in butter, and nearly swooned—it was the most luscious, sweetest, richest thing I had ever tasted. Then Abe told me how proud my mother was of my academic success at Chicago. Ruth kicked me under the table.
“Abe, thank you very much for your help recently,” I said.
Marcy asked me what I was studying.
“English.”
Ruth, who had already drunk three glasses of wine, said, “He’s going to be a famous writer someday.”
“Oh, what do you write about?” Marcy asked.
“Things,” I mumbled.
Marcy said that she was the educational director of the Temple Emanuel Sisterhood and was planning to set up a class for young people to write stories and poems about the Holocaust. Would I be interested in helping her?
“I’m pretty busy this summer,” I said.
Ruth swigged down her fourth glass of wine. “Do you know that Seth is studying with Saul Bellow?” she exclaimed.
“Seth, that’s amazing,” Aaron said. “I love his novels. What’s he like in person?”
“Who are you talking about?” Marcy asked.
“Saul Bellow, Mom,” Aaron explained. “He’s the most important Jewish writer in the country.”
“Oh, then I certainly want to read something by him. Seth, what would you recommend?”
“Pride and Prejudice.”
“Pride and Prejudice,” Marcy repeated. “Is it about the Holocaust?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
I looked around the table. Abe was staring into his glass, an unhappy expression on his face; my mother looked distraught; Sarah glanced at Aaron and he gave her an understanding smile. Ruth raised her glass. “I’d like to propose a toast to Abe. You’ve done so much for my son. I don’t know how I can ever thank you for all your help. “
“Oh, I’ll think of something,” Abe said, with a big wink.
“Here, here,” Marcy said, raising her glass.
I was watching my mother sullenly, but mainly I was angry at Sarah. I felt abandoned by her. I could see she liked Aaron, liked the Zelmans’ expensive food, their wine, their stunning views. I knew she was thinking that this would be a nice family to belong to, and I didn’t blame her: If the Zelmans had a beautiful daughter who had just graduated from Harvard Law School, I would have had Abe and Marcy crowning me as the Nicest Jewish Boy in all the land. But they didn’t have a daughter, they were suing my father, and I wanted Sarah to be as resentful as I was.
“Honey, do you know that Abe offered to pay your tuition if your father didn’t come through in time?” my mother said to me.
Marcy added, “I’ll never understand how a parent can turn his back on his own child.”
I turned to Marcy and said, “You’re talking about my father.”
Ruth put her hand on my arm. “Oh, sweetheart, you don’t know half the things that bastard did to me.”
I yanked my arm away and stalked off. Behind me, I could hear my mother apologizing for my behavior.
I WENT BACK TO THE GUEST COTTAGE and got into bed. In the distance, I could hear fireworks going off, but I was happy to be by myself, alone with a book. At about ten o’clock I heard my mother go into her room; I was just drifting off to sleep an hour later when I heard the door to the cottage open again. I presumed it was Sarah, but after a minute I heard Abe’s voice in my mother’s room. I could only decipher the odd word or two—they were keeping their voices down—but then I heard the sound of bedsprings screeching, then moaning and sighing. I lay very still for about five minutes, debating whether or not I ought to go out, wondering if they would hear my door open and shut, until I heard the door to the cottage open again. The sound of the bedsprings had become rhythmic, as if someone were jumping up and down. A few minutes later, Sarah opened the door to my room.
“Seth?” she said softly.
“I’m awake.”
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
She lay down on the opposite side of my double bed.
“Thanks. A mouse is skittering around in my room.”
We lay silent for a moment, the bedsprings in our mother’s room screeching incessantly.
“You can hear them in here too,” I said.
Sarah reached for my hand. The tangy scent of sex rose from her body like the shimmer of heat from hot asphalt. Reflexively my nostrils pinched in and then fared out. She knew I could tell that she had been having sex with Aaron, but she also knew I wouldn’t say anything about it. She understood that the last thing I wanted to think about was my sister having sex. Was this the only normal thing about our family?
“Oh, Abe, I can’t breathe anymore! At least let me get on top.”
“Doll, I’m coming. I’m coming.”
“This is all my fault, isn’t it?” I whispered.
“No,” Sarah whispered back.
But from the other side of the wall, I heard the true cost of my words to Hortense.
“Oh, Abe, this is really getting painful.”
“I’m almost done. Oh, God, I’m almost there. Almost . . .”
Sarah and I were born with our umbilical cords twisted around our necks, and my mother loved to tell the story of our traumatic births. Sarah and I had titled it “Was Anybody Praying?” Neither of us were breathing when we emerged from the womb. We were on respirators for ten days and it was touch and go. But a rabbi came to pray over us, and our grandmother tied a red thread around each of our wrists. Finally, on the tenth day, Sarah and I were able to breathe on our own. “I thanked the doctor,” Ruth would say, “but the doctor said, ‘Don’t thank me. Was anybody praying?’” When my mother told this story, Sarah and I always joked that we had probably tried to strangle each other before we were born. But lying next to her now, hearing Abe fuck our mother, I wondered if it was actually a suicide pact. Perhaps, floating in the briny ether of our mother’s womb, we had been able to hear some cruelty or coldness out in the world, a world where children were abandoned and women were debased.
Finally we head Abe’s orgasmic victory cry: “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“A regular Molly Bloom,” I commented.
“Who?” Sarah said.
“Never mind.”
“Look, Seth, you do need to apologize to Abe about that Pride and Prejudice business.”
“I know . . . but I can’t stand it when Mom lies like that about me. You don’t know how many times I’ve asked her not to tell people I know Saul Bellow.”
“She’s just proud of you.”
“You’re not going to tell me I have to apologize to Hortense too, are you?”
“No, you don’t owe Hortense any apologies.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Aaron told me he had seen a copy of Mom and Dad’s divorce agreement. Apparently Mom really did get reamed. According to Aaron, Dad hired the top divorce lawyer in Boston, who thoroughly kicked the ass of the mediocre lawyer Mom had hired.”
“Jesus,” I said. My father had committed adultery and had left a wife and three young children. I always presumed a judge would have awarded my mother anything she asked for. “I mean, I believe it, but still. . . .”
“Seth, why do you think we had to live in a tiny apartment and he’s lived in that huge house?”
We were both silent for a moment or two. Abe said something and my mother laughed. I thought I heard her say, “I love you too.”
“Do you ever wonder how Mom and Dad could have possibly gotten married?” Sarah whispered to me.
“All the time,” I replied.
When I thought about how my parents might have come together, I imagined their second date, a Sabbath dinner at my mother’s home on Long Island. My father’s mother had died when he was twelve, and when he crossed the threshold of my mother’s childhood home that night his orphan’s heart was probably no match for the scene that greeted him: a dining-room table set with a white linen cloth, beautiful china, a braided challah, a silver kid-dush cup. The Sabbath candles illuminated my mother’s adoring gaze and my grandmother’s radiant warmth. I imagined my grandfather, unctuous and conniving, calling him “Dr. Shapiro.”
Like me, like Sarah, my father was looking for another family he could belong to.
“I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to get my bearings in life,” I said. “They pull me in such opposite directions. Maybe that’s why I don’t know how I’m supposed to act most of the time.”
Between the distant poles of my mother and father, I felt as if I were trying to navigate my way in the middle of some vast white tundra. I only had my sister, my polar opposite, my North Star, to guide me.
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“So, are you going to see Aaron again?” I asked.
“Not after what I just heard his father doing.”
“Too bad. I can tell you like him. He seemed nice, not like his parents.”
“Not a big deal,” she said.
I didn’t believe her—not any more than I believed that she had a mouse in her room, or that she had been a virgin before that night.
“What are you going to tell him if he asks you out?”
“I’ll think of something. I always do.”
I might have been the writer in the family, but my sister was the most accomplished liar. It was the way she kept the peace, and inoculated herself against the meanness of the world.