Dad’s new apartment was in the basement of a town house in Sunnyside, Queens, about twenty minutes from Jamaica without traffic.
The first time Fritz and I walked through the front door at the bottom of the cement stairs, we saw tucked in the corner of the small foyer a tank holding two garter snakes and a terrarium with a ball python named Peter. Farther along the wall that divided the foyer from the main room stood another tank, stocked with goldfish, and another with a few mice scrambling around in the straw. At first, I thought the mice and goldfish were pets, too—and then Dad explained their purpose to me.
In addition to a foldout couch, and a small refrigerator and hot plate that had been set up as a makeshift kitchen (there was no stove), Dad had furnished his new studio apartment with a card table and a couple of molded plastic chairs. Two more terrariums bookended the TV, which sat on a low shelf across from the couch. One housed an iguana named Izzy and the other a tortoise named Tomato. Dad seemed proud of his new place, with its drop ceiling and fluorescent lighting and thrift-store furniture. At the age of thirty-two, it was the first time he’d lived alone.
Staying with Dad back then was almost like being at a sleepover. At home Fritz’s bedroom was at the opposite end of the apartment from mine, which could be lonely late at night when I had trouble sleeping. At Dad’s place, Fritz and I shared the sofa bed and Dad slept in a sleeping bag on the floor next to us. I liked that we were all together, and Dad let us eat whatever we wanted. In the evenings, after we unfolded the sofa bed, we put Tomato on a piece of cardboard with a hunk of lettuce for her to snack on, and Izzy perched on my leg. Dad made Jiffy Pop, and after we settled in, we watched All in the Family and reruns of The Twilight Zone and The Honeymooners. We had no curfew, and sometimes we kept the TV on after Dad turned off the lights; when the shows were over the white noise came on.
Over the next few months, Dad taught me how to hold Peter, which made me a bit nervous at first because he was longer than I was tall. I became adept at catching the mice and goldfish and offering them up as the snakes’ lunch.
Almost every other weekend there was a new addition—an earth snake named Edith (after Edith Bunker); Cornelius the corn snake, because originality in the art of naming was not our strong suit; and a boa constrictor named Baby Benjamin, who was given to me for my sixth birthday.
“It’s through here,” Dad said, getting ready to open the door to the boiler room just down the short dark hallway from his apartment. I hesitated, because we’d been told by the landlord that the boiler room was off limits. “Close your eyes.” He ushered me through, and placed his hands on my shoulders when we reached our destination. “OK, open.”
A crumpled cardboard box sat on the floor next to the boiler. A couple of heat lamps had been clipped to a wooden crate that shone down on the box’s contents—six ducklings that were so small they couldn’t have hatched more than a couple of days earlier.
Dad had found them out east on the way home from one of his trips to Montauk, where he still occasionally went deep-sea fishing with friends from the days when he and Mom rented the cottage. Not as often, he’d take Fritz and me out for the day. His boats were long gone, but he still knew people to charter a boat and rent rods and tackle from.
We usually started our trips at three in the morning. Dad kept the driver’s-side window wide open to keep himself awake, a cigarette held loosely in his left hand. When he was relaxed, Dad was casual and confident in his movements, and I watched him from the back seat as he smoked, surveying the landscape as the day dawned, lost in thought.
The sun was up by the time we got to the Big Duck, a duck-shaped building on a dusty patch of dirt by the side of the road in a town right before Long Island split into its north and south forks. Dad pulled over. The Big Duck, which sold local produce—and ducks and duck eggs—was closed that early. We only stopped because, if the weather was good, Dad let me drive. The roads were empty and there was nothing on either side of the road but duck farms and potato and corn fields. I climbed from the back seat onto his lap, his long legs bent at an angle to make room for me. He placed my hands on the steering wheel at 10 and 2, keeping the index and middle fingers of his right hand in light contact at 6 just in case.
On his most recent solo trip, he was late getting back, so the Big Duck was deserted, but he’d pulled over to stretch his legs and saw the cardboard box, the six ducklings inside, not far from the side of the road. He didn’t understand “what kind of idiot” would leave them there after the place was already closed—they would never have survived the night.
He put the box in the passenger seat, grabbed a blanket from the trunk to line the box with, and cranked the heat the rest of the way back to the basement in Sunnyside.
They were so tiny that we had to feed them sugar water with an eyedropper. Despite the landlord’s prohibition against our being in the boiler room, his son, Steve, a burly guy with a thick dark beard and mustache, made allowances once the ducklings arrived. The whole room was suffused with the warm smell of the ducklings’ down, straw, and mash.
I knew we wouldn’t be able to keep the ducklings forever; not even the incredibly tolerant landlord, who didn’t seem to mind the reptiles and mice, would put up with six grown ducks waddling around the basement—and it wouldn’t be good for them anyway. I thought we’d have more time to make sure they got stronger before we found somewhere for them to live. But when we arrived the next weekend that we were scheduled to stay with Dad, everything was gone—the pets, the furniture, the hot plate. Mom had only brought us by to pick up any clothes or board games we might have left behind. She told us Dad was sick and would be away for a while. After he returned, he’d need to live in the House for a few months, so it didn’t make any sense to keep the apartment.
My mother had a horrible fear of snakes, so there was no way she’d let us bring them to the Highlander, even temporarily, though we probably could have convinced her to let us keep Izzy and Tomato. But we weren’t given the option.
I worried about the snakes—Peter was so gentle; Ben was sensitive and had to be handled in a particular way or he’d bite; Cornelius, sharp and lethal looking, was sweet in his own way but couldn’t be held for more than a few minutes at a time. I worried about Izzy, who, like Cornelius, needed to be kept warm; I worried nobody would make the effort to give the ducklings, especially Blacky, the runt, their sugar with an eyedropper. Who would keep them warm? Mostly, I feared that my grandfather had instructed the landlord to set them all loose on the streets of Sunnyside and none of them would survive.