CHAPTER 2

When I was little, I used to watch my father reading and smoking at his spot on the end of the sofa. He’d clear his throat and tap the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray on the coffee table without looking away from his book. I’d stand there and stare at him. I was trying to bore through his skull to see inside his head. Using all my powers of imagination, I entered his mind and wandered around in the darkness until the trees parted and I came upon a little orphan boy peering at me from behind an iron fence. My father reached out and tapped the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray. He looked up. “What do you want, you stupid kid? Get out of here.”

He died in winter. I got annoyed with Brenda at the shiva. It really bothered me when she leaned over the funeral candle in the tall blue jar with the Star of David and lit her cigarette off the flame.

We sat shiva only one night, and then I flew back to the West Coast with Fred. He was a screenwriter and had a deadline. Leaving right away was a mistake. I should have stayed and helped Brenda clean out the house, but I couldn’t bear another minute with her. So I fled with Fred to our rented bungalow in Venice, California, where the light was clear and hard as glass. I walked along the sand and let the ocean lap at my ankles. White stucco everywhere. I missed the seasons. “Are you kidding?” Fred said. “You really want to go back to the cold?”

“I can’t remember anything without seasons,” I said. I couldn’t place myself—was I wearing a winter coat, were the dogwoods in bloom, was it one of those hot summer nights? Fred shrugged. He was happy living in a desert. I watered the lemon tree. The light was as clear as glass, but I was still in a fog. I felt numb and cut off. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. I’d had a job as a copy editor at a little newspaper, but I quit to take care of my father. It was a crappy job anyway. The editor-in-chief hired me as a favor to Fred. I’d find something better.

But first, I’d have to turn around and go back East again and sort through the homemade birthday cards, mine to my father and his to me: How come you’re twenty-five, and I’m still alive? When you are fifty, will I still be nifty? He was supposed to be a writer, that was his promise, unfulfilled, and I felt sure that besides birthday rhymes there had to be a manuscript hidden somewhere. I was excited at the prospect of what I might find, but I stalled because of an irrational obsessive fear that the amount of stuff in the house was literally infinite. I was convinced if I started sorting through things I would never finish. It was a sorcerer’s apprentice job—the boxes would fill up as soon as I emptied them, while Brenda stood over me clicking her tongue, disgusted by my sentimentality.

He was a saver like me. The Eisenhower jacket from his army uniform still hung in the front hall closet. A felt hat lay above it on the top shelf and whenever I saw the hat, I thought how strange that men in the nineteen-fifties and even the early sixties regularly wore fedoras. No man left the house without his hat, as I remembered it. My father palmed his, thumb fitting into the right dent, fingers into the left dent, a ship’s prow above the black band. He placed it on his head and went out into the world. I watched with solemn eyes, aware I could not go out into the world like him, since I was a girl and could not wear that sort of hat.

To be fair, sometimes he took Susan and me with him, usually to the Forest Park Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The library, for us, was like church must have been for other people. The smell was heady—paper, ink, wood, and glue. I sat in the children’s section on a low mahogany bench worn down like a sucked candy. “You borrowed that book last week,” Susan said.

“So what?” I said. “I like it.”

My father disappeared into the stacks, a flash of crew cut and black glasses.

“Put it back!” Susan said.

“No!”

He reappeared studying a book gray with type and no pictures. The book was so thick if it were a sandwich I wouldn’t be able to put my mouth around it. “Children,” he said in his mock schoolmarm voice. “Quiet. You’re in a library.” He smiled to himself.

Outside, I climbed a mountain of broken pavement in front of the Forest Park Branch and stood on the precipice. In Baltimore, people said payment for pavement. We said balling for boiling. If you were Jewish, ants were called pussy ants. Your mother killed the pussy ants on the payment with a chynik of balling water. We got into the car and drove away from downtown, over the railroad tracks toward the suburbs, until we came to our street of ranch houses cut out of a swath in the woods. Our new block was as bland and bright as only the future can be.

“Did you get anything for your wife?” my mother said, waiting at the kitchen door.

“Doctor Zhivago,” my father said. “Should be good, my darling.”