CHAPTER 8

On Cedar Drive, I woke in my sweaty tank top and shorts, legs tangled in the sheets on the sofa, still walking down Tuckahoe Road in my mind with my grandmother who was holding the very suitcase with the yellow handle that I had stowed under the coffee table. Brenda was banging around in the kitchen clanging pots, probably gloating at being awake earlier than I was. I had stayed up late reading, but hadn’t gotten very far because I kept stopping to study the orphanage photos in the black album and to blow my nose from crying. I’d finish it all when I got home. Now I was impatient to get working on the den and the attic. First, though, I wanted to put the suitcase in the trunk of the car. I fumbled for my glasses, and reached under the coffee table, but the suitcase was gone, with the manuscript and Picture Booke inside.

“Where’s the stuff I was looking at? Where’s the suitcase?”

Brenda had her back to me at the stove frying eggs. “I put it away,” she said.

“I wasn’t finished with it.”

“You can look at it later.” She turned around. “Want some breakfast?”

“No thanks.” I tugged on my tank top to smooth the wrinkles. Brenda was wearing shorts and a tank top, too, and her skin glowed under a sheen of sweat. She usually dressed conservatively—slacks instead of jeans, suits for work. But it was another blistering day. I wasn’t used to seeing this much of her exposed and I noticed she was a bigger woman than I had thought. Not that she was fat or tall—her body was medium in every way—but she was solid. There was strength in her thighs, in her plumped arms and freckled shoulders. A peculiar worry flitted through my mind. I thought if I had to move her the way you move a piece of furniture, she wouldn’t budge.

I turned away and slipped quietly down the hall to the back of the house. I definitely shouldn’t be doing this alone, I thought. “I can’t leave my kids,” my sister had said when I asked. “Besides, I don’t want any of that junk.” And then my mother, in her unnervingly reasonable therapist’s voice: “It would be inappropriate for me to go through the boxes, since your father left the house to Brenda.” Thanks, Ma. Thanks, Susan. I went straight to the den to search the closet—no suitcase—and then I tried my father’s bedroom. Not there either, but as I left his room I slid a gilt-framed picture off its nail. In the photograph, my chubby-cheeked father at about age three is standing on the steps of a brownstone in a sailor suit, his little hands balled into fists—not defensively as far as I could tell, but eagerly. This was the only photograph of him taken before my grandfather deserted the family, and I was glad that someone had seen fit to capture an image of my father undamaged. I peeked into Brenda’s room hesitantly, but there was no need to even cross the threshold. The suitcase was right by the door! I brought it into the living room along with the picture, and shoved the boxy frame into my daypack, shoved my feet into my Keds and fished my car keys out of the small zipper compartment in the pack. The sooner I locked these things in my car the better. I slung the pack over my shoulder, and reached for the Indian table. I hadn’t remembered it being so light. I always imagined my parents’ Armenian poet friend in a crowd of colorful saris awkwardly lugging a piece of furniture, but the wood was almost weightless, so I lofted the table one-handed, gripped the suitcase by its Bakelite handle with my other hand, and headed out so fast I almost crashed into the obstacle blocking my path. It was Brenda, sturdy as a credenza, barring the door.

Brenda didn’t raise me of course—she was only twelve years older than I was—but I called her my stepmother because I thought the word captured the fake attachment, and later, the menace in the relationship. Brenda was my stepmother but I hardly knew her. She came from a Catholic family, one of six kids. Her father died when she was young. She worked in the accounting office at Hutzler’s department store. She and her mother didn’t get along. I hadn’t wanted to know more. I hadn’t wanted her to exist. Even grown children wished their divorced parents would get back together, some did anyway, and considering my loyalty to the past, it was natural that I was one of those who wished it. My father complained about Brenda off and on, giving hope to the fantasy of my parents’ reconciliation. He said living with Brenda was difficult. She suffered from depression and spent whole weekends in bed; she had no friends. He liked being needed, though. He liked people dependent on him. Not Susan or me. Never us. We got kicked out of the nest, such as it was, unceremoniously. But in his romantic relationships, he liked being in control of his women, that’s why he picked them so young. (He plucked my mother when she was sixteen.)

Married life wasn’t easy for my father, but it wasn’t easy for Brenda, either. He was tyrannical, although also kind-hearted. About two years into their marriage, my father told Uncle Harry about the days and days Brenda spent with her head under the covers. Uncle Harry counseled my father to get the locks changed while Brenda was at work, pack her clothes and leave her bags in the driveway. Of course, my father didn’t, couldn’t. Uncle Harry would have. He’d been married and divorced eight times. My father couldn’t leave no matter what (my mother was the one who left) and Uncle Harry couldn’t stay. So Brenda and my father struggled along, and after four years as husband and wife, he woke up one October morning transformed into something monstrous—not exactly Kafka’s giant cockroach, but something huge and troubling possessed him– a giant throbbing headache of unknown etiology. It was a hideous metamorphosis. The throbbing was excruciating and relentless. He underwent all kinds of tests and x-rays, tried all kinds of painkillers, but nothing helped, nobody knew what was wrong with him, and Brenda decided he was faking.

My father liked to put on an act, for sure, especially for his students, but he wasn’t a faker. A provocateur, yes. But always himself. I knew he wasn’t faking. And yet, I was the least likely candidate to enter the scene and right things. I had a job in far-away California, I was known for being personally irresponsible (sloppy, absentminded, burdened by unopened bills and unsent thank-you notes) and to top it off, he and I were awkward with each other. Whenever I got close, he pushed me away. I knew certain things about him. Not from his childhood, but from my own. He didn’t like that. Things that happened when I was a teenager. I could tell he thought I was judging him—either harshly or too well. If he caught me staring at him, he got mad. Whenever he called California, he wouldn’t even say hello. I’d pick up the phone and I’d hear, “Yeah?”

“Yeah?” I’d say.

Silence. Then he’d say something like: “I made this great soup. You want the recipe?”

“Yeah.”

He’d give me the recipe and we’d hang up.

We’d had a good time the last time I visited, in September, just before he got the headache. We drove to Annapolis with Hoffman. He was happy I liked his dog. I thought the visit might be a turning point. But more likely, the next time I saw him, he’d just push me away again. He’d say something dismissive. No one could get too close. Not Harry, not Shep Levine, who occupied his own happy center of the universe. Maybe my mother, once. Maybe our friend Johnny Dolan, once. But Johnny was dead and gone.

When I heard my father’s headache wasn’t going away, I called Baltimore and Brenda answered. She said he was better. “No, I’m not!” he shouted in the background. “Don’t believe her.” He grabbed the phone.

“Yeah?” he said.

“You sound bad,” I said. “I’ll come home if you want.”

“Yes, Joanna. Please. Come home.”

I was stunned he wanted me, even after that nice day in September with his dog. I was thirty and I still got on his nerves. What are you standing there for? Go to bed. Don’t you know how to peel a potato? Is that the only book you’ve read in the last six months? Don’t you know how to beat an egg? You want air in there, stupid. Lift it, lift it, faster. Haven’t you ever swept a floor? Leverage! You make a fulcrum with your thumb and forefinger.

There was more. Deep down, he didn’t trust me. We had Lake George between us, miles of cold black water. The first stop on a camping trip when I was fourteen. We hadn’t spoken about Lake George since that summer sixteen years ago.

No. He couldn’t possibly want me. Susan was the better choice. She wasn’t afraid of him. She was good at taking charge, cheerfully bossy. Susan never stood there and stared at him like a weirdo. She offered her casual affection, and lived a few hours away with Larry and their kids in New Jersey. But of course, Susan had those little girls to take care of, and besides, she said she didn’t want to step on Brenda’s toes. “Brenda’s the wife,” Susan said, and my mother agreed. “Let Brenda deal with him.” When we first heard about the headache, all three of us chuckled meanly about how we were lucky Brenda was there to play nurse, letting us off the hook. But something wasn’t right. It struck me how alone he was. So I went back to Baltimore in early December to see my father for what I thought would be a week.

“You better be prepared,” my mother said on the way to Cedar Drive from the airport. She glanced at me, then back at the road, the worried glance of the initiated to the innocent.

Hoffman barked from the side yard, but there was none of the usual fanfare at my arrival, no act, no put-on Yiddish accent: “Mine daughter, all the vay from California she comes, to see her poor daddy.” None of that shit. He sat at the dining-room table holding his head as if it were a delicate piece of china. “Close that door. I don’t feel good,” he said. “You heard?”

I put down my bag and came around the table to give him a hug. He shooed me away with his cigarette. “You heard? I don’t feel so good.” He was camped out surrounded by an ashtray heaped with butts, matches from the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant, a crumpled package of Benson & Hedges, a copy of An Illustrated History of the English Garden, and a plate of odd, assorted food: a slice of rare roast-beef wrapped around a glob of cream cheese with a crescent bite torn out; a soft-boiled egg, the puddled yolk glistening; and a mound of apple sauce plowed into furrows with the tines of his fork. Brenda sat across the table staring at his plate. She turned to me as if I had broken her reverie. “Oh, hello there.”

My mother kept her coat on, her purse hanging from her shoulder and a clump of keys in her hand the way she always did whenever she came over to Cedar Drive. Except when she and her boyfriend Marty Geller were invited for dinner.

“Are you going or staying?” I asked.

My father perked up. He kept his head in his hands and moved his eyes until he settled on my mother. “Well?”

“I’ll stay for a little while,” my mother said.

“Then put your purse down,” I said. “Put your keys down.” She kept jangling her mass of jailer’s keys, some of which actually locked people up at the state mental hospital where she was a social worker, a midlife career. “You’re making me nervous,” I said. I didn’t want her to leave.

My father jumped up, tapping into a hidden energy reserve, as anxious to keep my mother there as I was. “I’m losing weight, Evie, whaddaya think?” He unbuckled his belt and held his jeans out from his waist. I’ll let you know when I get down to 127.”

My mother laughed as if this were some hilarious joke. My father managed a small laugh, too. “That’s how much Clyde weighed when I met him in 1942,” she told Brenda.

“That’s the emis,” said my father. “She got so mad when her sister introduced us and I mispronounced her name. ‘Not Evy! My name isn’t short for Evelyn. It’s Ee-vie with a long “e.”

“Evie is the diminutive of Eve!” my father and mother said in unison.

“She was so cute,” my father said, “in bobby sox and saddle shoes, sixteen years old.”

“He was so skinny he had to hammer extra holes in his belt,” my mother said.

“That was before I enlisted in the army and got three squares a day.” He started to buckle the belt he was wearing now. “I’d never seen so much food. First day of chow I go up to the sergeant and I say, ‘Who am I supposed to share this with?’ I thought they made a mistake.”

“They fed you in the orphanage, though,” I said.

“They fed us. But I still went to bed hungry.” My father shot me an angry look.