Even when I was small, when my father said things like, “You have to do it because I say so!” in a stern voice, it made me laugh because it was hard to take it seriously that he was really in charge. In some ways, I guess he was in charge because no one ever thought to say no to him when we were dragged around from state to state, and school to school, because it was time for him to change his job again. When he couldn’t get along with his boss, I thought he must be strong for standing up for his ideals. When we’d hear him talking disparagingly about the company managers at the dinner table, we just figured he was right, even though it could mean uprooting the whole family yet again. I even saw the humor in it, maybe because it ran so straight against my mother’s anxious concern that everything be safe and normal.
My father’s haphazard ways made us laugh. One of his roles was taking care of the cars. And even though it could be frustrating when they wouldn’t start, and he’d blame the faulty carburetor or alternator that hadn’t been fixed right after he’d just taken it to be repaired at Kmart the week before, there was something comical about the way he’d manage to keep the cars just barely functioning, just enough to get us where we were going. He’d fail to replace bald tires even when we went on ski trips and we’d risk driving off of a slippery cliff on the icy roads, or he wouldn’t fill the car with gas in time and we’d run out before we got where we were going. He’d matter-of-factly leave us all waiting in the car on the side of the highway, until he’d eventually appear again, jogging toward us with rusty gas can in hand from the nearest service station. He was hardly the model of a responsible father.
Sometimes when he’d push things too far, it would clearly be at the family’s expense, like the time he passed an under-cover police car on a double line, when we were driving home from a day of skiing. “Joel, what on earth are you doing?” my mother screamed, as the police turned on his siren and pulled us over. We then had to follow the police back to the station, and wait in the cold while my father was inside being interrogated. My mother yelled at him the whole way home, but we didn’t really pay attention because to the three of us it was another good story about my father to tell our friends. His negligence, while frustrating, could somehow be turned into an endearing trait.
When my father visits us in New York, Roy and I usually go out on Saturday night and my father babysits, like both my parents used to do together before my mother died. But this is the weekend of Eli’s seventh birthday, and we’re all staying home on Saturday night so I can make Eli’s big chocolate cake for tomorrow, along with the thirty cupcakes that need to be baked, frosted, and delivered to his class on Monday morning. I’ll need to get up early to prepare all of the party bags and decorations, before we go to the Planetarium where we’ll meet up with the seven boys who Eli has invited to his party. Roy decides to go to bed early because he thinks he’s coming down with a cold. So it’s just me baking in the kitchen, while my father reads a book in the living room.
“Do you need any help, Annie?” my father asks. I notice that he’s edged his chair into the kitchen, and is watching my every-baking-action. His obliviousness to boundaries really gets on my nerves, but as I glance at the clock and realize that it’s already past ten, there’s no time to be annoyed. I’m about to run out of cupcake papers and I still have the third batch left to bake. “Dad, would you mind running out for some cupcake papers? West Side Market is just a couple of blocks down Broadway on the east side of the street, and they’ll definitely have some.”
“Sure, Annie,” he says, happy to be of assistance. And off he goes.
At about eleven o’clock, it’s been more than an hour and I realize my father’s still not back. Once the second batch of cupcakes is out of the oven, I decide I’d better go out to look for him. I walk slowly and scan the streets along my way, not wanting to miss him in transit. I get all the way to the market, and there’s my father standing in the middle of the baking products aisle, raising his arm to greet me with a package of cupcake papers in hand. “I found them,” he says, apparently unaware of the fact that I’ve left the kitchen to come find him. I wonder why after all this time he hasn’t asked anyone for help, but I don’t bother to mention it. We walk home together, I finish the final batch of cupcakes and collapse into bed.
The next morning I’m up early to finish the frosting and decorating, so I can get the kids bathed, and we can make it to the Planetarium on time. I’ve just finished with the party bags, when Roy says, “Why don’t I stay here and get everything ready while you go to the Planetarium?” I can’t believe it. Just what can he possibly have in mind—dialing the phone to order a pizza before we get back, while I bring seven boys plus Eli and Eva and my father to the star show? “No!” I shout back. But then I can only think that maybe his cold is really bad if he’s come up with this idea, and I relent. We leave Roy behind and rush off to find a cab.
The boys arrive in the museum foyer and the activity level quickly mounts as they wrestle and throw each other around on the floor. Eva grabs onto me for protection, and my father is off looking at something. Our babysitter’s supposed to be meeting us to help out, but she hasn’t shown up.
Finally we’re all sitting in our seats, ready to watch the star show, which much to my relief will last a full fifteen minutes. The boys love it, their awe palpable as we travel through a facsimile of a black hole. But then it’s over, and it’s time to coordinate our exit. The boys are all banging on the big bronze Neptune like it’s a drum. I shoo them away from the planet and then they’re all together jumping on a scale that will tell them how much they would weigh on Jupiter. We get out of the museum, I hail three cabs for our excursion home, and we manage to all make it back to the apartment, where the pizza is waiting for us, along with the cake. A new computer game mesmerizes the boys. I take a seat by myself at the end of the table, and bite into a big piece of chocolate birthday cake. I try to amuse myself with the thought that the act of giving birth to Eli seven years ago was possibly more intense than this birthday party.
Once the apartment is cleared out of all the seven-year-olds except for Eli, it’s time for my father to leave, too. As he steps into the elevator, he advises me, “You should give Roy a hug,” he says. “You know, he’s not feeling well.” I stifle my exasperation, and usher my father into the elevator.
“Please don’t say that Mary Tyler Moore is exactly like Mom,” Ted said when I called to ask him if he’d seen Ordinary People yet. But clearly he agreed. “You’re determined, Beth, but you’re not strong,” he quoted back Donald Sutherland’s line, already having memorized it. Donald Sutherland was the father and Mary Tyler Moore played Beth, the mother. “She’s exactly like Mom,” we agreed. And that was even before Danny had committed suicide, just like Mary Tyler Moore’s son attempted to do in the movie, after the drowning of his brother before him. That was when my mother’s compulsion for normalcy seemed at its most oppressive, after we already knew the truth about my grandfather but before it was completely clear that her construction of life couldn’t hold anymore.
Only now do I begin to understand my mother’s endurance from a different perspective, her drive to impose a sense of order on her family. Just like Mary Tyler Moore in the movie, my mother worked hard to keep up appearances. But maybe that was more heroic than I’d given her credit for. In what must have been my mother’s version of a normal family, my father had to function in the role of protector and my mother as his wife. It must have been important to my mother that my father be in charge, even if all she could get was my father’s oblivious form of that. If he could appear to be at the helm, then we would look like a normal family, and maybe then we would be one. My mother made sure that it was my father who made the big decisions, like where he would work, and where we would live, and how much we could afford to spend on a house or a vacation. Also on her list of my father’s charges must have been filling up the car with gas. Even when the needle was so often so close to empty, and even though my mother could easily have made the occasional extra stop at the gas station herself, she opted for anxiety rather than filling the car up with gas, and eventually we’d feel that familiar chugging motion of the car that told us the inevitable—that she’d have to call my father at work and yell at him because again we’d run out of gas.
Other than the jobs that were allotted to my father, everything else was my mother’s domain. Her role of family organizer may not have made her happy, and often it made her unlikable, especially compared to my father, who could be viewed as sensitive and quirky, more like a child, more like me. But while she may not have always been popular at home, she also refused to be a martyr and she found herself a different venue where she could be appreciated in her role. In the Hebrew school, she found a place where she could reap unqualified praise for her work. While I’m sure she would have preferred that her family didn’t belittle the work she did there, she didn’t let that get in her way.
My mother and I were completely different, something I asserted whenever anyone tried to compare us. Yes, we both had curly hair, but mine was thicker and hers was darker. She had a round face, and I had an oval one. She had broad shoulders and I didn’t. I resembled my father. I had his same nose, his eyes, and his narrow build. And of course, the biggest difference between my mother and me was that she had no sensitivity, or at least no sensitivity to me. My mother was driven and she squelched emotion, and I was questioning, often with questions that my mother would have preferred to remain unasked.
But now with the distance of having her beside me, I can acknowledge that my mother did have her strength. She found a way to do much more than survive. She endured. And she did this with a family legacy that when seen from the outside could only be considered of tragic proportion—surrounded by suicide on all sides. In her own way, she would only accept progress for the next generation, and in her own way she achieved that. Her father had only made it to age fifty when he’d committed suicide by taking too many pills and was found dead in a men’s bath on the Lower East Side. My mother had lived to age sixty-eight, and when she died it was accidentally, all the way on the other side of the world, in the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, under a big, blue sky, with fish all around. Ultimately, the end of her life seemed more like a story of death than the actuality of gory details, a death that would always remain distant and a little unknown. Maybe that’s what she had been trying to pass down to her children—a story. Maybe that’s what she was doing when she so persistently veered away from the truth. Maybe a story of her life was the best inheritance she could offer.
My father has finally agreed to invite Judith to his seventy-fifth birthday dinner. “You’ve been close friends for almost three years now,” I’d pushed him. “It’s a good time to be inclusive,” Ted tried, too. “You’ve been to all of Judith’s family events. Now it’s time to invite her to ours.” And finally my father has agreed. Eva has heard my father mention Judith once or twice, and she’s intrigued. “Will she be like my grandmother?” she wants to know. “Sort of,” I say. “She’s Papa Joel’s friend and she’s really nice. Maybe next time when he comes to New York, she’ll come with him and they can babysit together.”
Ted has reserved a table for the six of us—him and Janet, me and Roy, and my father and Judith—at a new restaurant in Boston. It’s a place with white tablecloths and shiny silverware, maybe a little too stiff for us. It’s hard not to think of my father’s sixty-fifth birthday when we gathered at another Boston restaurant. That was ten years before, when my mother had been strongly present, and Roy had been only a recent addition. My father orders the foie gras as an appetizer, followed by chicken rolled up with brie. “Don’t you think that’s a little high in cholesterol?” Roy whispers to me. But my father, now seventy-five, eats with gusto. “This is the best food I’ve ever tasted,” he says. After dessert, Ted takes a picture to remember the occasion.
The next day, we visit my father in Andover. With the passage of time, the house has become more wanting. It’s clear that my father hasn’t spent much time here lately. Eli asks if I can make him a cup of tea, and I find a teabag in the otherwise empty cabinets. My father has already brought the gallon of milk up from the freezer. “It will thaw in a few minutes,” he says. I brew the tea lightly, the way Eli likes it, and add the milk, picking out the flecks of ice floating on top. The honey’s hardened and I can’t spoon it out of the bottle, so I use sugar instead. “It tastes funny, Mom,” Eli says. “I don’t want to drink it.” I tell him we’ll make a new cup when we get home.
With Gloria’s declining condition, we couldn’t plan ahead, we were lucky to get a last-minute flight to San Juan for Presidents’ Day Weekend. And Roy successfully found a Puerto Rican family resort on the internet with reservations available. The swimming pool is especially designed for kids—three feet deep at both ends. Eli and Eva jump right in, happy to be free at last.
Roy and I survey the premises. The beach is a little disappointing, the sand coarser than other Caribbean beaches we’ve been to. But at least we’re in a tropical place. I’m hoping that the salve of the water and sun will get under Roy’s skin, and mine, too, and that we’ll all feel far away from the gray February we’ve been inhabiting.
“Look Mom, over there! That’s where Jesus lived.” Eva points to a thatched gazebo on the beach. I wonder what she could possibly be talking about.
“Jesus?” I say. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“He died on a post, right?” says Eva. Her pre-school teacher had already asked me gently to ask Eva not to keep telling her classmates that Santa Claus was really a man dressed in a costume.
Then I remember Eli and Eva arguing last week in the bathtub. “Is it true?” Eli had wanted to know. “Eva’s friend said that Jesus died on a post. That’s not true is it?”
“Well, yes it is,” I had answered.
“Told you!” said Eva.
“Do you really believe there was someone named Jesus?” Eli asked me.
“Yes, I believe there was a man named Jesus.”
“And he died on a post,” chimed in Eva. “He was nailed there. And he couldn’t have anything to eat.”
“Mom, do you believe Jesus was God?” Eli wanted to know.
“No, I believe he was a man, and I believe he died on a post. But I don’t believe he was God.”
“That’s ridiculous that people think he was God,” asserted Eli, who next to Roy has become the family’s greatest pragmatist.
“He died on a post,” Eva says kicking sand on the beach. “Come on, Mom. Let’s go look for the post where he died.”