The keen is low but urgent and getting louder; it hurtles along a dark street, one of the thousands of streets that make up the vast and terrifyingly gargantuan sprawl of city outside our apartment. My bedroom, equally cavernous, with towering ceilings and two enormous windows like giant black eyes, is empty except for my younger brother Greg’s and my cribs and one hard wooden rocking chair. Red-and-white lights flash across the ceiling and the siren’s wail fills the room as Greg pulls himself to his feet. He can’t yet walk, so he holds the crib railing, sobbing out his panic. I am not yet two, but this is something I am aware of: my brother is a worrier. Though I’m not in disagreement that the siren is too loud—I’m crying, too—as he shrieks, red-faced, his baby-fine blond hair sweat-dampened, with no sign of letting up, his terror seems bottomless. Now our mother, wearing only a thin sheath of a nightgown, fills the doorway. Greg is still standing and crying as she steps into the room, pads over to my crib first, then Greg’s, lifting then carrying each of us, one in each arm, to the rocking chair in front of the windows. She sits back, holding our damp bodies against the dryness of her slip, our hot cheeks pressed to the cool skin at her collarbone, and rocks us slowly as the siren’s screech recedes. As it goes, the ebbing scream traces an auditory grid of streets and avenues and boulevards that stretch away endlessly, reminding me that the world around us feels too big and that I’m a worrier, too.
* * *
Down at the other end of our Dakota apartment building, Alan Alda is laughing. I know he is important, like all the people at my father’s fortieth birthday party mingling now in the museum-formal rooms where we are not allowed. I lie in my bed. Punches of laugher and bursts of exclamations drift down the city-block-long hallway of our apartment. Though I am five, I know from past experience that to be my father’s daughter, the only girl and eldest of four, is a kind of spotlight. I have two choices, lie here unnoticed and uncelebrated, dutifully obeying our bedtime schedule, or go see if I can elicit some attention. It is 1966, and my father is head of programming at ABC. In the past few years, he hired Jim McKay and Roone Arledge and created Wide World of Sports, which, I will later understand, serves as the model for all sports broadcasting to come. My father’s pioneering belief that sports are a story and need to be in every living room fueled his efforts to bring weekly blockbuster football broadcasts, pregame commentary, and coverage of lesser-known sports to television. He was also a pioneer of the use of instant replay and of bringing the camera onto the field, understanding that viewers wanted to feel closer to the action. More recently he has green-lighted shows such as Batman; the first soap opera, Peyton Place; and Bewitched, programs that, along with Wide World of Sports, are responsible for the fact that ABC is number one in the Nielsen ratings for the first time in history. He also put That Girl on the air when no other network would do so, supporting Marlo Thomas’s vision and belief that a program about an unmarried career woman living on her own would have an audience, setting the stage for the cultural shift to come.
I climb out of bed, pad along our long rugless hallway. The rubber bottoms of my footie pajamas grip the long polished boards of hardwood, little thwacks in the now-quiet of the hall. Closer now, I can hear the low hum of conversation, the tinkling of ice against thin glasses, the occasional bark of a laugh or exclamation of surprise. I round the last turn in the hall and there it is, the living room, dark every other night, its furniture sharp-angled, silent sentinels, tonight lit white. I stop at the track along the wood floor, the runner for the doors as wide as the walls they slide into when this room is shut away. People stand in clusters, as tall as trees, their legs stilts. No one has seen me. I could go back to bed. I don’t know, really, how I will be received.
“Christine!” someone cries. “Is this Christine?”
A rush of warmth. Marlo Thomas is perched like a pretty bird on the centerpiece of the large room, our blue velvet rotunda, under the marble bust of a Greek woman baring her white marble nipple. Marlo is smiling, reaching out her white arm. She doesn’t stand; she waits for me to walk to her. Around her, legs part amid the rustle of fabric, the crackle of leather, the brushing together of stockinged thighs, murmurs of approval. Cigarette smoke swirls like totems. Someone touches my head. Marlo leans forward, takes my hand, and kisses my cheek. Her hand is warm and her lips are cold and pungent-sweet with liqueur. My father is standing in front of her. He is dressed in a dark suit and narrow tie and twists his feet to the right, his hips to the left. He is holding his elbows bent at his sides and is smiling with only one side of his mouth, the face he makes when he dances.
“Your old dad’s pretty good, huh?” he says for me but also for the benefit of Marlo and whoever else is watching. He continues this sashay, hips and feet, the jitterbug. “I was quite a dancer in my day.”
I already know, because he has told me, that he was a good dancer when he was younger. We have also been told of Marlo’s affection for my dad, which is evident in the glow coming from her smile, her bright eyes.
“She says she is eternally grateful,” my mother often says. “She is full of love for him.”
My mother now stands in the opposite corner of the room by her Steinway grand piano, holding a short square glass and talking to a man with thick black glasses. She stands upright like the model she was, holds her head as if she is carrying a book on it. Germans rule with the head, not the heart, she likes to remind me, and this dictum seems to go with the formal way she carries herself, the way she nods and smiles to the man though her shoulders are braced and the smile on her face is wider than usual. Something else she has told me: she doesn’t know how to make small talk. She doesn’t like it when my father leaves her to “work the party,” leaves her to fend for herself at these gatherings.
* * *
One month later our mother is crouched just inside the kitchen door, her arms outstretched. It’s our bedtime, but she has just returned from a week with our father in the tropics. Tears run down her cheeks. Irma, the maid, puts Braddy, who is two, down, and the four of us run into her arms. She hugs us all at the same time.
“Why are you crying?” Jay, three, asks.
“They’re tears of happiness,” she says. I look more closely. I’ve never heard of this. They look like regular tears, though it’s true she is smiling.
“I missed you children so much. It isn’t natural for a mother to be away from her children.”
“Irma, where is my shoehorn?” my father calls from the hall. He has been home for only moments, but his voice is high-pitched, the way it gets when he’s angry.
Our maid, now washing dishes at the sink, stops, her gloved hands still soapy, and walks to the doorway between the kitchen and hallway.
“I don’t know, Mr. Scherick!” she calls back. Her hands drip soap onto the wood floor.
My mother turns her head away from us to shout, “It should be on your shelf, Edgar!” Her voice sounds strained; she is pushing it so it carries down the hall.
“Which shelf, Carol?” His voice carries, too. My heart misses a beat. This is the way things usually start.
My mother stands up out of her crouch.
“I’m coming, Edgar!” she calls loudly.
* * *
The man with the thick white beard tells my brothers and me to lie down on the wooden floor of his New York apartment. My mother has introduced him as Maharishi. The foreign-sounding name goes with his appearance. He is wearing loose white clothing and his bare feet are at eye level. I am five. Greg is four, Jay three, and Braddy two. My mother stands in the entryway, smiling a patient, benevolent smile. Maharishi crouches and holds his hand a few inches over my stomach.
“Breathe,” he says.
The wooden floor is cold under my back. I feel self-conscious with him watching me like this. I take a huge breath in, sucking in my stomach. Is this how I usually breathe? I suddenly can’t remember.
“No. No. No,” he says. His voice is smooth like cool milk and each No clips up at the end like it has a tail that he snaps up and out of the way. This is the man, our mother has told us, who taught the Beatles how to meditate.
“This is the incorrect way to breathe. This is how Westerners breathe.”
My mother is nodding. Although she has never explained to us how to breathe correctly, it seems she has known this all along.
“Breath is prana; it is life force. You must fill your body with prana. When you breathe in, your belly should rise to here.” He nods at his palm, which is still hovering over my stomach. “Try again.”
I take another deep breath in. My stomach sucks in with the effort. This is harder than it sounds. I’ve been breathing my way, the way that seems to make the most sense, for all my life. This new technique is going to take some work. The Maharishi shakes his head. My mother is not smiling as broadly now.
“Fill your belly with your breath. Touch my hand,” he says. His head is tilted over me as though I am a specimen he is examining, the representative for all children of my kind. Non–East Indian children. Children who don’t know how to breathe properly. I feel suddenly responsible. Can we learn, or are we doomed to an existence of incorrect breathing? I don’t want to let anyone down.
I take a third breath and push my stomach out as I do so. It feels like the opposite of real breathing—pushing out when I should be pulling the breath in—but Maharishi nods and sits back on his heels. From the doorway my mother is smiling again.
“Now you must practice,” Maharishi says.
He pats my stomach and looks into my eyes. My mother sighs and folds her arms. I now know the correct way to breathe. The fact that I can’t seem to actually take in any oxygen when I follow the Maharishi’s instructions, the fact that the right way feels wrong, matters not.
The Maharishi moves to Greg.
“Take a deep breath,” he says.
I feel some satisfaction as my brother sucks in his stomach just as I did, but also embarrassed. Does this Maharishi feel he is wasting his time with such ignorant children? Has he just remembered that he has better things to do?
“Fill your belly with prana,” he says.
Greg tries again, taking in an even deeper breath. His stomach is concave with the effort. The Maharishi lays his palm gently on Greg’s midsection as if bestowing a benediction. Then he moves to Jay, who miraculously, typically, has distended his stomach with his intake of breath. At three, Jay already possesses a kind of quiet knowing that Greg, Braddy, and I blunder around on the outskirts of. The Maharishi nods and lightly rests his palm on Braddy’s stomach.
“They will get it. It will come.” He stands.
The lesson is over.
* * *
My kindergarten room smells of just-cleaned-up afternoon snack, graham crackers and grape juice. Outside, the sky is gray and the large wooden-framed window that faces Fifty-seventh Street is dark and mottled with drops. I’m standing at the waist-high worktable, taking a break from tracing the letter K to watch these drops live out their life spans. Some have tails that are short; these drops disappear almost instantly. Others wind their way down the length of the window. I imagine myself like those bold ones. They seem adventurous and daring and kindred. I try not to think about the fact that all the drops on this window are dying almost as soon as they are born and the fact that they exactly resemble tears.
My mother has appeared at my cubby and is pulling out my galoshes. The day is over. Her black-and-white polka-dot raincoat is drawn in at the waist with a wide, stylish belt. She is wearing dark red lipstick; her shining, carefully curled chestnut hair bounces on the tops of her shoulders. Her smile as she greets Teacher is wide and dazzling. She is a beautiful, capable giant moving among child-size desks and tables and chairs, and I feel the familiar stab, the hot pain of my dependence on her.
After we leave my room, we gather Greg and Jay and their galoshes from their rooms. Braddy is at home with Tata, our nanny. This is the Child Development Center, a school my mother is proud to send us to because she says it is a pioneer in early childhood education. The school was recommended by our pediatrician, Dr. Berenberg. When my mother brings all four of us to Dr. Berenberg’s office, we arrive like a parade. At the Child Development Center, my brothers and I are given intelligence quotient tests. Though this is supposed to be a secret and our mother’s plan was to keep our individual scores private, Greg tells me that he tested at the genius level, which doesn’t surprise me. It was Greg who taught me how to tell time and tie my shoelaces in a bow, though I am older.
“You’re my big helper, Christine,” she says now. Our names are formal and Protestant, like my mother: Christine Carol, Gregory Edgar, Jonathan Jay, Bradford Roman. “William Bradford came over on the Mayflower,” my mother has told us. My father’s family is Jewish. She addresses us, with the exception of Jay, whom she calls “Jay Jay,” by our full first names.
Outside, my mother asks me to hold my brothers’ hands, and we wait on the sidewalk as she steps out onto the street to flag down a taxi. The wet streets and sidewalks are awash in light, reflections from headlights, taillights, blinking crosswalk signs. Still, the sky hangs low and the rain presses, the sea of umbrellas overhead creating a ceiling of black, everyone looking down. A checkered cab pulls up and my mother opens the door, unfolds one heavy jump seat, and sits down on it, holding Jay. Greg and I slide across the black vinyl seat, which is torn at the seams and losing its white stuffing.
“Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street, please, driver,” my mother says. Her voice rings confidently. As the door closes and the cab light goes out slowly, it catches all the highlights in her dark hair.
The cab lets us out. The rain has stopped, but the sky is still gray. It’s almost October and very cold in the shadows between buildings. Overhead, a rooftop incinerator spews a black plume that rises in slow motion and spreads, mixing with the clouds.
“Look at that.” My mother’s mouth is tight with disgust.
“What?”
“That building’s incinerator pumping poison into the air. It’s criminal, forcing everyone to breathe that pollution.”
My mother pulls my hand as we cross the island that runs down the middle of Broadway, tugging at my arm as she steers me around the dusty-looking, Tootsie Roll–like pieces of dog feces that lie in the hard-packed dirt, where there are no cobblestones.
A cluster of bells tied to the door tinkles as we step inside Florsheim Shoes; the air in the shoe store is cool and thick with the smell of leather. The shoe salesman crouches at my knees and presses hard with his thumb at the toe of the brown Mary Janes on my feet. They’re so stiff, his thumb barely makes a dent.
“I don’t really like these.” I eye an illustration on a poster by the door of a little girl on a swing wearing a pair of rubber-soled Buster Browns.
“They’ll last,” my mother says. “They’re well made.”
The shoe salesman crouches at Greg’s knees, then Jay’s. I practice walking and sliding along the store rug in my new shoes’ slick leather soles until I shock myself when I touch the sales counter. I sit back down in a chair and swing my feet. Finally Greg and Jay have their new stiff shoes too, and it’s time to go home.
Outside, the sky is clear but the sun has set. In the deepening dusk, despite the lit storefront signs, headlights, and taillights, Broadway is tinted blue. My mother leaves us on the curb again and hails another cab.
“Central Park West, driver. The Dakota,” she says, after we pile inside, her voice ringing extra bell-like.
“How does he know where to go?” I ask.
“The Dakota is a very famous residence,” my mother said. “Everyone knows where it is.”
The cab pulls up in front of our building and Heinz, the doorman, steps off the curb to meet us, opening our cab door with one white-gloved hand.
“Mrs. Scherick,” Heinz says, and nods.
All the doormen at the Dakota match in their long navy brass-buttoned coats and gendarme hats. But Heinz speaks with a German accent. I like the way his words sound like jabs and the way he smiles down at me when he sees me. Now he puts his gloved hand on the small of my back and, with a soft push, helps me onto the sidewalk. My mother, brothers, and I file past him to the wrought-iron gated entry, big enough for horse-drawn carriages to have parked and let out the building’s inhabitants when the Dakota was built in the 1880s, when the Upper West Side of Manhattan was considered remote and was surrounded by empty fields.
Heinz goes back to his post beside his copper doorman’s booth, his feet spread apart and his hands clasped behind his back. We stop in the dark paneled co-op office, which is located at the top of the marble steps, just inside the iron gate that closes off the Dakota’s courtyard to outsiders. The office is a room of dark paneling and white-and-black speckled marble floors and smells of lemon Pledge and wood. Winnie is behind the desk, her reading glasses attached by a string of miniature balls that drapes behind her neck. She leans forward when she sees us, her middle-aged face alight.
“There they are, those beautiful children.”
We are celebrities in this office, so I am used to feeling exclaimed over and important, though it is my brothers, especially, who are beautiful. Compared to Braddy’s chubby cuteness or Jay’s fragile blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty, I am clumsy and too big. Greg and I are mistaken for twins, but he is smooth-skinned and handsome, and important as eldest son in a way I’m not.
“You have such beautiful children, Mrs. Scherick,” Winnie says.
My mother pushes my hair behind my ear with her finger, touches the top of Greg’s head, pleased. We take the back door out of the office, head down the stone steps into the courtyard, which, surrounded on all four sides by ten stories of Dakota apartments, is very cold. We cross between the fountains. The copper man-size reeds and stamens—the fountains’ motif is a water plant—are dry; the water has been turned off for the winter to prevent frozen pipes. Then we climb the stairs to the service entrance that leads to the back door of our apartment. This stairwell smells of furnace heat and dust. As our apartment is on the first floor, the cavernous basement is only one short flight down. My mother pushes open our back door, which leads into our kitchen. Our apartment, like Winnie’s office, smells of dust and wood and floor wax. I head from the kitchen in my stiff new shoes, down the long, tall hallway that leads, eventually, to first my bedroom, then my brothers’, then my parents’, and beyond that, down another long, tall hallway, to the formal rooms of the apartment that sit too dark and silent and where I try never to go. As I reach my room, the stiffness of my shoes feels connected to the heaviness of our apartment; the towering ceilings and doors; the dark, cavernous hallways; the sharp angles and dense, closed-off atmosphere. My parents bought our apartment from a couple, two men, who, she told me, had painted all the wood black.
“Can you imagine? Black? Who in their right mind would paint over wood?” my mother spits whenever the subject comes up, though the wood she had painstakingly revealed is dark. I make a note never to paint over wood in her presence, but I also look into the apartment windows in the building next door and secretly long to trade our dark wood paneling and molding, our museum-quality, antique period furniture tacked down with plastic we aren’t allowed to sit on, for the white walls I see in these other apartments. I long for these other comfortable-looking sofas and chairs, for the golden halos of lamplight throwing circles of intimacy and warmth.
After dinner the rain starts up again. I sit cross-legged on the radiator by the window in the kitchen that looks out onto the courtyard. I watch the raindrops fall into the puddle that always forms in the same spot on the aluminum roof of the walkway that runs around the perimeter of the courtyard. Every fall this walkway is carried in sections, man-high segments of glass and paneling, by workmen in coveralls, then pieced together to form a tunnel, shelter from winter rain and snow for residents as they leave their apartments. My nose almost touches the cold glass as I look out. The walkway’s aluminum roof, the shadowy stone of the ten stories of building that rise up and surround this courtyard on all four sides, the small disc of stormy sky visible overhead, the puddle and the raindrops that fall into it, are all black. I am testing myself. Can I remain separate from the gloom around me? Is there a place deep enough inside me that it is impervious to the cold glass, the cold black raindrops, the low-hanging gray sky, the silently watching black windows of other apartments and towering walls of stone, the pointed Gothic spires that stab the heavy drape of clouds?
* * *
They are filming a movie outside our building. My mother points out the production crew and movie cameras on the corner. The movie is Rosemary’s Baby, and the Dakota features prominently as the building where the witches and warlocks in the story hold their coven and Mia Farrow is forced to ingest blended green drinks with strange ingredients to prepare her to spawn an in-human child. Though I know that some of the most famous people in the world live in the apartments around us, Leonard Bernstein and Lauren Bacall among them, as our mother guides us around the filming, I feel some relief that someone is recognizing the very thing I myself have felt, that this is a scary place to live.
* * *
My mother has bought a rug and rolled it out in the formal living room. As my mother is allergic to dust and except for the dining room, there are no other floor coverings in any room of our apartment, the arrival of this rug is an occasion. This new rug is white, and we squeeze handfuls of the soft piles, kneel on it, lie down on our stomachs, turn onto our backs and make snow angels. It’s soft, softer than my bed, softer than anything else in this apartment, and despite the fact that it’s down where my mother’s rooms feel more like mini museums than someone’s home, I don’t want to leave. Maybe this is the first step, and our apartment can become like the apartments in the windows I look up into.
“Can we sleep here tonight?” Jay asks.
My mother sets us up with blankets and pillows and goes back to her bedroom. We lie in the unfamiliar night world of this room. The ceiling is lit with headlights that run from one corner to the other. The cough of the bus engines is louder here. I want to stay anyway. I plan on sleeping here every night from now on.
Braddy sits up first. Without a word he heads off. I hear him padding down the hall. Jay’s next. He gets up and is quickly gone. The room feels darker and bigger with just Greg and me. I hold my breath. Maybe Greg’s asleep and doesn’t realize it’s down to us.
“Are you going or staying?” Greg says. I look over. He’s sitting up.
The thing is, even if I make it one night, tomorrow night, when everyone’s brushing their teeth, I won’t be walking back down here by myself. Nothing moves in this part of the house. It’s so far from the kitchen, the laundry room, the bathroom, and the bedrooms where we spend our days, it seems to belong to another apartment. And if I can’t make it a regular thing, why prolong the good-bye?
Greg is almost to the hall. I gather my blanket and follow him.
The rug is gone by the end of the week. The rug’s departure makes more sense than its arrival in the first place. None of us asks about it again.
* * *
It’s Saturday and we’ve been inside all day. We’ve played Battleship, Twister, Candy Land, Parcheesi, Sorry. Little colored wooden men go around and around, fighting to get into their plastic-domed homes while we want out of ours. I feel coated with a layer of grease, a combination of my own and my brothers’ sweat from an ongoing wrestling match, from the invisible residue of artificial lights on skin, from animal dander, from furniture polish rubbed through my T-shirt each time I slide across the dining-room table and from floor wax rubbed through my socks from sliding down the halls. The small TV in the room by the kitchen, where the new maid, Rose, who replaced Irma, lives, plays cartoons while Rose irons my father’s Hanes undershirts and white handkerchiefs. Twangy boings and eh, what’s up, docs repeat like the endless loop of background cacti and desert mountain. I feel sick to my stomach just being in the same room with it.
Our mother is in her bedroom, leaning over her sewing machine. This machine has traveled from her farm-girl childhood to our city apartment and has the appearance to prove it. Giant and bulbous, it looks like a relic, but when she unpacks and packs it, pulling off or setting spools on levers, threading and unthreading, her movements are slow and measured and reverent.
“When I was younger, I used to make all my clothes,” she has told me.
Now large swaths of fabric are spread out on the floor and bed. “We have one month until Halloween and I need to get these done.”
My youngest brothers are old enough to trick-or-treat and this will be our first Halloween. She is making our costumes. A few days ago she spread the Simplicity patterns on her bed and let us choose which animal we wanted to be. Jay chose the yellow duck costume, Greg a shaggy dog. I chose the gray mouse with long white whiskers and a pink nose, and Braddy, the black-and-white spotted Dalmatian.
I’m lying on her bed, watching her pump her foot on the pedal and feed the fabric through the needle that bobs so fast, it’s a blur. Then she snaps a switch and the needle slows then stops; the hum of the machine quiets. She lifts up the arm, pulls out the material still attached by several threads, and holds up my gray mouse costume. She leans back and looks it over, seemingly glad to take a moment to appreciate her handiwork. The costume has a white stomach, a long pink tail. These are full-body costumes complete with fur paws, and they cover us from the tips of our fingers down to our feet. They even include fur hoods adorned with ears and whiskers. She’s made them big so that we can wear them again next year.
“Braddy is walking into our game and knocking over the pieces.” Greg, nine, appears through the dressing room that connects my brothers’ bedrooms and my parents’ room. The original one room that Greg and I shared, my mother has proudly divided (how many apartments in New York City have rooms that are so big—fourteen-foot ceilings—they can become four?) so each of my three brothers can have his own room. Greg and Jay, the oldest boys, have rooms on the second floor, accessed by ladder. Braddy’s is on the ground floor, a fact he hates, next to the fourth room, which has a small guest bed and houses our toys. Our mother calls it the playroom.
Greg is wearing only a pair of cotton briefs. His naked skin is golden brown. He and Braddy both look perpetually tan, their skin smooth. It seems completely natural to me that I know my brothers’ bodies as well as I know my own. Jay, eight, has the palest skin of all of us, narrow wrists and ankles, soft blond curls and light blue eyes, always flushed, feverishly pink cheeks. Both Greg’s and Braddy’s nipples are brown and round like copper pennies. Greg has a long body, long legs and arms. Brad has boxy toes, and his feet are square and slightly pigeon-toed. When he was a baby, he had to wear a brace between his baby shoes that held his legs so his feet would turn outward. He lay in his crib and screamed, his battles with the world beginning early.
“Bradford! Come play a game with Christine.”
“No!” Braddy’s six-year-old voice pipes from the bedroom.
“He won’t leave us alone.” Greg’s shoulders are back, his chin jutting forward. He usually considers it our mother’s responsibility to set his inconveniences right. Greg knows all the important things before I do. But right now, and often, Braddy is an affront he doesn’t want to manage. The next step for Greg will be to use his fists and for Braddy to fight back, an outcome that is fairly regular between these two brothers born on the same day, four years apart.
In the other room Jay and Braddy are conversing. Jay’s voice is low and soothing. I imagine his and Braddy’s heads bent over the game pieces as Jay includes him in some manner, sensing in his fragile way that Braddy barrels in strongest when he feels most excluded.
“Bradford, will you find my handkerchief from Grandpa?” my mother calls. “You’re my best finder.”
Braddy’s footsteps are instantly quick and loud as this distraction works, and he runs down the hallway toward the laundry room and comes back with a sheer white handkerchief, hands it to our mother, and crawls up beside me on our parents’ bed. Greg has slipped back into the playroom to finish the game. The term will come later: hyperactive. Right now all we know is that most of us usually attempt to put distance between ourselves and the cloud of constant frenetic energy around Braddy. I compensate by sometimes stepping in to try to help when he and Greg butt heads. But mostly Braddy travels in a sort of bubble of isolation, attempting to relate to Greg and Jay, his older brothers, by annoying them.
Now my father’s high-pitched voice travels down the hallway from the kitchen. I can’t make out what he’s saying but, home from whatever mysterious Saturday work goings-on he was engaged in, he’s loud. Adrenaline instantly shoots hot from my chest down into my legs. His energy, like Braddy’s, makes it impossible to relax. He chews gum too fast and talks too loudly, becomes angry when any clutter piles up on a countertop, when we leave a plate on the kitchen table or a toy in the hall. Right now I’m hoping he is joking with Rose, and this is the reason his voice is carrying. Braddy jumps off the bed and heads through the dressing room and into his room. I want to retreat to my room, too. But my father is coming down the hall now, his voice still strident, his leather-soled footsteps percussion strikes on the bare wood. He will hit my room, at the elbow of the turn in the hall from the kitchen to the bedrooms, first.
“Containers on every refrigerator shelf? Is it too much to ask for order?”
He is directing his attention to Rose in the kitchen, but his speed tells me he is bringing whatever problem he is having with him and will shortly unleash it upon this end of the apartment. I duck into the playroom at the last minute, just before he rounds the turn.
“… five containers of rotting fruit…!”
I have an urge to hide in the closet. I crouch beside Jay and Greg’s Battleship game instead. My heart is thudding against my rib cage—what have I left lying around?—but he strides past our door without looking in and enters his bedroom.
“Is there a reason we are saving five containers of rotting fruit?”
My mother’s voice is low and I can’t hear her words, but clearly she is attempting to calm him. What she won’t say is that she doesn’t like to throw anything away. She has told my brothers and me the story of her uncle Herman, who died trying to get the last bit of a gravel delivery out of a raised dump-truck bed with a stick. While scraping, he triggered the release mechanism and the bed of the truck fell backward and crushed him. It’s a cautionary tale we don’t adhere to. My mother wants to get the last drop of use out of everything, so our countertops are cluttered with items waiting to be needed: used notebooks, broken pencils and crayons, loose nails and screws, a pile of socks with no mates. In the fridge, her need to find a use for everything translates into shelves full of containers of mostly eaten food, which she will bring out with a flourish every time we sit down to a meal and attempt to coax us into finishing the last wedge of now-oxidized brown apple or the tablespoon of cottage cheese left at the bottom of the plastic container.
Now my father responds to whatever she is saying by maintaining his decibel level.
“Is it too much to ask to open the refrigerator and find order?”
“No, it’s not too much to ask, Edgar, to open the refrigerator and find what you’re looking for in it,” our mother says stiffly. She’s already had enough of this. We were having a nice enough time before he barged in.
His decibel level raises as he says, “It’s not too much to ask to come home to a refrigerator where I can find something I want to eat. It’s certainly not too much to ask for order in the kitchen.”
Silence. I imagine her arranging her fabric pieces methodically. Like Greg, my father holds my mother responsible for his inconveniences. I know from experience that he will not let her off the hook regardless of her attempts to disengage from the confrontation. His decibel level quickly raises again, to an impossible scream I couldn’t have imagined a man could make: “Goddamn it, this is my house, and I get to decide how things are around here.”
The final tactic: escape. She is out of the bedroom and passes the open playroom door. He follows her down the hall, roaring, “I’m fighting for my life here, Carol!”
A muffled, angry tangle of voices from the kitchen. A bang, something being thrown. Another bang, a crash. My father’s voice is at its highest pitch now. Then a door slams loudly and there is silence. He has left the apartment. I feel awash in cool relief. Then hot panic. It’s so quiet now; is our mother all right? After a moment, she passes us in the hallway, walking like she is tiptoeing.
“I love you, children.” She stands at the doorway in her thin nightgown. We look up at her. She looks pale, shaken.
“We love you, Mom,” we chorus.
Then she is gone, heading back to her bedroom.
* * *
I wrap my index and middle fingers around a few tendrils of hair at the nape of my neck and pull. The tug, then the snap of hair as it releases from my scalp, feels satisfying. I hold the hair in the crook of my index finger and insert my thumb into my mouth, rubbing the hair against my upper lip. The hair balls up. This will be a good piece of fuzz, I can tell. Not too big, not too small. It is already compacting the way I like it, into a ring, one side of the ring solidifying, the other staying soft. I like both, the soft and the hard, against my lip. I flip the fuzz, taking turns with each side. My thumb is warm along the roof of my mouth; it fits snugly against the top of my tongue, follows the curves of my palate, fills in all gaps. I realize I’m not sure why I am awake. Then: leather-soled footsteps coming down the hall. My whole body tenses. I must have heard the door as my father reentered the apartment. I have an urge, as his footsteps get louder—it sounds as if he is walking straight into my room—to slide out of my covers and under the bed, but now his footfalls are receding as he heads for his bedroom, where my mother sleeps. I wait for her sharp protest, his matching high-pitched accusation, but I can hear only the dark, dense silence of our apartment at night, the whoosh and gurgle of the steam pipes, the Dakota’s heating system, in the walls. I’m not proud of myself when I lose my temper, my father has told me. He must be apologizing. Promising my mother that it will never happen again.
* * *
It’s Halloween night, and my mother is sitting at her sewing machine, cranking the foot pedal and sliding yellow fabric under the bobbing needle while my brothers and I lie in our underwear at the foot of her bed. Finally she stands up from her sewing table, triumphant. She bites the remaining attached threads and holds up Jay’s duck hood, showing us where she has just finished attaching the orange felt bill. We jump down from the bed as she checks for pins in all four costumes then hands me and Greg ours, helps Jay with his, and dresses Braddy.
We follow her down our long hall. She opens the double front doors of the formal entrance to our apartment and ushers us through. We go out the front doors and pad with our mouse and duck and dog feet onto the cold white, with diamonds of black, marble of the lobby, which is dimly lit and empty and smells like our apartment, though the oily aroma of wood polish, of dust and wood, hangs thicker here. They are heavy smells, Dakota smells. Although there is an elevator—my mother has told us that the Dakota was the first building in New York to have one—she leads us to the staircase. It is rimmed by a carved dark wood banister and winds up to the next floor. I tilt my head back. From this vantage, the bottom of the stairway spirals up in perfect symmetry against the white underside, floor after floor, to a white ceiling, ten stories up. Swept up in the geometry, for a moment I lose my bearings—am I looking up or down?—until my mother nudges my shoulder with her hip.
“This way now, Christine.”
She steps onto the first marble stair, holding Jay’s and Braddy’s hands. Greg and I follow. I slide my slippers as I go. Surrounded by stillness, it seems as if we are the only people to have ever walked these stairs. We reach the second-floor landing, approach heavy double front doors that look exactly like ours on the floor below. Everything about this floor is a replica of ours—black-and-white-checked marble landing, the door exactly the same—but also slightly off. The light on this landing isn’t quite like our light, and this foyer leads to both the flight up and the flight down and doesn’t have the extra expanse, as our ground-floor apartment does, leading out to the courtyard.
My mother knocks, then stands back. My mouse suit feels too hot, and I wonder if I can take off the hood without hurting her feelings. If it’s true that there are many famous inhabitants living in the Dakota because of the gate and the security, people who don’t want to be bothered, it doesn’t make sense that she is so eager to knock on this door.
She knocks again. Steps back again. I’m just about to suggest we move to the next floor when the sound of dead bolts clicking rings out into the silence.
The door opens. A figure steps into the doorway, a woman with broad, masculine shoulders and a square jaw. She is very tall, and the dim white light from the sconces on the wall throw shadows around her deep-set eyes and around her mouth and cheekbones. I take a step back. Greg and Jay step forward.
“Trick or treat,” they say in unison.
The woman smiles, but the shadows on her face remain and my mother has to reach back to pull me forward. I hold out my plastic orange pumpkin pail. The woman drops in two large-size Tootsie Pops.
“What darling costumes,” she says in an unexpectedly gravelly voice. Her voice is deeper than my father’s.
“Happy Halloween!” my mother says. “Can you say thank you to Ms. Bacall?”
My mother has told me the actress is very famous and very reclusive, which seems to explain, in part, her appearance.
“Thank you,” we say in chorus as she smiles, nods, and closes the door.
We repeat this procedure on each floor, though I don’t recognize anyone else famous. I’ve taken to pulling off my hood while we walk, then settling it back down when it’s time to knock on another door. I’m not sure how I feel about Halloween if we’re just going to go up and down this one staircase, though my brothers are smiling from ear to ear. We have been given more candy than we’ve ever held in our hands at one time: Milky Way bars, 3 Musketeers, Sugar Daddys, Tootsie Pops, Tootsie Rolls. Once we are back inside our apartment, my mother gathers up our pails.
“I will keep them separate, but I want to hold on to them,” she says. “You’ll get sick if you eat all this candy at once.”
She gives us each a Tootsie Pop and unzips my brothers’ costumes—the zippers run all the way down the back—then mine.
* * *
Down the hall my mother is bathing my brothers in the children’s bathroom by the laundry room. I have the bathtub in the study to myself. This is the only time I like being at this end of the apartment. My mother poured in Mr. Bubble, and the froth and foam around me looks like millions of tiny round enclosures. I peer into the bubbles. Their walls shimmer with color and reflect the light from the sconces over the medicine cabinet. I imagine myself miniature, living inside these tiny, cozy, shimmering spaces.
“Ready?” My mother appears with a towel. I climb out and she wraps the terry cloth around me, helps me step into my footie pajamas.
My father is home and in the butler’s pantry, by the dining room, scooping ice. I pass him on my way to the kitchen to get a cup of water. The rest of the apartment is quiet; my brothers are in bed. He kisses me on the cheek, his lips wet, his breath hot with the aroma of liquor.
“Hi, darling,” he says, relaxed.
On the way back from the kitchen I peek into the butler’s pantry again. The room is empty. I can hear the television down the long hall blasting from the study, where my father is most likely sitting in his favorite chair with his drink, watching the news. Where is my mother? I haven’t seen her since my bath. I check in her room and bathroom. I walk back down to the kitchen and realize the door to the small bathroom by the maid’s room has been closed since I passed it the first time. I knock.
“Mom?”
No answer.
Then I hear something muffled. It sounds like my name, possibly. I turn the ornate glass door handle and push open the door. My mother is sitting on the toilet, but the top seat is down, so she is just sitting. Her head is in her hands; her face is red and wet. She looks up, smiles, and wipes one eye with the side of one hand. She smiles again and tries to say my nickname, “Steenie,” but it comes out as more of a croak.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” I wonder if the costumes disappointed her or if she’s upset because we got so much candy.
“I’m okay.” She sits up, wipes her other eye. “Go to bed. I’ll come tuck you in, in a minute.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask again.
“It’s nothing. It’s silly. It’s just a day.”
Yes, Halloween is just a day, nothing to cry over. Then it hits me. I was so wrapped up in trick-or-treating that I forgot.
“It’s your birthday,” I say, seared with guilt. “Happy birthday.”
She pulls me close. “It’s not your job to remember.”
She wipes her face with both hands now. She stands up. “Your father never remembers my birthday. It’s just a day. It doesn’t matter.”
* * *
It’s after bedtime. The piano notes travel down our long hall, reach me in my bed. My mother is sitting at her Steinway grand in the dining room. She plays first in the upper register—the sound is like a pinging of raindrops—then her fingers find the lower keys, and the notes are true percussion, pounding, like strong emotion. The tinkling resumes and the raindrops become a song, her favorite of late; she has been going to it at night after everyone is in bed. The theme song to the movie The Sandpiper, “The Shadow of Your Smile.” The sheet music with the photo of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor strolling along a shoreline sits among her books of Bach and Mozart. Sometimes she sings while she plays. Though the song is sad—now when I remember spring, all the joy that love can bring, I will be remembering the shadow of your smile—I like knowing that she is sitting at her beloved piano. Knowing, as I drift off to sleep, exactly where she is in the apartment.
Now her playing stops, starts again from the beginning, stops and starts again. This time she plays the song all the way through, having gained mastery over a mistake only she can hear. I try not to think about the fact that music had been the focus of her life until she had us, that she was a child prodigy on the piano and that she began playing when she was four. When she plays sad songs like this, it seems like she misses that part of herself.
The piano playing stops for good. I am still awake. Blocks of light run across my ceiling, headlights from the parking garage outside my window. The rectangle with the square for a head, the three squares, and the triangle slip from the door to the closet to the fireplace, then run down the wall and slide through an invisible exit in the corner by my babyhood cradle. I am trying to match the shapes with possible names: Rose. Geoffrey. Tom. Beatrice—Bea for short. If I name them, I can make them familiar, instead of what they are, headlights from cars driven by people I don’t know, coming and going from places that have nothing to do with me, more evidence of the vast and unknowable city outside our apartment. I’d rather they were my friends down here in my room at the far end of the apartment, where I sleep because I’m the oldest child and only girl. But the blocks of light don’t stop to befriend me. They just continue sliding silently across the ceiling.
* * *
My mother is in her closet, getting ready to go out. She pulls out a shoebox from a wall of shelves filled with similar shoeboxes and opens it, bends down, and slips a shoe onto her foot. Most of the shoeboxes read Ferragamo. She has told me this brand of shoe is made well and fits her size-ten but very narrow feet. Most of her shoes are flats because, at five foot eight, she doesn’t want to be taller than my father, who is six foot.
I pick up a small bottle of perfume from its place on another shelf and sniff at the cap. It smells like flowers and alcohol and other things I can’t name. It’s my mother’s going-out smell, though the fragrance warms and softens when it’s on her skin. In the bottle the smell is too strong, too sharp. I’m not sure how I feel about the smell anyway. I don’t like it when she goes out.
“That’s Joy,” my mother says. “It’s very expensive.” She sounds proud.
“Where are you going?”
“To the Four Seasons.”
“When will you be back?”
“You will already be asleep.”
She slips on the other shoe. Black-and-white flats with gold buckles. Her legs are long; she is proud of them, too. It’s unusual to have long legs like this, she has told me. She holds the doughnut roll of her stocking, tips her toes in, and pulls it up over her tapered ankle, her rounded calf, her long, lean thigh. She does the same for the other leg. There is a technique. She snaps the snaps around her garter. I am impressed, but the care she takes, preparing herself to go out, also tugs at me. How am I supposed to go to sleep when she’s out wandering the dark, overwhelming maze of streets and sidewalks and alleyways of New York City?
“Don’t let the bad guys get you,” I say.
She pulls me close. A cloud of Joy engulfs us both.
“Nothing will get me,” she says.
I want to feel comforted, but how does she know this? I look down at my own feet, barefoot and tiny on the wood floor. I feel suddenly weak-kneed. Everything comes down to her. She seems like a giant, tall, beautiful, and mighty, when she shows up in the doorway of my classroom and gathers my things from my cubby, stylish in her belted white raincoat and checkered Jacqueline Kennedy sunglasses. But now she is trusting and hopeful for the night ahead. The more I need her, the more vulnerable she seems. I imagine myself orphaned; maybe if I practice feeling self-sufficient, I’ll be ready. But I can’t imagine anything on the other side of my dependence on her.
* * *
It’s the end of November and we are walking back to the Dakota from the rowboat pond, eating Cracker Jacks my mother bought at the concession stand. The trees are bare and Central Park is furred gray and brown. The puddles are frosted over with a thin layer of ice that cracks when I touch it with my toe. We stop at our favorite rock, the one with the worn surface that acts like a slide. I slip my sneakers into a crevice and pull myself up, climb to the top, and Greg follows me. My mother holds Jay’s hand while he plays on the lower rock. Braddy is in his stroller. At the top of the slide I hesitate. Greg steps in front of me and goes down first. Our mother catches him with one arm, holds Jay with the other. She lets me slide down on my own, two of us already safe in her arms. On our way out of the park, we see police setting up white barricades along the sidewalk.
“What are they for?” Greg, interested in everything policemen do, asks.
“The Thanksgiving Day Parade is tomorrow,” our mother says. “Remember the floats?”
The next morning we head out of our apartment, my father with us, cross the courtyard, and enter the formal lobby of another wing of our building, which, with its black-and-white marble floor and dark wooden stairway up, is an exact replica of our lobby across the way. We walk up three flights of stairs and knock on a door. A tall man with thick white hair and black square glasses opens it.
“Linda, our guests are here,” he says over his shoulder.
“Can you say hello to Mr. and Mrs. Ashley?” my mother asks. “Mr. Ashley is a game hunter in Africa.”
“Come in, dears!” Mrs. Ashley says.
My father gives me a push. I step through the threshold into an apartment that, except for the crown molding—though here the wood is painted beige—is nothing like ours. Instead, the room we enter is filled with animal skins: a zebra-skin rug, leopard-skin throw pillows, giraffe-skin footrests. There is a rhinoceros head mounted over the couch and a water buffalo head over the fireplace.
“Come sit by the window, children,” Mrs. Ashley calls. I wonder if she feels guilty surrounded by dead animals.
To get to the window I have to walk across the zebra rug. I bend down to touch the hair. It is thick and plentiful. It seems strange that this zebra is dead but its hair is healthy and lives on, here in this room, so far from where it once roamed.
Mr. Ashley stands with his wife beside two semicircles of chairs positioned to look out the two large windows facing Central Park.
“Can these sweethearts have hot chocolate? We have snacks, too.”
Mrs. Ashley indicates several trays laid out with bite-size pieces of bread smeared with cream cheese, miniature cinnamon rolls, and tiny hot dogs with toothpicks in them. I choose two miniature hot dogs. They are warm and slightly spicy.
“Here comes Snoopy!” my mother calls.
I had almost forgotten there was a parade going on outside. My mother hands me a napkin to wipe my hands with as Mr. Ashley pulls out a chair. Snoopy is coming down Central Park West in the nodding slow-motion waggle of arms and legs and head. The re-creation is good. They have his head and nose and eyes and paws right, but there’s something off, something eerie about the movement. Snoopy doesn’t move in slow motion. He isn’t silent; his head doesn’t nod the way the balloon’s head is nodding.
“Spider-Man!” Jay calls.
“Smokey Bear!” shouts Greg.
My brothers are getting into this. Next comes Rocky and Bullwinkle. I am impressed by the balloons’ enormity, amazed that an object passing so close could be so big, but there is something eerie to me in the slow-motion strangeness of these familiar characters, a strangeness no one but me seems to notice. In between marching bands and floats, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Underdog, Popeye, Smokey Bear, and the Pink Panther bob slowly and enormously down Central Park West. After the parade has passed, my mother stands. We are not lingering. Mr. Ashley shakes my hand and my brothers’ hands in turn.
“Can you thank Mr. and Mrs. Ashley?” our mother prompts.
“Thank you,” we chorus.
“See you next Thanksgiving, dears,” Mrs. Ashley calls.
“Isn’t that lovely of them to open their apartment to tenants who want to watch the parade?” my mother says on our way down the staircase. She and my father are holding hands.
“We only see them on Thanksgiving?” I ask.
“The Ashleys’ children are grown. It makes them happy to share their view of Central Park West with Dakota residents who don’t have one,” my mother says.
* * *
After the first snow, we walk to the sledding hill, in Central Park, across from the Dakota. We’ve been sledding for several hours. Greg is heading up the hill again, pulling his Flexible Flyer behind him for another ride. Jay and Braddy, each holding a plastic saucer, follow. My mother, dressed in her robin’s-egg-blue parka with the fake-fur collar and matching hat, watches from the bench. I’m at the bottom of the hill, taking a break. It’s dusk, and the opaque winter world is deepening to gray. My toes are cold, and as the sky darkens the chill spreads. I’m playing my old game of seeing how far I can get to the edge of the gloom without succumbing: the sight of the low-hanging clouds, the wet walkways like black ribbons through the snow, the bare branches, black fingers curled against the bleak sky, all add to my chill. But with my mother there beaming at us, and the newly strung white Christmas lights on the grape arbor at Seventy-second Street twinkling brightly against the gathering night, it feels safe to notice the winter melancholy. There is a beauty in it if I don’t get too close.
That night, after dinner, my father’s voice rises in a shriek from the far end of the apartment, where he has been reading in the study. My blood stops cold. I have been coloring by myself in the playroom, but now I freeze, hoping he’s laughing. But no, he’s roaring, and his bare feet pound the rugless floors. He’s heading down the hall.
“Car—ol! I. Could. Have. Been. Killed. I don’t play with your things. This is my chair—do you understand? Mine!”
My mother comes running out of her bedroom, where she’s been finishing up a sewing project, a blue dress for an important function with my father, a month away. It’s been giving her trouble because the fabric is stretchy. “I will never work with stretchy fabric again,” she told me the night before, near tears.
“What is it, Edgar?” There’s an edge to her voice. She sounds concerned but also impatient.
Overhead, my brothers scramble in their loft rooms, toys are dropped, bedposts creak.
My father’s footsteps are louder.
“Leaned back on my chair. My. Chair. And the whole thing collapsed. My head missed the marble table by inches.”
I stay where I am on the playroom floor as he blows in, my mother right behind him, an avenging angel.
“Get. Down. Here.” Over my right shoulder, as I continue to color intently, heart pounding wildly, my father stands at the foot of the ladder, looking up. Braddy, having only the distance from his room on the ground floor to cover, is instantly beside him and stands as if in an army line, upright and at attention. He is wearing only a pair of white Fruit of the Looms. Jay climbs down the ladder first, Greg behind him. They are in their underwear, too. My father waits until all three boys are down and looking at him.
“I don’t go into your rooms and play with your toys, do I?” His voice is suddenly calm and measured.
“No,” my brothers say in unison.
“When you spun on my chair, the screw that holds it to the base unscrewed. I could have been seriously injured.”
“Sorry, Dad,” Jay says.
“I didn’t know that would happen,” Greg says.
“Sowwy,” Braddy adds.
My heart is still in my throat. I breathe in anyway. My father is breathing, too. It feels like the whole apartment is breathing and waiting.
“Please stay off my chair,” he finally says. “If you leave my things alone, I will leave your things alone.” My father, for some inexplicable reason, when he really does have something to be mad about, is choosing to be reasonable.
“Okay, Dad,” Jay says.
“We will,” Greg says.
“I pwomise,” Braddy says.
My mother crosses through the playroom, passing me, on her way back to her sewing. Crisis over.
My father gives each brother a kiss and exits through the adjoining dressing room.
I hear the low murmur of my parents conversing in their bedroom. I let out my breath, take in another. The low murmur continues and then the sound of footsteps as my father goes back down the hall to resume what he was doing in the study. Greg and Jay climb their ladders as quietly as mice, like they are walking on eggshells.
* * *
My mother tries to hide the patches of missing hair using her brush, but there’s almost no hair left to hide it with. I don’t feel like I’ve been pulling it out more than usual, but my father hires a psychiatrist to come to the house to speak to me. The psychiatrist wears a reddish tweed coat that matches a thin growth of gray-flecked reddish beard over his cheeks. He tells me I can call him Bernie. Bernie and I are in the den. I am on the gold chair, and Bernie is on the black leather swivel that almost killed my father a few weeks ago.
“How are things going?”
“Fine.”
“Do you notice there are specific times when you need to suck your thumb?”
“I guess.” I suck my thumb almost all the time.
“It’s soothing?”
I know it’s his job to ask these questions, but this is embarrassing. An eight-year-old who still sucks her thumb? I just crave the feeling of thumb in my mouth. My mouth wants thumb. After Bernie leaves, my father comes into my room.
“Bernie asked me if there was tension in the house. He said you were most likely reacting to the general tension. I told him I lose my temper sometimes. That I could be better.”
* * *
It’s Saturday. My brothers and I have gathered for a game of Giant Ladybug in the deep-red-and-fleurs-de-lis-on-gold-velvet-wallpapered dining room, the only one of my mother’s formal rooms on the lived-in side of the apartment. In our game, the person designated as Ladybug must crawl on all fours around the periphery of the thick red area rug, the only rug in the apartment, which sits at the base of my mother’s Refectory-style banquet-size dining table. The rug is the “grass” and the sections under the table legs are cave-like shelters. Not-It players get to choose what animal they want to be. Greg is usually either a gorilla or a giraffe; Jay is a wildebeest or a zebra. I always choose a horse. These animals graze and frolic in the imagined pastoral setting until they see the Ladybug coming, at which point they must scramble back to their homes, which act as base. The game lasts only as long as Braddy, who almost always ends up as the Ladybug, will put up with the humiliation of lumbering around and around the base of the table on all fours as Greg, Jay, and I scoot out of the way every time he approaches.
“I call I’m not Giant Ladybug,” Braddy says, his hands on his hips.
“The Giant Ladybug gets to eat up all the other animals,” Greg says.
“I want to be a puppy.”
“The Ladybug is the best thing to be,” Greg adds. This appeal usually works. “She’s the meanest and biggest and scariest.”
“I don’t care.” If Braddy is figuring this out, our days of playing Giant Ladybug are numbered.
“Jay, be Giant Ladybug,” Greg says.
“Uh-uh,” Jay says.
“Greg, you,” I say. Greg is the quickest of all of us. This would add a dimension to the game I’m not sure I’m up for.
“No way,” Greg says.
“Can we go to Candyland?” Jay says.
I feel a pang. This is a game I thought up out of the sheer desperation of excruciating boredom, but it comes with a price. The last time we played, Jay ran straight to Braddy’s Steiff teddy bear and took a bite out of its shoulder, coming away with a mouthful of fur, and I’ve been feeling guilty ever since. At the time, I quickly explained that objects in Candyland are candy until we touch them, at which point they revert to their original states. I waited for the question: What’s the point of a world made of candy if it doesn’t stay candy when you touch it? But no one asked.
“Okay,” I say.
Jay, Greg, and Braddy follow me down our hallway and into my room, and I open the door to my closet, which I’ve told them is actually an elevator. We all step inside.
“Close the door,” I tell Braddy.
Jay asks, “How long till we’re there?”
One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand.
I open the door. My brothers peer out cautiously. They believe we are stepping forth into Candyland, where everything that we see, although it all looks exactly the same as our apartment in every way, is actually made of candy.
“Duck,” I say.
We stoop under the first invisible electric eye I have told them runs in the middle of my doorway, then step over another eye in the hall. This is a land of giants, and grown-ups, though they might look like our mother or father or maid, are actually spies for these giants, looking to give away our whereabouts. The game consists of our tiptoeing around the halls and ducking behind doors when we see an adult coming, all the while imagining that we are in a world where everything is deliciously edible.
My father’s voice booms from the kitchen, talking to Rose. He has just arrived home. He is loud, though it doesn’t sound as if he is upset about anything.
“I want to go back now,” Jay says, almost whispering.
No one disagrees. It’s one thing to dodge the maid while she’s folding laundry or mopping the kitchen floor and hardly paying attention to us. It’s another to navigate around our father.
We step over the electric eye in the hall, duck under the one in my doorway, file into my closet. I count one, two, three, open the door, and we’re back just as our father is striding down the hall, heading for his bedroom.
“Where’s your mother?” he says when he sees us coming out of my room.
“At the store,” Greg says.
“What’s she getting?”
“I don’t know,” Greg says to his back as he continues down the hall.
We quietly scatter to our separate rooms now, an instinct kicking in not to draw attention to ourselves. It’s getting dark outside, the winter afternoon ending early. Too late to go to the park now anyway.
* * *
My father has set out two platters on the kitchen counter, whitefish and lox, each wrapped in shiny white deli paper. It’s Saturday morning, early December. We are at our beach house in Point Lookout. In one of my mother’s photo albums there is a black-and-white picture of me as an infant in a long white baptism dress in my father’s arms on the steps of one of two churches in Point Lookout, one Episcopal, the other Catholic. A friend had told them about the Episcopal church, an hour from New York City, that would marry a Jew and a Protestant in 1960. My brothers and I would be baptized in this church, the decision made that we would be raised Protestant. Two years after the photograph was taken, almost three after they were married in the tiny unfamiliar town, my parents bought our little redbrick house at the dead end overlooking the ocean. Every summer we pack up and leave New York as soon as school is out, arriving in town in our red Volkswagen bus laden with four children, two Siamese cats, one golden retriever, two tortoises, an albino rabbit, and a macaw. On summer weekdays, my father commutes the short train ride back into the city. On weekends, he fishes. But now, in the winter, our house feels smaller; the cold seeps in. The town is quiet and gray, not at all its summer self when it bursts at the seams with sunshine and beach bustle. But we’re all together, away from the city, and we’re supposed to be having fun. As we line up with our plates, my father elbows me, hitting me under my rib cage.
“We’d have gefilte fish. And pickled herring. My mother made it Saturday mornings. She ordered the pickled herring from Norm’s Deli.” He elbows me again. “Eh, Christine? A delicacy.” He shakes his head at the wondrousness of the memory, then says louder, to include my brothers:
“Who wants fish?”
He pulls open the paper to reveal smoked salmon in one package and half a gray-skinned fish, complete with a small white marble of eyeball, in the other. The last time he brought us smoked salmon, partitioned out between my brothers and parents and me, we ended up with around four slices each, which wasn’t even remotely enough.
“Me! I do, I do!” my brothers respond.
My mother stands beside my father as my brothers hold out their plates. My father pulls open the paper and uses his fork to peel the thin gray skin off the fish on the second platter. The whitefish is also smoked but isn’t at all the same thing as the pink, almost translucent slices of salmon, though I don’t say so. I’m guessing we’re supposed to be just as appreciative of the lesser charms of the whitefish as we are of the salmon. To be picky is to be spoiled. Sometimes my father talks about “the evil eye,” which seems to be related to this subtle lesson about humility and appreciation.
“Too much awareness about one’s success tempts the envy of the gods,” he has told me, explaining the evil eye. “When mortals are too proud about their worldly accomplishments, they attract notice.”
I will later learn that, because they live their lives underwater, fish are seen, in the Jewish tradition, as being free of the influence of the evil eye. I will wonder if there’s a connection he might not have considered in the fact that he loves to fish. A love that began when he was six and walked to the pier at the end of his street in Long Beach, Long Island, the town he grew up in, just over from Point Lookout, with his pole and bait to catch dinner for his mother’s table. It was the Depression, and his father had lost his job manufacturing boys’ sailor suits and, for a month, told no one. Day after day, for a month, my grandfather dressed in his suit, boarded the Long Island Railroad to walk around the streets of New York City until it was the time he had always returned home. When he finally whispered to my grandmother in the wee hours of the night that at fifty-one he had been turned out of the garment factory he had worked in all his life, my father’s father sat down in his living room chair and never got up again. “He just stopped,” my father told me. His father also raged every day from that chair. “I’ve always been fascinated by people who just stop.”
My father moves to the salmon now, using a fork to separate the diaphanous slices. I hold my plate very still, lest I give away my delirious eagerness for this food. Once we sit down with our booty, the salmon’s salty, candy-clear flesh melts in my mouth so fast, it almost vaporizes.
* * *
I’m lying with my head on my father, his worn white Hanes undershirt a thin layer between my ear and cheek and his chest, which rises and falls as he breathes. We have finished our treat of smoked salmon and whitefish, and my brothers lie around him, too. We are upstairs in my parents’ bedroom. This room, like all the rooms in our beach house, is compact, but it doesn’t seem small, because one wall consists of a large picture window overlooking our sandlot, the two jetties that bookend the Point Lookout beach, and beyond that, the ocean. Our father is telling us a story, the next installment of The Rock, which he insists is the tale of his true adventures with this giant bird. My brothers and I enjoy this time with him but, despite our relaxed appearances, lying with him like this doesn’t feel completely natural. There’s part of me that holds myself ready in case things take a turn, and I’m guessing my brothers have that same part of them, slightly fearful, reserved for trouble.
“And then, lo and behold, the Great Red Rock grabbed me in her mighty talons and, pumping her mighty wings, lifted me into the air and flew me to her massive nest. She opened her claws and there I dropped, finding myself in a nest as big as this room, awaiting her young’s awakening.”
I notice he speaks a little bit like the Bible reads. I have learned about the Bible in Sunday School at the church where my parents were married, which sits at the edge of town.
“Lo and behold,” my father says again. This must be part of telling a story, making it sound important and big.
“What do you think happened?” He lifts his head off the pillow and looks at us, and his lips are wet with spittle formed in the excitement of spinning this tale.
I can think of no way out of this mess for him. But my father is here in this bed, so he must have escaped. One thing I really like about this story is that the Great Red Rock is so big and powerful, it sounds like it should be a he, but my father calls it a she.
“The baby birds woke up and ate you?” Jay says.
“No!” My father reaches out and tickles Jay, who squirms and squeals.
“You found a vine and swung down like Tarzan?” Greg says.
“The Great Red Rock returned and dug her great black claws into my shoulder and lifted me high in the air again. She flew far, far away over the sea, and dropped me into the foaming waves.”
Though this is the only story my father ever tells us, in installments when the mood strikes him, we know a few real stories about his life. We know that when he was born, his head was so big—that’s why Eddie’s so smart, his sister, our aunt Shirley, has said when she visits—he split his mother. I also know that as a boy my father passed out circulars for the local movie theater in town. His pay was a free pass to the movies playing there. On Mondays and Tuesdays the theater ran a double feature. He saw four movies every week. He loved Captain Blood with Errol Flynn and The Ten Commandments. His favorite movie was Shane. When it came to town, he saw it as many times as he could, a 1953 Western about a gunslinger cowboy who becomes a father figure to a boy but doesn’t stay.
* * *
It’s Sunday night, and we will be heading back to the city in a few hours. My parents have each opened a can of Schaefer beer in anticipation of our lobster dinner. I stand in the middle of the kitchen as my mother drops three lobsters into the giant black pot steaming on the stove. At first, the sound of claws scratching frantically to get out fills the kitchen.
“Why do you have to put them in alive?” I ask.
“They need to be eaten fresh,” my mother says.
This is fate beyond imagining: What must it feel like to die in boiling water? But once we sit down, the steaming, soft white meat of the lobster is sweet, hot, and delicious. My mother passes the bowl of melted butter she has made for us to dip the meat into. We even have special utensils for this dinner, silver crackers to split the leg shells open and long, thin, needlelike forks to pull out the meat, which takes on the shape and color, complete with the pink nodules, of the shell that had encased it.
* * *
A few days later we pull up, my mother driving the Volkswagen, to a cold, unfamiliar beach. Just beyond the dunes, people stand around, fully dressed, amid canvas-backed chairs, tables of food, giant lights on stands and bug-heads of movie cameras, their long, spindly wide-set legs like spiders perched and waiting. We follow my father to a blanket where Marlo sits, dressed in a little-girl white dress, her stomach engorged underneath. It’s a shock until my father makes a joke—doesn’t Marlo look good pregnant?—and Marlo punches her stomach a few times, her fist bouncing lightly off what is clearly a prop.
“Why is Marlo pregnant?” I ask my mother.
“Your father is making Jenny, a movie about unwed pregnancy and about the Vietnam War. Two very important topics.” My mother sounds proud. I know that my father was recently offered the job of being the head of MGM, but he told me he didn’t want to step into anyone else’s shoes. He created his own movie production company, Palomar Pictures, instead. Jenny is his first movie.
“Quiet on the set,” calls a man holding a walkie-talkie. My father points down the beach and whispers, “Watch there, Gregory,” as if I’m not standing there too. I don’t expect what comes next: an explosion in the sand. I jump. Then another. Contained detonations of orange flame, smoke, and flying sand as Alan Alda, dressed in camouflage, runs through the blasts. The sound of small yellow popping flames explode around him as he runs: one, two, three explosions. As he goes, he pulls off the backpack he is wearing, unlatches his belt, and throws them onto the sand.
“Cut!”
“Those are supposed to be bombs?” Greg says now that we can talk.
“There’ll be music and special effects added in the final edit,” my father says. “It will look more like war. The magic of moviemaking, Gregory.”
We leave the beach and make another stop, enter a small theater with velvet seats and a big screen. It looks like a real movie theater in every way but size. There are at most a hundred seats. My father holds my hand as we enter. A woman and two men in open shirts sit in the back row.
“Can you say hello?” my father says.
“Welcome. We have hot cocoa,” says a woman with thick blond hair and black glasses. “Sit in the first row, if you’d like.”
“Third row,” my father says. “They’ll see better.”
My father sits in back with the others. My mother leads us down to the third row. The seats are soft and velvety. The lights dim; playing on the screen is the scene we just watched being filmed. The filmed version of the explosions, which looked silly on the beach, look real and believable on the screen in front of us.
After a few takes of this same scene, the screen goes black and the lights around us come up overhead.
“What do you think, Christine?” My father cracks his gum from a few rows back.
“It’s cool.” I feel shy knowing everyone’s listening. He doesn’t ask for my opinions when we’re at home.
“Pretty realistic, Gregory?”
“Yeah,” Greg says.
I glance over my shoulder; our father sits back, popping his gum, arms draped around the backs of the chairs on either side of him, looking very satisfied.