a photo in which she is nine and dressed for a ballet class in a long-sleeved black leotard, in the living room in front of the fireplace. She is doing an arabesque, one arm bent slightly over her head, one arm out to the side; because it is a front view, only one leg shows, and she looks something like an amputee, the tip of her ballet shoe just visible above the outline of her shoulder, her whole body leaning into the camera as her eyes gaze off to one side of it, looking half sorrowful, half comical. "She looks like a greasehead," James said once, sitting next to me, taking note of the tight wet way her hair was pulled off her face into a bun. "You're a greasehead," I said, nurturing fantasies of becoming a ballerina myself, and I punched him in the leg. He moved farther back on the couch, a little away from me, and just chewed his gum harder. Sometimes when we had fights, I would say I'm sorry, and sometimes he would. He liked to look at the pictures, too.
"cold men destroy women," my mother wrote me years later. "They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect's drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone."
"Dear Mom," I wrote back. "I am coming home on the 23rd, so should he there for the candlelight service on Sunday. Hope all is going well. Exams are merciless. See you soon."
a photo of my mother when she is fourteen and the adult bones are at last there—stark cemented lines, startling as the curves in a mountain road, from eye to jaw, her skin lineless, and although she is not smiling there is no sadness in her face, simply an inquiring, a wide stare of scrutiny, a look of waiting, of preparedness.
my mother was the only mother I knew who wore her hair long. Sometimes she would wear it in a single braid that hung like a dark tail, marbled with auburn sun streaks, down the middle of her back; other times she wore it in two side braids that would swing back and forth when she bent over. "You look like a featherhead Indian lady," James would tell her. He was just being made aware of the distinction between India Indian and the kind you saw on TV. "How," my mother would joke, holding up a hand. And James, not getting it, would tug impatiently at her braids and say, "Because of these, because of these."
she is fifteen and has Tonied her hair into a wild frizz that dances, dark and frenetic, way out beyond the barrettes she uses to clamp it down. She is sitting on a bench in a park somewhere, eating an ice cream cone, blue jeans rolled up mid-calf, legs spread wide and feet pigeon-toed, ankles caved outward, and she is hunched a bit forward with her cone, making a crazy face that involves sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes.
there were nights my parents fought, woke us up with their fighting, and James would put his pillow over his face and I would lie wide-eyed, terrified and paralyzed by my father's bellowing, the doors slamming, something metal always clinking somewhere to the floor, the pounding on the walls, and my mother's "Oh god, oh god, just leave, why don't you."
One afternoon, the day after one of these night fights, I brought my friend Rachel home on the bus with me. We walked in the kitchen door and I reminded her to wipe her feet. Down the hallway that led to the bathroom I suddenly saw my mother, sitting on the toilet with the door wide open, her legs and hips bare and white, her underwear coiled at her ankles, her long hair all unbraided, a mane of unbrushed ripples floating out and downward toward her waist. She didn't move when we walked in. She just sat there in an old black shirt like some obscene statue, her head leaning frozenly on her hands, her elbows propped on her knees.
"Is that your mother?" whispered Rachel.
And I said maybe it was and maybe it wasn't.
My mother never saw us, but continued to stare like a drunkard at something on the floor just ahead of her.
"Come on," I said, and led Rachel upstairs to my room where James, on the bed, was reading a bird encyclopedia: cow-birds, starlings, cuckoos. "Look at this," he said. "A blue-booted boobie." And we looked and saw it was just some dumb black-faced bird. And then all three of us played "Careers" and Rachel bought a farm and lots of happiness, but I was the first man on the moon and loaded up on stars, winning everything.
her high school graduation picture. The yearbook caption reads, "Salutatorian" and "Best Ail-Around." Her friends write things like, "Beautiful Anna, we will miss you off in Chicago, come back to visit."
"The Windy City has a treat coming its way. Good luck."
"Stay as sweet as you are. Remember the Bluebird Dance. We had fun. Good luck at U. of Chi. Love, Barbara."
that night, or was it another night, my mother came into our room late after we had already tucked ourselves in and she laid our schoolbooks on the floor next to our bed and then stood in the doorway awhile, looking wraithlike, silent, in a long white sleeveless nightgown, one bare arm dangling loosely at her side, the other bent upward, hand cupped around the back of her neck, thoughtfully, her head tilted toward the dangling arm, her dark unpinned hair obscuring one shoulder like the hood of a cape. And there was a bird outside on the lake, hooting, calling, and it was the only sound, and James murmured groggily, "That's a loon, a ruby-throated loon," and my mother turned and disappeared until morning.
"your father wrote music, too, you know, but he never shared it with us," my mother said, a bit breathlessly, as I smoothed out her blankets. "Music ultimately left him unstirred. Like a god irritated with his own tinkerings. Despite his talent, or perhaps because of it, he heard only the machinery, the clanking and spitting. He felt nothing. No compassion." She coughed. "You would think creating something would necessarily be an act of love or compassion."
"Mother," I said, remembering the nurse's instructions. "Perhaps you should take your pill now."
she leaves behind all her friends, including Barbara. A picture of this, with streamers and cake and wine hollies. At college she falls in love with a sophomore named Jacob Fish and works toward a degree in fine arts. After four years she leaves him, inexplicably goes back home, paints and designs sets for a local Syracuse theater group. Kismet. South Pacific. See the scenery. She also sings in the chorus; that's her, there.
i remember overhearing a brief snatch of a fight my parents had once. Or rather my mother was crying and having difficulty explaining why to my father, as he seemed angry and distant, she said, and soon he was screaming at her that she should stop her goddamn crying and perhaps get some exercise for a change. At this my mother cried even harder and my father stormed out of the house. But the next day, and several times a week for years afterward, my mother was running along the lake in sweatclothes and old sneakers she didn't mind getting wet. Once in a while I went with her, jogging next to her, watching her breasts float up and down beneath her sweatshirt, imitating the way she breathed in and out with quick snorts. Twice we saw dead birds washed up on shore and we stopped to look at their bedraggled carcasses, their eyes already crawling with small black bugs. "What is beautiful is seized," my mother said. "My grandmother used to tell me that."
scotch-taped to my mother's scrapbook is a thumb-sized lavender picture viewer, which, when you look through the eyehole and hold it up to a light, magnifies a tiny picture of her and Jacob Fish on New Year's Eve at a big hotel in the Catskills. On the outside of the viewer is printed in gold script, "Kiamesha Lake, N.Y.," and there is a small gold chain attached to it, so you can hang it somewhere or twirl it around your fingers. Inside of it, when you peer through, my mother is standing next to Jacob Fish, both done up like prom royalty, my mother in a strapless apricot dancing gown, her hair piled up on top of her head, fastened with pins and one pale rose, and Jacob Fish, short and tow-headed, just about her height, with a nav
y blue bow tie, a kindness and graciousness in his face, which, I can tell, made my mother happy, made her smile, tunelessly holding his arm in the little lavender capsule.
Saturdays were motherless—she went in to Crasden to shop—and my father would sometimes make pancakes and play cards with us: "Go Fish" and "War." Sometimes he would do tricks: we would pick a card and he wouldn't know what it was and then we would put it back in the deck, which he would shuffle, cut, make piles, rows, and columns with, and eventually he would find our card. All his card tricks were variations of this. Sometimes it seemed that we were the ones to find it ourselves, as when we held the deck and he'd karate-chop it, the sole remaining card in our hand being, miraculously, the one we had chosen. "Aw, how'dya do that?" James would want to know and he would grab the cards and try to figure it out as my father put on an exaggerated, enigmatic smile, shrugged his shoulders, folded his arms. "I'll never tell, will I, Lynnie?" My dad would wink at me.
I never wanted to know. It was enough to sit in the living room in my pajamas and smell pancakes and be reassured that my father was special. To discover or expose the wheels and pulleys behind the tricks, I knew, would be to blacken Saturdays and undo my father. If his talents, his magic, his legerdemain, didn't remain inimitable, unknowable, if they weren't protected and preserved, what could he possibly be, to us, for us, what could he do?
a picture of mom and Jacob Fish on a beach. Mom's one-piece is black like her hair and the water is gray and the sand is white. There are buckets, a small shovel, and a blanket. Jacob Fish holds a fistful of sand over Mom's head. She laughs with her eyes closed, a momentary shutting out, the only way sometimes one can laugh.
the fall i turned ten, my father played Billy Bigelow in the Crasden Playhouse production of Carousel. Halfway through the show Billy Bigelow sings a song about his plans for his child to be, warbling through a lilting list of parental love promises. My mother brought us to the Sunday afternoon rehearsals (the real performance was too late for us, she said) and sat stiff and pinched through that song, staring narrowly at my father as he walked through it, following the snow-haired director's commands for the placement of his feet ("Damn it, Sam… you sing like a god, but you just can't dance"). Off to one side two stagehands were painting a merry-go-round red and green. "Bad colors," my mother said, shaking her head critically. A blonde woman a few seats away piped up: "Last week somebody stole all the good paint. Our budget is tight."
"What is beautiful is seized," murmured my mother, and the blonde woman looked at her oddly and said, "Yeah, I guess," and after a few minutes got up and left. Years later my mother would say to me: "That song your father sang in Carousel. What wonderful lies. He never spent time with you kids, never sang to you or took you places."
And when she said it, it became true. But only then, when she said it. Until then it seemed Dad was just Dad, was somehow only what he was supposed to be.
a picture of Jacob Fish standing by a river with a suitcase in one hand and a hat in another. That was the City River, opposite the train station, my mother said. The suitcase was hers. So was the hat. He was trying to look dignified and worldly and had requested props.
she cries, slumped over at her dressing table, and dreams that someone comes up behind her and bends down to hold her, to groan and weep into her neck with her, to turn her around and lift up her face, kiss her eyes, mouth on water, on cheek, on hair. But there is no one, just my father, sitting way across the room from her, in a white and rose upholstered chair (something later moved to my room at college, something I would sit in, stare at), an icy anger tucked behind his face, locked up like a store after hours, a face laced tight as a shoe. His arms are crossed behind his head like a man on vacation, but he is not relaxed. His features arrange themselves in straight, sharp lines.
"Your numbness," my mother cries softly, "is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world."
He picks up a porcelain pill box on the lamp table, hurls and shatters it against the wall. "That's what I have to say to you," he says. "I won't do your little dances." And he walks out, slamming the door.
i only heard parts of this. She told me the rest years later when she was dying, and I spent hours brushing and brushing her hair. She liked me to do that, always managing a smile and sinking back into her pillow. "My legs, Lynnie. Can you do my legs today, dear?" she would ask. And I'd take the Norelco razor from the nightstand drawer, pull up the covers from the foot of the bed, and glide the razor up and down her calves. She liked her legs smooth and hairless, and I think she liked the metallic friction and buzz of it. That, too, made her smile.
a picture of my parents on bikes before they were married. They are at a gas station where they have stopped to fill up their tires with air. Mom smiles. Dad makes a goofy face, both hands on the handlebars. Both of them wear long, Jamaica-style shorts. An Esso sign behind them is missing the O. Yiddish for "eat," my mother told me once.
"they want to take things and destroy them," my mother sighed the same month she died, when we were talking of our lake house, which had been sold at first to a funeral home and then bought by the federal government, who tore it down for vaguely military purposes no one ever bothered to explain.
"They want my hair," she said another day, winking weakly at me when a nurse came in with scissors and suggested a haircut. My mother shook her head, but the nurse's air was insistent.
"I don't think she wants one," I said, and the nurse looked at me dumbly and padded out on the soundless rubber soles those who surround the dying always wear.
my mother coming into our room at night. My childhood sometimes simply a series of images of her swirling into the doorway, in white, over and over again, coming to hear our prayers, to sing us songs, to whisper that she loved us, to kiss me wetly on the mouth, hair dangling, making a tent in which just our faces, hers and mine, lived and breathed forever. She'd rub my nose, and James's too, and whisper, "See you tomorrow," and at the doorway, "Good night, my sparrows."
she dreams that he is trying to kill her. That he has a rifle and is calling her out of the bathroom. In the bathroom she has knives and axes. She bolts awake and he is looking at her, chilly, indifferent. "Your face," she says. "My god. It is a murderer's face."
"What the hell are you talking about?" he says.
the year after Carousel was The Music Man, and the woman who played Marian the librarian used to call our house fairly regularly, purring like older women do at babies. She would ask if my Daddy was home.
"My father's not here," I almost always said, even if I knew he was upstairs with lesson plans. I think of all the things I did as a child, this was the boldest.
She would ask me to tell him that Marcia called. Sometimes I would. I'd knock on the door to his study, walk in, and say: "Marcia called. She wanted you to know."
And he would turn and look at me vacantly, as if he wasn't quite sure who I was talking about, and then say, "Oh, right. About rehearsal. Thanks." And he would turn his back to me and continue working at his desk, and I would just stand there in the doorway, staring at the back of his sweater. It seemed when he corrected papers and things that he always wore the same Norwegian sweater: green with a chain of rectangularized gold reindeer around the top, across his back and shoulders.
"Did you want anything else?" He would twist around again in his seat and lower his glasses.