Dead Languages (7 page)

This was certainly a side of Mother I had seen little of until then. I wanted to show my gratitude by giving her the whole box of gingerbread men, but she said, “No, I’d rather get a dozen kisses from you later tonight.” When she came downstairs to tuck me in and kiss me sweet dreams, she still had on her perfume, her triangular earrings, her lipstick, her purple dress, her gold bracelet, her gold watch, her black high heels—all that evidence of having competed in the world and won—and looked so pretty I decided I must never lose her love.

In order to make certain I hadn’t forgotten to tell her something she should know about, I took to telling her anything that could possibly be construed as bad behavior. For a while, this was a charming enough ritual—every night after dinner, Jeremy sitting on Mother’s lap and recounting all the little misdemeanors he’d committed—but very quickly I became fixated upon filling her with negative information. No offense was too trivial, no confession was too exhaustive. If while playing with friends I indulged them by speaking of Willie Mays as a “nigger,” or while walking the dog I pulled the leash so hard I made little Bruin choke, I couldn’t wait to rush home and tell Mother how dreadful I’d been. My after-dinner apology grew so lengthy Mother would lie down on the living room couch where, while she kept one ear on what I was saying, she’d watch Chet Huntley, dip oatmeal cookies in lemon tea, and read the
Examiner.
Before I finished my disclosures, she’d be sound asleep with oatmeal crumbs across her lips, and the paper—open to the Op-Ed page—at her feet.

The only way to attenuate the atonement was to do no wrong. I set out to be perfect. I treated Bruin with respect. I called people only by their Christian names. I crossed the street at the stoplight, a mile away, on top of a hill. I gave blood. I didn’t listen to baseball games in bed. I emptied the trash twice a day and went out at night to hose it down. I burned comic books whose binding staples I determined to be inexactly aligned. I gave all my money to skinny girls in Africa. These devotions lasted for months, but they amounted to nothing because goodness gave way to spotlessness. I showered and showered and showered. I washed my hands so often a rash formed on my palms and when the rash cleared I washed my hands so often a rash formed on my palms and when the rash cleared…. What money I didn’t spend on African girls I used to buy a small-scale vacuum cleaner. I dusted on top, in between, underneath, inside. After dusting, I’d vacuum. After vacuuming, I’d dust. I changed bed sheets every night. I changed clothes every hour. I wiped the towel rack until it broke. I scrubbed the sink until the splash of tap water felt like iron filth upon my marble white sculpture. My nightmare image was a
National Geographic
photograph of a parched lake bed cracked into an infinity of caked chaos. Last week, while we were packing up my parents’ ex-house, Gretchen called me “the boy in love with bare rooms.”

Mother’s cover article for the National Federation of Nurses monthly magazine was called “From Tears to Triumph,” and its opening bars I could practically hum:

“From Tears to Triumph” ended up winning for Mother the coveted Nightingale Award from the National Federation of Nurses and, if there is power here to the prose, it seemed to me to owe itself to the fact that it sounded as if she were writing about her son. For all I know, she just might have been, because this insane epistemological touching, this hypochondriacal perfectionism in which life appeared primarily as a problem, this sickness got sicker.

The two impulses—the desire, on the one hand, to be morally impeccable and the need, on the other, to be squeaky clean—came into dramatic and rather ludicrous conflict one evening when I was taking a bath and a beetle crawled onto the hot water valve. I lived in the basement, beetles were always barging in, but I’d never before answered the question: was it more important to be virtuous (let the bug live) or keep the bathroom clean (squash the silly insect)? Suddenly it seemed like the only serious problem I’d ever contemplated. I got out of the bathtub and paced up and back on the blue tile, cleaning up after myself as I dripped, wondering whether I should kill the beetle or let it live. For half an hour that dichotomy was the one idea in my head. I sat down on the stool to get a different perspective on the situation. Then the beetle fell off the faucet and drowned.

It’s difficult to be impeccable in the damaged universe. As hard as I tried to be moral and immaculate, I would have certain lapses and my environment would have others. Mother simply refused to listen to any more
mea culpas
—she said if I pestered her any more she was going to refer me to a child psychiatrist, who was paid to listen to such lunacy—so every night I sat up and wrote a list of all the infinitely important, infinitely unimportant things I’d done wrong during the day. The last item on the list would always be that I’d wasted electricity by staying up late to write the list, which sounds like one of Father’s jokes left behind on the Borscht belt but was, nevertheless, the degree to which my mind had wrapped in on itself. In the morning I’d leave the list in Mother’s purse or on the front seat of her Fiat before she left. After a while she wouldn’t even glance at it before throwing it out and we got so we didn’t have to talk about it. She knew I’d leave her a list, I knew she’d throw it away, and we both were happy. This went on for years and now it seems too close to psychosis to endure for more than a few minutes, but at the time Mother seemed to have arrived at a puzzled acceptance of it and I did, too. I thought I’d be observing beetles from the bathtub and writing notes at midnight forever. I forget how or when all this madness ended; God knows I can still get trapped in the interstices of the OED or the marginalia of some torn, blackened page I’ve rescued from the refuse. But before the initial disorder ceased, the lists—in the way that everything language touches it focuses and refines—made things worse.

I became imbued with the notion that to carry dirt from one spot to another was to spread germs and endanger people’s lives. In the house, this was easy enough to avoid. If I removed my shoes on the back porch, then showered six or seven times and washed my hands every time I came in contact with something, I was in no danger of distributing any mud. Outdoors, especially on the playground at Currier, the mania got magnified. I’d be running merrily across the yard, step in a puddle, realize what I’d done, then run back and soak my feet until I felt the dirt had returned to its point of origin. I used to spend entire recesses digging my heel into a grease spot I suspected of being the repository of the black spot on my shoe.

The climax of this campaign came when Charles flew up from Los Angeles for my ninth birthday, and Father took us to see
Citizen Kane,
which I didn’t understand, but Charles explained, “It’s about money. All great art is about money.” Charles is now employed by an association in Sacramento that has no address or phone because, as Charles explains, the government monitors all union organization of service workers. Although this was the sixth time he’d seen the movie, Father said some of the visual effects were stunning. I couldn’t distinguish a visual effect from a subplot, but I thoroughly enjoyed the buttered popcorn, the icy Coke, the pink box of Bon Bons. As we left the theater and walked toward the car, everyone was content until I intuited a certain stickiness on the sole of my shoe. It was July, I hadn’t brought a sweater, but when I said, “I think I left my sweater on the s-s-seat, I’ll meet you back at the car,” they nodded and kept walking because Charles was never any more observant than Father was.

Another showing of
Citizen Kane
was already on. I walked up and down the aisle in the dark till I found my little sled, I mean till I found my seat, which was occupied by a man with a monocle. He whispered to the girl next to him, young William Hearst looked at page proofs, and I rubbed my foot on the candy-coated floor until I felt I’d returned all the sweet viscidity to where it belonged.

This was definitely a low point. But the dementia had its rewards. Racing around as much as I did to return soil to its source, I turned into a runner. My legs were tan, hairless, and beautiful. My legs were legacy. Classmates would boast about my legs to their friends at other schools, and Mother said a lot of girls would give their right arm to have legs like mine, which was a messy accumulation of anatomy, but I got the point, and Beth, with fat white thighs at thirteen, agreed. Once, in my bare feet, on grass, at Currier, I ran fifty yards in six seconds, which is unheard of for a nine-year-old white boy. Black boys would cross town to challenge me and return to Hunters Point saying they got a bad start, man. It wasn’t the races, though, or the timed sprints that mattered. What mattered was running alone when no one was watching, running up and down the hills of San Francisco into a sun that was setting the golden bridge on fire and that I wanted to burn me alive, running until there were no distinctions to be made any more between feet and legs and arms and hands, and my entire body was all only fluid movement forward, running until I felt I could run forever and let out my kick and never look back and no one could catch me.

FATHER WOULD GO
to sleep at nine o’clock and awake to darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit—navy blue pants with zippers up and down both sides, his smelly sweatshirt, and on top of that his sweat jacket with
Speed of Sound
stitched across the back. Birds would be just starting to call, black would still streak the colored pencil soft blue of the sky, Father would be jogging. In an hour he’d run twenty times around a track which was without bleachers or lighting or lanes, which had weeds in the center and a dry water fountain at the end of the far straightaway and a running path littered with glass and rocks. It wasn’t what would be called a fast track. He didn’t care. He pounded his feet through the dirt and pumped his arms and kept his rubbery legs moving until, by the very stomping of his feet, night withdrew and morning came. He jogged because he preferred to go to sleep before Mother did and awake before she’d even begun to dream. What did she dream about? I suppose she dreamed about justice.

Father once wrote me, apropos of nothing: “I am, no surprise, that same skinny kid who ran with the speed of Pegasus through Brownsville’s streets in quest of a baseball.” He doesn’t really run anymore, so what did he mean other than to turn himself into a figure in a frieze? We share that trait, we Zorns, all the way down the nondistaff side. A little too often for my taste Father likes to say,

Father’s mother, after whom Beth is named, died when he was eight, and it’s fashionable in certain psychiatric circles to see this as the formative event of Father’s life. It was not. The formative event of Father’s life was this: he and his friends were crossing train tracks when little Teddy, last in line, stepped directly on the third rail, which transformed him from a happy vertical child into a horizontal conductor of electric current. It’s difficult to think of Father as young once, since he’s so old now, so very old. In
1919
he didn’t have six pairs of eyeglasses, a bald head, or false teeth, though I suppose he already had the Jimmy Durante schnoz and those blue, blue eyes. The train, a slow-moving local but nevertheless a train, with wheels and gears and steel, rattled down the tracks toward Teddy, who was lying flat on his back, powerless to prevent his own, unfortunate, self-induced electrocution.

I wouldn’t be here today if Big Abe, a seventeen-year-old block of massive triangular stone, a wrestler who wore black shirts and a purple hat, hadn’t slid a long piece of dry wood between galvanized Theodore and the third rail, flipping him high into the atmosphere only seconds before the train passed. Teddy was bruised about the elbows and knees and, later in summer, was a near-corpse as flesh turned red, turned pink, turned black, and peeled away to lean white bone. Toenails and fingernails crumbled and what little hair he had on his body was shed until Teddy himself had nearly vanished. His father, named Nate, sued Long Island Railroad for one hundred dollars, which paid—no more, no less—for the doctor’s visits once a week to check for infection.

I never met Father’s father. This past Christmas, from a straight-backed bed at Montbel, Teddy tried in all seriousness to pin Nate to the page for me: “You can tell, Jeremy, can’t you, how his life touched me? There was the sense of doing things for his fellow men; there was the kindly, mediating approach.
Ess vett soch oy spressen,
he liked to say. It will press itself out. It will take care of itself. This, when told about a problem. He couldn’t cope with problems. He let them drift, grow, fester, or fly away. Recognize some of your dad’s penchants and peccadilloes in that?” My favorite thing Nate did was fall asleep on the subway every morning after reading one paragraph each from the
Jewish Daily Forward,
the conservative paper, and
Freiheit,
the Communist gazette, as if he knew even then how communication can cancel itself out, how “penchants and peccadilloes” alliterates a little too easily. In the summer of ’
56
Mother and Father had gone to Balboa to give Mother a shady haven in which to edit copy for a special double issue of
Open Forum,
the ACLU “in-house organ.” Mother was pregnant and Beth was three, with a blood blister on her left foot. When Father’s sister called from the nursing home in Floral Park to say Nate was dead, Father somehow found this cause for confessing his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.