TREYF (6 page)

“He'll be back,” the child whispers to herself.

The child has heard the parent-had-to-leave fairy tale over and over again; she's heard it over dinner and she's heard it in the car and she's heard it while being tucked in, sometimes instead of Dr. Seuss. Her father's mother left the family when her father was three years old, but ultimately, she loved them and couldn't stay away; she came back to them eventually, and they lived happily ever after. He has spoon-fed this tale of abandonment to the child like pabulum—there's no wolf or witch or getting lost in a forest in his bedtime story; desertion itself is the villain, abandonment
the scoundrel, hovering like a cloud, always threatening—from the time she understands words and can comprehend their meaning, and the meaning behind their meaning. He tells the story not as a warning, but as a lesson, a parable, a statement of fact: sometimes, parents leave.

“And then,” he would say to the child, “she left.”

And then, she left.

She left.

“But then,” he says, beaming, “she came back. And they lived happily ever after.”

He kisses her on the forehead and the child hugs his neck and nuzzles his rough cheek and he settles her down deep between the white sheets dotted with faded pink roses and fuchsia.

She came back
.

The child brightens and sleeps soundly.

The night he leaves, the screen fades as I sit on the toilet while my mother washes my face; I have no memory of being put in bed, but I wake up the next morning in that short sliver of time where everything feels normal until it doesn't, and routine is the tenuous plank that connects sleep to waking. I lower the metal guardrail on the side of my bed that keeps me from rolling out onto the dark green carpet, and, like I do every morning, I run into my parents' bedroom and fling myself on their bed; for a few minutes, until I see his side still tightly made, his pillow cold and untouched—my mother is already up and in the bathroom, putting on her makeup—I've forgotten that he's gone. My mother and I are alone together in the apartment; she steps out of the
bathroom and asks if I like her new eye shadow color; she's trying powder blue for a change.

•   •   •

I
never knew where he went or whether he intended to leave us for good. But two days later, my father came back, as my mother assured me he would. When he returned, my mother threw on her coat and went downstairs to the kosher butcher on Austin Street and bought nine baby lamb chops for what I was sure would be a celebratory meal; she deposited them in a foil tray, drizzled them with vegetable oil, and shoved them under the broiler until they ignited like dry kindling and angry blue flames licked up and out of the bottom of the stove, blackening our white Chambers oven door. I shrieked and ran into my bedroom with the dog while my mother languidly beat at them with a greasy kitchen towel.

“Dinner!” she yelled, and my father and I came back to the kitchen and sat at the table. The three of us ate in silence, the little Zenith television at the end of the kitchen table blaring news about Saigon; we scraped thick black layers of immolated fat off our chops, picked them up, and gnawed them down to the bone, the bitter taste of food cooked in anger filling our mouths. It was as though nothing had happened; as long as she was feeding her husband dinner, there was hope, even if it was incinerated.

On the Saturday morning after his return, my father appeared in my bedroom doorway dressed like he was going fox hunting—jodhpurs, boots, gray-green tweed blazer—instead of for a walk
out onto The Champs-Élysées Promenade with the dog. He returned an hour later carrying a heavy paper bag; while I watched from a kitchen stool, he set one of my mother's scuffed Teflon pans on the stove and opened a small rectangular metal can with a key that came attached to its bottom. Using a butter knife, he pried the gelatinous pink brick out of the can; it slid out with a sickening
splat
onto a gold-banded white plate from my mother's wedding china. My father sliced it into thick rafts and in the dry skillet fried the slices in their own fat until great clouds of smoky pork essence rose around us like a mushroom cloud, making my eyes tear and the dog drool.

My father carefully flipped the spluttering, crispy planks, and broke six eggs into the pan, cooking them until the whites were firm and the yolks just set. He portioned the meat and the eggs out onto three plates and set them down alongside each other. We sat down to eat at our counter, side by side in silence; he reached over me to slice my breakfast into small squares. When he was done, he cut his up the same way.

The Spam was tender and unctuous and encased in a crackling jacket of golden fried pork fat. It was salty and bitter and rich; it tasted of spite and fury and betrayal, and clandestine flavors that I had never tasted before.

We sat together in silence, and ate.

“Good?” he said.

I nodded.

My father read
The Times
and lifted fork to mouth, fork to mouth, not looking up when my mother walked into the kitchen, dressed for the day in her favorite brown wool blazer and tan suede
jeans, a blue and gold silk Hermès horse-bit scarf tied around her neck. Her plate sat on the counter next to mine; her breakfast was cold. She picked up the empty can, squinted at it, and threw it into the garbage.

“We're Jews,” she said, scraping the Spam and eggs directly into the trash and dumping her plate into the sink. She turned on the water and blasted away the sheen of pork fat and sticky yolk.

“We don't leave our children. And we don't eat dog food.”

T
here were the synagogues and the kosher butchers, the Tung Shing House and the Oasis, and the bar mitzvahs that took place every Saturday in 1974. But Forest Hills—before Son of Sam and after Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in 1964 a few blocks from The Marseilles while her neighbors famously pulled closed their shutters against her screams—was a mixed community of residents with one foot planted squarely in the past and the other shuffling clumsily into the future like a sweaty-palmed boy learning the fox-trot. For many, the town was a midway point, a way station to breathe and refuel, a not-quite-verdant pit stop stuck between the grimness of first-generation Brooklyn and the Bronx, and the promise of the Long Island border towns, which my father called The Golden Ghetto, and where, almost without exception, we all dreamed of living.

When I was a young child and just learning how to read, Gaga
and my parents filled my bedroom with books; there were colorful storybooks and alphabet books, books of light verse and a set of illustrated presidential biographies that arrived once a month through a Time-Life children's subscription that my father had ordered for me. There was a spine-broken, taped-together hardcover copy of
D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
, which had been handed down to me by Aunt Sylvia from her youngest daughter, Sarah, and which I slept clutching under my covers the way some children do a stuffed toy, so enamored was I of my teenage cousin that her castoffs felt to me like love itself. My parents and Gaga read to me constantly: Gaga preferred poetry, and I knew the first lines of
The Song of Hiawatha
before I was five; my mother liked the singsong simplicity of Dr. Seuss. When Gaga and my mother weren't looking, my father devised his own way of teaching me how to read that was more practical and produced immediate results: he handed me a heavy catalog of toys from FAO Schwarz. My eyes bugged: there were pictures of stuffed animals, sulkies meant to be pulled by actual small ponies, gorgeous wooden blocks in brilliant colors. He showed me how to match the letter next to the toy to its description:
a
matched up to a watery-eyed German teddy bear, its arms open in beckoning love, from a company called Steiff;
b
connected to a life-size Tudor-style dollhouse big enough for a small child to stand up in. Surrounded by children's books piled in every corner of my bedroom, I learned how to read by analyzing advertising copy for things I longed for, but would never actually own. I lived in a state of constant want—so desirous of this stuff I was certain I'd die without it—but I was reading chapter books by the time I was six. It was
want
, my father
believed, that would push me and motivate me, and drive me to success; chronic disappointment was something he didn't count on, although he knew it like the color of his own eyes.

Less than ten miles from the eraser-pink brick building we lived in in the shadow of the Queens Boulevard traffic snarl were the pristine country clubs, golf courses, and yacht clubs of my father's dreams. There were closets bursting with St. John suits and headlight-sized diamonds worn beneath expertly lacquered fingernails; there were skiing vacations to Sun Valley and customized, boat-sized Mercedes sedans, the ultimate status symbol of the time, with their hood ornaments sliced off, like automotive circumcisions, to hide the vehicles' German provenance a mere thirty years after the war.

Every Sunday, after our dutiful, staccato visits to Coney Island to see my father's parents, we pointed our massive Buick towards Kings Point—Jay Gatsby's West Egg—where his advertising agency's real estate clients had been dotting the area with hastily built contemporary split-levels and ranch houses since the end of the 1940s. We drove from model home to model home—ten of them in a day, ostensibly part of my father's job, but not much different for him than my FAO Schwarz catalog—and for years, I believed that we were forever on the verge of moving. I envisioned a yard, a carport like the Bradys had, and a place to throw around a football with Gaga.

“Are we buying
this
one?” I'd say, dropping my mother's hand and racing through fake avocado green model kitchens filled with fake avocado green model appliances and basement dens carpeted
with fake avocado green broadloom, and bathrooms adorned with fake harvest gold toilets that I, more than once, peed in.

“We'll see,” my father would answer, opening and closing closet doors like an inspector.

“I'm
never
living on Long Island,” my mother insisted every time, her arms folded across her chest. “I'm a city girl.”

“But the schools are so good out here,” he'd say.

“They're fine where we are, too—” she'd say.

“We could have a yard—”

“You're gonna
mow
? We don't
need
a yard.”

“But look at the kitchen—it's enormous.”

“I hate to cook.”

“You could have new neighbors—”

“I like our old neighbors.”

Weekend after weekend, year after year, we made the long drive out to Long Island to see the houses my father advertised, until they began to blur like smeared ink into one wood-paneled, game-roomed beacon of hope and promise of success that my father wanted so badly he could taste it.

•   •   •

T
here were few secrets in The Marseilles and The Brussels; the walls were too thin, the hundreds of apartments jammed together like sardines so that every fight, every cry of anger or ecstasy could be heard, every rasher of bacon smelled as though neighbors were all living under the same roof, which they were. There were the Pugaches—Burt and Linda—she of the darkened
glasses, famously blinded for life when the enraged Burt, who was having an affair with her that she ended, hired three men to throw lye in her face in a jealous fit. He went to jail for fourteen years before marrying her and settling down in The Brussels, just upstairs from my grandmother. There was gossiping Laura Steinman, who lacquered her skin to the color of a football with the sunless tanner QT and whose face, my father once remarked over dinner, resembled a rotting apple core; her husband, Richard, gave off great, billowing clouds of Jovan Musk and could be seen walking around The Champs-Élysées Promenade in a stained cream-colored trench coat, whatever the weather. There were the Garbfelds, who were possibly married and possibly not, and their daughter, Shaina, who might have been Moishe's child or might have not. Whenever we saw her, Judith spent as much time eyeing my mother's unique outfits as my mother did hers; Judith wore tight polyester hip-huggers in bright colors and puffed-sleeved blazers over too-short blouses that revealed a ribbon of putty-colored flesh. Waiting for the elevator together, they gaped at each other like gladiators: Judith stared at my mother's riding outfits. My mother gawked at the roll of creamy fat that bulged between the top of Judith's pants and the bottom of her shirt. The tension between them cleaved to the air like humidity.

The enmity between the Steinmans, the Garbfelds, and my parents was mutual; they were never invited to visit us, nor we them. Instead, my mother and father did their cocktail partying to Trini Lopez and Peggy Lee, and their coffee and Entenmann's after a movie with a small coterie of other couples, all of them mixed-faith, who lived in the buildings.

My mother's best friend, Inga Hoffmann, was an earthy, warmhearted redhead who loved to laugh, and who had grown up in a devout Lutheran home in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. Inga was married to George Hoffmann, a bug-eyed, potbellied itinerant magician whose most notable physical characteristic was that his feet drastically turned outward, making it impossible to know which direction he was heading in when he walked. George performed regularly at my birthday parties, turning everything—our dog's Milk-Bones, a red silk hankie, a small budgie—into a burst of yellow flame that exploded from the depths of a threadbare Goodwill top hat, and sent me hurtling to the floor, where I cowered in terror. He employed his children, Eddie and Tor, in his magic tricks: he ran a narrow, almost invisible wire from a small magic button in his trouser pocket down the leg of his triple-weave trousers and up into the pants legs and shirtsleeves of his two boys, and down into a tiny battery that they held in their closed hands. While the boys waited in silence for their cue, George casually zapped his sons with shocks when he asked them in front of a rapt audience of six-year-olds to G
o on, guess how many scarves Daddy is going to pull out of his magic top hat
, and they'd wince accordingly: once, twice, three times, four, or five.

“Five scarves, Daddy,” towheaded Eddie Hoffmann would miraculously guess, smiling through his stubby, clenched baby teeth, his Sta-Prest white shirt and tiny black clip-on tie damp with sweat.

Inga and the boys left George in New York for two months every summer and went to Denmark, where her mother still lived.
When she returned home with Eddie and Tor at the end of August, my mother and I would spend our late afternoons at the Hoffmann apartment in The Brussels, which with every passing summer became increasingly festooned with all manner of imported Danish foods, paintings of rock-jawed Scandinavian sea captains, yellow Dansk Kobenstyle cookware, small rubber trolls, and miniature statues of helmeted Vikings that Inga carried back to New York with her. Her sliver of a galley kitchen had been packed with processed junk foods before she left for Denmark every summer: there were bags of Funyuns, boxes of Pop-Tarts, jars of Tang, cans of spray cheese, sour Slim Jims smelling of rancid pork fat. But when she came home from Copenhagen, she made a clean sweep of her cupboards, replacing everything with the Scandinavian foods that she loved. Every day after picking Eddie and me up from the school bus, my mother and Inga planted themselves for hours at Inga's tiny table opposite her stove. While Eddie and I played Eric the Red or Rape and Plunder in the bedroom that he shared with Tor, Inga poured my mother cold goblets of Soave Bolla and fed her warm, sugar-dusted lefse, whisper-thin slices of boiled Danish ham, Jarlsberg, and wedges of Gjetost Ski Queen, a chocolate brown goat cheese made from caramelized goats' milk and solidified into a block of cloyingly sweet nuttiness. Tipsy and counting the slender hours of freedom before their husbands returned from work in the city, Inga served my mother on heavy brown earthenware plates; cigarette in one hand and wineglass in the other, my mother nibbled what was put in front of her—the warm bread, the cheese, the cool salty
boiled meat as forbidden as the Spam my father had cooked the day after he returned to us.

Tor, who was four years older than Eddie and me, had better things to do than play Eric the Red: he spent his afternoons tossing rocks off a Grand Central Parkway overpass onto the windshields of oncoming cars, pulling the legs off spiders while they sizzled under a magnifying glass in the sun, and setting fires in empty lots around our neighborhood. One Sunday when I was twelve and Tor was sixteen—before his incarceration, his heroin addiction, his eventual suicide—and Eddie had gone out to ride his new Apollo 8 bicycle, Tor grabbed my wrist hard like a handcuff, pulled me into his bedroom, forced me down onto his tartan blanket, and attempted to relieve me of my virginity while my mother did her Peggy Lee imitation for Inga, George, and my father, just steps away in the Hoffmann living room. Tor was tall and narrow, always dressed in the same sky-blue, slightly dirty Levi's bell-bottoms and tight plaid button-down shirt, a hormonal mass of ropy sinew and weeping acne, a fresh brown stubble sprouting like new grass along his pimpled jawline.

It'll . . . make you . . . Danish
, Tor growled in my ear, furiously humping me like a bronco rider on his narrow single bed beneath his shelf of tiny rubber Vikings, his face crimson, his blond hair glued with sweat to the sides of his head.

Get off,
I said, trying to push him away, and he did.

Fuuuck,
he groaned.

Fuck—fuck. Christ. Fuck.

And then, nothing.

I pushed and shoved him off me and made a grab for the doorknob and we rolled out of his bedroom, tumbling like weeds into the hallway, my puffed-sleeve bandana shirt half unbuttoned, a dark indigo splotch blossoming on the front of his faded Levi's.

“Enough, both of you—be quiet—she's singing,” George said from the couch, pointing over to my mother, who stood in front of his maple spinet piano and snapped her fingers, her arm straight in front of her, palm down. She knit her brow in a tight furrow above her heavily lined, unblinking brown eyes just like Peggy and whispered,
Fever all through the day.
I stood frozen in place and watched her performance with my father, Inga, and George, while Tor popped open a can of Fresca in the kitchen. My heart banged against the inside of my chest as she sang to us while a heavy brown platter of glistening ham and aging Gjetost sat on the modern teak end table, sweating in the heat of the apartment.