Flirting with Danger (2 page)

By the time we moved to America in 1964, there was already
tumult in my parents’ domestic life. My father had been so afraid of his domineering family that he could not bring himself to tell his own mother that he had married a non-Jew. He didn’t tell her that he was married at all, or that her first grandchildren had been born. When he went home to New Jersey, ahead of us, he still did not tell his family. No doubt he was afraid that his mother would blame his failure at medical school on this Protestant woman, this shiksa who had lured him into marriage.

When my mother, Alexandra, and I arrived by ship, he met us at the pier. But there was no home to go to. For a while we lived like vagabonds, traipsing from the house of one acquaintance to the next. Once he finally confessed to our existence, my father’s mother and sister refused to see us. They wielded enough emotional power over him to make him unwilling or unable to stand up to them, and he often went to see them by himself.

Although I never really got to know him, relatives told me later that my father was a highly intelligent and emotional man who had trouble holding a job for long. Most of what money he did earn went to his mother, so deep was his guilt about marrying outside the tribe. As a result, his wife was essentially stranded in a foreign land with small children she could barely feed. As we grew up, we lived a half hour away from my grandmother, but she still would not see us, her only grandchildren.

Uncle Leon, my father’s unmarried older brother, was the only member of his family who broke ranks and came to visit. He had no wife or children of his own and lived with my grandmother, so we were the closest he ever got to a taste of family life. He probably braved a lot of wrath from his mother by coming to see us, but he came anyway. He was the only connection I had to my father’s family.

As a child, I worshiped my mother. She was beautiful, strong,
and regal, despite the decidedly unregal circumstances in which we often lived. She held her head high in a town where people were generally judged by their income. Perhaps she was spared harsh judgment because she was an outsider and appeared sophisticated even while lugging our dirty clothes to the Laundromat or paying for our groceries with food stamps. I knew how badly we needed the government-sponsored food aid, but I was embarrassed when she pulled out the blue-and-green booklet while we were standing in the supermarket line, wishing she would take them out at the last minute so nobody but the checkout person would see. With this shame, I often weighed whether or not to go to the supermarket with her, but my desire to be with her usually won out. She was devoted to us, and we to her. She worked three jobs to pay for our ballet classes and my oboe lessons. After all she sacrificed, I was terrified of failing her by bringing home a bad report card. She was a firm disciplinarian, determined to see us work hard. She always corrected our grammar, forbade gum chewing, and hounded us to do our homework. I could always get out of doing menial tasks like the dishes if I went and practiced my oboe.

My mother never let our poverty define us. With whatever she had, she always bought the best. We ate Swiss chocolates or none at all. She concocted exquisite meals on our food-stamp fare. It didn’t matter how tatty our apartment was; it was often full of distinguished academics from a nearby university who, oblivious to the surroundings, were drawn to my mother’s charm, beauty, and excellent cooking. My mother felt superior to most Americans: she thought American wealth was vulgar, so often unaccompanied by good manners, education, or social refinement. She had nothing but contempt for the parents of my more affluent friends, whose children would go home to an empty house and whose mothers took them to McDonald’s. We often had no money for new school
clothes but were brought up to believe we were somehow better bred than the other children.

Having been brought up with servants, my mother wasn’t born to housework. She always seemed to be ironing or sorting clothes, but despite her valiant attempts, our house always looked like a mess. There were mountains of laundry, piles of dishes, stacks of books. And the newspapers. They were everywhere. My father collected them and refused to let my mother throw them out. They lined the walls of my parents’ bedroom, yellow, dusty, and half-read. The electricity and phone were often turned off because my father had not given her money to pay the bills, but our sheets were ironed meticulously, as were the linen napkins. Perhaps it soothed her to make some order in the chaos that she fought so hard to hide.

To my mother, expressing an emotion was a bad American habit to be discouraged. “It’s vulgar to talk about yourself,” she would often say, though sometimes she talked of the grand life she had left behind in Belfast. I loved hearing her stories, partly because her life seemed such a mystery. She had lived in the country with horses and dogs. It seemed a lot to give up to be with us. I often feared that she’d tire of our life and go back to her exalted country, leaving us behind. I wanted to be good and not let her down, to give her every reason to stay. I stuck to her side like glue, terrified to let her out of my sight. Many years later, I thought that maybe because I spent so much time keeping track of her, somewhere along the way I lost track of myself.

I learned to subsist on tiny crumbs of love. My mother was an extraordinary cook, but emotional sustenance was scarce. It must have taken all her strength to hunker down and survive and bring us up practically on her own. Maybe she couldn’t let down her reserve, even for a minute, for fear it would all unravel. She seemed to pour all her love into feeding us elaborately. But I still felt emotionally
malnourished. I learned to sate my hunger in unsavory places later on, with men so incapable of showing affection that they always left me in a state of near-starvation. I thought it was like indulging in fast food: when you eat greasy French fries, you know you’ll regret it later. But sometimes I was so ravenous I didn’t care. I seemed to accept almost any man who took notice and paid attention to me. I often failed to look them over and see how unappetizing they were. Always so well fed, yet starving.

Since my father wasn’t around much, I lived in an all-female world with my mother and two sisters. My towering flame-haired mother with her long, chiseled, aristocratic nose looked as if she had stepped out of the Victorian era. Alexandra looked wild and woolly, with an exquisite face that also looked as if it were from an earlier century, a face more at home on the walls of Europe’s finest art galleries than the streets of New Jersey. I, too, had corkscrew-curly hair, and no amount of ironing or hair rollers would straighten it enough to let me look like my classmates. Francesca, the youngest, with straight blond hair and huge blue eyes, always seemed the most American. We used to call her Marilyn, from
The Munsters
, that seventies TV show about a family of assorted freaks and vampires that had one normal-looking relative.

The three of us loved to compare body parts with my mother’s. Who looked most like her was a favorite topic of conversation, and whoever had more in common with her felt most loved. My hands and feet were identical to hers, which somehow assured me a permanent connection to her. Any feature attributed to my father was construed as an insult and major structural flaw. Not that his six-foot-plus frame, pale curls, and hazel eyes should have been a source of shame. According to my mother, Francesca and I seemed to have been cloned from her, while she would tell my older sister, Alexandra, that she was my father’s spitting image, piercing Alexandra’s
self-esteem. Sometimes I ventured that my green eyes and curly hair might have come from his side of the gene pool, but my mother always insisted, despite her straight hair, that my curls came from her side, since her brother had curly hair. It was easier for me to agree than to make any case at all for my father. He was the bad guy, and showing him any sympathy was more trouble than it was worth. Many years later I learned that it works the same way in any war: those who can see both sides eventually learn to keep quiet. So I kept to myself what sympathies I had for my father, like my secret love of kosher dill pickles. Occasionally I could see how he wanted to be part of us. But mostly I just wished he would go away and leave us in peace.

We treated my father as an alien invader. His presence, perhaps because it was infrequent, was always an intrusion. When he walked through the front door, I knew it meant trouble. Siding with my mother, I saw him as the bully who came into our lives and trampled on our daily rituals. My mother brought us up with a mixture of aristocratic tastes and sensibilities and disdain for money. She always stressed the importance of maintaining standards, from good school grades to proper table manners. We were taught to use a saucer with our teacups, and she would bake homemade éclairs for our afternoon tea. My father would turn up and plop himself down at the table with his shirt out and the top button of his pants undone and dive into a box of cornflakes. My mother would watch in disgust with me at her side, a loyal deputy, as he sliced bananas into bowl after bowl of cereal. It was a cultural feud. He wasn’t one of us. The tension led to a perpetual state of warfare in our home. It vacillated from the cold-war variety of icy, disapproving stares to sudden explosions of violence.

When we were growing up, I never understood why my father often disappeared for days at a time. Sometimes he would say he
was going out to the market to get milk on a Friday night, and not show up at home until Sunday night. Only later did I realize that he was slinking off to spend the weekend with his mother and sister. Torn between two families, he was destined to disappoint both.

By the time I was a teenager, I too lived a double life. I ignored the anger and despair that shrouded nearly every exchange between my parents. I did my homework and brought home my honor-society grades. I played in the school band and acted in school plays. I seemed quiet and good but I was beginning to be someone else. I smoked dope with my friends and puffed on cigarettes under the bleachers on the football field. With my mature looks and buxom figure, I could buy booze and not be asked to show ID. I took to shoplifting, both stealing and also using a price-changing technique of peeling off the sticker and putting a cheaper tag on my target. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would get caught.

One day the store buzzer rang as Cindy, my best friend of the week, and I stepped out the door of Bamberger’s. Beach season was approaching, and my part-time-waitress wages at Dunkin’ Donuts were not enough to get the right clothes. The two new bathing suits I had carefully hidden under my shirt must have had some new secret device that eluded my notice. The store security guard hauled us back inside and marched us to an office while he called the police. “They are just trying to scare us,” I told Cindy, a novice at theft compared with me. But before long we were in the backseat of a squad car, in handcuffs, two fifteen-year-old girls. I tried to make light of it, joking to Cindy, “If we were going to get caught, we should have at least ripped off Saks.”

The store security’s call to the police was one thing. But the police did something a hundred times worse: they called our parents. Cindy was crying. I was still trying to make her laugh, although I knew I was in big trouble. I hated disappointing my
mother. The police let me off easy. I had to write an essay on why it is wrong to steal. I learned my first lesson on writing one’s way through the chaos inside. I also learned that I was comfortable living on the edge.

My mother let me off easy too. She was distracted by larger problems. She didn’t tell my father about the incident, sparing him the worry. A medical checkup for a new job he had landed detected swollen lymph glands. I didn’t really understand what that meant, but no one discussed it. Alexandra and I, through overheard snatches of conversation and by trading intelligence, became vaguely aware of my parents’ anxiety over medical insurance and whether my father would get it before his new employers realized he had cancer. I tried to ignore the medicine cabinet that was suddenly overflowing with drugs to kill my father’s cancer, and more drugs to kill the side effects.

That summer I went away to Barbados after being selected as an American Field Service exchange student. My father wanted to take me shopping for new summer dresses before I left. I felt awkward about going with him, but he insisted. When he decided we’d go to Bambergers, I was terrified that the store security would recognize me and toss us out. They didn’t. My father helped me choose a few cotton shifts for my big adventure. There was a brown-and-white-striped dress he particularly liked. I didn’t, but I took it anyway to please him. It was one of only a handful of intimate memories I have of us together as father and daughter. With death looming, he was trying to get to know the daughters whose childhood he missed.

Although I was still only a teenager, I learned the art of escape through travel. I wanted to get as far away as possible from my life in Highland Park, New Jersey. I had been chosen to represent my high school after a series of interviews with community members
and teachers whom I convinced of my ability to adjust to a new country. It made sense: a clash of cultures had been under way in my own home since I was an infant. Two alien cultures lived under one roof with no dialogue, just hostility, misunderstanding, and resentment. I’d been straddling the customs of two worlds all my life.

It was the mid-seventies when I left for Barbados. There had been race riots in New Jersey and all over America, giving me a sense of looming crisis. But suddenly I was living with all black people, in a calm and peaceful environment. Now it was my turn to feel what it was like to be the outsider, to be the one in the minority. Sometimes it made me uncomfortable, but people in Barbados are so friendly, most of the time my racial differences were cause for laughter. When I first arrived at the home of my host sister, Janice, her five-year-old nephew walked into a bedroom where I sat, and he ran away screaming. “There’s a big white doll in Janice’s room!” After I was settled in and started to forget about race, I was walking downtown with Janice and a bunch of her friends one day when I caught a glimpse of us in a shop window. It took me by surprise to see how much I stood out. Janice and I came from completely different worlds, yet as teenagers we found it easy to understand each other. She’d cornrow my curly blond hair just like her other friends’. We often hit the discos, or cut school to hang around downtown, checking out the boys. West Indians have a penchant for standing around on street corners, gabbing and watching the world go by. They called it liming. It was good training for all those future stakeouts I had to endure as a reporter, waiting around for hours for faceless officials to emerge from a meeting. For Janice, who dreamed of getting off that tiny island one day, I seemed an emissary from another world. For me, this lush tropical paradise let me forget the world I’d left.