Peep Show (12 page)

My father puts the box on the table and I hear his jaw pop. “She can't miss an hour of school? To see her
father
? You're the most manipulative person on the goddamn planet, do you know that? I did not drive an hour to see
you
. I came here to see my daughter and you're playing too many fuckin' games right now!”

A waitress in a light blue uniform and doily name tag puts her hands on my father's shoulder. She asks if there's a problem and he says, “No.” We all sit but no one says anything.

“Let's start over,” my mother finally says, and actually smiles. “The first thing I want to say is that . . . I know this must be hard for you.”

“I've hired a lawyer,” my father says. A lie.

My mother stares at him. I look down at my paper place mat and rip a hole in it with my thumbnail.

“I think that's a horrible mistake,” she says.

“Yeah?” my dad says. “I'm sure you do.”

“Maybe I should just say what I came here to say.”

“Okay, say it. We're listening.”

She tugs at the handkerchief on her head and takes a quick deep breath. “What I came here to say is not going to be easy for either of you.”

It sounds like she's rehearsed this. She isn't looking at me. The booth is so cramped. I try to push the table, but it's bolted to the floor.

“Good morning,” chirps the waitress. Her name tag reads Paula. “Who's ready for breakfast?”

“Nothing for me, thank you,” my mother says.

“I need more time,” my father says.

“How 'bout you?” she asks me.

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Okay, I'll be back.”

I stare down at the hole in my placemat and tear it more.

“I have decided to get married again.”

My father looks at me, and then my mother does too.

“Married?” I say.

“Yes.”

“Are you even divorced?” I ask.

“Yes,” they say in unison.

My mother's forehead is sweating and she blinks a lot. “He is a Lichtiger, a widower. He has no children. We're going to ask the grand rabbi's permission next week.”

“Next week?” I say.

“And,” she says, “if all goes well, we'd like to move to Brooklyn.”

My father nods, eyes wide. “Brooklyn? Is that it? Is that the news you said we weren't gonna like?”

“It means a new school for Dena. It means new friends, a new synogogue for us. There will be a lot of changes for her.”

“Where do I sleep?” I say.

My mother looks down at her hands. “You can visit us,” she says softly. “And I can visit you.”

In the silence of the next seconds I am hurt, punched in the face. I begin to envy all the other conversations in earshot, the safe and simple ordering of “rye toast, please, not white.”

My father begins to cough and search his pockets for a cigarette. “You had us drive out here so you could tell your son he can
visit
you in Brooklyn? Visit you, Mickey? Do you remember giving birth to this one, do you? I was there, I remember it. Look at him, he's your boy.”

“And I love him,” she says, a teary wobble to her voice. “I'd give everything I have and everything I am today if David would embrace the life I've found.”

I've heard her say this so many times before. But it's been a while. How 'bout it? Join the sect and you could be sleeping in your own bed tonight.

“You mean he's got to turn Hasid, Mick? Is that what you really want? A whole world of Orthodox Jews.”

“I want my son to understand me. I want him to respect who I am and who his sister has become.”

“Don't worry, Mickey.
I'm
his father and I've always taught him to respect all shapes and sizes.”

“Then why?” she says.

“Why what?”

“Why would a boy who respects me bring that picture to the Danowitzes' home on one of the most important days in their lives.”

My father rolls his eyes and thumps the table. “You're still talking about that? You're the one who left it out there to be seen.”

“I threw it away!”

“But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I told him all about it, Mick, the way we met, the—”

“Why did you give it to him?”

“He found it on his own! You put it in with all the other pictures.”

“I would never put that picture in one of those boxes.”

“Mom! It was in there.”

“Stop,” she says, her eyes now frozen on me and tearing. “It doesn't matter. What matters is that you pointed it at me. So close to my friends.”

“You had a secret and I—?”

“I need to keep it a private matter for the rest of my life. Tell me you'll never,
ever
tell your sister and—”

“Oh, Mickey, give the boy a break.”

“Tell me you won't tell anyone!”

“I won't tell anyone,” I say.

“Promise me!”

“Yes. Yes, Mom.”

“Enough already. He said he wouldn't for Christ's sake.”

My mother wipes her nose and eyes and sits up straight. “Now, I'm not saying you cannot see your sister. I'm saying that there will be times you can see her, privately, and there will be times when you cannot, can
not
, see her at all.”

“Are you done?” my father says.

“I'm asking you to understand, Martin. We're not who we once were. We are completely different people.”

“Is that right?”

“Do I look like the same person you married? The same person in that picture? Do you think Dena's the same?”

“You've worked very hard to be someone else. But I'm still me. I still love my girl.”

“She is in love with her studies and she's become an interested, intelligent, and involved
baal teshuva
who many people . . .”

“I
just
want to see my
kid
! Look at me, Mick. I
get
to see her. I don't give a flying fuck about your status in the shtetl. I'm not so young anymore. Look at me. I piss eleven times at night. I have headaches and heart burn and I didn't drive an hour to hear you say that Debra's too Jewish to see us.”

“Did you give David a job at the theater?”

“Yes. He needed a job.”

“That's his career path?”

“Why not.”

“In pornography.”

“Pornography?”

“Whatever it is you do there,” she says. “If it's associated with me or Debra—the talk, the gossip in the community, Martin—she'll never be able to marry a Lichtiger. I won't be able to marry either, Martin. Ever.”

My father's hand is shaking as he wipes his forehead. No one speaks. He stands for a moment, then sits again. “You want us to hear that you're an extremely religious person.
You want to us to know that nobody is as connected to God as your team, the Lichtigers.”

“That's not what I said.”

“How in hell can anyone as close to God be as close-minded as you are? If the Almighty One, blessed be he, knew how you're treating your son, he'd never, ever like you.”

“That's a horrific thing to say to me.”

“And it's horrific what you're doing to this family.”

“
You
,” she says pointing at him, “have no idea what it means to keep a family together!”

“And you're full of it, lady. I may be a scumbag in your eyes but I love my kids and I . . .”

Paula is back. “Are you ready to order?” she asks.

“No,” my father says. “No we're not. We don't need to order. We're leaving. Let's go, David.”

“Wait,” I say. “Mom? Look at me.”

“
Now
, David. Let's go.”

I touch her shoulder but she doesn't face me.

“David!”

“You won't even look at me?”

“Go,” she says. “Go with your father.”

I stare at the top of her head before I walk from the booth to the door. I'm not breathing. My father barks to himself and starts coughing. Outside, he slams his hand on the top of his car and his cigarette package drops to the ground. As he leans for it, I watch his back arc and his head lower and
boom
, he vomits onto the pavement.

“Holy shit.”

“I'm fine. I must have eaten something.”

He coughs, pounds himself on the chest and pukes again.

“I'll go back in and get you some water.”

“No, I don't want you to. I don't want your mother to know.”

I look back at the restaurant and she's still inside, still in the booth. My father spits a few times and straightens up.

“Let's get out of here,” he says, and I get in the car. “Check for tissues in the glove box.” He wipes something off his lips with his hand. As I look for them, a deep chill comes upon me and it's fear, I think, that's raising the hairs of my arms. I find a few tissues and hand them to my father. His face is a chalky gray and he keeps clearing his throat. He coughs hard and I reach to pat the middle of his back.

“What should we do?” I say.

“It's passing,” he says, and starts the car. “Let's go. Let's go get your sister.”

“No. No. She's in school anyway.”

“Who cares?”

He sees me shaking my head. “It's not a good idea.”

“
One
weekend,” he says. “One fuckin' weekend.”

The Greyhound drives by us and changes gears for the highway. My father puts the car in drive and follows it. I see my mother stand from the booth as we pass. She bends, looking for our car, and starts walking toward the door.

I
REMEMBER ALL OF THE
nineteen days I went to this place with my sister. A horror I could not wake up from. My building was across the street from hers and of course I was never permitted to visit the girls' section. It was my father who stopped it. He walked into my classroom and literally grabbed me out of there in the middle of prayers. I remember my feet leaving the floor as he ran with me, a silver-haired man in a red-checkered blazer, jogging the halls of the yeshiva, looking for the door.

We're silent as we approach the parking lot and I just know this is a horrible idea.

“I think
you
should get her,” my father says.

I face him but he doesn't look at me. “No.”

“Just say we're looking for Dena Arbus.”

“To who?”

“Whoever's there.”

“I'm not going in there.”

“Look at me, I'll stand out too much,” he says.

“We both will, Dad. Just say you're her father and you're here to pick her up early. Or let's just leave. This is stupid.”

He glances over his shoulder at the building. “Fine,” he says, and he's out of the car.

As the minutes pass, I envision a siren and then two long-bearded men dragging him by his armpits to the exit. Or my mother pulling in the driveway to a screech, running past me, holding her handkerchief on her head as she bolts to the door. I crane my neck to see if I can see him. Two teenage girls walk out of the building and see me there, sitting in the tan Cadillac with the engine running. I may as well be an albino kangaroo the way they gawk and keep turning back to see me, a boy, wow, in our very own parking lot. They end up joining three other girls on the swing set of a kiddie playground outside a separate entrance. I watch them tell their friends there's a member of the male species sitting in that car over there and all of them look over at me. I see Sarah Danowitz before she sees me. She's the only blonde Hasid I've ever seen. And by far the prettiest. My instinct is to hide, to keep the story away from her, to move over to the driver's seat and get the hell out of here. But my father is in there. I just hate all of this. And here comes Sarah, to the shock of the other girls. Right outside her school, she's squinting, the brave one, and walking closer and closer.

“David?”

“Hi.”

“Are you looking for Dena?”

“No. Not really.”

She looks back at the school before facing me again. “So why are you here?”

“My father is picking her up. It's a birthday thing.”

“I get a ride from your mom on Thursdays, so I guess he'll need to drive me home too.”

“But we're not going home.”

“Oh.”

“We're going to the beach.”

“The beach?” she says, and laughs. “Dena? I don't think she has a bathing suit.”

“Well, yeah, she probably won't swim.”

One of the girls from the swing set yells something in Yiddish at us and laughs. All the others laugh too. Sarah smiles and sticks her middle finger up at them.

“I better go look for my dad.”

Sarah nods. “The beach.”

I turn the engine off and open the door. A few steps toward the school and I can't see anything inside because of the glare. I look back at Sarah, who's now sitting in the passenger seat. Great. I walk inside the school and there's a hum of distant voices. It smells like body odor but it's faint and sort of pleasant, the way gasoline is. The scent brings me back to those nineteen days I spent here. I am unseen
until I pass a classroom where a girl Debra's age looks up from her book and notices me. She says something to her teacher and the woman pokes her head out the door.