Prison Baby: A Memoir (4 page)

As a young man, my father boxed in amateur bouts, his lanky and lean less-than-two-hundred-pound body perfect for the sport. He believed in the balance of exercise to complement the hours he spent in mental discipline. He taught me the old adage: all work and no play and exercise make us dull. Even though my father devoted hours to the study of seventeenth-century literature and was a dedicated professor to his graduate students, whom he entertained in our home with cocktail parties and poetry readings, at the same time he was an avid hiker and swimmer.

FROM AS FAR BACK as I can remember, my father scared me. Not just his backhand swats. Not just his six-foot-four-inch stature. His melancholy frightened me, his dark thoughtful pauses between words and his high expectations for our articulate brilliance. Children of academics often grow up isolated inside a bubble of expected intelligence.

I can still hear my dad telling me, “Don’t act so silly.” Well, it worked. I turned tough and shut down.

SILENCE DOMINATES MOST memories of my father, though. I’d stand at the door of his study and Mother would say, “Let him finish his train of thought.” I couldn’t figure out why he sat at his desk all day or what he was writing, and what exactly is a train of thought?

Each dusk I fetch him from his study, a converted log cabin by the apple and cherry orchard and chicken coops on the property of our first house. Wood piles lean against the back of his study. I enter his world—“Time for dinner” I announce with caution, and wait, timid in his silence. The quiet swallows me while he scribbles away with a mechanical pencil.

A silence so intimate I’m embarrassed. For something to do and to ease my discomfort, I memorize the room. Old issues of
National Geographic
and the
New Yorker
pile in front of the iron fireplace grate and fill the wide hearth, the stone fireplace always cold. His desk swims with imbalanced stacks of scattered papers and open books, pipe cleaners stained tan with tobacco oil, rancid ashtrays, and a typewriter. None of it makes sense to me. He gazes at me through air thickened from blue-gray tobacco smoke, clears his throat, and, in a voice raspy from not talking all day, says, “Just a sec, Mouse.”

He rises from his desk and we head across the backyard into the house for dinner. He never says what he’s writing, and I never ask. We talk of other things.

MY FATHER FANCIED himself self-sufficient, almost like a farmer, a contrast to his New England background and his life as a scholar. My father was an East Coast cultural Jew and borderline socialist. His mind disciplined with military-like focus, he rose out of a blue-collar family. He savored aged cheeses and built a cellar for his fine wine collection. He shunned his working-class background in Brockton, shunned his father who worked in a flower shop and played pool in bars. My father felt shame about his roots, but he never lost his Boston accent. In fact he accentuated it the more years he spent away from New England.

He was first in his family to attend college and graduated from Harvard and later Yale for his graduate work. He financed himself through his first years of college by gambling at late-night poker games and with a series of jobs, including weekends as a guard, and he helped put his younger sister through college because he believed women deserved education as much as men.

In back of our first house my father cultivated a small orchard. He’d wander it in season and pick berries, prune trees, and pluck apples. Maybe he wanted to support his family by “living off the grid.” My brother reminded me how once our father also grew a short row of corn, one plum tree, and a pear tree. Right within Seattle’s city limits we lived with a country feel.

My perfect weekend day was one of silence and solitude. I loved to sprawl in bed and read or sit still and look out a window. Or out back in the garden, I’d poke and roll the thick green slugs before my mother dissolved them with salt. Other times I’d plant myself in front of the poplar tree in our front yard and pop its sticky sap blisters until the whole trunk wept with goop. If I wasn’t playing with my neighborhood friend Wendy or hanging around her mother, I’d wander alone from yard to yard up and down our street on the hunt for adventure. Sometimes I stopped to watch other kids play, but then I’d move on, restless.

On some weekends I played around the pond by the house of our next-door neighbors, an elderly couple, Captain Mac and his wife. Captain Mac looked like Captain Kangaroo, white beard and round, rosy-cheeked face often full of smiles. Sometimes Captain Mac sat next to me, both of us silent for hours, while I squatted by their pond and stirred the water lilies with a stick in search of tadpoles and frogs. I’d even bring a sandwich so I could sit longer at the pond’s edge. Come pollywog season, I never poked into the water because I wanted to protect their slimy masses and examine the magic of baby frogs as they evolved from their goopy mucus. Science fascinated me then. I couldn’t wait for the tadpoles to approach the adult stage, when their legs sprouted and little tails disappeared.

On cool, fall weekends Jonathan and I would rake our long front lawn while Mother weeded her garden.We’d drag our bamboo rakes over the geometry of orange, yellow, and red maple leaves. I’d stay quiet so I could listen to the scratch of the bamboo over the carpet of leaves. Pine needles and leaves blanketed our grassy slopes, and after we’d build high and round mounds of leaves and needles, my brother and I would jump into the piles and flap around in the crunchy leaves. Some would stick in my shoulder-length hair, but I never minded getting dusty and dirty. After enough fun in the leaves, my parents would toss a match onto the piles. The flames pulled me into their power with a dance of heat from leaves and twigs on fire.

MY FATHER AND I shared another routine besides Friday-night fights: jaunts to the Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle on the edge of Puget Sound. We’d shop for our fish and vegetables every Saturday morning, one of the few times I relaxed around him. We’d wander the market stalls, but his pace drove me crazy compared to my quick and nimble ways. He moved with the grace of a ballroom dancer, slow, deliberate, calculated. People strained to hear his gentle public voice, not always his voice at home

We’d watch fishers peddle their fresh catches and farmers and their families sell crisp, fresh vegetables, moist from the washing. The winds off Elliott Bay fused the aroma of fragrant fruit with the essence of fish, all mixed with the steam of French dip juice as its scent sailed from the cafeteria where we ate lunch. I’d never seen anyone with features resembling mine in my neighborhood or school, so I felt at home in the market surrounded by Asian and Mexican farmers and their families. I loved the market for its tough working-class realness. I wanted to live there, where all the get-up-and-go of city life merged, to live with the farm families who sold fruits and vegetables, even though farming didn’t fit my middle-class upbringing.

On our way to the market every weekend, my father and I sometimes drove past the homeless men and women, slouched from either hunger or alcohol and scattered across the grass in Market Park along the waterfront. On one Saturday trek, we passed a swarm of men in a food line, who waited in stiff procession in the damp Seattle chill. My father’s eyes revealed grief as he handed a dollar bill to a man in the park. My father said he believed many of those men tried to rise above their situation.

“No matter what,” my father always told me, “for dignity, for the challenge of life, do the best at whatever you do. If you work in the post office, wherever, do your best.”

That was one of the few conversations with my father I could recall from my childhood, though it was more like the one sentence. My lockdown was so cemented in me then, I recollect few conversations with him or with anyone else.

The street-corner preachers near the Pike Place Market fed my early fascination with spirituality and ways of worship. Although we weren’t a religious family, I grew up with a broad religious exposure. My mother was more observant than my father. She sent my brother and me to Sunday school and lit Sabbath candles, and we said grace every night in Hebrew and attended synagogue on the Jewish high holidays. But I grew to understand Judaism more as a culture than as a religion.

My mother was raised Orthodox. Every spring we visited Minneapolis to celebrate Passover with her five brothers and sisters. We’d spend a week with a flock of my aunts and uncles who’d embrace me with abandon. The affectionate racket of a large family gathering put me more at ease than the sedate academic gatherings at home, where my father and his colleagues constructed dense sentences and analyzed every word as if it were a mathematical equation.

Even though I sometimes thought my father an intellectual snob and arrogant academic, I admired his humanity, his instinct to help those in need. Both my parents lived in a strong Judaic tradition of helping others, as in the text from the Talmud: “It is not your job to finish the task, nor are you free to avoid it all together.”

I recall a vague memory of my mother’s volunteer work as a tutor with a literacy program for inner-city school kids. I can’t recall specifics, but I also remember my parents and their friends in day-to-day dialogue about the 1960s civil rights movement. They favored whatever group felt oppressed, and they condemned the privileged, whoever dominated. I admired this until I put something together:
Was that how they viewed me—as a girl in need? Did they adopt me as a social statement, a souvenir of their ultra-liberal principles?

WHEN I WAS in elementary school, we lived in Rome for one of my father’s sabbatical years. One afternoon my mother took me to St. Peter’s Basilica and I plunged into a world I’d never seen before, a universe of incense, marble, candles, and stained glass, and of sculpted figures of saints and the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

I arched my back to look up. “Wow!” I whispered to my mother as we stepped through the heavy double doors carved with religious symbols. I imitated the old woman in front of me at the entrance and dipped, then splashed my fingers in the shallow basin of water, a birdbath-shaped bowl the size of a small fountain. When I waved my watery fingers in the outline of a cross over my face and shoulders, my mother swatted my hand away. “Stop that!” she said in a hushed voice. The décor and all of it fed my budding fascination with worship.

ONE SATURDAY, AFTER a jaunt to the Pike Place Market with my father, I charged down our driveway to climb into my secluded galaxy of boards, the tree house I’d built with Wendy in the thick-trunked maple at the bottom of our yard. We’d gathered scrap wood in my garage to pound together nothing more than a platform of plywood and two makeshift windows with a wide plank for a door. We never let our brothers or any other neighborhood kids inside our silent and private haven, and I climbed up there whenever I got a chance, even in Seattle’s wind and drizzle. Some days, alone, I lugged up a bag packed with books, blank paper, and colored pencils. In tree heaven, I wrote poems, drew pictures, and illustrated stories I never showed anyone. I collected leaves to decorate the tree-house walls, and Wendy and I rigged a school-locker padlock to lock the door. We formed our own club and kept a notebook of Rules and Creative Ideas. Rules are her idea, and the creative ideas mine.

Perched in my tree-house escape in the sky this particular Saturday, I listen for a few minutes to the wind whisper through the fir treetops, then peek out onto the quiet and steamy street below. It’s another day of drizzle. Suddenly I remember Persephone, my puppet from the third-grade school play in Rome, and the flour-water paste and glue our class stirred up to make our puppets.

MY TEACHER ASSIGNED a Greek goddess to each student and we put on a play with our puppets. My puppet, Persephone, goddess of Hades, fit me perfectly. The underworld sat right around the corner from me. My mission in life would be to raise hell.

I kept up my pranks and mischief even on another continent. Before the school year started in Rome, my brother and I spent a summer at camp in Devon by the sea in southwest England while our parents traveled separately, my father in Poland to deliver a lecture and my mother off to sightsee in Edinburgh. We were the only American kids in camp. Mother sent us off with pre-addressed blank postcards which helped me discover a way to reach out to her because writing felt easier than talking. In Devon I bought a miniature pocketknife that, to this day, I still display in my trinket collection. It left me with a scar from a slash across the meaty side of my right hand, sliced in some fancy knife trick of mine that I can’t remember.

FLOUR AND WATER, paste and glue. I scramble down my tree house ladder and charge home to grab a bag of flour, then lug it up to my tree. The moment I hit my platform, a sports car rounds the curve at the edge of our neighborhood. The driver steers towards the street below my tree house, and I rip open one corner of the flour bag.

But why pour when I can fling the whole bag?

THE SPORTS CAR SPEEDS THROUGH THE drizzle on the wet street below and the second its headlights beam against my tree house, I pitch the whole bag of flour out my window.

Victory! Fluffy white powder breaks loose from the bag and sails like an unformed high-speed cloud. The rest of the bag explodes on the hood of the car. Poof! All over the windshield. Science learned from my puppet-making: windshield wipers make a perfect paste with a one-pound bag of flour coated onto wet glass.

But no time to celebrate. The driver slams his brakes and pulls over on the shoulder. Fast as I can scramble, I make it down my tree-house steps and dart across our lawn into my house. I sneak upstairs to my bedroom just in time to overhear a pound at the front door.

My mother’s out with Jonathan at a swim meet, so Dad answers the door.

“One of your kids poured flour on my Ferrari,” the neighbor’s voice booms downstairs.

I’m in for it.

“Deborah! Get down here!” my father shouts. “Now!”

He starts in with, “Why did you . . . ?” and before he finishes his sentence, I blurt, “Haven’t been in my tree house all day.” I spin around and march back upstairs, no footsteps behind me.