TREYF (15 page)

T
he last days:

There is the lingering smell of hot, spice-crusted pastrami on thin-sliced rye from Ben's Best deli, a few blocks away from The Marseilles.

There is the tiny black handgun that my father keeps buried under his bar mitzvah tefillin in the top drawer of his highboy dresser.

•   •   •

W
hen I was seven and my mother left my father and me alone on a Saturday morning to have her hair done, he took me out for a pastrami sandwich at Ben's, which shared a wall with the Ballet Academy on Queens Boulevard. The Academy was where at age three, I bald-faced lied to my teacher Miss Carolyne and told her at the beginning of class that I'd forgotten
to kiss my mother goodbye and needed to find her. Disgusted with being shoehorned into a pink leotard and ballet slippers—I wanted to be Ken, not Barbie—I packed up my tutu in my patent leather tote bag and found my mother standing outside, having a cigarette in front of Ben's, watching the rotisserie chickens revolve. Each time the door to the deli opened, the smell of pickle brine and schmaltz wafted out and engulfed us. I handed my mother my ballet tote and told her,
I quit.

At Ben's, my father ordered pastrami sandwiches for both of us; they arrived unadorned on two small white plates: just seeded bread and dark red meat edged with ripples of lace-white fat. On the table, half-sour pickles floated in a small metal vat, next to a cup of yellow mustard and the can of Cel-Ray soda we shared.

Before that day, I had never eaten pastrami; my mother despised it for being too greasy, and it rarely crossed our threshold unless someone died. The Tung Shing House meant celebration; pastrami meant the end.

Sitting at Ben's with my father and faced with our sandwiches, I was captivated: I loved the smoke and the metallic tinge of the curing salt and the spices. I loved the grease and the fat and the way the blackened ends of the meat, pungent and crisp, were softened by the earthy caraway. I ate quickly, shoving enormous bites of sandwich into my mouth, my eyes closed in animal bliss.

My father and I ate in silence; he seemed preoccupied. When we were done, we left and walked hand-in-hand the three blocks back to The Marseilles.

“There's something I have to show you,” my father said to me
solemnly when we stood alone in the elevator. Left to our own devices, my father was a different man: quieter, reserved, less quick to anger.

He opened our door and patted the dog on the head, and I followed him past the kitchen and into the bedroom he shared with my mother. He slowly pulled open the top drawer of his tall dresser; I was too small to see into it. He took out his phylactery, last worn by him on the day of his bar mitzvah in 1936, and tossed the jumble of cracked leather straps and dinged wooden blocks onto the bed. Containing sacred Torah scrolls, the phylactery, or tefillin, was traditionally worn as a sign of remembrance that God brought the people Israel out of Egypt and gave them freedom. Buried underneath it was a shiny brown cordovan arm holster; he lifted it out of the drawer and unsnapped the top flap. Inside was a small black handgun with a silver trigger.

“I
never
want you to touch this,” he said. “I want you to know that it's here, but you can't ever touch it. Not without me holding it.”

“Is it real?” I whispered, looking up at him.

“It shoots tear gas,” he said. He sounded almost apologetic, like he was disappointed in himself for not manning up to a .357.

He let me hold the gun; I cradled it and immediately turned it around and gazed squint-eyed down the barrel. It felt heavy and solid and gorgeously weighted, like the Western-style pearl-handled six-shooter cigarette lighter that Buck kept on his coffee table. When I gave it back to him, my father snapped it into the holster, slipped it over his shoulder, and pulled the belt tight around his rib cage.

We stood side by side and gazed into the mirror: he patted the
gun, turned around, and looked over his shoulder, then turned to the side and put his hands on his hips, like a model. He unbuckled the holster and put it back in the drawer, covering it up with the blocks and straps of the tefillin. Every day after that if I was alone in the apartment—even if Gaga was in the kitchen, making dinner—I'd slink into the bedroom, open my father's dresser drawer, shove his tefillin to the side, and take out the pistol, removing the holster and unsnapping the leather flap. I would narrow my eyes and stare down the barrel and wonder whether it was real.

The year before he moved out, in 1977, the summer of Sam, my father started wearing his piece when he took the dog out after dinner. I was fourteen, and the idea of my diminutive, horsey, Chopin-loving father packing heat struck me as ridiculous.

“Do you really think that shooting tear gas will protect you?” I asked him one night. I sat on his bed and watched while he slipped his arm through the shoulder holster.

I laughed at him; he slapped me so hard that my jaw rattled.

“Do you want a sandwich?” he asked, glaring at me.

An hour later, my father appeared in my bedroom doorway with a brown paper bag splotched with grease, stinking of pastrami brine and a half-sour pickle. The next day, alone in the apartment after school, I went into the bedroom, opened the drawer, took out the gun, and sighted down the barrel in silence.

•   •   •

T
hat fall, the man who owned the pizzeria at the top of The Champs-Élysées Promenade was murdered one night, shot at point-blank range as he walked the half block from the shop
home to his apartment in The Marseilles, four flights below ours. For weeks after, we would see his widow—a wan, red-haired woman wearing frosted pink lipstick—floating around our neighborhood in a daze until someone would bring her home. A few weeks later, my father came downstairs one morning to the garage underneath The Riviera Garden Terrace to find a small bullet hole in the driver's-side window of his Buick. It went unreported, the mystery unsolved and, until he sold the car a few years later, unmended; my father said it was a constant reminder of the fragility of life.

A few days after he packed up his suitcase and moved back to his mother's house in Brooklyn, my father returned to Forest Hills to remove the other things that were his before he married my mother. He waited in his parked car in the promenade until she left for work, and then he came upstairs to begin the process of parsing the things of his life, while I watched: he packed up his Yma Sumac and Gerry Mulligan records and his teak Garrard stereo, his Hasselblad cameras and his celestial navigation charts, his Yiddish typewriter, his Philip Roth and his Henry Miller. He sent me out to walk the dog, and while I was gone, he quietly slipped their wedding silver set into the carton with his records and put it in the trunk of his car. When I came back upstairs, he was done; the apartment looked vaguely picked-over, as though it had been ravaged by a thief. Then he took me back to Ben's for one last lunch of pastrami sandwiches and half-sour pickles and cans of Cel-Ray soda. Pastrami meant the end, as it always had.

“When will I see you,” I said.

“I don't know,” he said.

He dropped me off and drove away, and I went into what had been my parents' bedroom. I opened the top drawer of his empty dresser; the pistol was gone. All that was left was his worn tefillin and an ancient dog-eared book of matches from Ben's, stained with a fingerprint of yellow deli mustard.

M
y father and I are sitting side by side at the bar at the massive Sugar Maples Hotel in Maplecrest in the Catskills, a mountain village so small that it's officially called a
hamlet.
Forty miles south of Albany, down a rural road, it is about as far off the beaten path as a Jewish boy from Brooklyn can get.

There is no borscht in this particular belt, which attracts an almost entirely Irish Catholic and Protestant crowd from the Bronx, Staten Island, and New Jersey. Many of the locals are descendants of Dutch settlers, whose families have been in the area for hundreds of years. Everywhere we look—on T-shirts, coffee mugs, lawn signs, commemorative plaques bolted to buildings, restaurant awnings, hospitals, banks, bridges—is the likeness of Rip Van Winkle, who, according to legend, was plied with moonshine by the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crewmen until he passed out and slept for two decades, waking up to discover that
the world had changed around him. There is not a Jew for miles in any direction: there's no Julie Budd singing in the nightclub, no Simon Sez in the lobby, no bottles of Manischewitz on the dinner table, no card room like the one my father's mother played pinochle in for thirty summers at The Windsor in South Fallsburg, before it was turned into an ashram. It has been years since The Sugar Maples' heyday, when whole families came for eight weeks at a time, and husbands left on Sunday nights to go back to the city for work, returning the following Friday. The hotel is a little bit down on its luck, a little bit paint-peeling. Its clapboard buildings are beginning to sag around the middle, like a too-big mattress on a too-small frame; with every passing year, the buildings fall in on themselves just a little bit more.

I kick the quilted vinyl base of the bar and lean my elbows over onto its plastic burled walnut top; clamped to an articulated metal arm attached to the wall near the ceiling is a small hospital television tuned to the 1979 Wimbledon Men's Final. Dusty beams of summer light shine through the hotel's open French doors; outside is a paving stone patio decorated with white baskets of bright pink and purple impatiens. There, in two hours, The Sugar Maples Hotel will hold its annual July Fourth weekend all-pork barbecue, after which my father will leave me behind for the whole summer to work the first unsupervised job I've ever had, as a snack-bar girl. I will sleep in the employees quarters, in a single room with a corner sink, down the hall from a clean-cut Mormon boy a year away from going on his mission; a twenty-year-old couple and their six-year-old daughter, who reeks of the
patchouli incense her parents burn to mask the smell of hash; a bloated blond teenage landscaper who puts gin in his bong, and who gets so stoned one night that he takes a bite out of a lightbulb, mistaking it for an ice cream cone.

“Gibson?” Jack Doherty, the ginger-haired bartender, asks my father, wiping down the bar top with a terrycloth rag. My father nods his head and stubs out a cigarette in a square hotel ashtray, and immediately lights another.

“And you?” Jack asks me. I am sixteen.

I rub my neck; I don't answer.

“Give her a Genny Cream,” my father says, matter-of-factly, “in a Collins glass.”

He has always allowed me small amounts of alcohol from as far back as I can remember; it's a strongly held cultural belief that giving young children alcohol in restricted quantities on a regular basis will mitigate curiosity and curb addiction. As a child, I drink tiny glasses of Manischewitz at Passover, spoonfuls of Slivovitz in the winter, thimbles of Harveys Bristol Cream at Thanksgiving, and shot glasses of Bordeaux at the secret, fancy lunches my father and I have in Manhattan while my mother is out having her hair done. At three years old and in love with the metallic tang of bitterness on my tongue, my parents and I are on our way home from a family outing and I wail and scream like a siren until my father stops the car someplace off the New Jersey Turnpike and buys a six-pack of Schlitz. He pops open a can, gives me a few sips, and throws out the rest. Sated, I sleep in the backseat of his Barracuda until we reach Forest Hills, and my father has to carry
me into our apartment in a pink party dress and white patent leather Mary Janes, a damp cloud of hops and yeast swirling around my lips.

But until now, I have never sat at a bar next to him and had a drink that's been ordered specifically for me.

“Jewish girls don't sit at bars,” my mother said one night at Maxwell's Plum in Manhattan, a few months earlier. I'd climbed onto the barstool while we waited for Ben, her furrier boyfriend, to join us for dinner. The bartender, in a tight black T-shirt, looked at me smugly, leaning over my head to pass off a white wine spritzer to a bearded, open-shirted man behind me, a gold ankh around his neck.

“Get down!” she shouted through lacquered fuchsia lips while Gloria Gaynor's divorce anthem,
I Will Survive,
blasted from a massive speaker hanging above the bar.

I hopped off the stool and stood lip-glossed and sullen next to her, sweating in the block-shouldered, sheared champagne beaver jacket she borrowed from the showroom, as though putting me in a fur might suddenly compel me towards feminine coyness. I felt like I was in drag.

On this lovely summer afternoon in upstate New York, Jack Doherty carefully places a gin Gibson in a glass the size of a fishbowl—one onion, no twist—in front of my father, followed by a tall Genesee Cream Ale topped off with a thick head of stocking-colored froth in front of me.

“Like love in a canoe . . .” my father says in his best fake radio announcer voice as I lift my glass to take a sip. He elbows me
gently in the ribs and winks: this is my punch line cue, his call to my response.

“. . . fucking close to water,” I answer, winking back, unsmiling.

I roll my eyes and squirm on my barstool, hold my glass up, and my father carefully taps it with his Gibson, which spills a little of the clear liquid over the rim.

“Cheers,” we say together, like old Navy buddies.

We are a divorced father and his spotty, panic-prone teenage daughter who he is about to leave for an entire summer in a lush Christian upstate New York mountain town where she is the token Jew, and where Gaga has warned her that they may or may not look for her horns; where she will be paid minimum wage to make eight weeks of cheap ham and mayo sandwiches on white bread for cigar-smoking shuffleboard players in wife-beaters and kind Italian grandmothers who wear their flowered bathing caps all day and who, more than once, will press rosary beads into her hand after she feeds them, slicing their sandwiches in half on a precise angle, tossing their iceberg lettuce with just the right amount of Wish-Bone Italian salad dressing, and slipping them a cookie and a small cup of coffee at the end of their meal; where, during the employee parties that take place every night, she will learn to ingest vast, almost inhuman quantities of liquor—a screw-top jug of Almaden Mountain Rhine passed around a circle of off-duty employees by thumb-hook, vodka injected into a watermelon with a hypodermic begged from the hotel nurse, grain alcohol spiked with cherry-flavored Hi-C out of a galvanized trough—with the sole, resolute purpose of getting completely and utterly tanked as quickly as possible.

Jack Doherty laughs out loud, and shakes his head.

“A regular Shecky Greene, she is,” he says, nodding over to me. “When are you sending her out on the road?”

This has become our shtick since he's moved out. It's as though his switch has been flipped: my father is no longer a hot wire ready to burst into flame, warm and charming one minute and unpredictably enraged the next. My father-without-my-mother has become a wholly different animal, as though he's stepped into a phone booth like Clark Kent becoming Superman; all signs of his temper have melted away like snow in a rainstorm, replaced by a soft, mildly ribald sense of humor as pliable as Silly Putty. He comments on the absurd in everything and teaches me the punch lines to the jokes—some tired and worn; some so lewd that the listeners laugh and cringe at the same time while they watch me speak mechanically, like my father's Charlie McCarthy—that he's been telling for half a century, hauling them out whenever we're together. In Maplecrest, he wants the locals to love us like we're court jesters. Hotel employees and guests flock to him wherever he appears: in the dark, wood-paneled lobby, on the tennis court, in the cavernous dining room that seats seven hundred, in the bar. Wherever he is, there is a joke, and barks of laughter: a fat guest looks from behind
like two bulldogs fighting under a blanket
. His guest room is so small that
the mice are hunchbacks
. The new snack-bar girl, Emma, who, according to hotel gossip, fucks her way through every week's new guest roster,
spends so much time on her back, you could sell ad space on the soles of her feet
. And the Genny Cream Ale is so thin and wan that it's
like love in a canoe: fucking close to water
. My father, whose Coney Island nightstand creaks
under the weight of Lion Feuchtwanger and Bernard Malamud and John Cheever, has turned before my eyes into Don Rickles.

But his laughter is bottomless; it invariably erupts into an explosion of uncontrollable coughing, which devolves into a fountain of tears that he can't stop. This is his B-side: he is a Jewish night fighter pilot, an advertising executive in a Brooks Brothers sack suit, the little brother of Aunt Sylvia, whose carefully constructed world is the picture of social perfection and safety, which he will never attain. He is a newly divorced man looking for a toehold as though life itself is the smooth face of a mountain and he, a climber looking for a place to hang on and perch. He gravitates to places where no one knows him, where he—where we both—can start fresh: new lives.

We sit together at The Sugar Maples bar, side by side, and like Rip Van Winkle, we drink the numbing nectar of somnambulance and wait, anxiously, for the world to change around us, to accept us, to approve.

•   •   •

M
y father and I spend every weekend together: he arrives in Forest Hills on Friday afternoon, parking his car in my high school rotunda and waving me over with a cold bottle of cola he has waiting on the passenger-side floor. He lets the motor idle; my classmates and I pour out of the building and into the street, and while they pair up and head out to a nearby pizzeria for a snack, I spy my father's car; I get in, we drive away. We have late lunches and early dinners at restaurants my mother would never dare set foot in, which my father fetishizes as being real, authentic
New York: The Belmore Cafeteria, which smells like puke and Lysol, and where my new Bass Weejuns stick to the floor, and the chocolate brown gravy on the spongy gray meatloaf comes out of an industrial food service can. We go to The Automat, where we open small plastic doors to retrieve our food: rubbery orange cheese sandwiches on white bread, and cold blueberry pie on a thick, pasty crust that attaches itself to the roof of my mouth like dental putty. We sit at the counter next to off-duty cops at Brennan and Carr, and gorge ourselves on warm roast beef sandwiches drenched in
jus
that dribbles down my chin and onto the pressed Brooks Brothers oxford cloth shirts and khakis that my father has taken to outfitting me in since the divorce.

Gone are my stiff Wranglers, my rodeo belts, my fringed jackets, my pearl-snap gingham yoked shirts, and my Dingo boots: my father has assembled a new wardrobe for me—a new persona—that exudes conventionality and traditionalism and old WASP wealth and security. It's a carapace of safety, a way to fend off the bedlam that we have both grown up with, and I crave it the way an alcoholic craves a scotch; I slip into this Presbyterian facade like a hand into a velvet glove. Conformity will allow me to leave the past behind, he believes, and propel me into a different, more predictable kind of world, where children aren't beaten or preyed upon, and life itself is orderly and fair. There are monogrammed Shetland sweaters in murky Scottish colors of pine and heather; wide wale corduroys in emerald greens and Pepto-Bismol pinks; high-necked Carroll Reed turtlenecks emblazoned with ducks and lobsters, which my father buys for me by the dozen. There's an Irish fisherman sweater that smells of sheep lanolin and salt,
and is so thick that when I wear it, I can't bend my arms; a navy blue Brooks Brothers blazer purchased for me in the boy's department, where he believes the clothes are better made; there are square-toed Docksides, round-toed Top-Siders, shin-high L.L. Bean duck boots, and low rubber moccasins and lace-up brown Bluchers and band-sleeved Lacostes in every shade and a wool plaid-lined hunting coat the color of burning sugar, which has an interior pocket the width of my back, to carry home dead ducks from my hunting party. For Thanksgiving at Aunt Sylvia's house, the first since the divorce, he buys me a special outfit: a black cashmere turtleneck and floor-length Black Watch kilt held closed with a safety pin the size of a harpoon; I carry a dark gray, wooden-handled Bermuda bag containing a linen hankie and a tube of ChapStick. I comb my thick, frizzy, shoulder-length hair back, attach a green-and-white grosgrain band to my head like a clamp, and spray it in place with Aqua Net; it's so tight that I spend the evening looking surprised.