TREYF (18 page)

“Hey,” Steve says, kicking my chair. “Did you hear me? Where else? Emma—” he yells, turning around, “where else?”

“You're the local, dumbass,” she yells back, wringing out her mop in a galvanized steel bucket.

We pile into two cars and end up at The Stewart House, a bed-and-breakfast three towns away. Steve, wearing khakis, a button-down oxford cloth shirt, and a clip-on tie that barely reaches his navel, sits at the head of the table, and Emma plants herself directly opposite him in the one flowered silk hippie dress she rolled up into a ball and stuffed into her bag when she packed to come to the hotel for the summer. Eric sits next to me and his girlfriend, Sally, next to him. Jim the Yardbird joins us, along with Jack Doherty's little sister, Carla; and Barbara, who works in the office with Jessica, comes along, too. We're seated in the inn's private dining room, which is illuminated by a fake gas-powered chandelier dripping with cut crystals. Our server, a gum-cracking, acne-scarred woman wearing a name tag that says
Call Me Colleen
, refuses Steve's request for the wine list; the only one at the table technically old enough to drink is Jim, who orders a Coke. Platters begin to arrive—spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad, garlic bread, chicken Kiev, peas and carrots, fried zucchini—and the din in the room begins to rise; the server closes the French doors that separate us from the rest of the inn.

“To you,” Steve playacts, dramatically thrusting his goblet of Sprite in my direction and kicking me hard under the table. He is the make-believe man of our house; it's as if he's playing dress-up in his father's clothes. He is carefree; I know nothing about his past or his home life. Perhaps he is beaten every night at seven by an alcoholic father who he's desperate to escape until one night, the man, with visions of a 1968 attack near Quang Tri Province,
lunges at his thin, sleeping boy with a knife, and the boy overtakes his father and throws him out into the Catskill Mountains snow, to sleep it off. Perhaps not. Perhaps Emma had gotten pregnant at Exeter, and abandoned by her parents, left school and looked for work. Perhaps not. Whoever we are, we came to the table at The Stewart House with no past; we didn't ask, and we didn't want to know. We were fresh, newly minted near-adults, psychic virgins with no prejudices or rages, who could only look forward to the future with hope.

“To us,” I answer quietly—this is what they say in movies, I think—looking around the table at this motley crew of strangers who have, in the midst of my chaotic life, become my family.

When the check arrives, we all pull wads of singles out of our pockets, except for Emma, who puts her father's Diners Club card on the table; Steve leaves his share of the tip in pennies he carried to the restaurant in a ziplock sandwich bag.

•   •   •

W
e skulked back to our rooms not through the lobby, but up the fire escape that ran along the outside of the building; as I climbed it, I see my father and Jessica sitting at a small table in the corner of the bar. He smokes; she rests her hand on top of his.

Steve stayed in my room that night; when we got in, he yanked off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, and we spent hours sitting on the floor of my room and talking about high school and college and the primal need to escape Maplecrest and Forest Hills, and hours rolling around on the floor, a groaning pile of disembodied
arms and legs. At two in the morning, exhausted and sweaty, I threw on Steve's shirt and got up to use the bathroom at the other end of the hallway. The floors creaked under my bare feet; I could hear voices coming from a room near the bathroom, and when my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I had to squint to make out the vague outline of a familiar figure. My father crept out of Jessica's room and quietly pulled her door closed.

“Dad,” I whispered.

“Shit—” he said, giggling like a drunk teenager. “Caught me.”

“Jessica?” I looked over his shoulder towards her room.

He sheepishly shook his head yes; he gazed past me and down the hall towards my room, and smiled.

We drove home to Forest Hills the next day in silence.

“Anything you want to tell me?” he said, staring straight ahead as we weaved and snaked south along the tree-lined Taconic State Parkway. I gazed out the window.

“Steve?”

A cloud of green blurred along outside; I didn't answer.

“Or Emma?”

PART III

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

—Psalms 137:4

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

—Patti Smith,
M
Train

F
amily lore:

My father was nine when a neighbor living across the street on the south side of Ocean Parkway offered Grandpa Henry first crack at the redbrick 1920s Spanish-style house he was putting up for sale because he was moving to California. Clay mission-roofed and pristinely landscaped with abundant white climbing roses scaling a thick cedar trellis covering the carport and mature rhododendrons with deep fuchsia blossoms flanking the transom, the house took up nearly a quarter of the square city block. The el train rumbled by only a few streets away, but the house was lush and alive and throbbing with the promise of suburbia, and it stood out among the parkway's squat brick buildings as though it had fallen abruptly from the sky like a satellite traveling west on its way to Pasadena.

My grandfather, the story went, yearned for that house and
all that it meant: he envisioned his children and grandchildren running safely around the fenced-in yard, shielded from the grime and din of Brooklyn. He imagined Talmud study sessions with the local rabbis over his wife's gorgeous kosher dinners prepared in a modern kitchen big enough for two stoves and two sinks and two iceboxes. But it was 1934, the effects of the Depression lingered on like a vague hallway odor, and the $25,000 price that Jay Silverheels asked was simply too steep. So my grandfather chose to stay in the two-bedroom apartment with the rippling, faux stucco walls that he shared with Grandma Bertha, my father, and Aunt Sylvia; the house across the street became a tantalizing dream and a symbol of what could have been, like the model homes my father would take my mother and me to visit every weekend when I was a child. In what was my grandparents' first brush with Hollywood royalty—but not their last: they ran into Jayne Mansfield during the Rose Parade when my father drove them cross-country in 1948; when he saw her, my grandfather shouted,
Hey, Jaynie baby,
and my father said she turned around and blew him a kiss—they turned down the man who played Tonto and remained at 602 Avenue T for the rest of their lives.

Besides walk-to-worship, the apartment's allure was dubious; it wasn't the view, although the east-facing bedrooms where my grandfather prayed morning and night were cooled by soft eastern breezes blowing in off Coney Island, and on a clear day you could see the Parachute Drop and the merchant tankers floating along on the glimmering bay in the distance. My grandmother's prized Knabe baby grand piano stood in the dark living room
adjacent to the south window and flush against a steam radiator that howled and clanged in the winter and stayed hot and damp regardless of the season; eventually, the piano's mahogany veneer finish peeled and fissured and its ivory keys crazed like fine porcelain. By the time I moved to 602 Avenue T in 1991, the poster-board rendering of Bruegel's
The Harvesters
that hung above the sofa bulged out of its frame, making the field hands look like ghosts on a Mathew Brady battlefield.

My family called the apartment
602
—just
602
—like a three-digit secret code for our past. After my grandmother died in her sleep there at ninety-three, my father and Aunt Sylvia left everything in place—except for the good silver and the crystal and a few pieces of jewelry—where it had stood for almost sixty years; the apartment became a shrine. When I got there, it was like cracking open a time capsule: assorted bric-a-brac and small china statues from Aunt Sylvia's frequent trips to Europe and South America remained where I remembered them standing nearly three decades earlier, on the end tables flanking the couch. My grandfather's vast, dust-caked, leather-bound Yiddish library sat untouched in the mahogany living room breakfront, bookended by two mother-of-pearl, life-size magpies in flight. Photos of my father and Uncle Lee in their World War II uniforms were displayed on the piano, alongside a high school graduation picture of a stunning teenage Aunt Sylvia shot in the late 1930s, and two eight-by-tens of my older cousins, taken when they were in college in the 1960s. As a child, I had never noticed it; as an adult, it made me wince: at 602, there was no discernible sign of my presence in my grandparents' lives.

Nothing about the apartment had changed: not the original nameplate from 1933—
H. Altman
, it said, in a swirling art deco font of the time—slipped into the little slot under the front door peephole. The phone was still connected with the apartment's original number—ESsex 5-1177—in the assumption, or maybe just the hope, that someone might still try to call. On the bitterly cold January day when the apartment became mine, I tried to unpack my suitcases, but couldn't: my grandparents' clothes—paisley Qiana dresses; a gold polyester bed jacket from a 1970ish hospital visit to remove an angry appendix; a white stole of unidentifiable fur; six fine wool suits in various shades of steel gray, size 42 regular; neatly pressed button-down dress shirts and striped rep ties and leather belts—hung in the closets as though my grandparents still lived there. Both beds were tidily made: my grandfather's massive horsehair mattress in the big, east-facing bedroom, and my grandmother's narrow single bed, in what had been my father and Aunt Sylvia's childhood bedroom. In the bathroom, a matted thicket of frosted hair cocooned my grandmother's favorite Mason Pearson brush, which sat in the medicine cabinet above the flesh-toned sink, next to a rusting container of Colgate tooth powder. Her flowered makeup bag gaped open on a small putty-colored stool near the tub, holding the things that made her beautiful: Coty blush in frosted peach, a crumbling cake of dusty brown mascara like a square of old chocolate, a pot of Revlon powder blue eye shadow. I touched my finger to the lipstick—Max Factor Misty Coral—and then to my mouth; it tasted stale, like last Halloween's wax lips.

In the kitchen, where nearly two decades earlier, I had been
fed a cold boiled brain, the glossy white ceiling-high cabinets, painted and painted and repainted again until they refused to close, were filled with my grandmother's coffee cups and saucers, juice glasses, and the repurposed 1940s yahrzeit memorial candle glasses that she saved over the years and used as perfect ten-ounce measuring cups. In a drawer, I found a three-pound Koch Messer—a giant meat cleaver, its blade dull as butter, carried over on the boat from Romania by my great-grandmother—buried under a pile of Maxwell House Passover Haggadahs. The 1950s refrigerator—a squat, bulbous Frigidaire with a massive metal handle that hugged its wide midsection like a girdle—still plugged in, hummed and belched near the kitchen table. I pulled the door open carefully, expecting to be overcome by a wave of rotted food; instead, a moist, dank cloud of mildew wafted out and into the kitchen, dissipating as it made its way to the open window. Inside the fridge stood a half-empty container of two-year-old Mother's gefilte fish next to an old mayonnaise bottle covered with disintegrating wax paper secured with a wide red rubber band; although the contents was now a rancid gray swamp, I recognized it as my grandmother's favorite gribenes jar. An open box of Coffee Nips stood on the foyer telephone table next to the brown paisley-upholstered French provincial chair from which she liked to watch
The Muppet Show
in the 1980s.

When my grandmother died, fifteen years after her husband, life at 602 had been simply placed on hold, like a staticky phone call; the fact that she wasn't coming home seemed impossible to her children.

•   •   •

E
ach of us has an immediate, olfactory connection to our grandparents, who emit the musty clouds of age; hallways and bedrooms smell like dust, or mothballs, or liniment. In my case, they smelled like food, and my connection to them grew during the weekend mornings of my childhood, when my parents and I walked into the lobby at 602, which reeked, perpetually, of chicken fat.

For years, the building's resident super was a Hasidic rabbi named Lipshitz who regularly took long, ambling afternoon walks down Ocean Parkway with his young wife and their eight daughters in tow. Lipshitz, who my grandfather detested—
Lipshitz the Goniff,
he called him—was still there when I, the building's last tenant whose legal right to rent the apartment fell under the archaic rules of New York City real estate law, moved in. When we passed each other in the lobby, Lipshitz glared at me from head to toe like treyf
—
unkosher, unacceptable, unclean—since I didn't have to gain his approval before taking up residence. Everyone else in the building was ultra-Orthodox and had been since the building was built; that many people cooking that much gribenes under one roof for more than sixty years had taken its toll. Although Lipshitz took pride in the sparkling cleanliness of the hallways and the lobby, over time, the essence of schmaltz had been sucked into the pores of the place. When I moved in, the building still reeked; I feared for my clothes. I was certain that my two cats would stink like a pair of fat Shabbos pullets.

“Can't anything be done about the smell?” I asked Lipshitz
when I handed over my first check for the $142-a-month rent. He took it from me gingerly, like I was a leper.

“Maybe you could get out,” he said, shrugging. “Nobody wants you here anyway.”

I looked at him in silent rage; this man from the old country, this specter from the past, wanted me gone, banished from his building like it was his own personal shtetl.

But I didn't want me there either; it had been a last resort. Cheap rent, a few blocks from the subway, a place for me to get my bearings after a bad breakup.

“We own it in perpetuity,” my father promised me when I began to receive regular notices of eviction from the building owner, who wanted to turn it into a co-op like the rest of the apartments in 602; 5H was the last rental holdout.

“We don't own it, Dad—I'm paying monthly rent.”

“You'll stay and bring your husband and raise your children there,” my father explained matter-of-factly while we were in the car, driving to housing court in downtown Brooklyn; he was counting on it, although Lipshitz was evicting me, to free up the apartment for sale.

“Are you delusional?” I gasped, looking over at him. “I have to return to my life in the city. I'm never going to live here permanently.”

He pulled over into a bus stop and glared at me.

“There has been an Altman here since 1933,” he said, his face beginning to flush a deep red. “You are the last one. This is our family home, our connection to the past, to who we once were. It is your responsibility to maintain that connection.”

I opened up the passenger door, unbuckled my seat belt, and vomited into the street.

Like my father, who had returned to his childhood apartment after he divorced my mother, I went to 602 to heal my wounds; like him, I had nowhere else to go.

•   •   •

T
here had been a beautiful, petite medical resident from Minnesota, who I will call Julie. When we met, I was dating men, and sleeping with a tall, long-haired advertising creative director named James; he wore tiny round wire-rimmed glasses that seemed to always slide down his aquiline nose; wide, colorful ties from the early 1950s; and, on the weekends, a collection of moth-eaten Shetland sweaters from Goodwill. The food we ate in the late 1980s was tall and fancy and soulless, and sex was perfunctory and mechanical. Still, I loved the neutralizing idea of him if not exactly him; when he left me alone in his Greenwich Village bedroom every Sunday morning to play soccer in Central Park with a bunch of Guatemalan boys ten years his junior, I relished my quiet time alone to read the paper and drink endless cups of dark English tea before going back to the Upper West Side apartment I shared with my mother and Ben, who she had married in 1981, and where I slept in the den every night on their beige pullout sofa that possessed all the comfort of a torture device invented by Torquemada.

Julie was taking a summer break from her orthopedic residency to work for my Greenwich Village physician. She shared her squalid, mouse-laden walk-up tenement apartment near the
hospital with a colonic-addicted anorexic vegan nutritionist who wore her black hair in the style of Medusa; Julie wanted out of her situation. So did I. We became roommates, decorating the tiny, white-bricked Chelsea flat we illegally subletted from the X-ray technician in her office with Native American dream catchers and crystals of every shape and variety: Julie promised me that if I closed my eyes and quieted my brain, I could feel the heat coming off a rose quartz orb that we'd spent a week's salary on, and that it would ease the broken heart she was sure I had been carrying if not in this life, then certainly in past ones. A smoky quartz pyramid was going to guarantee our success at our lifework—hers as a physician, mine, I hoped, as a novelist. A hunk of watermelon tourmaline, dug, we were told, from a watermelon tourmaline mine in Pakistan, would transmute our negative energies and attract love, which it did: after three months of sleeping in separate rooms, we were gifted the keys to a friend's New Hampshire cottage, where we spent her Christmas break. As Interstate 91 snaked through Hartford and Springfield and into Vermont, it began to flurry; when we crossed the White River into Hanover, it started to snow. By the time we reached the cottage, flakes like half dollars blanketed and then shut down the state; for ten days, we stayed under the covers, wrapped around each other. Sex was tender and delicious and we fell asleep in each other's arms. We lost track of time and day and morning and night, exhausted and weeping with explosive relief and the slow burn of terror that comes from the fulfillment of the illicit.