TREYF (8 page)

Y
our parents speak in tongues,” my mother says to my father, as we pull into an empty parking space in front of my grandparents' building.

It's a late Sunday morning in December 1974; I am eleven. And like every late Sunday morning, we have just finished a breakfast of bacon and eggs and the diet white bread that my mother incinerates in the toaster while my father mans the frying pan, which spits angry, sizzling pork fat at him, spattering his wrists with the vengeance of his forefathers. He shrieks with fury at no one in particular and throws the hot skillet into the sink, where he blasts it with cold water and a mushroom cloud of vaporized grease explodes into the air.

We drive an hour out from Forest Hills, rattling along the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and over the rusting Kosciuszko Bridge towards Coney Island, a part of Brooklyn that my father calls
the Motherland. As in “Get in the car; we're going to the Motherland.” I stare out the window at the packed and heaving cemeteries of Queens morphing into manufacturing plants and industrial complexes; I watch as the putrid chlorophyll green canals snake below us and empty into the Gowanus, their surfaces slicked with a soapy rainbow of chemicals, and when I see a tall gas stack with a live blue flame rising from the dank water as if from the bowels of hell, I fling myself onto the musty floor mats of the car and howl in hysterical, pyrophobic terror. My parents ignore me—this Pavlovian response (fire; terror) happens every Sunday—and my father reaches below the heavy front bench seat and hauls it forward so that when I dive to the floor, I have room to huddle for the rest of the journey.

We ride in silence, my mother's white fox coat falling off her shoulders to the crooks of her elbow, like an old-time movie starlet riding in the Rose Parade. She chain-smokes cigarette after cigarette, stubbing them out in the passenger-door ashtray until we arrive at 602 Avenue T. On this particular Sunday, my father is seconds away from turning off the ignition when my mother leans forward and pops her new Melba Moore tape into the eight track, fast-forwards it to
Time and Love
, and cranks up the music. She tosses her head back, closes her eyes, and sings at the top of her lungs, like she's onstage at Carnegie Hall.

My mother has a heavily vibratoed voice that rattles our walls and shakes our parquet floors; she's a belter—a loud, confident, Ethel Mermanish singer who spent a season on national television and had her own show at the Copacabana in the late 1950s, her volume belying her tiny stature. She and Merman, it turned out, shared both a vocal coach and a decibel level.

“You're the next Judy Garland,” the producers in The Brill Building had promised her when she was seventeen, but when a Columbia Records contract was offered contingent upon her touring the country, her parents refused to let her go. There was a season as the girl singer on
The Galen Drake Show
; there were press parties at The 21 Club and The Stork and El Morocco, and the promise of fame. And then there was dating the famous composer Bernie Wayne, and then Thomas, who took her dancing at The Pierre every Sunday, and then marriage to my father, and then a return to Queens where her singing—always loud, always stunning in its power and beauty—was relegated to the cocktail parties of The Marseilles.

“Sing for us—c'mon—sing,” the neighbors would say, and I'd watch, my body folded halfway behind a door, as she'd take her place at the front of a living room or a den while chairs were organized around her like an audience. This was my mother—not dowdy and old-fashioned like my friends' mothers—but stunning, a beauty, who made my father the envy of every man in the building. She had a few favorite songs, some of love and some of redemption, always performed as if she was on a stage, alone, under a single, beaming spotlight:
Life Is a Cabaret
;
Bye Bye Blackbird; The Shadow of Your Smile,
which she only ever sang because it was Buck's favorite request, like she was a singer at a piano bar.

My mother became a stranger when she sang, tossing her head back and closing her eyes in ecstatic bliss. Singing in our living room while I sat on the couch, wedged between Buck and my father, as they drank their scotches while the dog lay at our feet,
she emoted from the very depths of her soul. More than once, I cried in fear and buried my face in my father's neck at the sight of her brow, furrowed with drama—I thought that she was hurt and in pain—before I understood that the line between pleasure and sadness was so fine that it was often hard to know the difference. When her song was over and she stepped off her stage, she became my mother again, pouring me a glass of Hawaiian Punch and sending me into my room to watch television. But there's music everywhere, all the time: there's Peggy Lee playing on my father's Garrard turntable when I come home from school, Cass Elliot on
The Tonight Show
while I'm trying to fall asleep across the hall from their bedroom, and today, Melba Moore on the eight track in my father's Buick.

“Let's GO—” my father shouts to her over the music, shutting off the engine. He gets out of the car, opens the front passenger door, and waits for her on the sidewalk while I stand behind him, holding my guitar case in one hand and a slim green and red book titled
Classic Tunes of Christmas Cheer
in the other.

“I don't want to see them anymore,” she says, holding her hand out for the car keys.

My stomach plunges.

“But my mother made lunch—” he says. I can see narrow cords of blue vein popping up in his neck.

“Whatever she's making,” my mother answers, “I don't want any.”

She looks out the windshield, straight ahead, at the car parked in front of us.

My father gives her the keys; she doesn't know how to drive, but it's bitterly cold out and she'll freeze sitting in an unheated car, even in her fur coat.

My mother's sudden display of independence lands like a guided missile at the feet of its intended target; she has forced my father to choose between seeing his aging parents from the old country, or leaving them behind and taking her where she wants to go, back to the new, modern world, where
she is woman, hear her roar.

“Please come upstairs, Ma,” I whine, bending down to talk to her face-to-face. “It's Christmas!”

I think of
The Brady Bunch
; Mrs. Brady never threatened to stay in the station wagon on a visit to her in-laws.

“We're not Christians,” my mother says, staring out the window. “I'll wait here. You go with Daddy.”

My father grabs the sleeve of my new fluffy gray rabbit coat from Bloomingdale's and ushers me up the steps into the lobby, where the gamy odor of schmaltz wraps around me like a boa constrictor as we step onto the elevator and head upstairs.

Grandpa opens the door and looks past us and down the empty hallway.

“Nu?”
he says. “So vhere is she?”

“Not hungry,” my father answers, and my grandfather shakes his head and waves us in.

•   •   •

F
or a lifetime of late Sunday mornings, before we drive out to the housing developments my father represents on the wealthy North Shore of Long Island, my parents and I make this
trip to Brooklyn, and I am required to bring something along—some sort of putative accomplishment to show off to my father's parents, an obnoxious totem of my success, like a chapter book I've just learned how to read at the age of six, for which everyone halfheartedly applauds, or my guitar, which I began playing at four. One February Sunday, I carry out a sheaf of handmade Valentine's Day cards fashioned from cherry red construction paper haphazardly pasted over with doilies.

“Vus es duss?” my grandfather asks, unfamiliar with the tradition of Saint Valentine.

On another visit, I proudly show them the paper snowflakes I've deftly avoided cutting up the middle. My grandfather holds one up to the light, squints at it, and laughs while I tell him about my new Flexible Flyer, on which Gaga drags me around The Champs-Élysées Promenade. Or meeting Santa at The North Pole Village on the seventh floor of Macy's, where an elf with a handlebar mustache and a voice like a lady picked me up under my armpits and plopped me down on the fat man's lap.

“Dahlink,” Grandpa says, putting his age-pocked hands on my bony little red-sweatered shoulder, “vere I come from, vinter means freezing to death. The Cossacks sent you to the North Pole, and you know what you got there? Gornisht.”

These are my Sunday afternoons with my father's parents: a car crash of old and new worlds, of schmaltz and Mitch Miller, of Santa Claus and the Cossacks. My mother locks herself in their ancient bathroom, its old beige enema bag suspended upside down from the shower nozzle, and spends an hour reapplying her makeup while I play show-and-tell until my bored grandmother
decides that it's time to eat, and we gather at the kitchen table set with small bone china luncheon plates and glasses of amber Swee-Touch-Nee tea. My mother emerges from the bathroom with a new face; we sit down together and she spends lunchtime in silence, rolling around the ice cream scoop of chopped liver and onions, the dollop of Matjes herring, the small ball of sweetened Galician balik fish—boiled chicken dumplings made by poor, landlocked European Jews with no access to or money for actual fish—on her plate silently. My grandmother pours everyone tea; my parents drink it down, zip me into my coat, and we leave.

But today, my mother has decided to stay in the car.

I turn to look back at her when my father and I step into the elevator, just long enough to see her reach over to the ignition; her eyes are closed and her head is pitched back, and I can see her lips moving on the soundproof stage that is our Buick:
Nothing cures like time and love.

•   •   •

W
e sit in the darkened living room before lunch, and my grandparents mumble to my father in Yiddish. He responds in Yiddish while I sit on the couch, kicking my feet beneath the poster-mounted print of Bruegel's
The Harvesters
, which bends and pops out of its rococo frame, concave with the humidity of half a century of damp Coney Island summers.

“Perform for Grandma and Grandpa,” my father commands. I unzip my vinyl guitar case and tune it up while I pick out familiar words from their conversation:
kinder
, and
a broch
, and
a nishtikeit
, and
tsuris
, and
chaleria
.
The baby. A curse. A nobody. Trouble. Evil woman.

I pluck a full six-string E chord and my father and grandparents look up.

“Play us a song, sveetheart,” Grandpa says and I open my music book to my new favorite Christmas carol—the one with the fancy minor chords that have taken me hours to master—and I begin to strum.

“You have to sing it,” my father says, “or we won't know what you're playing.”

I blush. I say no.

My mother is the singer. I can't sing. I don't sing. I won't sing. They'll compare me to her; they'll laugh.

“
Sing it
, dammit,” my father shouts and so I begin, playing the introduction before I sing with a shaking voice.

God rest ye merry, gentlemen,

Let nothing you dismay;

Remember Christ our Savior

Was born upon this day . . .

My grandmother stands, takes the guitar from me, rests it on a chair, and steers me to the kitchen table, which is set for five. Her white-and-gold-flecked house slippers squeak on the waxed linoleum floor as she putters around me in an apron embroidered with apples; she picks up one of the place settings and dumps it—napkin, silverware, and all—into the sink.

She pads over to the walnut china cabinet where she keeps her good tea set and pulls out a plate. I hear her bang a glass container on the drain board, and then a
thwack
. She spoons something out onto the plate, tapping and scraping.

“Vy vould she drive out vith you if she didn't vant to see us?” I hear my grandfather say.

“I don't know, Papa.”

“Makes no sense. She said she vasn't hungry? She doesn't eat anything anyway. Like a boid.”

My grandmother reaches over me and puts down a small gold-rimmed plate dotted with magenta petunias, upon which is perched an entire brain the size of my father's fist. She touches my shoulder; she hands me a salad fork.

“Ess, honey—it's delicious,” she says, before trundling back to the sink.

I stare at the plate; my napkin is folded in my lap. I'm certain I'll vomit: my breakfast will come up. I look down at the brain; it looks back, with its cool gray fissures and swirls, its light pink blood spots shimmering in the afternoon sun streaming in through the window, past the fire escape.

I want to scream, to run into the living room and out the door and down the stairs and out to the car, where my mother is having a cigarette and listening to Melba Moore
. I want Gaga; I want Gaga's familiar food—latkes, and goulash, and chicken soup. I don't want the brain. The brain. Get the brain away from me.