Interruptions

Age 8 I have just learned from Mom that Dad had gotten a promotion and we are

moving to Florida. That’s it.  We’re moving.  No, you can’t stay here.  Yes, we have

to.  In a month.  No, there’s nothing you can do. Why?  He’s been offered a very

good paying promotion.  Did you wash your hands?

I am standing in front of my house. I have flung myself up against the maple tree in

the front yard, crying. My father has just decided without asking us that we will just up

and move our whole lives to Florida. I am mortified. I know with every fiber of my

being, that my life will never be the same. I sense that this is equal to death. I am

appalled by how powerless I am to do a thing about this, even to voice my dismay. I

don’t know why but feel I have no human to tell how terrified and angry I am. I

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confide instead, in the tree and the mica rock out back, and the vacuum cleaner in

the closet, more emotionally irrelevant to my parents, than me. I am pouring out my

despair in sobbing appeal to this solid and dependable body I lean against, and the

tree is standing there, through all kinds of weather, just taking it. It is telling me to just

take it; it will be the beginning of a series of lessons in the need to just take what you

haven’t any power over. 

I have to go inside for dinner. I tenderly say goodbye, and walk back feeling alone

and feeding now only on my sobs. It will not make a difference. It is as if I am

invisible. If only I didn’t know it, feel it, I would be peaceful, like the tree in it’s

ignorance of anything other than it’s elements which hold it and give it purpose and

life, the purpose that can come only from a grounded sense of place. I am not yet

jealous of that sense of place because I have not yet lost it, but I am threatened to

the core.

After less than a year in Florida, my sister, Eleanor was so devastated that she

returned to Connecticut to live with my aunt and uncle (to whom I would be sent later

as tensions at home got to breaking point). 

The promotion got us a fancy house but I hate it anyway.  A gingerbread oversized

ranch, a grand piano and new furniture all covered with plastic, except when the

company comes. There is a guest room with a door that goes outside and that room

has a bathroom right next to it.  I want it to be mine.

~

We had moved from one of the best school systems in the country to one of the

worst.  The Blacks and Whites knifed each other on the weekends and played

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chicken on the railroad tracks.  We were the only Jews in the North Palm Beach

school and students threw pennies at me one day, yelling, “Pick them up, Kike.”    

Mom admits the school’s not good and that we’ve moved from one of the best

school-systems in the country to one of the worst. My sister, Jackie is too smart for

the high school and the only other school is Catholic.  She enrolls in Rosarian

Academy and one night when she is 18 and I am eleven there is a big deal at dinner

because she tells Mom that because she refuses to kneel and kiss the Bishop’s ring

at the graduation she will not be aloud to attend. There is nothing that can be done. 

We are all very,  very sad. Jackie is always crying, always slamming the door to her

room, and always making speeches. Why are we in so much trouble and when is

Eleanor coming home? She’s not coming home ever, she hates it here.  I hate it here

too, but I have to stay.  It’s not fair. I hated TV.  Hated Disney World.  It wasn’t real

and it wasn’t interactive.  I wanted attention. My first poem.  Age eight.  “A house is

not a home.  A house that has high ceilings strives to be mighty but is not wise.” 

That’s all I remember.  I was home sick always.

Everyone at home and at school that thinks they know me keeps saying to “lighten

up”, or “don’t think so much”.

I was sitting at my desk. I’m eight, I say aloud to myself.  Eight. I’m never going to

forget this.  I hate my new life.  Eight. I don’t belong here. I’m eight and no matter

what they do,  I’m still me and I am eight.

~

fifth grade/ the note

My teacher intercepts a note I am writing to David Ford and reads it aloud to the

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class:  “David, how come you never kiss me?  You tell everyone your going to kiss

me but you never do.”  

He added with a somber tone, “I didn’t know you were that kind of girl!” 

I run out of the room in tears. .

God, I promise I am not going to be one of them ever, even if I could  I don’t care if I

turn all the kids here and even the ones in charge against me. They can’t do anything

to me.  Even if they throw me in jail or throw me out of here, I’m still me and I’m not

scared because no matter what I’m not them and I don’t belong here in the first place

and Daddy did this and  I hate them all, all of them.

~

the sneer

We are the only Jews in the school and students threw pennies at me one day,

yelling, “Pick them up, Kike”. They are laughing and I’m supposed to run away but 

I’m so disgusted that I go over and say, “Oh good!” and pick them up. I want them to

know their antics have no meaning.  This confuses them and they stop. Now I am not

so much a Jew, as just “weird”.

I am chewing on my hair, experimenting with sneers. 

I have trained my upper lip to curl up in a sneer. after the move, it curled up when I

didn’t want it to.  I experiment with my hands, holding my wrists out so they can drop

daintily and no one will notice my sneer.

Sixth grade 

Mister Touchette is writing statistics on the blackboard that he claims proves that

black people are inferior to whites.  I don’t know enough to tell him that the criteria for

45

the test was devised by whites, and makes cultural assumptions and value

judgments that do not relate to non-Caucasians or to press him on his sources. 

However, I have thus far been raised by intellectuals and Jews who have led me to

believe that I’m allowed to debate ideas in schools.  

I try, clumsily, arguing with Mister Touchette, but  what can I say to his theories and

numbers?  He gives me a menacing smile and soon I just burst into tears and start

yelling “but it’s wrong!” He comes over to where I am sitting and moves my desk into

the back corner of the classroom.  The next day when the class is taking turns going

into the “igloo” in the classroom I am not to go in because I’ve been insubordinate he

says.  He gives me a pointed hat, a dunce cap, he calls it to teach me some humility. 

I am not to go into the igloo for a week.  Sitting at my desk with the slanted top that

one opened from the front,  I am memorizing this moment, the feel of the wood

beneath my fingers, the intensity of the sun on my white cotton dress shoulders, the

hungry tight feeling in my belly before lunch, the shock of adrenaline and the certain

realization that the world is no longer a place in which I want to be a member. I begin

saying a sort of litany to myself:  I will never forget this.  I am twelve years old and I

am sitting here in the sixth grade and I promise that I will never ever forget how I feel

right now.  I make a decision,  or rather, a decision sets in.  I will fight the bastards. 

All of them.  Forever.  No matter what. I test it. “You could get suspended,” I say to

myself: “OK”....”You could get expelled”: OK...”You could get arrested”: OK, “You

could get thrown out of your house”: OK, “You could go to jail” OK, “You could die,”

OK.

~

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Sunday School

The Sunday School teacher was sitting on the corner of his desk, smoking a cigarette

and letting the ashes drop on the floor. His lecture of the week was on “human

decency”. My arm shot up: I want to know how he could talk that way when he

himself was being dirty?  There are never answers to such questions, I’m learning,

only consequences, they call them.  He promptly sends me out of the room by the

sleeve, to the rabbi, who calls my mother with the news I am being expelled for

impudence.  She tells me this in the car, but she doesn’t elaborate, question or

lecture.  She never even mentions the subject.  Ever.

Cindy making a scene in homeroom

Cindy and I had the same home room in seventh grade.

“You look terrible today” Cindy told her homeroom teacher, in all earnest concern. It

got worse.  One morning she started laughing in class, fell onto the floor and lay

there writhing with laughter and tears, had to be physically moved, and started a

minor hysteria in that seventh grade home-room.  They carried her out, laughing the

whole way.

She started giggling after we said the pledge of allegiance.  We all giggled too.  But

then when she began outright laughing, the giggles became uncomfortable and

eventually subsided around her.  When the teacher asked her what was it that she

found so funny, she didn’t answer.  Rather she laughed even more, and louder,

hysterically.  Until finally the teacher came over with her ruler, but Cindy, at the point

when the teacher was almost pointing the ruler at her arm, Cindy fell onto the floor

and lay there and writhed with laughter until I feared she might pee her pants.  The

teacher became alarmed and sent for the principle but when he came in Cindy was

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crying with laughter, clearly unable to stop.  They carried her out.  I don’t remember a

word being said about the incident at home or at school, although at school there

surely must have been talk.  I was so worried that the rumor would spread that it had

been me and not her that I probably lost complete awareness of her from that day on,

more or less.  I only know that Cindy was no longer in that homeroom after that.  No

discussion.

~

trading classes

In seventh grade we traded places in a junior-high school class.  Cindy had

successfully taken a test that I wasn’t prepared for and offered to take it for me,

pretending to be me. I went to her class; no one knew the difference. It was too

much. I felt that someone should know. So I wrote in a note to someone in which I

discussed our prank. The teacher intercepted it. First he looks at it, then at me, and

then he tries to hide his amusement. “Get up,” he says, clearly trying to keep a

straight face, “we’re going to the Principal’s office”. He hands him the note and to my

disgust, I find they’re both barely suppressing amused smiles. I am scolded, told

never to do this again, and sent back to my own class. Then Cindy is pulled and

given similar treatment. For the rest of the day, the students are atwitter at learning of

our charade. It seems that I am the only one who is not amused. The entertainment

factor only added to my feeling of being “other” and my confusion about just who I

was without Cindy. Naturally, I decide I have to get free of her.  Even the serious

guys are enjoying the charade that is obviously ruining my life. I began saying to hell

with Cindy’s unmet needs, overlapping and colliding with my own.

There is only one thing left to do: Kill her.

48

There is more than one way to kill a twin, the physical being the most obvious but

least sophisticated. As virtually every twin I’ve ever met will attest to, you can do it

most cleanly and candidly by becoming the good twin. Then the other will find herself

taking on what’s left, which is by default, to fulfill her role as, and “the bad twin”.  Well,

Cindy took to her role like a fish to water.

Insubordination

We are eating lunch in the cafetorium; a combination cafeteria and auditorium.  The

teachers take monitor us by standing on the stage with a microphone and calling out

to various students to pick up garbage or lower their voices or get back on the

benches.  The monitor also peruses the tables and prods students with a measuring

stick and then points to various garbage she wishes them to remove from near or

around the tables.  I am in the middle of an intense discussion with a classmate

about racism and I feel the point of the stick on my leg.  I ignore it.  I am slapped with

the stick.  I look over and she is now pointing to a paper on the floor a few feet from

where I sit that I did not put there.  The monitor is standing closer to it than I am. 

“What?” 

“Pick up the napkin”. 

“Do it yourself!”  The kids become hushed. The monitor looks like she’s seen a

ghost.  She tells me she is giving me one chance to apologize and pick it up and

when I protest, “you’re closer!  I’m talking about something important!” The kids go

wild cheering and clapping, and the woman storms out of the cafetorium. She returns

with the dean and they lead me away.  In the office I feel euphoric, thinking I will

expose the sham of the system and be rewarded.  I stop ranting and begin crying

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about how oppressive the teachers are when the dean remains silent.  Finally when I

am only sniffling, the dean simply asks me, “Do you want a paddling or a three day

suspension?”  I know Mom would never allow them to touch me when she comes to

get me.  In the car, she is silent again, like she’s trying to figure something out again. 

But there is no conversation at all.  She makes a turn over the bridge to Singer Island

and without explanation we go to the beach.  The following two days we return there

and still there is nothing said.  And no sign from Dad that he even knows what has

transpired. 

When I wasn’t in trouble in school I was in trouble at home. I did years in the isolation

chamber of my bedroom. Once though, when I was fourteen and considering my

options between living and dying, after being grounded for a month for arguing about

wanting to go to a slumber party with some girls my Mom disapproved of, I was lying

on my bed with tears streaming down my face, praying to something vague with all

my might; begging for release,  when I felt a breeze and a presence blow into the

room through the window.  “You’ll find people who are more like you in 2 years,” the

powerfully soothing Presence promised. I fell asleep, reassured.

~

The Interruption

Circa Ninth grade. My parents were entertaining guests at home that evening.  I went

out in to the living room, where my folks were, and announced that Orin and I had a

spat and that he had left and I was going to bed.  I thought I’d sleep in the guest

room (which, incidentally had an outside door).

I went into the bedroom, locked the door, let Orin in.  Then I remembered that Mom

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or dad usually let the dog in the room where I slept.  I went out to the living room

again, nonchalantly requesting that they not let the dog into the room that night. 

They looked confused, but shrugged and said “O.K.” I went back to the room, glad

that they didn’t know me better, and amazingly, I forgot to lock the door.

For some reason my parents chose that night to show the company the house.  We

were in bed when the door suddenly opened and the light came on.  “And this is the

guest room” my father proudly announced…. There was a shocked silence, the lights

suddenly went out and my father forced out the words, “I’m sorry….I ...didn’t

know...anyone was here….”.  Then the door closed and the company was ushered

out of the house  as my parents mournfully apologized and the company awkwardly

tried to make it o.k.   I could hear the company saying, “We’ve heard that these

things just happen.  We don’t think less of you because of this, really...” Then there

was uncomfortable silence as my parents ushered them out the door, like people at a

funeral.

I witnessed a guilty boy sitting on the bed, catatonic, head bowed and in shock, a boy

who wanted desperately to make a good impression on others.   

My father came in, also in a daze.  It seemed that he had no idea weather to be mad

or what.  Looking back on that man, although he was a mathematical and musical

genius, I think that he felt completely helpless and incompetent when it came to

dealing with and responding to real life.  However, I’m also thankful that he lacked a

real response at this time.

He gropingly said, “so Orin, ...how’s your fathers’ business?   

Orin (the Catholic) just sat there with his shirt open, hanging his head.  “I’m sorry

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about what I did to you’re daughter, Mister Odess,” he said.  

I wrote him off right then and there. Tomorrow I would beat him up if I could.

My mother had some sleeping pills in her medicine cabinet, and I would just go and

take enough to kill myself.  I was headed to her bathroom, when she saw me. 

Sometimes mothers know instinctively when their children are going to do something

really crazy, A look of deep concern showed through her upset face.  “Laura, What

Happened?”......the wheels in her head must have been turning fast....”Did you have

a fight?  Were you making up?”

She was providing me with a line, to save face, especially from my father. 

“Uh,...yeah, we were just talking things out....””Why were you lying down, half

undressed?.... Was it hot? Were you tired?”  Sometimes  my mother was super

human. 

“Yeah, you know how it gets at night....” My father walked by. 

My mother said with strong undertones, “Lenny...they were just TALKING, Lenny”....

There was a long hesitation.  We never talked about it.  

That summer I was shipped off to camp Blue Star.  Somehow the two events were

connected.  It was run by a bunch of very mean, promiscuous teens. The last day of

camp I received 2 awards;  the “camp philosopher” and the “follow him even though

he doesn’t want you” award for falling in love with a boy who was older than me.

~

Betsy and Nora

On weekends the kids play chicken on the railroad tracks.  In the next town over,

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Rivera Beach, there are fights between the blacks and whites.  Knives.  Don’t go to

Rivera Beach at night, Mom warns.  In fact don’t sleep over anyone’s house.  It’s not

safe.  But my one friend, Betsy lives in North Palm Beach, like us, it’s a suburb.  Still,

something could happen.  

Nothing is going to happen. 

Betsy’s other friend Nora is a bully.  

One day I am walking home from school and Nora pulls over to me on her bike and

grabs the string on the end of my wrap-around skirt and yanks it.  It comes off and

she takes off with it and I am crouching on the sidewalk crying as the boys on their

bikes pile up to laugh at the spectacle of me in my underwear. 

I’m at Betsy’s and Nora shows up with bruises on her fat face.  She whispers

something to Betsy.  We’re raiding the nestles crunch bars, the ones they used to

make about and inch and a half thick.  I ignore her, I can’t believe her Mom is so nice

she keeps the fridge stocked like this with chocolate.  Betsy and Nora ask me if I

want them to make a clay mask of my face, a paper mache’ type of thing.  I don’t

really want them to but for once Nora is being nice to me so I agree.  I have to get

undressed and get in the tub because it’s a messy ordeal, they insist.  The thought of

going home and leaving Betsy is too painful.  I conceded.  In the tub they slap flower

and water on my face, thickly  and leave.  I am waiting but I don’t hear them.  I call

out after 10 or twenty minutes, thinking maybe they just took the dogs out for a pee

and they’ll be back.  After a half hour I get mad and get out of the tub.  I dry myself off

on the huge bath towels her nice mother keeps the bathroom stocked with and look

for my clothes.  They’re not in the bathroom.  They’re not in Betsy’s room.  They’re

53

not anywhere.  Finally I call mom to get me and climb miserably into the station

wagon wrapped in a towel.

Glue

Circa age fourteen. I hear there is something called Pot.  I want some more than

anything but I don’t know anyone who actually has seen the stuff. In Eighth grade I

begin to sniff glue after school with Betsy .  Her father is in the insurance business

and is on a drinking binge because there has been another hurricane and what will

he do, he can’t possibly pay all the customers with claims.  Whenever he comes

home she starts screaming insanely to him to get away from her but I can’t see why

since he only sort of stumbles into the living room and he’s only trying to say he’s

sorry.  

We sniff until we fall on her bedroom floor and my head is spinning so fast I’m a

record player and a record is playing like the munchkins in my head. The next time I

am at Betsy’s her father comes in reeling and stinking of alcohol.  Betsy is screaming

I hate you don’t touch me and he’s crying and begging for forgiveness and she’s

being so mean.  I can’t understand what she’s so terrified and enraged about.  

Betsy’s mother comes in with the two huge dogs; they’re wet from the beach, where

she takes them all of the time.  Then she leaves again with the dogs and Betsy

shows me something secret.  She pulls out a gallon of gasoline from under her bed

and tells me that if I put my hands over the hole and breathe the stuff for a while I’ll

feel really funny.   I try it and hate it.  All of the hate outside of me goes inside of me

and it’s under my control when its in me instead, somehow.   I feel a wicked self-

distaining pleasure as I inhale the fumes and soon I am passed out almost on her rug

saying over and over again, “I feel like a record player…I feel like a record player.”

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One day I go to Math class in Junior high and I can’t think.  I can’t remember how to

do algebra.  The same thing happens in French.  Then in History.  I decide I am

retarded and swear to myself and whatever it is that is always listening in on me, to

keep it a secret.  When report card times come the teachers give me D’s for showing

that I’m making an effort and for crying.  But in creative writing and in Art I get A’s. 

I’m a brilliant retard.  A lunatic genius a genius lunatic.  What is wrong with me?  

What is going on?  

Mom and Dad see nothing.  Only that my smile is gone.  I don’t know why but they

don’t rile me about the bad grades.  Somehow everyone knows I am trying.  Every

now and then when Dad explodes, he yells “What is Wrong with you?” and I don’t tell

him I wish I knew.  I think there’s nothing wrong with me at those times because he’s

so much worse. One time he gives me a black eye. I don’t care what he does to my

body, I’m numb.  It’s my mind that counts.  They have company over and the

company asks me what happened to my eye and I say nonchalantly, “Oh, that? 

Daddy hit me.”  No one, not even Dad says a word.  Not then, not later.  That’s the

way it was; they punished you with silence.  Somewhere along the way I get the idea

I’m strong.  “The strong one”.  Mom always pleads with me to give in to Cindy, give

her the good nylon socks that don’t fall down around your ankles like the cotton ones. 

“You’re the strong one.”  She says.  I think to myself, “So this is what it is like to be a

grown up and sigh at my noble martyr role, like mom.  But I can’t be like her.  I’ll

never measure up.  If I do, sooner or later I’ll blow it and it will be worse because it

will be expected, the sacrifices will come to look normal, and that ,I can not ever

afford.  

55

Ninth Grade- Getting Drunk with Jill and Tammy

~

Dad’s business failure

Dad buys another business on the side in fences and awnings so he can be a real

success, which means being his own boss.  He doesn’t know how to talk to the help. 

He wants to be fair and to set an example even to all of the racists around us and he

hires mostly blacks and a screwball manager who is not black.  He gets in the red, to

the tune of thirty thousand dollars, which back then was like a quarter of a million and

announces at dinner that if he doesn’t get over this it is going to  kill him. 

Mom and Dad announce at dinner that we are going back to Connecticut to start all

over again. 

Return to West Hartford/ dad’s diagnosis

Dad buys a much smaller house than we’ve ever had before and I am enraged. He

says it’s because soon it will only be him and Mom living there.  I am a junior in high

school .

Dad announced at dinner that he had been recently diagnosed with terminal stomach

cancer.

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Steve D.

My junior year in high school I told Cindy about “this awesome boy” I’d just met, who

was coming over; all-the-while, feeling good because she too had found someone,

just that day, that she liked. My good feelings for her abruptly changed when it turned

out to be the same “guy”. Mom said I should give him to Cindy, as if a boyfriend was

just an extra pair of socks. While sharing clothes was unreasonable enough an

expectation, sharing and trading off people was out of the question. 

~

1970 Spring sprawled on your parents’ blue living room rug covered with sheets,

white paper, acrylics, soft white brushes I felt completely lost what to do with your

tools a beauty that was yours only painting away even Surrealistic Pillow couldn’t

rescue me with some clue to entrance into the garden where you dined, The Source

where Art was served. My river of creativity was dammed, had flowed into grief over

Dad’s cancer blaming flooding me  with fear that you, too would reject me. 

Then, there was you saying you were seeing someone new, that I was too sad and I

felt there was no me without the possibility of loving the way of you: thin lips, gray

eyes, I only existed in your awe of me when I’d been enough, enough on the bed, 

mouthing you, your chest was still hairless (a little concave) your tongue delicious

inside me I held your perfect sensibility.  I’d found a way into your Art then though

your parents hated me with silent disapproval, they didn’t mind anything else that you

loved. You were the stoned music you were sex and love you were me sitting in a

small den, my hand up as high as I dared on your thigh with your mother skulking in

57

the nearby clean kitchen at first I ‘d been your wise woman but later I felt like a wet

animal on their sofa, with their son wondering what exactly was wrong with me.... 

who made me so inferior? 

I discovered too late that it was not me, but our fearful parents to whom sex was not

beauty budding they all four feared the young Jewish woman ready to give all she

had to a shy tall Christian artist who smoked too much pot and loved his parents very

much, or so he claimed. 

I thought then that I was unworthy it was somehow my doing that pain killing my

father demanding of me to always be virginally lonely, and now, thirty years later I

find you online, and you fell into addiction I have my health, I’m younger now yet

amongst friends and family, 

I find that I still slip into a fissure of sadness that’s been carved so deeply in me, so

deep that even when painting or potting, this pain of rejection refuses to heal, except

while making love,  as if only someone reaching up inside of me can touch and heal

my pain.

New Hampshire/ Dad’s Satori  

I was on a bus up to a commune near the University of New Hampshire.

Settling in to my seat on the bus, I nervously wiped my tears.  Talking to myself,

elated, confused, and bewildered.  “This is real. My God!  Laughing and crying, 

disoriented, a long held prisoner suddenly released without money, rich with

excitement , spacious unknowing. Thinking “I don’t know what is going to happen to

me but at least Something will happen!” Separation from accusation, feeling my own

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natural goodness, for a change.

A commune in New Hampshire, an American Indian, tall, sulking.  I take to his bed

surprising and unsettling him, he whom I’d met a weeks before and had invited me,

seemed less sturdy than he looked.  He was very tall, had long braids, dark reddish

skin. I took him like an animal takes meat, or like trying ethnic food, he was offended. 

And in bed there I found there was nothing inside.  It was very strange.  I thought

exotic but it was meat and he was not connecting with what was happening. I’d

known boys who were not really interested in knowing me, taking advantage of me. 

But now it was the other way around.  I was attracted to this boy solely because of

the way he looked and he must have felt that.  Because when it was over he became

very upset. He was crying, saying “That’s it.  I’m never sleeping with anyone who

doesn’t love me again.”

I couldn’t stay by morning, the misery hung between us.  I called my parents.

My mother answered the phone.  I said, “It’s me. I’m O.K.”  There was silence on the

other end.  Then “Where are you?”  “I’m in New Hampshire.  I’m not coming home

unless I have total freedom.  No more rules, no more punishments, no more blame.”

“You can have whatever you want.  Lennie has said to tell you this.  Whatever you

want.  Just come home.” And I did. 

We had family therapy. Dad wanted to come to some kind of terms with us. After two

meetings, Dad announced that we didn’t need the therapist any more. We could have

our own meetings.  He promised that everything was going to be a lot different, a lot

more trusting and freeing at home because something amazing had been occurring

in his mind and spirit.

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Mom informed us that he was in what Alan Watts, or Martin Bubber, described as a

state of “Satori”.  I hoped feverishly and against all odds, that it would hold.

Dad called a family meeting and announced he was no longer afraid of anything, not

even dying, that he felt like a different person—that he was a different person: “I’m

not afraid of anything at all, not even dying!” Dad said to us girls, “You think you’ve

had trips.  Well, I’ve had the real thing.  I was there.  Back in Africa, leading a safari

out of danger.  And I tell you, I’m no longer afraid of anything, not even dying.

Insert stitches

Then he had a setback. 

Stitches 

After Dad’s brief period of enlightenment my father had to go back into the hospital to

have three quarters of his stomach removed. Afterwards, when a stitch broke, so that

he literally spilled his guts, and he was in delirium and he’d asked Mom, “You don’t

mind do you?” She’d wanted to say yes, give him permission to move on  now that

he’d made peace with us girls.  Typically, she fought her instincts instead, said what

Hollywood would have had her say:  No. You’ve got to stay here with us, hang in and

fight (with us?). When he came out after that looking like death on legs, I felt so

betrayed. He’d returned from a long stay in the hospital, where he’d spent delirious

weeks, following the complications with the stitches. The doctor had expected him to

die, but he’d come home instead, a pale skeleton of a man. He didn’t die, out of

respect to Mom’s request. Those events had served to cause him to lose his amazing

enlightenment.

Meanwhile, Dad had had a terrible problem.  He’d told Mom in not so many words

that he felt complete, ready to go. He did this by simply turning to her one night and

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asking, “It’s OK now, isn’t it?” Meaning, can I please die now?

You’ll be able to carry on won’t you?  

But Mom made herself answer what she imagined the Hollywood version would have

her say.  No.  In her head and heart she wanted to say yes but she didn’t. So the

cancer was eating my fathers stomach.  He had to get three quarters of it removed

and then his stitches broke and his guts literally spilled.  When he insisted he would

come home and play tennis again, and miraculously walked out of the hospital, he

brought into the house the equivalent of the grim reaper.  My Dad was gone.  Fear

filled his hollowed out sockets from which protruded the bulging eyes of the walking

dead.  I was completely freaked.  He took to screaming and crying and then ignoring.

I was heartbroken and couldn’t find it in myself to forgive him no matter his condition. 

It was like asking me to befriend the Devil.  I was terrified.

He’d returned home a ghost in the winter, 90 pounds, eyes wide with terror, a scowl

for a face.  I looked away from the grim reaper, sitting across from me at dinner, not

talking, not eating, glaring at me as if I were harming him with my very presence. He

then reversed his formerly, permissive stance, tightening our curfews and lashing out

at me when I forgot to lock the door, asking what the hell was wrong with me. His

sound was hollow and echoed as a shadow; his pained and uncertain gate, that of a

disembodied spirit wandering around in total darkness.