Happy Family (22 page)

“Solomon?” Since their fight, she's taken to calling her father by his first name because it irritates him. He is wearing a dark, pin-striped suit and a bow tie; his rusty gray hair raked across his head looks as if it might spring up at the slightest provocation. “What are you doing here?”

“I was looking for you,” he says. “Your mother gave me your schedule. You've got a class in there at ten forty-five, yes?” Since when did his voice lilt like a Canadian's?

“What, you're thinking of auditing? Spending a little father-daughter time?” She lights a cigarette. Sol's nostrils flare in disapproval but he doesn't say anything.

“No to auditing and yes to the other,” he says, resisting the urge to wave the smoke out of his face. “I'm a full-time student here. At the law school, right down the street by the gymnasium. Have you checked it out? Great tennis courts and the swimming pool—outstanding.”

“Law school,” Cheri says with incredulity. “Here at NYU?”

“It certainly disproves the adage you can't teach an old dog new tricks.” He laughs uncomfortably. “I'm on an accelerated program. Should be a cakewalk compared to med school. It's not a career change, more like an expansion.” Sol's eyes squint in the sun, making him look like a mole.

“And you're telling me all this because…?”

“Because I thought we could spend a little time together. I wanted to tell you personally, and we haven't crossed paths at the house very much lately. Let me take you to lunch,” Sol says. “After your class. One o'clock at Cicero's in SoHo?”

“Can't. I have to get to comparative religion. Sorry to ruin your reunited-and-it-feels-so-good moment but I'm late. See you around campus.”

“Cheri,” Solomon calls as she's walking away. She turns around. “I'd like to believe that it's never too late—or too early—to learn something.”

But his overture was too little, too late. The last thing Cheri wanted to do was revisit the fallout of their fight. The idea of seeing her father at school infuriated her. It wasn't as if he needed another degree on his wall. How dare he follow her?

“Why, why, why can't you be nice to your father? Please, he came with the olive branch in his beak,” Cici begged when Cheri finally deigned to answer the phone one day just as she was heading out of the apartment. As Cheri suspected, her mother was behind all of this.

“Right. And if I sent him doves, he'd send them back stuffed with olives and capers and ask you to cook them.”

“You are tearing my heart,” her mother said.

Cheri finally agrees to let her father take her to lunch. That phrasing bothers her. She feels like she's a briefcase that her father carries into Le Cirque, throws down on the chair next to him.
The briefcase will have the snails.
Actually, he says, “Let's start with some snails for the table.” Because the table really enjoys mucus-producing garden pests. Her mother thought her father was manly when he ordered for her. Cheri didn't.

“Well, then,” he says after the waiter leaves. “Let's chat.”

“About what?”

“Tell me what your life is like. What courses you're taking, other than the prerequisites. How do you like your professors? Who are your friends? Do you have a significant other?”

“Significant other? Who says that in normal conversation? You think you're going to catch me off guard so I'll admit I'm gay?”

“Okay, let the record be amended: Do you have a boyfriend?”

The waiter arrives with their snails and Cheri fixates on the garlic butter pooling in the indentations of the snail tray. The risk factor is at red. Her father has never met a condiment that didn't somehow end up on his face; sauces were also fair game.

“So, where were we?” Sol asks. “You were going to tell me about college life. You found a major yet?”

“I'm thinking about comparative religion. And yes, I have male friends, some of whom I've slept with.”

Sol ignores the thrown gauntlet.

“Religion? Where did this interest come from?” A portion of snail butter drips out of the corner of Sol's mouth and dribbles chin-ward.

“Well, not from you guys or that Catholic elementary school you sent me to.”

“But what are you expecting to do with a religion major? The job field after graduation has to be pretty narrow.”

“Isn't a liberal arts education supposed to be about learning?” Cheri answers emphatically. “If I just wanted a job, I'd go to trade school. Religion is actually one of the broadest fields. It intersects with history, art, language, politics. Wars are always being fought over religion. People are adamant that one is better than the other but they're all kind of saying the same thing.”

Sol nods. “Organized religion is just another political system, especially Catholicism. The whole point is to create a hierarchy that is sustainable over centuries and, of course, offer the promise of salvation if you follow A, B, and C. I always found the history of the church surrounding the Council of Nicaea especially interesting.”

It's shocking, but Cheri thinks she may actually have something to talk to Sol about. “Since when are you so interested in the Catholic Church? Religion is Cici's thing. It always seemed like she was dragging you along at Christmas and Easter.”

“I had to learn about it when I converted,” Sol says, looking around for the wine steward. “To marry your mother.”

“Converted? From what?”

“My family was Jewish. I thought your mother might have mentioned that.”

“Nope,” Cheri says, amazed, once again, at the lack of communication in her family. Sol looks relieved to see the wine steward appear; he puts on his reading glasses and makes a to-do over swirling the glass and savoring the taste of an expensive Montrachet. “And you can pour some for my daughter.” Cheri had been drinking wine since she was a teenager, but her father acts as if he's bestowing a great favor on her.

“To continuing education,” he says, holding up his glass and clinking it against hers. She takes a big sip.

“So why are you really going to NYU? Did you just wake up one day and think,
Man, I've really got to go to law school
?”

“Not at all,” he says, stabbing another snail. “You sure you don't want to try one? They're delicious.”

“Screw the snails. I'm being serious.”

“Screw the snails. That would be a good name for one of your punk bands.” Cheri slits her eyes. “It's a joke. Come on, Cheri, I know I'm an old fart but I can still make a joke.”

“I answered your questions. You can answer mine.” Cheri wonders if he's going to wipe his face before more butter settles into the cleft of his chin.

“My lawyers were costing me a fortune. I figured if you can't beat them, join them. Besides, it's good to have an intellectual challenge and the law school here is excellent.” He pauses and sets down his fork. “I also thought I'd see if we might repair things. On neutral ground.”

“I'm sure that's what Mom wants you to say. She called me too. But we don't have to play this whole game. We can wave to each other across the street and call it lunch. Tell her whatever you need to tell her. She'll never know the difference.”

“But I will. I'll know.”

“Sol,” she says, because she can't stand it anymore, “you have butter all over your chin.”

The father-and-daughter lunches and sometime dinners continued, about once every other month, up until her junior year. The conversations adhered to well-trod paths: the legal machinations involved with Sol's patents, questions about Cheri's classes, and the occasional jab about her needing to figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up. And while they didn't Kumbaya afterward or take a stroll in Central Park to look at the stars, they found their sweet spot, surprisingly, in world religion. Cheri was passionate about her comparative mythology course and inspired by Joseph Campbell's
Hero with a Thousand Faces.
She even managed to audit a class Campbell taught at Sarah Lawrence that interwove threads from pagan and monotheistic religions, art, literature, and philosophy and introduced her to Sumerian gods and Mesopotamian studies. At first Sol pooh-poohed myth as the study of fairy tales, but Cheri overcame his objection by passionately drawing a circular diagram on the tablecloth (in pen, gasp) illustrating the stages of the hero's journey from his call to adventure through his return. Sol raised an eyebrow, intrigued.
I'm not as stupid as you thought,
Cheri felt like saying.

While Sol liked to hold forth, Cheri managed to have a few decent two-way conversations with him. In the process, Sol revealed surprising things about himself. If anyone was the archetype of the good son, it was Sol. A straitlaced doctor—he was the paragon of success, a Jewish parent's wet dream. He was everything Cheri wasn't. So why did Sol's parents disown him? Sol explained that he was a disappointment to his father because he chose medicine over the family schmatta business. His mother had supported his ambitions, but she was horrified by his marriage to a shiksa, and his conversion was viewed as a complete betrayal. Cheri had had no idea that religion played such a major part in her parents' relationship.

It was starting to dawn on Cheri that there was more to Sol than she had realized. And it seemed like Sol, who had always seemed either repelled by Cheri's tough exterior or totally perplexed by her, was recognizing the same thing about her. Still, they were safest when keeping their conversation strictly in the realm of the intellectual. When they veered outside of that, they were back to being two radically different people thrust into a biologically false role. Then they'd revert to their familiar pattern of anger. Anger was protective, safe. But even though Cheri would never admit it, she liked the attention Sol gave her at these lunches. She claimed that she went only out of obligation to her mother, but a part of her hoped that she'd find a sliver of something that would justify her relationship with Sol. She wasn't quite sure what she'd found, but she started to think she wanted to know more.

W
hen it was all over, Taya dubbed 1982 “The Year of the Outed Fathers.” Taya's father's sex scandal played out in gossip columns like Page Six and in the tabloid headlines, thanks to her father's wealth and her mother's celebrity as a former movie star. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars and half-truths later, the Resnicks' money and stand-by-your-man solidarity prevailed. The unveiling of Sol Matzner, on the other hand, had Cheri and Taya as the only witnesses.

It was in their junior year, after Taya's twentieth-birthday bash, that Cheri again ran into her father where she least expected him. This time, he was not alone.

Taya rented a gallery in SoHo for the party, and when Cheri has enough of tight leather, clove cigarettes, and angry art, she slips out the side door. It's late September and the Feast of San Gennaro in nearby Little Italy is in full swing. The scents call her like a barker:
Come closer, little girl, have a
zeppola,
some braciole; we won't tell your mother you ate street food with us lowly Italian Americans.
Her mother took her to the festival when she was little, but it was a pale imitation of how things were done in Italy. After years of complaining about the red sauce and bastardization of
la bella lingua,
Cici said
fanculo
to that patron saint of the barbarian southerners.

Cheri hasn't been to the festival in years, but walking under the green, white, and red banners, she's transported back to the loud, we're-one-big-Italian-family party she loved as a kid. What she most vividly remembers is the clown in the dunking machine. Whether you hit the bull's-eye—causing the clown to drop into the water below—or not, you'd get, “Fuck you, you cocksucker motherfucker, I'll yank you so hard I'll pull your balls through your mouth.” Cheri was eight years old the first time she encountered the clown. “But I'm a girl,” she said as Mama pulled her away from the booth, shouting her own obscenities. “I don't have balls.” Cheri loved that clown; he was what being Italian was all about.

As Cheri strolls down Mulberry Street eating
zeppole
out of a paper bag, she glances at the entrance to the Most Precious Blood Church. Men who look like they could be extras in
The Godfather
are gathered outside, smoking cigars by the statue of San Gennaro. And there, behind a lady with her three kids squeezed into a stroller for two, is her father. For a second, Cheri's view is obscured, but then her father reappears with his hand on the shoulder of a blond woman, ushering her through the crowd, up Broome Street. The woman has her mother's stature and her hair length and looks around her age. But on second glance Cheri knows it definitely isn't Cici. This woman is wearing flat shoes and carrying a functional black briefcase like she came here straight from work; she also looks distinctly American. She has a gelato in her hand, and her face is turned to Sol. Before Cheri can move closer, they are swallowed up by the flow of revelers, reduced to dots in a pointillist painting.

It takes Cheri a while to digest what she's seen. Her father has never gone to the Feast of San Gennaro with them, so why was he here today with this woman? There was nothing illicit about their behavior. The woman was probably a business associate. But something about the way her father was shepherding her seemed a little too familiar, bordering on possessive. Cheri dumped the rest of the
zeppole
in a trash can and ducked into the nearest subway station to head home.

What she saw that night gnaws at Cheri over the next few weeks. If their lunches had taught her anything, it was that there was a lot about her father she didn't know. She vows to forget the incident, wall it up like asbestos. But one night, as she heads to the White Horse Tavern to meet Taya for a few beers and a ride home to Jersey for the weekend, she is struck by an insatiable desire to know more. She calls Taya from a pay phone: “Change of plans. Can you pick me up at Mercer between Eighth and Waverly in about twenty minutes? That's eight o'clock real time, not your time.” While she waits, she realizes it was a bad idea to cut the fingers off her gloves. Cheri blows on her hands for warmth, then hugs her thrift-store coat closed as she heads down Eighth Street and toward the garage where her father parks his car.

She knows Solomon will be in his evening class, after which, Cici informed her earlier that day, he is staying in the city for the weekend to attend a medical convention. That was why Cici had begged Cheri to come home for one of her rare visits.

Cars honk and swerve to avoid Taya as she pulls up in her purple Camaro and tries to park, almost hitting Cheri in the process.

“I'm going to assume that wasn't on purpose,” Cheri says, plopping into the passenger seat, shutting the door, and holding her icy hands against the hot air vent.

“First: What are we doing here? Second: What are we doing here? And third, I've got pot and there's a pipe around here somewhere, so whatever we're doing, let's get stoned first.” There's a boot poking Cheri in the ass, makeup spilling out of the glove compartment, and something that looks like a plumbing part under her seat. “Give it here,” Taya says impatiently, then she packs the plumbing part with weed. Cheri stares out of the window. What if Sol walked into the parking lot while she was dealing with the pipe, what if they missed him?

“My grandparents are in Montclair right now expecting me for dinner. I bagged Chandra Beekman's book signing to aid and abet you. You're not getting any of this”—she wiggles the bong—“or going anywhere until you tell me what we're doing.”

“There he is!” Cheri says, pointing in the direction of the garage's entrance.

“Who's
he,
the parking guy?”

“My father.” Cheri grabs the bong and takes a hit. “He's going to pull out in a big silver Mercedes any second.”

“So what do you want to do, follow him?” It takes only a beat for Taya to catch on. “Oh, fuck. Now your dad too?” “I don't know. But I saw him with some blond woman. Walking, not doing anything,” Cheri looks out the window again. “It's probably nothing.”

“But enough of a something that you want to follow him.” Taya takes a hit of weed. “I can't believe our fucking fathers. Mine kept saying it was all a lie, and me, like a dumb idiot, I believed him. I'm sorry, CM. I wish I'd never learned the truth. Maybe you're better off leaving it alone. Call me insensitive, but it's not like you like Sol anyway. Why find more reasons to hate him?”

In the darkness of the car Cheri feels something tugging at her heart. She and Taya always seemed to know where they were going even when they didn't. But in this moment Cheri feels like Dorothy following the yellow brick road. She's in touch with a childlike innocence she didn't know she had—a belief in the union of her parents. Dysfunctional as their threesome had always been, there's never been a doubt that Sol and Cici were devoted to each other. Cheri has lived for so long feeling that she hated Sol, but now it's more complicated to use that word or want to believe he'd give her more reason to use it. Taya chews on a cuticle and mutters, “Fucking fathers.”

Just as she takes another hit, Cheri sees the grille of the silver Mercedes poking into the street.

“There he is,” Cheri says. “Let's go!” When Taya hesitates, she adds, “Come on. If the situation were reversed, you know I'd do it for you.”

“I'm just thinking about you,” Taya says with concern, pulling into the street. “Let's just hope it really is nothing.”

They almost lose the Mercedes a couple of times as they follow it to the Cross Bronx Expressway. But swerving taxicabs and traffic lights do not deter Taya, who is as intrepid as she is reckless.

The Mercedes takes the Midland Ave. exit and winds its way into the town of Rye. A smattering of snow hits the windshield and melts on contact with the defroster's heat. Rye looks like Montclair or Scarsdale or any other affluent community, with its imposing driveways, stately brick houses, and oak trees that seem to stand up and scream as Taya's headlights swept past them. Cheri cautions her to stay farther behind the Mercedes. “Who can see anything in this weather?” Taya says. “If this snow keeps up, we could get stranded here.”

Sol's Mercedes pulls into the circular driveway of 5521 Forest Drive. The snow is lighter now, and the stone Tudor house looks like something out of an English storybook, with trees and topiaries in large pots lit up with small white lights. “Go behind that van; we don't want him to see us.” Cheri motions for Taya to park two houses down.

Sol gets out of his car and walks, briefcase in hand, to the front door of the house. He goes inside as the little white lights on the trees blink on and off, on and off. Did he have keys? Was the door left open for him? It's dark out and the distance between Taya's car and the front door is far enough that Cheri couldn't tell for certain. They sit listening to the hum of the heater and the
flip-flap
of the windshield wipers.

“Maybe it's someone he works with, and your dad is bringing him papers to sign.”

Cheri lights a cigarette and cracks her window.

“So now what?” Taya asks.

“I guess we wait. What else can we do? We can't knock on the door.” Cheri rubs a spot on the windshield, making a hole like she's ice fishing. Taya reaches into the backseat for more layers of clothing. She wraps a few sweaters around her. “Riding jacket or evening gown, your choice.” Cheri rubs the window to keep her spot clear.

“Fine, more insulation for me,” Taya says. “Are you hungry? I think I have a Slim Jim in my purse.” Cheri finishes her cigarette and rolls the window back up.

“When you say wait, do you mean for a little while? A long while? What if he doesn't come back out? I've got a full tank of gas but we can't keep the car running all night. And if we turn it off, we'll fucking freeze.”

“I don't know. It's not like I've done this before,” Cheri says. “Let's just see what happens.” Cheri doesn't take her eyes off her ice hole. The picture she sees through the patch in the window is like a snow globe after it's shaken and everything is settling into place.

“This calls for getting way sober or way stoned and I'm neither.” They light up another bowl to forget the cold, then another. Eventually, the twinkly lights on the house next door flicker, then go dark. The last thing Cheri remembers is looking up at the sky and thinking,
It's
like a giant black tongue, capturing the snowflakes.

With no one to maintain it, Cheri's ice hole closes in on itself.

Certain sounds immediately evoke a sense memory. The rhythmic sound of a shovel scraping the pavement says
Snow day, snow day,
and Cheri's dreaming mind conjures the image of her young self, dressed in her red parka and rubber boots, excited to see the world covered in white. Cheri bolts upright. It's light out. Taya's in the backseat buried beneath clothes and magazines. Cheri reaches over and turns the key in the ignition. She flips on the windshield wipers and the snow is swept aside. There he is, shoveling the driveway of 5521.

Sol wears his pants tucked into boots Cheri has never seen. She's also never seen him hold a shovel or a rake or do anything that Gusmanov could do. But her father is fully engrossed in his task, shoveling with determination Then Cheri notices a young boy, maybe five years old, sitting on the front steps of the house. He's dressed in a snow outfit, the kind that makes a crunchy rustle when you walk, watching Sol intently. When Sol motions to him, he comes running. Sol bends down and puts the boy's hands on the shovel's handle, on top of his; together, they are a great big machine for moving snow. The boy laughs, but his legs wobble and he takes a tumble in the snow. His hat falls off and his hair is a halo of strawberry curls, his little fists are at his eyes. If there had been any doubt in Cheri's mind before, there is none now. It isn't just that the boy has her father's red hair and fair complexion; it's the way he's looking at Sol, lifting his arms:
Pick me up.
Sol sweeps him up immediately. She experiences a frisson of that same primal need. She suddenly remembers falling, finding herself at the bottom of the slide at the park, in her favorite red parka: bright, loud, now dirty. Reaching toward him:
Pick me up, pick me up.
Her father looking at her like a package he doesn't know how to unwrap, then turning away. Cici's arms reaching in.

Sol sets his son down and brushes the snow off him. The blond woman from the Most Sacred Blood Church opens the door, smiling. She waves at them:
Come back inside.

Cheri has glimpsed an alternate universe, one that apparently exists alongside hers. What would happen if she blinked? Would she be in Montclair, walking in the snow up her driveway to find her mother waiting in the doorway in her bathrobe, her father behind her with a shovel, ready to clear their path?

“Oh, shit,” Taya says softly, leaning over Cheri's shoulder, seeing what she's seeing. Taya has raccoon eyes from last night's makeup and a sweater wrapped around her head. She puts her arm softly on Cheri's shoulder. “Let's get out of here,” she says.

Cheri doesn't see Sol for weeks after her secret trip to Rye. He is out of town on business; she has exams. It's easy to avoid him until there he is, standing outside her lecture hall, saying, “I'll walk you to your next class,” like they're in high school. She isn't prepared for the bile she tastes when she makes eye contact. She imagines him just a few hours ago handing his kid a Superman lunchbox.
Thanks, Dad,
she hears the mop-headed little boy say as he hugs Sol good-bye.

Sol leads her down the crowded hallway, making small talk. “There's another storm coming in; looks like we could get more snow.”