Riding Fury Home (12 page)

I PULLED MY MAIL out of my back pocket. The straw smelled musty and was itchy against my bare legs, but I ignored that. I leaned against the side of the wagon and opened my mother's letter first. It was all about her antiwar activities with her group, Women Strike for Peace. Mom wrote that she had come close to being arrested at a demonstration, and that a son of a friend had fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Things were serious, and sad. I got teary thinking of that boy having to run.

I put Mom's letter back in the envelope, shoved it in my pocket, and opened Dad's. The wagon hit a bump; yelps and shrieks interspersed the singing. I read the first couple sentences: “Dear Karen, Last week I married Catherine. It was a simple ceremony with just two witnesses and a judge . . . ” I leaned back hard, my throat a lump, looking skyward, the passing trees a blur.
Catherine?
She was a coworker of Dad's, in the chemistry group he headed. Once, Dad had taken me to the lab and introduced me to her, disappearing for a
while, leaving me alone with her. But he'd said nothing more about her. I didn't even know they were dating. She had knit me a ski sweater and matching hat, and I had just thought she was a nice lady who liked to knit. Why hadn't he told me? Why would he think I wouldn't wish him well? Hadn't I listened to all his complaints about Mom, nodding my head in sympathy? Didn't he know I was there for him? My indignation covered the deeper pain that I couldn't let myself acknowledge: the terrible loss of being Dad's one and only, his special girl he poured his heart out to. I couldn't let myself think that he was deserting me again, but my chest beat and pulsed, my throat ached with hurt.

 

 

IN THE FALL OF TENTH grade, there were no more special excursions with Dad. Instead, every other weekend I stayed at the two-bedroom apartment he now shared with Catherine in Highland Park, about twenty minutes from Millstone. From camp, I had sent them a letter of congratulations, written with forced good cheer. I had stuffed my rage behind phony good wishes, terrified of seeming resentful, but now, sitting with them at meals, my cheeriness wilted to a withdrawn, sullen silence. All I could manage were occasional compliments to Catherine on her cooking.

Catherine, with her big bones, small eyes, and wide Slavic face, was twenty-six, only eleven years older than me. Dad had mumbled only the barest explanation of why he hadn't told me about his marriage until afterward, saying their courtship had been kept a secret from Catherine's family. They were Catholic Ukrainians who'd emigrated to America when Catherine and her sister were children. It was easy for me to guess why they wouldn't find Dad suitable: He was divorced, a Jew, almost twenty years Catherine's senior, and
burdened with alimony payments for an unemployed, mentally ill ex-wife and child support for me, his fifteen-year-old daughter, who in a few years would need money to go to college.

In any case, Catherine seemed to have made up with her family, because she was often on the phone for a long time, speaking in Ukrainian. After dinner, Dad and I would move into the living room, decorated in Danish modern, while Catherine talked on the phone in the kitchen. Dad sat in a recliner, reading
The New Yorker
or the newspaper. I sat on the couch with my own book or sketchpad. After some uncomfortable interval of sitting in the living room, I would say, “I've got homework to do” and withdraw to the spare bedroom I used.

But I rarely did my homework. I had developed a bad habit of procrastinating, and forced myself to do it only at the last moment. Instead, I lay on the bed reading. Once the apartment fell quiet, and I could tell that Dad and Catherine had gone to bed, I turned on the old black-and-white TV. I watched through the late-night movies, exhausted, but too restless to sleep. Eventually, I drifted off, the voices from the screen weaving into my dreams. Other times, I turned off the TV to stare out the window. Across the way blinked the pink neon sign of a Dunkin' Donuts. The shop was closed, but the sign was lit through the night. I stared numbly at the pink glow, mesmerized by its rhythmic beat as it flashed on and off, on and off.

MY RIVER, THE MUDDY Millstone, was dying. Several years before, Dad had replaced our rotting wooden rowboat with an aluminum canoe. In the spring, summer, and fall, I often took the canoe out, paddling upriver. Occasionally, Mom came with me, but most often, I was alone. The trees that lined the riverbank reflected in the brown water, their leaves evolving from the pale green of spring to deep green summer foliage to autumn golds and rust. I would paddle upriver for a good hour, then drift back downstream, steering with my paddle, watching the ripples, relaxed and daydreamy. I knew the river's bends, where to avoid the old trees that had fallen in and lurked underwater, knew the patterns of bird migrations, the season of the geese's return.

The changes were subtle at first, just a few suds along the shoreline where the water lapped against the banks. Upriver, toward Princeton, there was a new housing development whose soapy runoff was invading the river. Over the course of my freshman year, the bubbles grew to great white foamy swatches swelling against the
riverbanks. Then the algae bloomed bright green, coating my paddle with each stroke. By the fall of my sophomore year, the stench began. The fish died en masse. They floated belly-up, their silver undersides coated with algae. I stopped canoeing, stopped going down to the river at all.

I retreated indoors. I still had no friends at Somerville High, no one with whom to share my antiwar activism or political beliefs. I was out of sync with most other girls' obsessions with makeup, fashion, and boys. That no boys showed any interest in me didn't bother me; I told myself they were bumpkins and idiots and that when I got to college I would meet my equal: a mature, politically passionate, brilliant boy who would adore me. After school and on the weekends, when I wasn't at Dad and Catherine's apartment, I lay on the couch reading or sat playing my guitar. I had assigned myself Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment,
and I was struggling through it without understanding much. I had added the more cynical and militant antiwar songs of Phil Ochs to my guitar repertoire, and I sang them with vehemence.

Now and then, I still played piano, even though I had quit piano lessons at the end of ninth grade. My piano teacher had argued hard, telling me I had talent and if I would only practice, I could go on to minor in music in college if I didn't want to major in it. But that was just the problem—I resisted practice, and didn't see that changing, and I wouldn't be swayed. Now, I always played the same thing: Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. As I leaned over the keyboard, my chest ached with melancholy and yearning, the notes echoing in the silent room over the soft pump of the pedal and the lonesome creaking of the black walnut trees that swayed outside in the wind. The sonata was singing my griefs, and the sorrows of the messed-up world, its high notes reaching for hope, then descending back to dolefulness. Sometimes, I played it over and over again.

 

 

MOM WORRIED ABOUT money, especially after the divorce. Sometimes I came home to find her at the dining room table, bills spread across it—the electric bill, the psychiatrist's bill, the pharmacy bill. In front of her would always be a yellow lined pad where she listed expenses in a column, checking off what had been paid. The weight of the bills creased her brow as she pondered which to pay first.

Since Mom wasn't working, our only income was Dad's alimony payments. After she got her teaching credential, she substituted at a local elementary school, but they'd stopped calling her. For months, she hadn't paid Grandpa Bachman the mortgage. He'd put up the loan for my parents to build the house. One day in the fall of tenth grade, Mom said, “Grandpa wants his money. He says we have to sell the house.”

I stared at her, stunned. Our house was a work of art. I felt nourished by its beauty. But Grandpa had never liked the house. He was a butcher, a peasant from Poland; he didn't understand modern art, felt ill at ease in a house without many rooms, just one vast open living space.

“Man, he has money!” I protested. “He doesn't need it! He just hates this house, Mom!”

“Honey, there's nothing I can do. I tried to argue, but he wouldn't listen. Maybe it's for the best.”

It wasn't until Mom began to ready the house for sale that I realized we could move anywhere, except that I didn't want to move too far away from Dad. We were unmoored, adrift; there was no one who much mattered to us or who cared about us. This idea held a certain freedom, but most strongly it underscored my loneliness. I decided it would be a relief to get out of this goddamn small town with its nosy-bodies and conservative ideas. Much as I loved our house, I had grown to despise Millstone.

 

 

MOM AND I MET Ruth and Brian Walker at a weekend conference on nonviolent civil disobedience held at a Quaker meetinghouse in northern New Jersey. They were communists, which intrigued me and scared me a little. Communists were the bogeymen in those Cold War days, but now that I'd decided I'd been taught a pack of lies, I was curious about what communism really was. Brian had been an actor who was blacklisted during the McCarthy HUAC hearings and lost all his work. Now, he ran an acting school in New York City.

Ruth and Brian came to visit us at the house. Communists or not, they were awed by the fame of its architect, and by its beauty. They stood in the open living space, staring around the two-story main room with its mahogany ceiling and furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with its wall of twelve-foot glass windows that looked out on the woods. “Won't this place be hard to leave?” Ruth asked. Mom just shrugged, her eyes sad. I felt sad, too. How would I say goodbye to this place, my home? When they heard our dilemma of where to move, they suggested their town: Englewood, New Jersey. It was close to New York City, right across the Hudson River, but quieter and cheaper, and had a good high school, and, of course, they lived there, so Mom would have some friends. And it was only a forty-five-minute drive from Dad's. Now we had a plan.

 

 

IN THE SPRING, for the first time since Dad had married Catherine, they invited me to go with them to a special event: a poetry reading in Princeton by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The thought of hearing a real Russian writer had me jazzed. The Saturday evening of the event, Mom and I sat eating dinner. Our house
was on Dad and Catherine's route to Princeton, so they were going to pick me up. Excitement distracted me from whatever Mom was saying, and as soon as I heard the revving of Catherine's VW bug in the driveway, I leapt up from the table, kissed Mom on the cheek, and made a hasty exit. I hated for Dad to come to the door, hated to feel the air crackling between my parents.

I had never heard a poet read, had never thought of poetry as something related to my life. At the packed concert hall in Princeton, Yevtushenko first read his poetry in Russian, his voice vibrating with intensity. I understood nothing, of course, but his passionate intonations thrilled me. I stole glances at Catherine's face to gauge the reaction of someone who understood Russian. Then he read the English translation, and the thrill of meaning emerged.

He began to read a poem called “Babi Yar” in English. Certain words jumped out:
no memorials . . . the steep hillside . . . as old as the Jewish race.
I felt chilled, the whisper of something stirred in me. Then the second stanza,
wild grass . . . one silent cry over the many thousands of the buried . . .
and my growing horror, hearing of another atrocity, one unknown to me, against my own people. And astonishment: here was a man, a Russian—not a Jew—who identified with us and felt the shame of his own country's collaboration.

 

 

ON THE RIDE HOME, over the chug of the engine, I asked Dad, “What was Babi Yar; what exactly happened there?” I leaned forward in the back seat to hear his answer.

“It was a ravine outside Kiev where the Nazis shot and massacred thousands of Jews.”

Kiev!
The horror came closer, became personal. Kiev was where Grandma Wilson had lived with her family. She had been sixteen
when she'd left in 1920, simply saying to her mother and father, “I'm going out for a walk,” when in fact she was about to cross the border with my grandfather, never to return.

“Dad, what about Grandma's family that she left behind?”

“We don't know what happened,” Dad said. “Grandma lost touch with them long before the war because her brother told her to stop writing. It was too dangerous for them to have relatives in America.”

I thought about this as the car curved along the dark wooded road, how Dad had never mentioned that possibly his grandparents, uncles, and aunt were in that grave in the ravine of Babi Yar, piled with the other Jews. How there was so much we never talked about.

Dad turned down our driveway and pulled to a stop. I thanked them, bid them goodbye, and stood on the front steps a moment, watching them make a three-point turn and head up the drive.

Then, I opened the front door. Water rushed toward me; several inches of it filled the hall. “What the . . . ?” I gasped. I waded down the hall, the water sloshing around my ankles, yelling, “Mom! Mom!?” Where the low-ceilinged hall opened to the two-story main room, I got my first glimpse of my mother. She was sitting on the floor by the bank of windows in her pajamas, holding a running hose in one hand, water pouring out its nozzle.

“Mom, what the—?”

“Hi honey! I'm washing the windows!” Mom grinned a loopy, lopsided smile. Her speech was slurred; she must have taken her sleeping pills early, sometime after I'd left for Princeton. Perhaps she'd been upset, and had taken an extra one. Or two.