Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(21)

    But how much parenting could they have provided, really? Glen and Simone were both in college at Emory University, and anytime there was a crisis at home—of which there were many—one of them, usually Simone, had to manage it by phone from Atlanta. The crisis usually consisted of my father and me going to battle about the trouble I was in at school, my not listening to anything he or my mother told me, and my general lack of respect for anyone in a position of authority.

I became terrible. I hated everyone and everything. Shoving any pain in my pocket, hoping that eventually it would form a hole and fall out onto the street during one of my bike rides. I remember being on those bike rides, sailing past our neighbors’ houses so fast that the tears were blowing off my face. This is what the adults should be doing, I thought, figuring out a way to handle the situation without falling apart. I would force myself up the hills around our neighborhood on my banana-seat bicycle and think, You need to get stronger. Strength is what everyone in this family is missing—I’ll probably have to start lifting weights. I was dancing farther and farther away from myself.

I learned from Dan that being in motion was a way for me to avoid sitting still with my feelings. You can’t let anyone see you cry, so you move.

Action is motion—is doing. Sitting is being. I had been a doer my entire life. I never sat still long enough to let anyone unglue my pain.

Dan wanted to know more about my father.



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    The best way to describe my father is that he’s a lot like Donald Trump, but less successful, thank God—otherwise, the damage he could have unleashed on innocent people could have been more widespread. I would use the word “shyster” to describe my father. He claimed his entire life that if his own father hadn’t died and left him a gas station, he’d be a civil rights attorney or a famous poet. “My father respected civil rights just about as much as he respected a hot pastrami sandwich,” I told Dan. Based on his confused facial expression, I put it in less abstract terms. “If one’s body is a temple, my father’s body is an IHOP. I don’t know much about his poetry, because—well, he’s not a famous poet, that’s why.”

I organized my thoughts and opinions of my father in the most succinct way I could, hoping to give Dan a clear overview without shocking him.

“He’s very nontraditional, and you’ll probably be alarmed by some of the things you hear—at least that’s my hope. Also, he wasn’t abusive. Verbally, at times, but not physically. He definitely spanked me a few times when I was little and smacked me across the face a couple of times when I was too old to be spanked, but that stopped when I finally hit him back one day. I would also like to add that I deserved to be hit.”

One can argue that no child deserves to be hit, but a slap across the face once or twice in your life sends a strong message, and the reason I don’t have children is partly because of my belief in sending a strong message to people when they are assholes, and lots of kids are assholes.

I went on to tell Dan about going with my father to Friday night services at temple, which used to be our thing when I was a little girl. My mom let me dress up in whatever ridiculous outfit I wanted, which was usually a combination of anything hot pink combined with red. I thought for a long time those two colors were great together, until later in life when I fashioned the phrase “summer whore” to describe that very look. My mom would slap some tights on me for good measure, and my father and I would go on our date night.

    After Chet died, my dad didn’t want to go to temple, but my mother somehow convinced him that I needed to go, which was silly in the sense that I had no regard for religion. Temple was about me being my dad’s favorite. None of the older kids ever wanted to go to temple on a Friday night, because they had more interesting things to do.

If I could get him to temple, he would have to hold hands with me—that was our jam when I was a little girl. I’d get dressed up, and he’d show me off to the congregation, and then when the rabbi would ask one of the kids to answer whatever question he posed to the congregation, I’d raise my hand, and the rabbi would always call on me—probably because no other kids raised their hands. Then I’d run up to the bimah, and the rabbi would pick me up, and I’d whisper into his ear, “I don’t know,” really loudly. Then the whole congregation would laugh, and I’d run back to my father, and he’d put me in his lap, and we would both be beaming.

But, now that I was nine or ten, I wasn’t so little, so my outfits were no longer cute—I looked more like a child prostitute—and the only person who still was physically able to pick me up had gone off and let himself die. Temple was a disaster that night because everyone in the synagogue was coming up to my father and telling him how sorry they were about Chet. Fuck, I remember thinking. When were people going to get over this already? I was trying to get my father back to some sort of routine, and all these people kept interrupting my progress.

    There were cookies after every Friday night service, so afterward, I excused myself to go collect them and bring some back home for my mother. When I came back to look for my dad, I couldn’t find him anywhere and I started to panic. I ran back and forth through all the rooms in the temple in search of him. Where was he? Did something happen? No, no, no.