Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(22)

My panic turned to hysteria. A woman I knew from temple saw me and came over to me and tried to calm me down. I hadn’t cried in front of anyone for months, so it was more like hyperventilating. Not being able to breathe, but not crying. Like the girl in Jaws, who saw her boyfriend get eaten by the shark and was left out to sea for hours until Roy Scheider found her inside the sailboat curled up in a ball, in shock.

More people were gathering around, and then a woman kneeled down in front of me, put her hands on my shoulders, and told me to breathe. Then someone in the crowd whispered to someone else that he had seen my father leave moments earlier and that he seemed out of it. He had driven home without me.

I wanted to die right then and there. I remember telling the people standing around me that I was fine to walk home. I don’t even know if I knew how to get home from temple at that age. Plus, it would have been nine P.M. on a Friday night. Maybe I’d get hit by a car and then my father would have no choice but to wake up. Two dead kids. That would teach him.

    The rabbi came over, and I remember seeing him in plain clothes without his Jewish garb on and wondering if he was going to take me home with him and if I would just become part of his family. He wouldn’t forget to pick me up, and his clothes were clean and pressed, and he seemed so normal—like a professional. Professionals showed up when they were supposed to. Why couldn’t my dad just be more professional?

Instead, the rabbi drove me home, and when we got to our house, my dad’s car was in the driveway, and our rabbi walked me to the front door. “Your dad is in a lot of pain, Chelsea,” he said. “I know you must be too.”

“I just have a stomachache,” I told him. “I’m fine.”

“If it’s okay with you, I’m going to come inside and talk to him.”

“Okay,” I said.

I opened the front door, which was always left unlocked, and all the lights were off. Of course. Everyone was asleep.

I needed to recover these optics quickly. “He’s just sick,” I told the rabbi as we stood in the darkness of our front hallway. “He’s got a heart condition, and sometimes he gets heart attacks.”

My rabbi kissed me on the forehead and said something in Hebrew that I didn’t understand.



* * *



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Dan told me to stop talking. To sit with the feeling of my father driving home without me. Sitting with my feelings meant it was time to cry again.

I wondered how many more sessions would be like this. It was fucking exhausting, and our sessions were in the morning, which meant I’d show up to work for hair and makeup looking like I had just gotten into a fight with a cherry snow cone.

I put myself through this because it was a psychological workout. It was easy to not address my own issues and to focus on everyone else’s. Judging other people had become my way of avoiding judgment of myself, and I had to do better than that. Going back to Dan week after week, knowing that I was stripping away all the layers of protection I had spent years fortifying, was particularly dreadful. I knew it was worth continuing. If you went to the gym every day, you were going to get stronger; this was my mental gym.

“Also,” I added, when I felt like enough time had passed, “my parents did this kind of shit all the time. They’d forget to pick us up from Hebrew school, or regular school, and it wasn’t just me. It happened to my brothers and sisters before I was born, so I don’t think we can blame this on Chet. My sister Simone went to school with the three older boys for an entire week when she was four years old, because my mom thought you could just do that. She didn’t really understand how things worked in this country.”

    “What do you mean? Where was she from?”

“She was German, but she was fluent in English. That wasn’t the problem. She was just so laissez-faire about everything. The school called her and told her that Simone wasn’t old enough for kindergarten and they couldn’t allow her to keep coming. You have to understand that my parents were not equipped for or interested in conventional parenting. They were off, and they were like that before Chet died. My dad worked when the older kids were growing up, and I guess my mother was usually asleep, so it was always mayhem. It probably was worse for me because the older kids were all gone, and that was after my dad had sold the gas station and worked from home, which meant he had a big oak desk with a lot of papers on it that meant nothing, and a big room he called his ‘office.’ Oh, and he had a fax machine. He never shut the fuck up about that either. He’d tell waiters at restaurants that they could fax him the bill—as if that were ever an option in any sort of reality, ever. He also used a toothbrush to comb my hair when I couldn’t find a hairbrush one morning before school and my mom was away somewhere. I just want you to know the kind of operation my parents were running.”

“Was your mother depressed?”

“Maybe, but she also just loved to sleep. My grandmother—who was a Nazi, by the way—would always tell the story that the teacher at my mother’s school in Germany used to find her taking naps underneath the staircase every afternoon. She just loved sleeping. Our whole family can sleep for hours, especially when we’re all together. Either we bore the shit out of one another or it’s genetic. I can sleep for fourteen hours straight. With a Xanax, twenty.”