My Year of Rest and Relaxation (16)

On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk.

“Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?”

I shook my head.

“It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding.

“Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me.

“Orgasm,” my mother whispered.

“Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said.

“That warm fuzzy feeling.”

“It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.”

“For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.”

“Men don’t attach as easily. They’re more rational,” my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, “We just want you to be careful.”

“He means use a rubber.”

“And take these.”

My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills.

“Gross,” was all I could say.

“And your father has cancer,” my mother said.

I said nothing.

“Prostate isn’t like breast,” my father said, turning away. “They do surgery, and you move on.”

“The man always dies first,” my mother whispered.

My dad’s chair screeched on the floor as he pushed himself away from the table.

“I was only teasing,” my mom said, batting the smoke of her own cigarette away from her face.

“About the cancer?”

“No.”

That was the end of the conversation.

Later, while I packed up to move into the dorm, my mother came and stood in the doorway of my bedroom, holding her cigarette out behind her in the hall as if it would make any difference. The whole house always smelled like stale smoke. “You know I don’t like it when you cry,” she said.

“I wasn’t crying,” I said.

“And I hope you’re not packing any shorts. Nobody wears shorts in Manhattan. And they’ll shoot you in the street if you go around in those disgusting tennis shoes. You’ll look ridiculous. Your father isn’t paying this much for you to go look ridiculous in New York City.”

I wanted her to think that I was crying over my father’s cancer, but that wasn’t quite it. “Well, Goddamnit, if you insist on getting weepy,” my mother said, turning to leave. “You know, when you were a baby, I crushed Valium into your bottle? You had colic and cried for hours and hours, inconsolable and for no good reason. And change your shirt. I can see the sweat under your arms. I’m going to bed.”

A realty company managed my parents’ property after they were dead. The house got rented out to a history professor and his family. I never had to meet them. The company handled the maintenance and gardening and made any repairs necessary. When something broke or wore out, they sent me a letter with a photo and an estimate. When I got lonely or bored or nostalgic, I’d go through the photos and try to disgust myself with the banality of the place—a cracked step, a leak in the basement, a peeling ceiling, a broken cabinet. And I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived. They weren’t my friends. They didn’t comfort me or give me good advice. They weren’t people I wanted to talk to. They barely even knew me. They were too busy to want to imagine my life in Manhattan. My father was busy dying—within a year of his diagnosis, the cancer had spread to his pancreas, then his stomach—and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer.

She visited me just once in New York, my sophomore year. She took the train down and was an hour late to meet me at the Guggenheim. I could smell alcohol on her breath as we wandered around. She was skittish and quiet. “Oh, isn’t that pretty?” she said about a Kandinsky, a Chagall. She left me abruptly when we got to the top of the ramp, saying she’d lost track of time. I followed her down and out of the museum, watched her try to hail a cab, seething and flabbergasted when each passing taxi was occupied. I don’t know what her problem was. Maybe she’d seen a piece of art that unnerved her. She never explained it. But she called me later from her hotel and had me meet her for dinner that evening. It was as if nothing strange had happened at the museum. She was accountable for nothing when she was drunk. I was used to it.

I paid for my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in cash from my inheritance. From the windows in the living room, I could see some of Carl Schurz Park and a sliver of the East River. I could see the nannies with their strollers. Wealthy housewives milled up and down the Esplanade in visors and sunglasses. They reminded me of my mother—pointless and self-obsessed—only she had been less physically active. If I leaned out my bedroom window, I could see the uppermost tip of Roosevelt Island with its weird geometry of low brick buildings. I liked to think those buildings housed the criminally insane, though I knew that wasn’t the case, at least anymore. Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would.