I.M. Read online

  My mother’s father in particular adored her, and in his eyes she could do no wrong. My favorite illustration of his blind worship occurred when she was first learning to drive. She was always a rather bad driver, bumping awkwardly back and forth into parking spaces, quipping, “Well, that’s what bumpers are for!” But when she first got her license as a teenager, she was particularly bad. One day she was driving her father to Bradley Beach, a resort town on the Jersey Shore where a lot of Syrian Jews spent summers. On the road that day she was honked at, shouted at, cursed, and aggressively passed by the other drivers she managed to piss off. Finally her father turned to her and said, “What’s the matter? They never saw a pretty girl drive a car before?”

  My mother was something of a celebrity in the Syrian community, and especially among her extended family. She created her own mythology, taking the simplest events of life and elaborating and editing them to the point where they became pure melodrama. From the time I was a young child, my mother captured my imagination with stories about the many men whose marriage proposals she’d rejected, usually at the insistence of her parents, who didn’t think there was anyone good enough for their daughter. One suitor proposed to her at a rooftop party he threw in her honor, while offering her a perfectly matched strand of pearls. When she rejected him, he violently ripped the pearls apart and they went streaming and bouncing across the rooftop into the dark night.

  She was close to her siblings and looked upon her younger sisters more as daughters, doing their hair and fixing their dresses, and her younger brothers more as peers, playing baseball and other sports with them. My mother’s family had their share of money woes, but never terrible enough for them to go without food, clothes, or schooling the way my father’s family did. The fact that my mother finished Brooklyn College and actually worked briefly as a secretary on Madison Avenue (albeit for someone named I. Shalom, one of the founding fathers of the Syrian community) was amazing for the time. Among other things, it positioned her for a world of interests outside the realm of the Syrian Jews.

  Window-shopping became an obsession for her. She would study the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller (which at the time was on the corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue). There’s a story about a bias-cut striped sundress she saw in the window at Bonwit and just had to have. She passed that window and longed for that dress for weeks. Finally she saved the money to buy it. She wore it to a very important party in the community that summer and “made a hit.” Her sophistication stood out among the other girls her age who wore homemade dresses or ones that were bought in the local Brooklyn shops that my mother had already outgrown. That prized dress stayed in her closet for years, a symbol of her fashion independence.

  There were also negative ways in which my mother stood out in the community. She was a very smart, pretty girl with a drop of worldly exposure and a library card that was in constant use. But by the community’s estimation, she deluded herself into thinking she had all the time in the world to meet the perfect person on her own terms, fall in love, and fulfill the obligations to wed and set to the task of reproducing. The older she got without being married, the more she became a symbol to other girls in the community of what exposure does to a girl. If let out of her restraints, if educated, a girl might get ideas other than the simple ones about getting married and creating a family. When she reached her late twenties my mother woke up, looked around, and realized the community in which she had always felt like a princess now considered her an old maid.

  My mother made up her mind to marry my father when they were out on his sailboat (bought at a time when he was making a lot of money in his first successful business). There was some unexpected bad weather, and his ability to get them to safety struck her as an augury for a nice, well-provided-for future. She speaks of the romantic scene on the beach, him wrapping her in his sweater against the harsh wind. She “fell in love with him that day.” He was “street smart,” according to her, something she needed in her life. They always appeared as a somewhat odd couple to me, but my father appealed to my mother as a provider and a solution to her waning marketability. She knew she could have—if not the great intellectual meeting of the minds she always dreamed of—a good life with him. It always seemed to me that my dad saw himself as having moved up in the world by marrying my mother. My mother, on the other hand, had an inkling of doing the opposite.

  Still, when my mother married my father at the impossibly old age of thirty, she knew it was something of a miracle that she’d received one more chance to fulfill what she was bred for. It seemed all her prayers were answered, and the way she describes it, the first eight years of their marriage were ecstasy. She immediately got pregnant with my eldest sister, then another daughter two years later. Pressure was mounting for her to bear a son, which was what every family wanted in those days. (Shockingly, in that community it’s still a major priority.) And then I came along.

  The two or three years after my birth my mother always refers to as her happiest time. She was ecstatic being home with her babies, away from all other worldly cares. She didn’t speak to anyone outside of her closest relatives and friends. She didn’t read newspapers, only books. She didn’t let anything pierce the bubble of happiness she had created for herself. Even when my father had his financial troubles, my mother claimed the rewards of motherhood overcame any of those pressures.

  * * *

  Memories of my father are mixed and complicated. There were tender moments here and there, but for the most part it was more like a standoff between us. I think he was as baffled by this preexisting disdain as I was. He was disappointed in me—his artistic, effeminate son—and I feared him. But these feelings were inborn, as inborn as the warmth and closeness I naturally felt for my mother. Even as an infant I’d scream and carry on if he so much as picked me up, and I wouldn’t stop until he handed me back to her. As an older child, I don’t recall thinking there was anything particularly amiss; it was simply a fact that though we “loved” each other, we didn’t really like each other. It wasn’t until later in my life when I made it out of the community and saw other, closer father/son relationships in action that I felt like perhaps I’d missed something.

  He could be genuinely charming, thoughtful, and loving. When he was feeling happy and lighthearted, he was fun to be around. He had an idiosyncratic, Runyonesque sense of humor and would repeat bad jokes until they became funny. He entertained all of us with Danny Kaye-ish gibberish-French. He had some good sayings: “That was a treat instead of a treatment” when he liked something. And a dubious one: “Are you really going to hock me a Chinig?” when he felt bothered. When I was a toddler, he would stay home in the mornings and watch a show called Romper Room with me and my sisters. The show was like a virtual TV nursery school, with a teacher named Miss Louise who called good children “do-bees.” That was a sweet nickname he called my sisters and me. Most times, when he’d leave the house he’d say to us, “Be good do-bees!” But his idea of affectionate patter sometimes backfired. The other nickname he had for us was “Dummy.” As in, “Dummy, pass the salt.” My mother hated it. My sisters and I were smart, so it’s not as if this crushed us intellectually, but being called dummy every day for years in whatever context does a kind of damage eventually.

  He could be callous and bigoted. He regularly used slurs such as the “N” word and “fairy.” “Those faggots,” he’d say in the front seat of the car, pointing to men we saw walking together in New York City. The epithets, and the hatred I sensed behind them, terrified me. Racism and sexism were imprinted on my father from early on. It was his upbringing, but it was also the country’s upbringing. He was no more racist than the average American at the time. I sometimes think he took the disparagement he endured for being a Jew as an affirmation that it was okay to disparage others lower down in the pecking order. Not to apologize for my father, but he died in 1982, before the awakenings of the last thirty-five years, before the modern day that landed u
s (I like to believe) on another level of cultural and sexual integration. If he had lived longer, he might have learned better, along with the rest of the world, and understood the evils of discrimination. My mother often forgave him by blaming his poor background and the terrible domestic violence that compounded the problems in his household growing up. I always wondered how he made it through as such a nonviolent and otherwise gentle guy. He was terribly abused by his father, who used belts and even baseball bats to beat his children. Yet as horrible as the beatings were—and his stories gave me the sense they would have been considered extreme even then—he never said one ill word about his father. He spoke almost sentimentally about the beatings, as if such things were a common practice in every family. He seemed to equate those beatings with a bygone kind of love. The thing that was most troubling was the mixed message he sent me about the subject. Again and again he’d note how lucky I was that I wasn’t beaten similarly, while intimating that I might have been better off if I had been—as if he were a better man for having endured those abuses. He occasionally “spanked” my sisters and me, which felt humiliating, but never came near the violence he lived through.

  To this day it’s difficult for me to stay angry with my father, because my memories of him are so divided. I remember how secure I felt dozing off next to him on the sofa at night while we watched TV. At other times, though, when I checked his spot on that very sofa, he was so utterly zoned-out that it was as if he had a “Closed for Business” sign across his forehead. I took it personally at the time, as if he didn’t care about me. But I think the truth was that his life exhausted him, and it was all he could do to stay awake after a long, hard day at work. And it would get worse after his first heart attack, which he had at the age of forty-two.

  Even with their differences, there was a lot of real affection between my mother and father. My mother was often frustrated by his shut-down affect at home, but once in a while I noticed them sharing a private joke, and more than once I noticed them spooning in bed together in the morning. They shared a similar sense of humor. All through the 1970s, as my mother got deeper and deeper into her forties, he would tease her, “If you don’t watch out I’m going to trade you in for two twenty-twos.” The joke could easily have landed wrong, but it always made my mother laugh, and would snap her out of a bad mood. They maintained a number of inside jokes that dated all the way back to their honeymoon in Niagara Falls. A guy named Lou ran the bed-and-breakfast where they stayed, so forever after my mother and father called each other “Lou” or “Louie.” Significantly less educated than my mother, my father didn’t know you had to qualify the word personify with a noun (such as, “you personify grace,” or “you personify humor”)—he thought the word personify was a superlative all on its own, and even after she pointed out the correct usage, they would lovingly say to each other, “Honey, you are personified!”

  * * *

  By the time I was in grade school, my mother’s contentment with her domestic bubble had worn off, and she grew depressed with her life as a housewife—although she couldn’t imagine doing anything to change her circumstances. Her disenchantment often led to an afternoon Valium and a lie-down on the sofa, when we knew not to talk to her.

  Her ticket to freedom was her library card, and she read everything from Henry James to Philip Roth, and could speak intelligently about both and all points between.

  And she had me.

  I listened to her problems and was sympathetic. I understood how frustrating life in the community could be for her, living among people who didn’t read and only talked about superficial things like clothes and cooking. I’m sure she felt limited by the confines of wifehood and motherhood as defined by the narrow-mindedness of the community she so loved and revered. Still, I couldn’t argue with my mother’s own decision to stay put in the community. Although she must have felt squelched, she was loved by her husband and kids. And she was no shut-in—she went to theatre and museums, she engaged with the outside world. The same couldn’t be said for other women in the community, who were so removed from the world and so uneducated they were barely literate. They didn’t read, and they considered my mother odd for being versed in things like literature and the arts. I could never fathom what it was that made these other women adhere to old ideas about womanhood that hadn’t changed for centuries. I think part of it was the promise of wealth. Great homes, clothes, and cars were the incentives with which men kept those women on such a straight-and-narrow line. My mother was coldly practical in her assessment of why women should stay with men who treated them badly—they should “stick it out” for the sake of their kids. There were terrible stories about women who were abused by their husbands. One of my mother’s close friends was married to a man with a terrible temper who regularly raised his hand to her. We argued all the time about what she should do. I thought that anything was better than living with him, but my mother would say, “What else can she do? She has no training, no skill. She can’t get a job. How are her kids supposed to eat?” And she had a point. In the context of that archaic world, I suppose women had no choice. Still it bothers me that for all my mother’s smarts, she defends the community and the system that looked away from that kind of abuse. And to this day she laments the misfortune of any woman who finds herself unmarried at the age of thirty.

  Most of the great girls I knew in the community who couldn’t rationalize a way out ended up with men way beneath them. Girls who might have had careers had they not been shackled to these old beliefs. My sisters were talented, brilliant girls who were held back by that brainwashing. And still my mother encourages her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to think along these lines. She simply can’t fathom how a woman might make a life for herself without a husband. Based on what I witnessed, I couldn’t fathom how a woman could make a life for herself with one.

  5

  I have almost no memories of my life prior to having meningitis, but I have these family pictures to remind me of the ways in which my body always seemed to present problems. In early pictures, I’m wearing leg braces to correct bowleggedness. When I look at these pictures now, I see a standard-sized, healthy three- or four-year-old boy, but there’s a deeper sense memory underneath of always feeling ashamed of my body. There’s a slightly later picture of my sisters and me standing on the beach. They’re beautiful little girls wearing matching black maillots, looking tall for their ages, and slim. Then there’s me. I’m sitting in the sand, wearing a striped singlet with a little navy elastic belt. Even at that young age I felt more comfortable in a bathing suit with a top that covered my belly and chest.

  I swam wearing a T-shirt for years. I was always horrified at the thought of being without a shirt, and I often wonder if this innate shame might have been some deeply felt wish to have another anatomy, the anatomy of a woman. Ultimately whatever that was transmuted itself into weight dysmorphia. I’ve always attributed the shame I felt about my body to being fat. By the age of twelve I was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 250 pounds. Then began the nightmare of weight control that has been the bane of my existence for as long as I can remember. My mother’s concern about my weight was complicated by the fact that my father was also overweight—something that bothered her tremendously. As an adult my father overcompensated for the food deprivation of his childhood, and by the time he was thirty-five he had a huge gut. He wasn’t the tallest man. Five foot seven at most. His suits all had outsized waists, and his belts were as long as dog leashes. Not only did I not want to be like my father, I was aware that my mother didn’t want me to be like him either.

  There were so many complicated scenes between me and my mother involving food. The lunches I took to school were different than my sisters’. In my brown-paper lunch bag I got all kinds of diet foods: individual packages of melba toast; fat-free, kosher cheese; tuna salad without mayonnaise; and fruit. Meanwhile my sisters got sandwiches, potato chips, and cookies. At night before bed, my sisters and I got glasses of choc
olate milk, which stood on the dresser in the bedroom we shared. My chocolate milk was much darker than my sisters’ because mine was made with skim milk. And they thought I didn’t notice.

  I recall my mother’s watchful eye on me at mealtimes, scrutinizing the portions I ate. During the week my sisters and I typically ate dinner with our housekeeper, Maureen, before my father arrived home from work. Maureen was like a fun aunt. She was easy and uncritical, a constant source of companionship and love. I was no easy weight to lift, but she managed to hoist me onto her hip effortlessly, no grunting, no loss of breath. It was a major feat wedging my heft into the playground swing seats, which were like little sedan chairs with slide-down metal safety bars. But somehow skinny Maureen hoisted me up and jammed me in without making me feel self-conscious. When the Good Humor man would show up on the block, my mother would place a quarter in my hand and say, “Don’t buy the ice cream. Save the money till you have enough for a toy.” I would get Maureen to walk me around the block, where we’d meet the Good Humor man on his next stop. I’d buy the ice cream and eat it, out of my mother’s sight.