Going Down 1 страница

FIVE

Thinking back, there was probably some way I could have felt worse at Bernard Guberman’s funeral. Like if I’d killed him myself.

The service started at two o’clock. I got there early, but the parking lot was already full, with cars backed down the driveway, spilling onto the highway. I finally parked across the street, dashed across four lanes of traffic and straight into a cluster of Bruce’s friends. They were standing in the vestibule, in what were surely their interview suits, hands in their pockets, talking quietly and looking at their feet. It was a brilliantly sunny fall afternoon — a day to look at leaves, to buy apple cider and build the first fire of the year. Not a day for this.

“Hey, Cannie, ” George said softly.

“How’s he doing? ” I asked.

George shrugged. “He’s inside, ” he said.

Bruce was sitting in a little vestibule, holding a bottle of Evian water and a handkerchief in his right hand. He was wearing the same blue suit he’d worn on Yom Kippur, when we’d sat side by side in temple. It was still too tight, the tie still too short, and he was wearing canvas sneakers that he’d decorated with drawings of stars and swirls during some particularly boring lecture. The second I saw him it was as if our recent history fell away — my decision to ask for a break, his decision to describe my body in print. It was as if nothing was left but our connection — and his pain. His mother stood above him with one hand on his shoulder. There were people everywhere. Everyone was crying.

I went over to Bruce, knelt down, and hugged him.

“Thank you for coming, ” he said, coolly. Formally. I kissed his cheek, scratchy with what looked like three days’ growth of beard. He didn’t appear to notice. The hug his mother gave me was warmer, her words a marked contrast to his. “Cannie, ” she whispered. “I’m glad you’re here. ”

I knew it was going to be bad. I knew I’d feel terrible, being there, even after our parking-lot breakup, even though, of course, there was no earthly way I could have known that this would happen.

But it wasn’t just bad. It was agony. Agony when the rabbi, whom I’d seen at Bruce’s house at dinner a few times, talked about how Bernard Leonard Guberman had lived for his wife and his son. About how he’d take Audrey to toy stores, even though they didn’t have grandchildren. “Just to be ready, ” he’d say. Which was when I lost it, knowing that I was the one who was supposed to produce those grandchildren, and how much the kids would have loved him, and how lucky I would have been to have that kind of love in my life.

And I sat there on the hard wooden bench in that funeral parlor, eight rows back from Bruce, who was supposed to have been my husband, thinking how all I wanted was to be beside him, and how I’d never felt farther away.

“He really loved you, ” Bruce’s Aunt Barbara whispered to me as we stood washing our hands outside the house. There were cars double-parked in the cul-de-sac, cars circling the block, so many cars that they’d had to station a policeman outside the cemetery for the burial service. Bruce’s father had been active in the temple, and had had a thriving practice as a dermatologist. Judging from the throngs, it looked like every Jew or teenager with a skin condition had shown up to pay their respects.

“He was a wonderful man, ” I said.

She looked at me curiously. “Was? ”

Which was when I realized that she was talking about Bruce, who was still alive.

Barbara wrapped her maroon fingernails around my forearm and dragged me into the immaculate, Downy-scented laundry room.

“I know you and Bruce broke up, ” she said. “Was it because he didn’t propose? ”

“No, ” I said. “I guess … I just felt more and more that maybe we weren’t a good fit. ”

It was as if she hadn’t heard.

“Audrey always told me that Bernie said how happy he’d be to have you in the family, ” she said. “He always said, ‘If Cannie wants a ring, she’ll have a ring in a minute. ’ ”

Oh, God. I felt tears starting to build behind my eyes. Again. I’d wept during the service, when Bruce stood on the bimah and talked about how his father taught him to catch a ball and drive, and I’d cried at the cemetery when Audrey sobbed over the open grave and said, over and over, “It isn’t fair, isn’t fair. ”

Aunt Barbara handed me a handkerchief.

“Bruce needs you, ” she whispered, and I nodded, knowing that I couldn’t trust my voice. “Go, ” she said, pushing me into the kitchen. I wiped my eyes and went.

Bruce was sitting on the porch with his friends around him in a forbidding-looking circle. When I approached, he squinted at me, observing me like a specimen on a slide.

“Hey, ” I said softly. “Is there anything I can do for you? ”

He shook his head and looked away. There was someone in every chair on the porch, and nobody looked like they were moving. As gracefully as I could, I squatted down on the step behind them, just outside of the circle, and sat there, holding my knees. I was cold, and hungry, but I hadn’t brought a jacket, and there wasn’t anywhere to balance a plate. I listened to them talk about nothing — about sports, and concerts, and their jobs, such as they were. I watched as Bruce’s mother’s friends’ daughters, a trio of interchangeable twentysome-things, made their way onto the porch with paper plates full of petit fours, and gave Bruce their condolences, and their smooth cheeks to kiss. It felt like swallowing sand, watching him go out of his way to smile at them and show how he’d remembered all their names, when he could barely spare me a glance. Sure, I knew when — if — we decided to break up, he’d most likely find somebody else. I just never thought I’d have to suffer through a preview. I sat on my hands feeling wretched.

When Bruce finally stood up, I got up to follow him, but my leg had fallen asleep, and I stumbled and went sprawling, wincing as a splinter dug its way into my palm.

Bruce helped me up. Reluctantly, I thought.

“Do you want to take a walk? ” I asked him. He shrugged. We walked. Down the driveway, down the street, where more cars were massing.

“I’m so sorry, ” I told him. Bruce said nothing. I reached for his hand, my fingertips brushing the back of his palm. He didn’t reach back. “Look, ” I said, feeling desperate, “I know things have been … I know that we …” My voice trailed off. Bruce looked at me coldly.

“You aren’t my girlfriend anymore, ” he said. “You were the one who wanted a break, remember? And I’m small, ” he practically spat.

“I want to be your friend, ” I said.

“I’ve got friends. ”

“I noticed, ” I told him. “Mannerly bunch. ”

He shrugged.

“Look, ” I told him. “Could we … could we just …” I put my fist against my lips. Words were failing me. All I had left were sobs. I swallowed hard. Get through this, I told myself. “Whatever happened between us, however you’re feeling about me, I want you to know that your father was a wonderful man. I loved him. He was the best father I ever saw, and I’m sorry he’s gone, and I just feel so terrible about all of this …” Bruce just stared at me. “And if you want to call me …” I finally managed.

“Thanks, ” he finally said. He turned to walk toward the house, and after a moment I turned to follow him, like a chastened dog, walking numbly behind him with my head hanging down.

I should have just left, but I didn’t. I stayed on through the evening prayers, when men with tallits over their shoulders crowded Audrey’s living room, bumping their knees on the hard wooden mourning benches, pressing their shoulders against the covered mirrors. I stayed when Bruce and his friends gathered in the white-and-chrome kitchen to pick over deli trays and make small talk. I hung on the edge of the group, so full of sadness I thought I would burst, right there on Audrey’s Spanish-tiled floor. Bruce never looked at me. Not even once.

The sun set. The house slowly emptied. Bruce collected his friends and took us up to his bedroom, where he sat down on his bed. Eric and Neil and Neil’s hugely pregnant wife took the couch. George took the chair at Bruce’s desk. I folded myself up on the floor, outside of the circle, thinking with some small and primitive part of my brain that he’d have to talk to me again, he’d have to let me comfort him, if our years together were to have meant anything.

Bruce unfastened his ponytail, shook out his hair, and tied it back again. “I’ve been a child my whole life, ” he announced. Nobody seemed to know quite how to respond to that, so they did what I supposed they normally did, up in Bruce’s room. Eric filled the bong, and George fished a lighter out of his suit jacket pocket, and Neil shoved a towel under the door. Unbelievable, I thought, biting back a burst of hysterical laughter. They cope with death the exact same way they cope with a Saturday night when there’s nothing good on cable.

Eric passed the bong to Neil without even asking me if I wanted it. I didn’t, and he probably knew it. The only thing pot ever did for me was make me want to sleep and eat even more than I already did. Not exactly the kind of drug I needed. Still, it would have been nice if he’d offered.

“Your father was really cool, ” George mumbled, and everyone else mumbled his assent, except for Neil’s pregnant wife, who made a big production of heaving herself to her feet and walking out the door. Or maybe it’s always a production to get up and go when you’re that pregnant. Who knows? Neil gazed at his sneakers. Eric and George said again how sorry they were. Then everybody started talking about the playoffs.

Always a child, I thought, looking at Bruce through the haze. For a minute, I caught his eye, and we looked right at each other. He tilted the bong toward me: Want some? I shook my head no, and took a deep breath into the silence.

“Remember when the swimming pool was finished? ” I asked.

Bruce gave me a small but encouraging nod.

“Your father was so happy, ” I said. I looked at his friends. “You guys should have seen it. Dr. Guberman couldn’t swim …”

“… he never learned how, ” Bruce added.

“But he insisted — absolutely insisted — that this house have a swimming pool. ‘My kids aren’t going to sweat for another summer! ’ ”

Bruce laughed a little bit.

“So the day the pool was finished, he threw this gigantic party. ” Now George was nodding. He’d been there. “He had it catered. He ordered, like, a dozen watermelon baskets …”

“… and a keg, ” said Bruce, laughing.

“And he walked around all afternoon in this monogrammed bathrobe that he’d bought just for the occasion, smoking this gigantic cigar, and looking like a king, ” I concluded. “There must have been a hundred people here …” My voice trailed off. I was remembering Bruce’s father in the hot tub, a steaming cigar clenched between his teeth, a Dixie cup full of beer sweating on the ledge beside him, and the full moon hanging like a circle of gold in the sky.

And finally I felt that I was on more stable ground. I couldn’t smoke pot, and he wouldn’t let me kiss him, but I could tell stories all night long. “He looked so happy, ” I said to Bruce, “because you were happy. ”

Bruce started to cry quietly, and when I got up and crossed the room and sat beside him, he didn’t say anything. Not even when I reached for him. When I put my arm around his shoulders he leaned into me, holding me and crying. I closed my eyes so I only heard his friends getting up and filing out the door.

“Ah, Cannie, ” he said.

“Shh, ” I said, and rocked him, moving him back and forth with my whole body, easing him back onto the bed, beneath a shelf lined with his Little League trophies and perfect attendance plaques from Hebrew school. His friends were gone. We were finally alone. “Sshh now, shh now. ” I kissed his wet cheek. He didn’t resist. His lips were cool underneath mine. He wasn’t kissing me back, but he wasn’t pushing me away, either. It was a start.

“What do you want? ” he whispered to me.

“I would do whatever you wanted, ” I said. “Even … if you wanted that … I’d do it for you. I love you …” I said.

“Don’t say anything, ” he whispered, sliding his hands up under my shirt.

“Oh, Bruce, ” I breathed, unwilling to believe that this was happening, that he wanted me, too.

“Shh, ” he said, shushing me the way I’d quieted him moments before. His hands were fumbling with the many clasps of my bra.

“Lock the door, ” I whispered.

“I don’t want to let you go, ” he said.

“You don’t have to, ” I told him, tucking my face into his neck, breathing in the smell of him, sweet smoke and shaving cream and shampoo, glorying in the feel of his arms around me, thinking that this was what I wanted, was what I’d always wanted — the love of a man who was wonderful and sweet and who, best of all, understood me. “You don’t have to ever again. ” I tried to make it good for him, to touch him in his favorite places, to move the way that I remembered he liked. It felt wonderful to me, to be with him again, and I thought, holding his shoulders as he thrust himself into me and moaned, that we could start over; that we were starting over. The Moxie article I was willing to write off as water under the bridge, provided he’d swear a solemn oath to never again mention my body in print. And the rest of it, his father’s death, we’d get through as a couple. Together. “I love you so much, ” I whispered, kissing the side of his face, holding him close, trying to quiet the small voice inside of me that noticed, even in the throes of passion, that he wasn’t saying anything back.

Afterward, with my head on his shoulder and my fingertips tracing circles on his chest, I thought that nothing had ever felt so right. I thought that maybe I’d been a child, a girl, but now I was ready to step up to the plate, to do the right thing, to be a woman, and to stand beside him, holding him up, starting tonight.

Bruce, evidently, had other thoughts. “You should get going, ” he said, removing himself from my arms and walking into the bathroom without looking back at the bed.

This was unexpected. “I can stay, ” I called.

Bruce came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “I’ve got to go to temple with my mom in the morning, and I think it would, um, complicate things if …” His voice trailed off.

“Okay, ” I said, remembering my vow, to be an adult, to think of what he needed instead of what I wanted, even though what I wanted was more along the lines of a long, slow, sweet snuggle, followed by both of us drifting gently off to sleep — not this hasty retreat. “No problem, ” I said, and pulled my clothes back on. No sooner had I straightened my panties then Bruce was grabbing my elbow and walking me toward the door, hustling me past the kitchen and the living room, where, presumably, his mother was waiting and his friends had regrouped.

“Give me a call, ” I said, hearing my voice trembling, “whenever you want. ”

He looked away. “I’m going to be kind of busy, ” he said.

I took a deep breath, willing the panic to subside. “Okay, ” I said. “Just know that I’m there for you. ”

He nodded gravely. “I appreciate that, Cannie, ” he said, as if I’d just offered him financial planning advice instead of my heart on a platter. I went to kiss him. He offered me his cheek. Fine, I thought, getting into the car, gripping the steering wheel tightly so he wouldn’t see my hands shake. I can be patient. I can be mature. I can wait for him. He loved me so much, I thought, speeding home through the dark. He’ll love me again.

SIX

When I took Psychology 101, the professor taught us about random reinforcement. Put three groups of rats in three separate cages, each equipped with a bar. The first group of rats got a pellet every time they pressed the bar. The second group never got pellets, no matter how often they pressed. And the third group got pellets just once in a while.

The first group, the professor said, eventually gets bored with the guaranteed reward and the rats who never get treats give up, too. But the random rats will press on that bar forever, hoping each time they press that this time the magic will happen, that this time they’ll get lucky. It was at that moment in class that I realized that I had become my father’s rat.

He’d loved me once. I remembered it. I had a handful of mental pictures, postcards that had gotten soft around the edges from being handled so often. Scene one: Cannie, age three, snug in her father’s lap, her head against his chest, feeling his voice rumble through her as he read Where the Wild Things Are. Scene two: Cannie, age six, holding hands with her daddy as he led her through the doors of the elementary school on a warm summer Saturday to take her first grade readiness test. “Don’t be shy, ” he tells her, kissing both her cheeks. “You’ll do great. ”

I remember being ten years old spending whole days with my father, running errands, meeting his secretary, and Mrs. Yee at the dry cleaners who did his shirts, the salesman at the clothing store who looked at my father with respect as he paid for his suits. We’d pick up brie at the fancy cheese shop that smelled wonderfully of freshly roasted coffee beans, and jazz records at Old Vinyl. Everyone knew my father’s name. “Dr. Shapiro, ” they’d greet him, smiling at him, at us, lined up in a row, from oldest to youngest, with me at the head of the line. He’d put one big warm hand on my head, stroking my ponytail. “This is Cannie, my oldest, ” he’d say. And all of them, from the clerks at the cheese store to the security guards in his building, seemed to know not just who he was, but who I was, too. “Your father says you’re very smart, ” they’d say, and I’d stand there, smiling, trying to look smart.

But days like that became rare as I got older. The truth was, my father mostly ignored me. He ignored all of us — Lucy, and Josh, and even my mother. He came home late, he left home early, he spent his weekends in the office or on long drives “to clear my head. ” Whatever affection we got, whatever notice he paid us, was parceled out in small doses, administered infrequently. But oh, when he loved me, when he put his hand on my head, when I leaned my own head against him … there was no feeling in the world that could beat it. I felt important. I felt cherished. And I would do whatever it took, press the bar until my hands bled, to get that feeling again.

He left us for the first time when I turned twelve. I came home from school and there he was, unexpectedly, in the bedroom, piling undershirts and sock balls into a suitcase. “Dad? ” I asked him, startled to see him in the daytime. “Are you … are we …” I wanted to ask if we were going somewhere — a trip, maybe? His eyes were heavy and hooded. “Ask your mother, ” he said. “She’ll explain. ” And my mother did explain it — that both she and my father loved us very much, but they couldn’t work things out between the two of them. I was still numb from the shock of that when I found out the truth of what was going on from Hallie Cinti, one of the popular girls. Hallie was on my soccer team, but in a completely different league socially. On the field she frequently looked as though she’d prefer that I not pass to her, as if my foot on the ball could transmit my own personal taint and send nerd-germs creeping through her cleats. Three years later she’d be infamous for administering restorative blow-jobs to three of the five starters on the boys’ basketball team during half-time of the state play-offs, and we’d all be calling her Hallie Cunti, but I didn’t know that yet.

“Heard about your father, ” she said, plunking herself down at my table, which was in a corner of the lunchroom where Hallie Cinti and her ilk rarely ventured. The chess club kids and my friends from Junior Debaters stared, open-mouthed, as Hallie and her friend Jenna Lind slung their purses over the backs of two plastic chairs and stared at me.

“Heard what? ” I asked warily. I didn’t trust Hallie, who’d ignored me through six years of school, or Jenna, whose hair was always perfectly feathered.

Hallie, as it turned out, couldn’t wait to tell me. “I heard my Mom talking about it last night. He moved in with some dental technician on Copper Hill Road. ”

I toyed with my peanut butter sandwich, buying time. Was this true? How could Hallie’s mother know? And why was she talking about it? My mind was fluttering with questions, plus the half-remembered faces of all the women who’d ever scraped my teeth.

Jenna leaned in to deliver the coup de grace. “We heard, ” she said, “that she’s only twenty-seven. ”

Well. So that would explain the gossip. Hallie and Jenna stared at me, and my debate-team friends stared at them staring. I felt like I’d been suddenly thrust onstage, and I didn’t know my lines, or even what I was supposed to be performing.

“So is it true? ” Hallie asked impatiently.

“It’s no big deal, ” said Jenna, evidently hoping to get me to spill via sympathy. “My parents are divorced. ”

Divorced, I thought, tasting the word. Was this really what was happening? Would my Dad do this to us?

I lifted my eyes to the popular girls. “Go away, ” I told them. I heard one of my debate friends gasp. Nobody talked to Jenna and Hallie that way. “Leave me alone. Go away! ”

Jenna rolled her eyes. Hallie shoved her seat back. “You’re a big fat loser, ” she opined, before scurrying back to the popular kids’ tables, where everyone’s shirts had little alligators, and all the girls ever had for lunch was Diet Coke.

I walked home slowly and found my mother in the kitchen, with about ten half-unpacked bags of groceries arrayed on the counters and dining room table. “Is Dad living with someone else? ” I blurted. She shoved three packages of chicken breasts into the freezer and sighed, her hands on her hips.

“I didn’t want you to find out like this, ” she murmured. “Hallie Cinti told me, ” I said.

My mother sighed again.

“But she doesn’t know anything, ” I said, hoping my mother would agree.

Instead she sat at the kitchen table and motioned for me to join her. “Mrs. Cinti works at the same hospital as your Dad, ” she said.

So it was true.

“You can tell me things. I’m not a little kid. ” But at that moment, I wished that I was a little kid — the kind whose parents still read to her in bed and held her hands when she crossed the streets.

My mother sighed. “I think this might be for your father to tell you. ”

But that conversation never happened, and two nights later, my father had moved back. Josh and Lucy and I stood in the backyard and watched him pull the suitcase out of the trunk of his little red sports car. Lucy was crying, and Josh was trying not to. My father never even looked at us as he crossed the gravel driveway, the heels of his boots crunching with each step.

“Cannie? ” Lucy sniffled. “If he’s back now, that’s good, isn’t it? He won’t leave anymore, right? ”

I stared at the door, watching it slowly close behind him. “I don’t know, ” I said. I needed answers. My father was unapproachable, my mother was no help. “Don’t worry, ” she scolded me. Her own face was etched with lines of sleeplessness. “Everything’s going to be fine, honey. ” This from my mother, who never called me honey. As much as I dreaded it, I would have to go right to the source.

I found Hallie Cinti in the girls’ room the next Monday afternoon. She was standing at the mirror, squinted as she reapplied Bonnie Belle lip gloss. I cleared my throat. She ignored me. I tapped her on her shoulder and she turned to face me, her lips pursed in distaste.

“What? ” she spat.

I cleared my throat as she glared at me. “Um … that thing … about my father, ” I began.

Hallie rolled her eyes and pulled a pink plastic comb out of her purse.

“He moved back, ” I said.

“How swell for you, ” said Hallie, now combing her bangs.

“I thought maybe you might have heard why. From your mom. ”

“Why should I tell you anything? ” she sneered.

I’d spent the whole weekend planning for this contingency. What could I, plump and unpopular Cannie Shapiro, offer sleek, beautiful Hallie? I pulled two items out of my backpack. The first was a five-page paper on light and dark imagery in Romeo and Juliet. The other was a fifth of vodka that I’d swiped from my parents’ liquor cabinet that morning. Hallie and her crew might not have been as academically advanced as I was, but they made up for it in other fields of endeavor.

Hallie snatched the bottle out of my hands, checked to see that the seal was unbroken, then reached for the paper. I yanked it back.

“First, tell me. ”

She gave a little shrug, slipped the bottle into her purse, and turned back toward the mirror. “I heard my mother talking on the phone. She said that his dental friend told him that she wanted children, ” she said. “And I guess your father doesn’t want any more. And looking at you, ” she continued, “I can understand why. ” She turned to me, smirking, extending her hand for the paper.

I threw it at her. “Just copy it over in your own handwriting. I put in some spelling mistakes, so they’ll know it’s you, not me. ”

Hallie took the paper and I went back to class. No more children. Well, the way he treated us, that made sense.

He stayed with us for almost six years after that, but he wasn’t the same. The little moments of kindness and love, the nights he’d read to us in bed, the Saturday afternoon ice-cream cones and the Sunday afternoon drives, were gone. It was as if my father had fallen asleep, alone, on a bus or a train, and woken up twenty years later, surrounded by strangers: my mother, my sister, my brother, and me, all wanting things — help with the dishes, a ride to band practice, $10 for the movies, his approval, his attention, his love. He looked out at us, mild brown eyes swimming with confusion, then hardening with anger. Who are these people? he seemed to be wondering. How long will I have to travel beside them? And why do they think I owe them anything?

He went from being loving, in an absent-minded, occasional way, to being mean. Was it because I knew his secret — that he didn’t want more children, that he’d probably never wanted us? Was it that he missed the other woman, that she was his one true love, forever denied to him? I thought that was some of it. But there were other things, too.

My father was — is, I suppose — a plastic surgeon. He started off in the Army, working with burn victims, wounded soldiers, men who’d come back from the war with their skin pink and puckery from chemicals, or lumpy and disfigured from shrapnel.

But he discovered his true genius after we moved to Pennsylvania. There, the bulk of his practice involved not soldiers but society ladies, women whose only wounds were invisible and who were willing to drop thousands of dollars on a discreet, skilled surgeon who’d make their bellies tight, their eyelids less droopy, who’d eliminate saddlebags and double chins with a few deft strokes of the scalpel.

He was successful. By the time he left us for the first time Larry Shapiro was known as the man to see in the greater Philadelphia area for tummy tucks, chin lifts, nose jobs, boob jobs. We had the requisite big house, the curved driveway, the in-ground swimming pool with hot tub in the back. My father drove a Porsche (although, thankfully, my mother was able to talk him out of the NOSEDOC vanity plates). My mom drove an Audi. We had a maid clean twice a week; my parents threw catered dinner parties every other month, and we went on vacations to Colorado (for skiing) and Florida (for sun).

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor. He didn’t want this life. That much was clear. He was miserable tethered to this suburb, to the never-ending schedule of soccer games and spelling bees and Hebrew schools, tied down by mortgage payments and car payments, habit and obligation. And he took his misery out on all of us — and, for some reason, on me especially.

Suddenly, it was as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. And nothing I could do was right, or even close.

“Look at this! ” he’d thunder, of my B+ in algebra. He was sitting at the dining room table, a familiar glass of scotch at his elbow. I was skulking in the doorway, trying to hide myself in the shadows. “What is your excuse for this? ”

“I don’t like math, ” I’d tell him. In truth, I was just as ashamed of the grade as he was angry about it. I’d never gotten anything less than an A in my life. But no matter how hard I tried, or how much extra help I got, algebra confounded me.

“Do you think I liked medical school? ” he snarled. “Do you have any idea how much potential you have? Do you have any inkling what a waste it is to squander your gifts? ”

“I don’t care what my gifts are. I don’t like math. ”

“Fine, ” he’d say with a shrug, flinging the report card across the table like it had suddenly acquired an offensive smell. “Be a secretary. See if I care. ”

He was like that with all of us — snarly, surly, dismissive, and rude. He’d come home from work, drop his briefcase in the hall, pour himself the first in a series of scotch on the rocks, and storm by us, upstairs into the bedroom, locking the door behind him. He’d either stay up there, or retreat to the living room, with the lights turned low, listening to Mahler’s symphonies. Even at thirteen, even without the benefit of a basic music appreciation class, I knew that nonstop Mahler, backed by the rattle of ice cubes in his glass, could portend nothing good.

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