going to go anywhere. My father had a stable job teaching biology in a high school. In the spring when he got to the unit on evolution a few of the English teachers who were creationists would somehow have sniffed this out and, during lunch, they would try to convert him, but in this task there lay madness. Perhaps they saw the classroom charts that mapped relationships between family, species, and genus laid out in green and blue lines like the veins of a leaf. In Darwin’s theory of natural selection they saw the cosmos reduced to chaos. The collector of beetles and carnivorous plants who rode a tortoise in the Galapagos opened the universe to random terror. This cracked my father up. He didn’t take the creationists seriously. He might notice them peering at him as he rode into the parking lot on his motorcycle, but he never described them in condescending terms. As far as he was concerned, the argument could be parsed into two obviously warring camps: evolutionists whose soldiers could refer to the Salk vaccine, the H-bomb (even though it had to be tested many times and even though it could be said to be a dubious achievement), walking on the moon. The soldiers on the other side drove their stake into ground with the solidity of the Everglades, and though they unfurled their banner with conviction, it was true, what did they have to brag about really? Galileo under house arrest because he wrote that the sun was the center of the universe? My father lit a Marlboro and tapped ash into a glass ashtray in the shape of the Apollo 11 rocket.
To my mother the creationists were nauseating, a grave affront. Pour water on them and they would melt into the floor in a plume of smoke. To her they were all complicitous bombers, and she longed for cities with narrow streets set at odd, unpredictable angles where the shadow of Nosferatu or a golem gliding across a wall would be as prosaic as meeting a friend in a café where you could talk about movies, plays, show off new clothes, and gossip in a language all your friends understood. Your feet made noise on the pavement instead of the silence of asphalt parking lots. After the letter bomb she embarked on fits of driving, traveling to the far-flung provinces of provincial life. On her journeys she discovered apple stands and strip malls, cut-rate carpet dealers and fish fries, public libraries set up in defunct churches, and covered bridges on unmapped roads.
My initial fifteen-year-old response was to try to blend into the town my parents had picked out of nowhere. I daydreamed in school, drawing relentlessly in notebooks, the margins of textbooks, on desks. I still have a few of those sketches of futuristic cities based on my mother’s stories of buildings honeycombed with crowded apartments which I imagined were Gaudí-like, glittering with tesserae, built like huge stalagmites. It was a means of imagining my way out. In the meantime I made an attempt to be anonymous, but the project was useless. After the letter bomb I realized it was impossible to hide behind ordinary clothes and straightened hair that only lasted for a few hours before it boinged back to its curly state. I went to Ravi Shankar and Nina Simone concerts, but if I cheered when she exhorted the crowd by saying if a few white men can run this country you can take over this university, nobody cared or noticed my enthusiastic response.
I encountered my own equivalent of the creationists. My classes were full of small-town boys, mediocre athletes with buzz cuts and monosyllabic names whose lives seemed fixed if not gated. My parents blinked and saw the lot of them crammed into Mr. Wizard’s Way Back Machine. All of them were the descendants of the Gaston who had joined the Children’s Crusade and all were ready to march on infidel-filled Jerusalem if their draft number came up. The letter bomb proved it. I wasn’t so sure. What happened when they, these boys who knew little of life beyond the next town, ended up in Vietnam, Beirut, the Persian Gulf? One bearlike boy who read Soldier of Fortune magazine bragged he would go to Afghanistan or Zaire, names he proudly mispronounced. The ingredients for explosives lurked in their cellar workshops, with how-to manuals hidden in drawers full of jock clothing; they were my suspects. I never knew exactly which one or ones created me, turned me into a target, one-eyed and angry, with no effective means of striking back at them. My parents who looked like Persians with Boris and Natasha accents made me an easy mark. My mother, in particular, was a sitting duck for mimics, and I knew it. Since I’d lost an eye to the anonymous letter bomb I was a sitting duck myself.
In school I had wanted to study Latin and Greek — as if dead languages might explain how images were first connected to words. I imagined hectoring mobs of things (lions, columns, arenas, aqueducts, toga pins, constellations) marshaled into categories: nouns, verbs, syntax — but my family insisted that I do something practical, so I studied the most insubstantial thing I could think of: light.
The job posting was the stamp on my ticket: Library of Congress Film Restoration Project, Paid Internship.
I was charmed by the idea of working in film, but intensely camera shy and happy to work as a kind of handmaiden to “the industry.” All right, I thought, at least I have a hand or an eye in something. Here, I wouldn’t be a target, wouldn’t be stared at, few questions asked, go on with your business, please. The process of learning how to put a brush to aged celluloid gave me a sense of professional identity, saved me from the night shift at a movie-rental shop with a large independent section, answering urgent questions about matrixchopsockeystarwarsdirectorscut. Now I had a hood I could pull over my head, a burrow, a bunker, a fallout shelter with a periscope.
I left for Washington at the end of the summer so my departure could be confused with going off to school, and it was still hot, but in a last gasp kind of way. Department store windows displayed artificial leaves while children on our street still ran through hoses and hydrants in brilliant fuchsia and purple bathing suits. My mother said good-bye at the house; seeing me wave from the window of a train was not possible for her. I kept looking out the car window all the way to the station, armoring myself against her resentment and despair, her sense of betrayal that chased me no matter how much my father, imitating Peter Lorre, said full steam ahead, Frances. Since we were early my father and I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the station.
“What do you think about Cuba?” he asked, stirring and staring into the parking lot.
“What do you mean, what do I think about Cuba?” My father, who was a very calm man, was making me nervous.
“They’re looking for science teachers.”
“You can’t go to Cuba. You’re a United States citizen. If you moved to Havana you’d never be able to come back.”
“I’ve left a lot of places that I can’t and don’t want to return to.”
“You’ve lived in Israel. You won’t be let in.”
“That was a long time ago. Maybe they won’t notice.”
“What about Mom?” The point I feared was that she occupied one of the places he didn’t want to return to.
“I need to get away from here. Between the creationists who guarantee me a life in everlasting hell, who think petri dishes are something you hang from a Christmas tree, and your mother, who mistakes family photographs for expired discount coupons and tosses them out, I think for me, personally, it’s time for a change.”
There was no arguing with him. I didn’t know if he would apply for Cuban citizenship or not, but I knew now that I was leaving, he would as well.
“I want to give you something before your mother makes a clean sweep of everything in the house.” He handed me a faded sepia photograph of a small girl, about four years old. I turned it over. On the back was written F. Baum, 1940. This was my father’s sister.
“So keep this in a safe place.”
Our conversation dwindled in the minutes remaining. Finally he dropped me at the station then went back to his machines. I didn’t want to get on the train, didn’t want to see him return to his mammoth computers, coverless radios, old turntables spinning wildly on the cluttered floor. By giving me this photograph I’d never seen, he was tearing some part of me
