talk about at a dinner party with loud laughter and tarnished sentimentality, my siblings and I squished along the top stair, elbows on knees, chins in hands. It was just part of the fabric of the past and, like any child who thinks her family is the only kind of family, I assumed it was nothing unique. You mean your folks didn’t write novels under pseudonyms in the sixties? Are you sure?
I knew that my father had renounced Judaism and was seeking enlightenment when he went to a Buddhist retreat in the mountains—a trip of ten days, from which he returned transformed indeed, but not in the way he had hoped. I knew that after some time—a year and half, maybe—of trying to live with those transformations, he allowed himself to be admitted to Austen Riggs. And I knew that when that place was unable to quiet the voices or the depression, he hanged himself in his hospital room.
* * *
THE TATTERED YELLOW quilt is tucked up to my chin. It’s dark outside Nan’s bedroom windows. I’ve never been in here this early in the morning. Josh is next to me on the bed, our backs up against the wall, the quilt pulled high around us, my head on his shoulder. Why were we called here? Nan scoots back to sit up but stays under her own blanket. Apart. The quilt is soft against my face. My thumb is in my mouth, my eyelids are droopy. I don’t hear the words Mom says, but when she speaks them we know he is dead.
5
AFTER NGONI RETURNED to Zimbabwe, our connection was dependent on weekly phone calls and nightly letters. This is how I learned about the demonstrations and strikes raging on his university’s campus, how I learned that one day tear gas forced him back from the campus gates. Soon classes were canceled, and he described his days alone in the house where he grew up, trying to find a plan. No university to attend, no diploma in reach, no graduate school applications he was qualified to fill out, no way out. Just a love across the ocean who thought she saw a possibility. With a crackling phone line covering the distance between us, a conversation in which each word arrived a beat after it was spoken, I could hear something new in his voice, which typically betrayed so little. It sounded like fear.
“How long can I sit around doing nothing?”
I squeezed the phone to my ear and took a breath before speaking. “We could get married,” I said, my voice quieter than I intended.
A pause. So I filled it. “You could come here and marry me.”
Another beat, so I said, “We would figure out school from here.”
“Yes,” he said, though it felt like hours waiting. “Yes,” he said, and I could hear a new sound now—was it hope? “We could get married.”
It was the only thing I ever wanted anyway.
ONE SPRING MORNING when everything was decided and the paperwork all but completed, when families on either side of the world were clapping at the news, I climbed into my car and drove a couple of hours south to see my father’s mother for a conversation that had to happen in person. My grandmother Rose stood in her black slacks and silk blouse, her old lady flats, her short gray hair, her compact five feet no inches, at the head of the tarmac path that led to the front door of her retirement village condo. It could have been 1978, this scene was so familiar.
“You’re delicious,” she said, and squeezed my cheeks like I was tiny. Except now there was no one behind me waiting to be squeezed and made to squirm. I was here alone, heavy with my task.
I followed her into the air-conditioning and sat on the couch in her icy-white living room. The coffee table was made of glass. There were glass sculptures backlit on bookshelves. There was a glass door to a patio I’d never stepped on. When I was little, I’d wander from here into the bathroom to pee, linger there and lift every cloisonné clamshell lid in search of treasure. Pause at the bookcases in the back hallway and check for her footsteps before crouching down on my knees to read the names of the authors of the books on the bottom shelf. Josh said they were Dad’s, and I worried that if I didn’t memorize them on these visits, Dad really would disappear. Cheryl Nash. Barney Parrish. Walter Bond. I didn’t know then that Dad’s most prolific pseudonym was missing from his mother’s shelves, I didn’t know then that my father wrote more than these titles to pay the mortgage.
I’d sneak further back into her bedroom to scare myself at her shrine. Giant portraits of my grandfather and my dad hanging on the wall by her bed. Grandpa’s hair was gray but his skin was smooth, and there was his nose like a mountainside on his face. I’d peer in as close as I could get to see if I could spot the scar—Mom said he’d tried to cut it off with scissors when he was little. Cecil died a year after his son, died of esophageal cancer a year after his son hanged himself. Died of esophageal cancer after not smoking a day in his life.
Dad’s portrait was different. It was taken outside in the snow, and his puffy seventies jacket and transition lenses and slight smile ached because I knew them so well. This picture was meant to appear on the back flap of a book he never published. Even as a kid I knew where Mom kept the negatives. I used to search them for clues. In high school I got one printed, kept it hidden between books in my bedroom. He’s sitting on the top of a picnic table in a yard I don’t recognize, he’s smiling like there’s something funny. How can Rose bear to have these portraits hanging on the wall, looking at her all night long? Doesn’t she want to forget?
“Where shall we eat?” Rose said to me when I sat on her couch. It was a trick question, because there was only one place she thought good enough.
“That place you like,” I said. “But before we go, there’s something I need to tell you.” My hands shook and my face was too hot. I was ready for the slap this time. She took her round pink plastic glasses off her face and looked at me steadily. “Ngoni and I are getting married.”
There was a pause before the tears. I sat with my hands in my lap, tea cold on the table, and felt myself get distant from that place, from her pain. I almost wanted to laugh. If this was going to make her sad, I decided in that moment, I was sad for her. But I was not sad. This is a ridiculous thing to cry over, I wanted to scream. I’ve found my person after all my life not having my person! If this makes you cry, I wanted to tell her, then cry. But I will sit here next to you and smile. I saw her then as if she were very far, and I didn’t come back to meet her.
After a while she got up and walked to the kitchen, so I got up too, and found her standing at the counter with something large and glass in her hands. A vase or a bowl. It looked heavy.
“Where will the children be?” she shouted as I walked in. “That is what I want to know!”
She slumped into a chair at the table, her back hunched and heaving, and I didn’t know where to put my body, where to put my eyes. So I focused on the large glass bowl in her lap. She was curled around it like a baby. It was clear and the glass looked very thick. I’d never seen anything like it, but it reminded me of the thick glass countertops in the bank my mother used when I was little. As she filled out small rectangular strips of paper with a pen attached to a chain, I stood with my eyes just exactly at the counter level, staring into the thick green glass edge. I’d then pile onto tippy-toes to see that from the top all was clear. Back and forth, thick green glass edge, all clear on top. A magic trick, an illusion. I repeated it again and again, rolling up and down on my toes. The bowl in my grandmother’s lap held this same illusion—purple edging curled into handles like a basket, clear from another angle. I focused on the edges, the thick purple edges I couldn’t see through. They were the color my skin turned with a bad bruise.
“Where will the children be?” she said again.
I sighed.
“That’s
