Piece of Mind Page 2

  Now it was basically afternoon, and I still didn’t have any clothes to wear or any idea of what I would say to this woman if and when I called. I could review my résumé if I could find it. I’d have to make sure I had a clean copy. That would take a while.

  I could tell her about how much my art meant to me, how much I enjoyed connecting with kids over crayons and cookies, especially one-on-one. Groups were intimidating. Could I say that? Probably not. And I probably shouldn’t mention that it would take me hours to get there, that the idea of doing that commute every day was exhausting. It was a bad idea to tell her how unpolished I appeared, no matter how much time I spent before a mirror, and that I couldn’t find an outfit for an interview anyway, and that it was silly to imagine getting up early enough to try when it was already whatever time it was and I was still wearing my pajamas.

  6. Do some research for more jobs.

  Seriously? See numbers 1 and 5.

  7. Think about cleaning your room. Really!

  He always underlined that part, and always included it on the list, and I always had the same response. I’d underline think.

  I had been told many times, mostly by Dad, that my room was hazardous. I could see how cluttered it was, from an objective perspective; he even took pictures once to make sure I understood.

  “Grey Gardens,” he said, waving photos in my face.

  “How would you know?” I said. “You walked out after five minutes of that movie.”

  “I saw enough,” he said.

  He couldn’t see how I could forget to close a box of cereal, a bag of chips, to put the top back on a tub of peanut butter. How I could let the toothpaste in the bathroom sit as it crusted over in the sink, and spill over the tube. How I could leave that hair in the drain, and never bother to notice the grime in the shower, or the mildew and the residue between the tiles, the water on the floor.

  Reams of papers were scattered everywhere. Used art supplies and plastic tchotchkes were crammed into corners of my room because I couldn’t bear to part with anything.

  By the end of the day, the mess I made had spread from piles into masses, and by the end of the week, my room was a colossal accumulation of socks, magazine ads, broken pencils, action figures, and stuffed animals all collected to form my own private menagerie. No one else would be able to bear it, but this room belonged to me.

  Every cleaning crew Dad had ever sent over refused to work unless I could first get my room into “manageable” shape, a concept I didn’t understand. So eventually Dad gave up, and I closed my door.

  I did sometimes think of what a normal person’s list might have said, if I was another version of myself:

  8. Pick up dry cleaning, or 9. Buy milk, but I couldn’t do errands because we didn’t live within walking distance of shops, and I couldn’t drive.

  I had tried learning once, when I insisted it was important to have a license as a central rite of passage. But I didn’t have a sense of direction; I usually went the wrong way, and I couldn’t tell the difference between left and right. See my hand? Look what letter it’s forming. It was an L, but I didn’t see it.

  Dad took me out driving once. We barely survived it.

  So I didn’t know what side of the street I was supposed to be on, I said, once Dad had stopped yelling. So what?

  I guess for most people a sense of direction was instinctive, but I had to think about where I was going, and then I still wasn’t sure, and you didn’t have time to think when you were on the road with other drivers. So I never got behind the wheel again. It bothered me when I was sixteen and still had to get a ride from my father, and again in my twenties when I had to depend on my teenage brother, Nate.

  But I couldn’t help it. My brain was complicated. I couldn’t blame everything on the parietal lobe, for example, even though that was the part that supposedly had something to do with direction (along with the hippocampus), because the parietal lobe also played a role in reading, writing, and drawing objects, and those were some of my best skills. Those were the tasks that didn’t need to go on the list. And yet the parietal lobe also had something to do with math, which I couldn’t do either. Dad basically cheated me through high school until I could meet the minimum graduation requirements, which is why I needed to go to a college that didn’t count the math portion of the SAT, which is why there was never any math on the list.

  Number 10 might have said Cook dinner. I tried cooking simple things like spaghetti or scrambled eggs or boxed brownies every once in a while, but Dad didn’t approve. I tended to forget details, like turning off the oven. There were a few incidents involving burns (I almost always forgot to use a mitt) and explosions (tinfoil in the microwave) and small fires (small towels and napkins too close to the burner). Luckily, none of them were very serious, unless you counted half a scorched cupboard (that was what fire extinguishers were for), or half a scorched hand (aloe was useful), but they were enough eventually to steer me away from the kitchen.

  Dad stocked the snack cabinet with plenty of cereal, peanut butter, and snack packs. He kept the refrigerator full of string cheese, hummus, apples, and carrot sticks. There was no danger of ever going hungry.

  In the evening, most of the time we ate something he could heat up quickly, like frozen dinners or instant rice dishes, or pizza that he could pick up from somewhere else.

  THE REST OF THAT DAY went fast. After a shower, I watched a documentary on the growth of the ivory black market and the devastation of elephants in Africa, made more coffee, read the rest of the newspaper, and found a random string for Harry to play with. It probably originated in one of my shirts. He didn’t always go for the string, but this day he did, and that meant a little exercise for both of us.

  Once we were sufficiently tired, we sat together by the windowsill and watched the outside. When I spotted a squirrel focused on an acorn, I grabbed my sketchbook. He was holding the nut in his tiny hands, gnawing on it piece by piece.

  I’d originally discovered a penchant for drawing animals in seventh grade when I met Russell the pit bull, the dog who patrolled the house at the bottom of our street. Allegedly, he once bit a little girl’s hand when she was giving him a treat, but I never believed that. He was a victim of breed profiling. And besides, no one came close enough for him to bite, except for me, the day he posed.

  Russell, a guard dog known for his rigid posture and guttural growling, was always on high alert, but for the twenty or so minutes I stayed with him, he let down his guard. He stopped howling when he saw I wasn’t going to break his electronic fence, and he even let his tongue hang out as I began to draw him. In my finished picture, I imagined him as the commander of an army, a leader torn by the honor of his obligation and a sympathetic will.

  “Isn’t that something,” Dad said when he saw any of my drawings, but that time he added, “really.”

  As I studied the squirrel, I started to get inside his head, imagining his determination pulsing though my pencil. But just as I began to find some rhythm on the page, Harry leapt up from a dream and startled me.

  When I turned around, the squirrel was gone and Dad was home.

  4

  DAD ARRIVED CARRYING BAGS OF CHINESE FOOD. FIRST WE LIT the Shabbat candles because it was Friday and that ritual still mattered to him, the idea of bringing light into dark and separating the workweek from the weekend.

  In the old days, when Nate was small and Mom was around, we’d have a proper meal with challah and wine, and an endless debate about the prospects for peace in the Middle East. Sometimes Mom and Dad would rehash the odd news stories they’d seen on TV or heard on the radio—they’d always heard the same stories, even when they listened to different stations or watched different channels—so they filled each other in and took turns correcting each other.

  Most of the time they seemed to somehow balance each other—she with her pragmatic optimism, he with his quixotic romanticism—both of them with these bursting hearts. But on Friday nights, their dynamic tende
d to swing to one of the extremes: from joyful bliss to blowout. It was never clear at first which way things would turn.

  One Shabbat in particular I remember, Dad brought home extra appetizers and extra sparkling wine and extra cake. He handed Mom an oversized bouquet with purple flowers and curled ribbon from the florist, and he kissed her, a real kiss, as he entered.

  “Ew,” I said. I was probably twelve then.

  Nate was too little to notice, only six or so.

  Dad created a spread and filled our glasses as he proposed a toast “to new beginnings.” For a few minutes, it was so much fun, all of this novelty, all of us laughing and joking. I even got to taste the wine. But then the whole thing started to feel a little strange. It wasn’t normal to have this many appetizers in our house. And we didn’t usually make toasts before the prayers.

  Nate said he felt sick to his stomach pretty soon after Dad raised his glass. Maybe he had an inkling something was off.

  Dad smiled and took a sip of his scotch. “You ready for the news?”

  “Yes!” we all said.

  “I’m leaving my job.”

  Mom’s face was white, almost instantly.

  “Everything is going to be fantastic! I’m telling you,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of leads for other things, much better things. Believe me.”

  “You’re leaving or you left?” she said.

  He didn’t say anything for a second.

  “With no discussion?”

  “What’s to discuss? This is a good thing!” he said. “I promise you it is. We’re celebrating here.”

  She looked around the table and took Nate out of the room without another word.

  She didn’t talk to Dad for the rest of that evening.

  Later that night, I found her sitting awake on the stairwell, staring out into nothing. Biting her nails.

  It startled me to see her there. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had to get up a minimum of two times in the middle of the night—for water or the bathroom, or just to walk around—but it was almost always just me in those moments.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  I’d never seen her like that. She worried, of course. I knew she worried. But not outwardly in that way, so I could feel it so concretely. Most of the time she was so joyful, so ready to laugh at herself, that you just wanted to absorb her energy by being near her. Everyone did.

  I sat next to her, and she pulled me close.

  “You want to know the secret of marriage?” she said.

  “You think I’ll ever get married?”

  “I think you’ll do whatever your heart desires,” she said. “Just remember, the quality you love the most in someone is the same one that will drive you craziest.”

  “That’s the secret?” I said.

  “It’s a good one to remember.”

  “Are we going to be okay?” I said.

  “Of course, peanut.” She took a deep breath and gave my hand a squeeze. “This too.”

  It was her favorite line: This too shall pass. It was cheesy and cliché, something her grandmother used to say, but it worked enough that night to make both of us feel better.

  The roughest patch did pass eventually. After a couple of months, Dad found more work. He always went to some kind of office, first recruiting and then consulting before getting a job in sales.

  But what does your dad do? Marni Masterson asked me once during lunch.

  “He works in business,” I said.

  As what?

  “A businessman.”

  It was all I ever knew. He didn’t like talking about work, so I didn’t press for more.

  When Dad mentioned the office, it always seemed his mind was elsewhere—plotting, maybe, or daydreaming about the big windfall, the creation of his own company.

  He never found another foundation position as good as that one he gave up.

  The Friday-night fight became its own ritual, as Mom began to notice Dad’s penny stocks, and then miracle weight-loss drugs, and pricey supplements with too many claims for healing taking up too much space in the medicine cabinet.

  “It can’t all be true,” Mom said.

  “But what if it is?” Dad said.

  And then, one Friday night Mom didn’t come home.

  As hard as she tried, she couldn’t plan for everything.

  It was a car accident on a random day in November. There had been intermittent freezing rain. Road conditions were unexpectedly slick. The police report said something about a deer and a patch of black ice. She had been unable to avoid hitting either.

  All of it seemed wrong. She couldn’t kill a spider, let alone a doe. And it wasn’t cold enough for ice.

  For a while, I half believed some force was going to pluck her from her grave and return her to us. In the afterlife, the gatekeepers, or whoever was in charge, could have only apologized. We didn’t mean to do this so soon, they might have said. Two accidents is too many for one family. If we’d known how much you were leaving behind . . .

  But that was years ago. I was fourteen when she died.

  Since Nate had left for college, we’d lit the Shabbat candles, said the Lehadlik Ner to welcome in the weekend, and then retreated to the living room to eat in front of the TV.

  DAD POURED his scotch and grew progressively more vocal as we watched Jeopardy!. He dominated in any questions related to history, geography, religion, and science, but I always beat him to the buzzer in the arts, animals, and pop-culture categories.

  He sat in his recliner with his legs up, Harry on his lap. He pretended he didn’t like Harry, but he never kicked him off his chair, and they fell asleep together most late nights watching the news.

  After Final Jeopardy, we cracked open our fortune cookies.

  Doors will be opening for you, Dad’s said.

  “You see?” he said with a big grin. “You never know what life will bring.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re taking your fortune cookie to heart?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. “The cookie knows. Did you call that woman today about the interview?”

  “I will,” I said.

  He sighed. “What does yours say?”

  You have a yearning for perfection.

  “Hah!” he said. “Yearning!”

  “The cookie knows,” I said. “That’s what you just said.”

  “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

  There was a lightness in his tone. He didn’t mean anything by it and yet—

  “I can be a perfectionist,” I said. “You don’t think I’m capable of perfection?”

  He put down his cookie and gave me a more serious look.

  “Of course you’re capable, sweetheart,” he said, lowering the volume on the TV. “You’re capable of anything.”

  I wanted the conversation to end.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he said after a while. “What do you say we feed the ducks?”

  “What ducks?”

  “At the Nature Center.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time we had gone there.

  “You can bring your sketchbook,” he said. “And the doors will open for both of us.”

  5

  ON SATURDAY MORNING WE WERE SET FOR OUR ADVENTURE— after I had time to find and gather all of my things and figure out how to pack. Then after some cartoons and reading a section of the Times.

  Dad eyed the stale bread on the counter.

  “You ready?” he said finally.

  I wasn’t ready to get nipped by an angry duck (I had once been pinched so hard my leg was red for days), but the bread was gathering mold anyway, and there was something in his tone . . . Maybe it was because it was the start of the summer and he had an itch to get outside, or maybe it was because he was feeling nostalgic and he needed to revisit a place he hadn’t been in a while. As regular members of the Nature Center, we used to go every Sunday, even when it rained. Or maybe it was the cookie.

  “I could be,” I said.

&nbs
p; “Terrific,” he said. “Maybe we should bring them a box of quack-ers.”

  I groaned, though there was something comforting in his corniness.

  There weren’t just ducks at the Nature Center. There was a whole farm full of animals—cows, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, rabbits—all providing ample opportunity to draw, so I stuck my book inside my giant tote filled with dried pens and markers, and torn pieces of paper stained with crayon and coffee, loose change and collected buttons. As long as there was space in the bag for the book and a fresh pencil, the rest could stay.

  Dad packed a picnic basket. Actually it wasn’t a basket. It was a plastic bag. He held on to the “good ones,” the sturdiest kind for these occasions. He loaded it up with cheese sticks, trail mix, apple slices, and sandwiches.

  “It’s too much,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  “We’ll never eat it all.”

  “We could get stuck, and you could get hungry.”

  It was useless to argue with him, and besides, within the first fifteen minutes of the car ride, I ate a third of the snacks.

  “You’re supposed to save some of it for lunch,” he said.

  “I’m car sick,” I said.

  I only ate it because he packed it. I was actually a little ­

  nauseous—I always was in his car—but I turned up the radio. We listened to the same newsflash every ten minutes, as though we were waiting for some kind of revelation to emerge from the static.

  When we got there, it took us ten minutes to walk from one end of the parking lot to the duck pond. And then Dad realized we’d left the bread in the backseat. We’d do the feeding on the way out, he said, when he could park closer.

  We needed to park closer because of his knee. He’d been a slow walker since I was small. I remember him playing tennis at one point, sometime around first grade maybe, but over the years his gait had degenerated into a lip-biting limp. We needed a handicapped sticker for his car, but he wouldn’t admit anything was that serious.