The Sunlit Night (2 page)

•    •    •

As a child, my father had wanted to be a doctor. He followed the track faithfully: Brooklyn Borough Science Fair, AP chemistry, pre-med major. Nothing deterred his interest, until at nineteen he received a sudden rush of praise. His molecular genetics professor raved about the precision of his double helix illustrations. His organic chemistry professor photocopied my father’s line-angle representations to distribute as study materials. My father started to understand his passions as distinct from his classmates’, from the sea of students pursuing identical paths. He loved the way the gallbladder had the shape and color of a cactus leaf. He hated the way his course textbooks depicted the esophagus as a rigatoni noodle. He discovered that he had a talent for drawing organs the way he wanted to see them, focusing on their harsh complexity. He discovered the Association of Medical Illustrators. He believed he’d found a way to contribute his best to the medical world.

His friends progressed from pre-med to medical school. He entered a biological illustration graduate program for CAAHEP accreditation. His friends called him “lucky” with affection and disapproval: his program would take only two years. He earned his first paycheck illustrating a cross section of the human palm. His illustrations were bold. He never redrew a line. His friends, having completed their studies, and over the years having completed their residencies and having started their practices, didn’t need to consult his good work. They had long since put their textbooks aside. He’d never met anyone who’d seen his illustrations. Thirty years into his work, my father couldn’t say what his excellence had earned him.

His drafting desk was a slab of wood resting over his clothes drawers, in my bedroom. Scattered over the desktop lay the empty cardboard cartons of graphite crayon sets—the crayons themselves lying out one by one with broken tips—an X-Acto knife and its gleaming spare blades, stacks of sketchbooks, rolls of masking tape, a half dozen mugs. My father, his sixty-year-old head full of eternally growing hair, liked to stand at his desk with all his drawings out, smiling, talking about how miserable they made him.

How miserable they made him. How many cups of coffee he drank a day. How mad he made other men with his full head of blond hair. I believed my father’s love of life was demonstrated by the coffee he drank—rabid, charged, sickening, acidic, addictive. Nobody had a bigger built-in smile than my father, though his mouth lent itself equally to extraordinary rage. At breakfast every Sunday, he asked me if his pictures were still good.

A diner we found one such morning was playing Ella Fitzgerald, so he wanted to stay. He spread ketchup over the omelet we were sharing, put his knife down, gazed out the window, then turned back, picked up his fork, scraped the ketchup off the top, and ate it alone, without egg.

“The sound is especially good in here,” he said. “It sounds like they’re playing live music.”

Ella was singing “Cheek to Cheek” in 1956.

Nowhere was my father more at home than in a diner, in the company of waitresses and condiments. He was the most American person I knew. Perhaps my mother was the least, with her specific intelligences, her tininess, her incredible talent for self-restraint.

A toddler ran past our table waving a bendy straw. We laughed, and then my father got wretched. His flaring nostrils signaled the turn.

“No solution,” he began.

I ate and let him go on.

“I did it to myself,” he said. “I could have been a podiatrist. Instead, I draw feet. It’s not science, and it’s not art. It’s just pictures. Students don’t look at them. Doctors
definitely
don’t look at them. How am I supposed to keep making these things when nobody cares if they exist?”

“They’re gorgeous,” I said. They were.

“What does it matter if you do what you love, if what you love doesn’t matter?”

The waitress wanted to know if the coffee should be refilled.

He said to her, “What I do doesn’t matter.”

She asked, “What?”

I said, “Yes, please.”

“I am sixty years old,” he said to me, while she leaned, patient, voluptuous, over our table, her pot filling his cup, her hair like mine—thin, curly, getting long—and it was such a relief to have three of us at the table for a moment, another innocent party, allowing us to pause, while a French family at the next table consulted their maps.

I wanted to be able to speak to him happily, to show him the way I was when I was away from him, which was happy, which was how he wanted me to be. I had a copy of Dostoyevsky’s
The Eternal Husband
with me and showed him its bright pink cover, to change the subject.

“Bought it for the title?” was his first joke. He flipped the book over. There was only a single line of text on the back: “The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings.” We looked at the quote together from opposite sides of the table.

•    •    •

My mother keeps a sea monster in five porcelain parts (\ ^ ^ ^ /) on her office desk, beside a row of long-living orchids. She works at a small interior design company. On a shelf beside her upholstery samples, she keeps a photograph of my father making a duck face with his lips, a photograph of me as an eight-year-old in a purple summer camp T-shirt, and one of my sister, age eleven, holding a pizza box on Lexington Avenue. The photos are displayed in reversible, clear-plastic frames that hold four images but take up the counter space of two. The thing that my mother likes most, personally and professionally, is the efficient use of space.

An example of which is the sofa bed. If the pillows are hidden in the chest-bottom of the Oriental side table with the remote controls on top; if the blankets are folded up into the groove between the piano and the wall; if the pajamas are in the children’s room; if the kitchen bowls and cookie tins fit concentrically inside one another, inside the cabinets with their clever wire separators; if the children sleep on top of each other; if the sofa bed pulls out to the door—

My mother apologized to every person who entered our home for its size. She told strangers her dream of a bedroom with a door. She designed duplex apartments, four-bed, three-bath; she made pillow recommendations to the owners of five-story brownstones; she was responsible for the strippable, nonwoven wallpaper of Connecticut summer homes. Two healthy daughters and one city-priced bedroom later, her salary was spent. She did what she could to make our space count.

•    •    •

I don’t remember why they fought. Why was my father always,
always
screaming? I can’t remember it ever having to do with my mother herself. It was a performance
for
her, as she was his best audience. “He’s an actor,” his mother had said. He was, with his wildness, showing my mother how genuinely angry he was: a good and smart man who worked hard at what he loved, in the field where he had become at last excellent, making work that he knew was beautiful and useful, but that nobody ever used.

He bellowed. He never struck her. It was not that kind of attack. My father was only screaming a version of Love me, because I love you, because you allow me to suffer, because it feels good when we suffer near each other.

Other fights were fights about fighting.

“You only know how to bark,” she would say.

He would shout something unintelligible.

“Bark! Bark!” would be her retort.

Sick of her barking, he would storm out.

Whose problem was it? Mine, or hers, or his? In the chain of things, it became mine: my father was an innocent victim of the medical community; my mother was an innocent victim of my father; I was an innocent child. If it wasn’t our apartment’s door that he slammed, it was the diner’s door. If it wasn’t my problem, it was nobody’s, and then what? Innocence felt so much like inertia to me, I wanted conviction. This desire coincided with high school. I wore my pants baggier and baggier, my shirts tighter and tighter, my headphones the size of my head.

My parents were older than all of my friends’ parents. They had been college seniors in 1969 and lived in Greenwich Village in the seventies, but I knew that my parents had never been involved in any kind of free love, that they hadn’t bothered over Dylan or Mitchell, that they listened to the same Bach partitas then as now. I don’t know what they were doing while their classmates were stringing flowers. I pictured them climbing concrete staircases.

The way my parents weren’t cool was timeless, as if all the bands and pant shapes and shoe heights of all the ages had passed right by them, leaving their good sense intact.

With pride, my father always said I was born a “dark, serious” baby. He always followed that, sadly, with the fact that I had become “a blabbermouth.” It was difficult to be nearly as serious, as Bach-like, as my parents liked things to be. When my younger sister turned eighteen, she began dating Scott Glenny, a boy who had been allowed to play video games all his life. He would turn out to be a gifted computer programmer, but my parents couldn’t have known that. Scott’s talent bred in him a rude form of confidence, one that led him to mock my father’s “doodles,” and even on occasion to belittle Sarah’s veterinary studies—her “girlie” love of animals. My parents suspected him of being a jerk and a moron. When my sister came home from his big messy bedroom, she would beg for the radio station to be switched, for something other than Chopin to be played in our house. It never happened.

We all lived together in our one-bedroom over the Crane, a classic American restaurant whose classic American roaches scared me when I turned on the bathroom light. I went out and could not come home at night without opening the front door right into the sofa bed and my parents’ open-mouthed sleeping. The only way we knew how to be was in each other’s way.

I could not call it a loveless marriage. There was this certain, occasional thing that happened where my mother held my father’s head in her hand and brushed his hair off his forehead. I knew their tenderness when I saw it. But was it the luminous partnership I wished for myself, and for my sister?

•    •    •

My father and I were at the kitchen table for breakfast. I had woken up early from a night full of Robert nightmares, but my sister was still sleeping deeply, her taxicab lullaby evidently a success. My mother was in the kitchen, scrambling eggs.

When the eggs were hard, and the juice poured, and the napkins folded perfectly, my mother sat down. I moved the toast and the Nutella from the kitchen counter to the table. Morning light bounced off the back of Sarah’s chair.

“Sleeping Beauty,” my father called to the bedroom.

And then the bedroom door opened, and Sarah and her left hand came to the table.

Had it been there the night before? She sat down and we stared. Had I failed to see the sparkle in the dark, on the fire escape? Sarah rested her adorned hand on the lid of the Nutella jar.

She looked around the table, pausing at each of our faces, but none of us spoke, so she opened the jar, dipped her knife to the bottom, and spread a piece of toast over until it was completely brown. She bit and chewed with her lips closed, smiling.

“How did he propose?” I asked. My sister began her answer, which to my embarrassment I could not fully recall when Yasha asked me about it months later. They had taken a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. I think Sarah had been posing as the Statue of Liberty when Scott got down on his knee. While she told the story, I was distracted by my mother’s enormous eyes, which were full of agony. My father was ready to speak. I saw something on his mind gaining momentum. When my sister ended her story, my father said, “Good, because your mother and I are separating.” He added, “Good you’ll be out of the house.” He looked at my sister, then at me. He concluded, “There won’t be a house for you anyway.”

My mother said, “Saul.”

He said, “Cat’s out.”

She said, “Saul.”

My sister said, “Mom?”

My mother said, “Congratulations.”

“He’s a schmo, Scott Glenny,” my father said. “You’re marrying a schmo.”

•    •    •

I went as quickly as possible to Grand Central Station. Without a ticket, I boarded the train and lay flat across three seats.

My sister was at Scott’s dorm by now, being consoled. I wondered if she would tell him what my parents had said. Schmo. Putz. All the Yiddish words for
not this guy
. The wedding was scheduled for September. Mrs. Glenny was hosting. Mr. Glenny would spend the summer repainting the Glenny house; they could marry in the Glenny garden. Summer didn’t come to San Francisco until September, Scott’s mother told Sarah, and when it came, it was glorious. In explaining the arrangements, Sarah repeated the word
glorious
. My father repeated the word
schmuck
.

Scott was my year, graduating. Sarah intended to take a year off before her senior year, move to California, and then see about graduating with work-credit transfers. Dropbox had offered Scott a staggering entry salary. Sarah would have plenty of time before she needed her own income. I knew this would only encourage Scott to call Sarah’s work “superfluous.” My mother wanted to know what she had done to drive Sarah to this marriage. My sister wanted to know what she had done to drive our parents to this separation. None of us could fathom one another.