Things You Should Know(4)

Connection, I am thinking. I want connection.

“You want something I don’t have,” she says.



I am at my desk, drifting, remembering the summer my parents divorced and my bar mitzvah was canceled due to lack of interest on all sides.

“I just can’t imagine doing it,” my mother said. “I can’t imagine doing anything with your father, can you? I think it would be very uncomfortable.”

My father gave me $5,000 to “make up the difference,” then asked, “Is that enough?” I spent my thirteenth birthday with him in a New York hotel room, eating ice-cream cake from 31 Flavors with a woman whose name my father couldn’t remember. “Tell my friend about school, tell my friend what you do for fun, tell my friend all about yourself,” he kept saying, and all I wanted to do was scream—What the fuck is your friend’s name?

On Memorial Day weekend, my mother married her “friend,” Howard, and took off on an eight-week second honeymoon, and I was sent to my father’s new townhouse condo in Philadelphia.

There was a small room for me, made out of what had been a walk-in closet. My father was taking cooking lessons, learning a thousand and one things to do with a wok. On different days, different women would come for dinner. “I’m living the good life,” my father would tell me. “I’m getting all I want.” I would eat dinner with my father and his date and then excuse myself and hide in my closet.

I spent my summer at the pool, living entirely in the water, with goggles, with fins. I fell in love with the bottom of the pool, a silky sky-blue, a slippery second skin. I spent days walking up and down, trying to figure the exact point where I could still have my feet on the ground and my head above water.

“It’s vinyl,” I heard the lifeguard tell someone.

The extreme stillness of the sky, the hot, oxygenless air, the water strong like bleach, was blinding, sterile, intoxicating, perfect.

The only other person who came to the pool regularly was a girl who had just been in the nuthouse for not eating. Deformedly thin, she would slather herself with lotion and lie out and bake. She was only allowed to swim one hour a day, and at noon her mother would carry out a tray and she had to eat everything on it—“or else I’m taking you back,” her mother would say.

“Don’t stand over me. Don’t treat me like a baby.”

“Don’t act like a baby.”

And then the mother would look at me. “Would you like half a sandwich?”

I’d nod and she’d give me half a sandwich, which I’d eat still standing in the water, goggles on, feet touching the bottom.

“See,” the mother would say. “He eats. And not only does he eat, he doesn’t make crumbs.”

“He’s in the water,” the girl would say.

In the evening I would crawl into my cave and read postcards from my mother—Venice is everything I thought it would be, France is stunning, London theater is so much better than Broadway. Thinking of you, hoping you’re having a fantastic summer. I am imagining you swimming across America. Love Mom.

“We’re still your parents, we’re just not together,” became the new refrain.

Later, when I started to date, when I would go to girls’ houses and their mothers and fathers would ask, “What do your parents do?” I’d say, “They’re divorced,” as though it were a full-time job. They’d look at me, instantly dismissive, as though I too was doomed to divorce, as though domestic instability was genetically passed down.

And then, later still, there were families I fell in love with. I remember sitting at the Segals’ dining room table, happily slurping chicken soup, looking up at Cindy Segal, who stood above me, bread basket in hand, glaring at me in disgust. “You’re just another one of them,” she said, dropping the bread, unceremoniously dumping me. Too stunned to swallow, I felt soup dribble down my chin.

“Don’t go,” Mrs. Segal said, as Cindy slammed upstairs to her room. After that, the Segals would sometimes call me. “Cindy’s not going to be here,” they’d say, “come visit.” I went a couple of times and then Cindy joined a cult and never spoke to any of us again.

My mother used to say, marry someone familiar, marry someone you have something in common with. The flatness of Susan, the hollow, the absence of some unnameable something—was familiar. The sensation that she was on the outside, waiting to be invited in, was something we had in common.

Never did Susan ask for an accounting of my past, never did she pull back and say—“You’re not going to hurt me, are you? You don’t have any weird diseases, do you? You’re not married, right?”