Riding Fury Home Page 8

  After Dad left my bedroom, I lay in my bed, imagining myself in a courtroom. Somehow, I’d gotten the idea that in a divorce children have to testify, and I knew from Perry Mason that you had to swear on the Bible. Like on TV, I saw the scene in black and white. The judge would be bald, with deep jowls and a black robe. We would all stand for the judge. His gavel would come down with a whap. They would call me to the stand. “Who do you love more—your mom or your dad?” Swear it on the Bible. “Who would you choose to live with? Choose! Choose!”

  “I love them both—equally,” I would protest.

  “No, you must choose,” the lawyer in the black suit would say. “Mom or Dad; Mom or Dad? You must answer!”

  I clutched my sheet in my fists. Mom needs me more, I thought, so I better say her.

  Mom came in to say goodnight. She got into bed and held me while I cried. “I don’t want to choose! I don’t want to choose between you!” I wailed.

  She stroked my hair and explained to me that custody was all settled and there would be no fight. I would live with her and visit with Dad one day each weekend. My body went limp with relief—I would not have to choose.

  THE FIRST CHRISTMAS AFTER my parents separated was a bonanza for me. My secular parents didn’t celebrate Chanukah but had decided early on that they didn’t want me to feel so different and deprived, so they gave me Christmas presents. Dad had just moved out a couple of weeks before the holidays, and he and Mom were vying to outdo each other. Dad bought me a pair of skis, boots, and poles from E. J. Korvette, and Mom bought me a beginner’s guitar. I found there was an upside to the tug of loyalties pulling on me—the unspoken who do you love best?

  On our first excursion to the rather pitiful ski slopes of northern New Jersey, Dad brought along a how to ski book. Neither of us had ever skied. We laced on our boots, clipped on the skis, and grabbed hold of the rope tow to the top of the beginners’ run. We wobbled to a spot out of the main traffic. Then my intellectual father, who believed one could learn anything from a book, held the book in the air and read me instructions.

  “Basic snowplow for beginners: tips of the skis are pointed together, knees inward, back of the skis flare out in a ‘V ’ . . . ”

  And then I was off, flying down the hill, unable to hear Dad’s voice reading Step 2. He had not gotten as far as “How to Stop,” so I flailed down the ski run until I fell on my backside and skidded to a stop near the bottom. My wet rear end confirmed the disappointment that had been growing in me: My father wasn’t the all-knowing genius I’d believed him to be. After he careened down the slope, I insisted we get ski lessons.

  On our weekend dates, Dad often took me into New York City. Usually we went to a museum, and every now and then we would stand in the half-price ticket line for a Broadway show. It was thrilling to be treated to such special excursions. Alone with Dad, I vibrated with excitement. Then, over dinner in a New York restaurant, I would stare at Dad’s woeful, angry face while he complained about the stress of supporting my mother. “When is she going to get a job?!” was his chronic lament. I shook my head from side to side, my face filled with sympathy.

  I carried my father’s anger home. More than once, I returned from a date with Dad and launched at Mom, “When are you going to get a job? Dad can’t keep this up!” Sometimes she would say, “Karen, you know I just can’t handle it right now!” and begin crying. Then I would feel awful, churning with guilt and anger and sadness all at once. Other times, she’d yell, “Go live with your father if you feel that way, but don’t talk to me about it!” I’d go to my bedroom and slam the door.

  I LEARNED TO PLAY guitar from a TV class on the public broadcast channel. I perched on a chair, practicing chords in what had been my parents’ bedroom and we now used as a TV room. Mom had moved back downstairs to the study right after Dad left, as if she could not stand to sleep in that room. Soon, I had learned enough chords to accompany myself singing the folk songs and political poetry I learned from records: Peter, Paul and Mary; Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; and Pete Seeger.

  Folk music was being rediscovered, with hootenanny clubs opening up where kids went to sing along. Even though I sang alone at home, I felt part of something, a message that was shared. On Saturday nights, Mom and I watched the half-hour Hootenanny TV show filmed at college campuses.

  Playing guitar and singing was easy and fun compared with my years laboring at the piano, practicing the same fractions of sonatas over and over for meticulous scrutiny by my piano teacher. As I sang, something happened in my body—my voice rode on my breath, my tight chest opened with song, the passion of the lyrics overcame my reticence and poured through me—something close to joy.

  Chapter 20. Crossing the Demilitarized Zone

  THE SUMMER AFTER DAD moved out, I spent a month at Camp Birch Ridge. I’d been going to the small camp in the Kittatinny Mountains of northern New Jersey since I was eight. I loved having other kids to play with all day long, and fell into the familiarity of camp routine with deep pleasure, relieved of responsibility by the structured activities.

  Twice a day we swam in the lake. In the morning there were lessons, in the afternoon free swim. I was proud that by my sixth year at camp I’d advanced to training as a junior lifesaver. I swam a crisp crawl as Paddles, the swimming instructor, yelled directions over a megaphone for a practice rescue of a drowning camper. During archery, I stood with legs apart, bowstring drawn back, my focus keenly narrowed to sight along the arrow. All else fell away as I felt the power of letting the arrow fly, listening to the sharp whap as it landed somewhere near the bull’s-eye of the target.

  I even took an odd comfort in the dreaded inspections of our quarters, the check for neatly made hospital corners on our cots and clothes folded in our trunks. Every morning, we stood at attention as the flag was unfurled and raised, then in the evening lowered and folded. At dinner, I ate with great gusto camp meals repeated from the same recipes each year, with ice-cold milk doled out by counselors in half-glass refills. And at night around the campfire, there was the group camaraderie as we sang together, flames sparking the dark.

  That summer, I brought my guitar. I had learned quite a few songs from the class on public television. During free period, I perched on my cot in my unit’s canvas tent, strumming and singing. Other girls joined me, sitting on the opposite cot. I felt almost giddy being at the center of their attention, leading them in song.

  WHILE I WAS GOING ABOUT my days canoeing and making lanyards, back in Millstone, Mr. Fredrickson noticed that Mom’s car had not moved in the driveway for two days. He went to check on her. I will never know how it was that my mother was still alive, two days after swallowing rat poison. Was there blood, shit, vomit? Was her skin ashen? Did they pump her stomach again, like with the sleeping pills?

  Some things are beyond bearing, and so sink from consciousness, leaving no memory. When my month at camp ended, my father picked me up. Years later, he reminded me how, on the drive home, he told me Mom had attempted suicide again, that she was in a mental hospital again, but I have blocked that moment out. Dad moved back into the house while Mom was in the hospital, but I can recall none of those first weeks of eighth grade when I lived with Dad. What I do remember is this: I kept my focus elsewhere—on school, narrowing my anxiety to worries about getting my homework done. I coveted straight A’s. This was my mother’s fourth suicide attempt by every lethal means she could think of: the rifle, the river, the pills, and now the rat poison. Hard as she tried, Mom always lived, and the whole possibility of her actually dying seemed unreal to me.

  I have one cloudy memory of going to visit Mom: There was the buzz of the locked door as Dad and I were admitted to the maximum-security ward, the walk down a long, empty green hall that went on forever and ever, and the smell of Lysol. No memory of my mother, her smell, her embrace; no remembrance of the greeting or the parting.

  YEARS LATER, MY FATHER told me his part of the story. After the ambulance took my mother to the emergency room, someon
e called him at work to come to the hospital. When he got there, Gloria was on a gurney in the hall, making incoherent sounds, grunts and groans. Her sister, Rita, was with her, and she stepped toward Abe, blocking him from going close to Gloria. Rita said to him, “Glor wants a divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty!”

  Dad glared at her, “Whose cruelty? Mine or hers?!”

  Gloria was now moaning, “Ah, ah, ahhhhhhh!”

  “Okay, okay,” Dad said, “I’ll agree to it.” He turned and left.

  Several days later, the hospital called him to come get Gloria and deliver her to the county mental hospital. He was, after all, still the husband, separated or not. As he drove, she sat glumly next to him in the passenger seat.

  There’s a gap in my memory: Was I out playing with a friend the day that my grandparents drove up with my mother? Or did I greet her as she stepped from my grandparents’ Oldsmobile, and wrap my arms around her? She’d been gone over two months. The adults were having a meeting in the living room, and if I was home, they must have sent me out of earshot. My father listened while Mom’s parents made a proposal: Move back for good, Abe, and raise Karen.

  My mother had been staying at my grandparents’ since her discharge, but they didn’t want her to keep living with them—I imagine her despair was too great for them. Gloria would be committed to a mental hospital or a halfway house. While my mother was being discussed, she sat mute and unprotesting, as if resigned to a life locked away. My father told me he got mad at her parents and said, “If you do this, it will be the end of Gloria!” He made a counterproposal: Let Gloria move back, and Karen will be with her and look after her, and I will move away again.

  And that is what they did.

  AT NIGHT MY VIGILANCE returned as easily as turning on a radio to a pretuned channel. I was programmed to startle awake to any sounds of my mother stumbling down the hall on her bathroom forays. But during the day, my interests were elsewhere; I was swept up in eighth grade, homework, piano practice, playing guitar, and riding my bike the several miles to my new best friend Theresa’s house. Theresa had long, dirty-blond hair that she chewed on, a tall, chunky body, and a great smile. Best of all, she was very bright and like I did, loved art. We had animated conversations about books and artists we liked, and ideas we were batting around in our heads. Barbie and I had drifted apart, our friendship lost to her obsession with her looks and with dating boys. So it was amazing to find another girl who was intellectual. We talked about all kinds of things—except, of course, my mother’s depression and what it was like for me to live alone with her.

  Theresa lived in a small cottage with her many siblings and both parents. Because her house was crammed with people, to get privacy we would walk out into the empty fields near her house, or along the railroad tracks. Immersed in conversation, under the big sky, with clouds scudding overhead, I would feel big and expansive, my body vibrating with energy. I had never felt such freedom and joy in sharing my thoughts with another girl.

  NOT LONG AFTER MOM came home, she heard about a doctor who practiced alternative medicine. He kept wacky hours, seeing patients at his office in Trenton from midnight to six in the morning. Mom left me at my grandparents’ house, checked into a motel in Trenton, and roused herself for her 4:00 AM appointment. The doctor diagnosed her with severe hypoglycemia and low thyroid, and gave her armloads of vitamins, thyroid medication, and a regimen for reducing some of her psychiatric drugs. Although still addicted to sleeping pills at night, she became less groggy in the daytime.

  Mom was rumbling back to life. Years later, she would tell me how defective she had felt when she knew her marriage was ending, like there was something really wrong with her. Somehow she decided to go on. That winter semester, she enrolled in a master’s of education program to become an elementary-school teacher. Sometimes I helped with her projects. One day, I came home to find her seated in front of a large blown-up balloon resting on the table, a bucket of papier-mâché next to it. Her ashtray was filled with cigarette stubs, and one smoking cigarette rested on its edge. “Hon, can you help me? I don’t have the patience.” She was supposed to make a globe. I loved anything to do with art, and I launched in, spreading newspaper on the table under the balloon, layering the papier-mâché around it. After it dried, I painted the continents in green, the ocean in blue, happy to have such a simple way to help Mom.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1965, American planes started the bombing raids on North Vietnam dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder, and Mom joined Women Strike for Peace. It threw me into a dilemma: Did I think the war was wrong? In 1965 there was no large peace movement yet, and I knew no other kids who were against the war. I sought out advice from my eighth-grade teacher, Mr. Shelton, whom I adored. He wasn’t handsome, but I thought he was the greatest because he challenged his students to think. I hadn’t yet learned to dampen my smartness in deference to boys, and I was one of those students always furiously raising a hand. One day after class, I asked Mr. Shelton what he thought about Vietnam. He wouldn’t answer. He told me that I had to learn about Vietnam myself and come to my own conclusion. I begged, I pleaded, “What do you think?” but he kept pushing me; “This isn’t a decision someone else can make for you. You have to delve into it, and then decide what you believe.”

  Mr. Shelton’s respect for my reasoning abilities made me face the responsibility. It was a scary decision. I hesitated because in some vague way I understood that once I concluded that America was not the righteous purveyor of freedom, many beliefs I’d been taught would come tumbling down.

  I had stared at the newspaper pictures of Vietnamese Buddhist monks protesting by immolating themselves in the Saigon streets. Puzzled, horrified, and moved by such an act, I was led by the intensity of those pictures to research more. Mom had bought a couple of books about Vietnam. Reading about the history of foreign interventions in Vietnam and the escalating U.S. role, I became clear. Mr. Shelton was right—I could figure out what I believed. I joined Mom on the picket line.

  In front of the New Brunswick Army induction center, there were the handful of Women Strike for Peace housewives marching with picket signs held aloft with one arm, their huge pocketbooks crooked on the opposite elbow, and me, the sole adolescent. I felt nervous and exposed marching along the sidewalk, but also angry about the war and proud to be taking action. For the first time, I witnessed these women as more than housewives and parents. Mom had found kindred spirits, passionate women, committed to a cause.

  I decided the United States had not simply made a mistake in Vietnam, but that our foreign policy was deliberately imperialist—a word I’d just learned. By then, I had watched black people being attacked by police with fire hoses and police dogs in the Birmingham demonstrations on TV. Right here in America, things were very wrong. But I also saw how courageous people could be, standing up against oppression, and that there was hope for change.

  I put away my horse books and launched into reading to deepen my understanding of the world. I read To Kill a Mockingbird, The Diary of Ann Frank, 1984, The Trial, The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible, The Jungle, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The books widened me, touched me with human experiences that were so different from mine, yet so reverberant with our human pathos.

  At meals, Mom and I now discussed politics, history, and current events. I discovered something about my mother, something that had been buried by drugs and depression, lost to electroshock and sorrow in the years since she had read me Greek myths: her sharp, passionate intelligence.

  Mom and I had a new bond. As the peace movement grew, we went together to antiwar marches. We boarded buses to Washington, D.C.; Newark, New Jersey; and New York City. We carried signs and screamed slogans with the other marchers. The antiwar movement and the growing social unrest gave us a focus for our discontent, and a place to feel some commonality with others after so much stigma and isolation.

  Chapter 21. Hayride

  SOMERVILLE HIGH WAS a shock. The three-story, L-shaped brick bu
ilding had a huge smokestack at its center that made it look like a factory. The grounds were asphalt, with not a blade of grass. But bleaker than the physical setting was the dullness of the classes and the loss of my friends. During seventh and eighth grades, I had been with the same classmates in the top track, in the electric air of teachers who challenged us, and we had bonded as a group. Now, I was in an English class where some kids could barely read. My body sagged in the thick, dull air of the classroom, and sometimes, no matter how hard I fought sleepiness, my eyelids would grow heavy and my head would bob down and then jerk up with a start.

  Most of my classmates had stayed on for ninth grade at our old school; only the few of us from Millstone township had to go as freshmen to Somerville High. The worst was that I had lost Theresa. Her family had moved away over the summer, but our friendship had ended before that. Toward the end of eighth grade, Theresa had stopped sitting next to me at lunch and passing me notes in class. She stopped asking me over. She acted like she didn’t know me at all—no longer catching my eye, raising her eyebrows, and grinning that conspiratorial buddy grin. I was completely baffled, and devastated. What had I done? I wondered if it was because I had decided I was against the Vietnam War. Or perhaps I had done something to offend her, or now that she knew me better, she didn’t like me. Or maybe it was about my mother. The loss left me hurt and aching, and I stayed away from her. I never asked her what had happened. Shame held me back.

  THERE WAS ONE ELECTIVE I chose that was actually interesting. It was Ancient Civilizations, my only class that had upper classmen, which made it exciting and intimidating. In the chapter on the Fertile Crescent and the ancient Middle East, there was a profile of a nose with a huge hump labeled “Semitic Nose.” No one else seemed to notice; I was the only Jew in class, one of the few in Somerville High. I went home and stared at myself in the mirror, turning my head sideways. My nose didn’t have a hump, but it was not petite or pert. I stared harder, cringing at how huge it was. I took my index finger to my nose, pressing it against the tip, trying to imagine my nose made smaller, less enormous, more pretty.