Playworld

Charles and Diana

Before school was out and summer arrived there was the endless week of finals.

Freshmen took these three-hour exams in the wrestling gym.

The mats had been rolled up to reveal the polished maple beneath, which made the space seem bigger and feel colder.

Desks had been moved in and arranged in rows.

My preparation for every subject began in hope and then drifted into confusion.

Maybe it was because of where I took these tests, but they reminded me of most of my matches that past year—I engaged them with what little ability I had.

I might even gain, at their outset, some tiny bit of traction, but they soon exposed my weaknesses and finally overwhelmed me.

So that during each, and always at some point past halfway, I had an abundance of the very thing all my hunched and scribbling classmates seemed to lack, which was time.

English was the exception.

Verbals still baffled me (how was “to wrestle”

a noun?); Mom had tried to explain.

Still, I nailed the vocabulary section, felt great about the quote matching, and wrote so frantically to finish the essay on time that the smoothed callus on my middle finger’s top knuckle pinkly shined from my pencil’s pressure.

Miss Sullens stood over me as I wrote the last sentence—I being the last student in the gym—

and after she collected my blue book, I sat there for a while, reveling in the familiar feeling of being spent, considering, once again, the lights above in their cages, contemplating the time and all that had happened in between these two moments, marveling at whom I’d met and who had departed, at what had surprised me and what had not changed, at what I’d accomplished and how I’d come up short, convinced that this emptiness I now experienced—this satisfaction of having entirely poured myself into something—was proof of a way that promised great rewards but whose path I’d yet to find.

Which I now see was simply sublimation for the fact that this room that was once Kepplemen’s, and within whose prison we were enclosed like the lights above, had been replaced by another I did not recognize, at a time when a year was ending while so much else remained unclear.

At the conclusion of exam week, Miss Sullens found me kneeling before my locker while I cleaned it out.

She was in sneakers and jeans and a sleeveless blouse that showed off her impressive shoulders.

She was thrilled by my reaction as I read my grade: the circled A-minus and Brilliant essay! double-underlined on the inside flap.

“I am so proud of you,”

she said, and mussed my hair, and before standing “to leave”—an adverb, I realized too late to make an A, modifying “standing”

by answering the question why—added, “Have a great summer.”

I watched her walk away, disappointed in myself for not thanking her.

Though the noise all around was familiar—lockers slamming, students whoop-whooping as they celebrated the end of the academic year or, in some cases, of high school—it was also alien to me, did not align with internal displeasure.

My locker was adjacent the tech booth’s door.

Music played from within, and when it opened, Marc Mason appeared in an MIT sweatshirt, singing, “People can change, they always do / Haven’t they noticed the changes in you?”

He spotted me and pointed, and then said, “Keep the campaign going, my man.”

He slung his book bag over his shoulder and said to the nearly empty halls, “Marc Mason…is officially…leaving the building.”

I paged through my exam.

I reread my essay.

We’d been asked to write on a theme that ran through at least four texts we’d read this year, and I chose Romeo and Juliet, The Catcher in the Rye, A Streetcar Named Desire, and the e.e.

cummings poem “Since Feeling Is First.”

In each of these works, those who are most suspicious of language are often the most capable of telling the truth.

Mercutio reveals to Romeo the lasciviousness beneath his flowery love for Rosalind, Holden Caulfield identifies the phoniness embedded in people’s concerns for him because they wanted him to conform to their values, Stanley Kowalski violently pokes a finger in the “paper lantern”

of Blanche DuBois’s nostalgia, and, finally, it is the speaker in the cummings poem who knows the “eyelids’ flutter”

of any lover (I thought of Amanda) is more potent than any wisdom (I thought of the conclusion to my father’s story about Millie Van Bourne), that it is holy to be “wholly…a fool,”

to trust instinct—what the “blood approves”—before the brain’s “best gesture.”

To give oneself over to another is best; to resist playacting is required.

What anyone wants, standing before the beloved, is the person wholly themselves—which was close, I concluded, to holiness.

What I felt after reading this was pride, which gave on to uncanniness.

I only partly recognized myself in the sentences, in the voice.

Mostly, I did not.

How was this possible? And as I finished emptying my locker, my bewilderment gave on to regret.

As I flipped through loose-leaf binders full of botched quizzes, my textbooks full of already forgotten facts and formulas, I was ashamed by how much I’d missed these past two semesters.

Of the opportunities I’d lost.

Of how far behind I remained.

Next year could be different, I thought, if I had a better start.

—

By June, everyone was working.

Oren got a job at Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken and regularly conspired to sneak home free buckets of drumsticks and thighs along with sweaty cups of mashed potatoes and slaw.

Cliffnotes took shifts at H?agen-Dazs (“The dots are called an umlaut, ”

he said, holding out his embroidered apron when I asked).

On weekends, the Columbus Avenue store had a line out the entrance, and during his shift he was packed in behind the case with four servers and a manager who marched behind them shouting, “Watch your scoops! Watch your scoops!”

He got tendinitis in his wrist and wrapped this in an ACE bandage, but the sacrifice was worth it, he said, because there was always extra milkshake left over in the malt cup, which he was sure to slug when the manager wasn’t looking, since he was trying to gain weight for lacrosse season next year.

Tanner, who we had seen only once since school got out, returned to his childhood summer camp in Maine to be a counselor.

Mom graduated from NYU.

Grandma and Grandpa flew to New York to attend the ceremony, and the first thing Dad asked her at its conclusion was “So now what?”

To which she replied, “Is that all you have to say?”

followed by, “I’m going to start my own business, if you really want to know.”

And in her regalia, she marched off to join a group of her classmates, in response to which Dad grimaced at me and mouthed, Whoops.

I turned away so as not to let him off the hook.

When Mom first came to New York, she’d been an instruction model for Joseph Pilates.

In her bathroom, she kept a framed picture of herself assisting him in his studio.

In it, she was hanging bow-bent backward beneath a set of parallel bars while Pilates spotted her.

The German’s hair was as white as his turtleneck, his eyes as black as the Speedo he was wearing.

She’d continue teaching ballet at Neubert’s in the afternoons, she later told Dad, but during the day would make house calls to women on the Upper East and West Sides—she already had ten clients lined up—putting them through mat work at their apartments, in buildings like the Beresford and the Century and the El Dorado and the Sherry-Netherland and the Pierre.

“So there,”

she’d said to Dad, when she returned and let him take her in his outstretched arms.

“I’m sorry,”

he said, and clasped her neck in the crook of his arm and kissed her hair; and she smiled and wiped a tear from her eye—it was difficult to tell if she was happy or sad—and replied, “You should be.”

And then she laughed.

Dad had his camera with him and shot pictures of her with Grandma and Grandpa and Oren and me; and later, Mom whispered in my ear, “Remember, better late than never.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant getting her master’s degree or apologizing or both.

Amanda was working at Bloomingdale’s as a perfume tester.

“Smell,”

she said when I visited, and raised her wrist to my nose.

“It’s Charlie.”

The place was so bright it was like one big dressing room’s vanity mirror.

“What do you think?”

she asked.

Amanda was wearing a red dress with shoulder pads and white tights.

She had on a ton of makeup, like when she went out with Rob.

“It’s kind of young, kind of now…” I sang.

Amanda slowly shook her head.

“…kind of free, kind of wow…”

I continued with the jingle.

“Okay, Bobby Short, try this one.”

From her woven basket she removed a bottle and sprayed the air ahead of her and then walked through its mist.

“Am I supposed to do that?” I asked.

“No, silly, you’re supposed to smell it on me.”

The white-frocked cosmeticians, the businessmen and -women, the tourists speaking Japanese, Spanish, and French—all disappeared as Amanda cleared her curls from her neck, exposing it, so that as I leaned in, I passed through the fragrance’s zone into a nearness ever so slightly darkened by our proximity, to spy her ear that, if I were bold enough, I might take in my teeth.

“Do you like it?”

she asked, watching me, sidelong, a bit caught off guard, as I slowly withdrew.

“Very much,” I said.

“It’s…”

But she had to look at the bottle.

“L’Air du Temps,” she said.

“Bonjour,”

came a deep voice behind us.

It was Rob.

In a suit and tie.

With a smile that was wolfish.

“Griffin,”

he said, “you keeping my girl company?”

Then to Amanda: “Can you still get away for lunch?”

When she nodded enthusiastically, he said, “La Goulue or Café Sabarsky?”

“You pick.”

Red Riding Hood disappeared under his arm.

“Thanks for stopping by,”

Amanda said to me before Rob led her away.

The Saturday morning before the Sam and Sara cast departed for Delaware, Dad took me to exercise with him at the West Side YMCA.

It was the last time we’d spend significant time together until the show swung back to Broadway that fall.

The Businessman’s Club had its own steam room and sauna; it was carpeted and had personalized lockers with nameplates.

The place smelled like Clubman cologne and chlorine.

All the men walked around with open robes, towels wrapped everywhere but their waists.

The sight made me never want to grow old.

Dad changed his clothes, said, “See you in an hour,”

and made his way to the indoor track, which was adjacent to the weight room, above the basketball court, and through the two pairs of double doors I’d spot Dad come rounding into view, his eyes to his sneakers, his jog more of a mincing shuffle, closer in pace to speed-walking but without the hip swivel.

I went and did some lackadaisical sit-ups.

I approached the Universal machine, considered my options, and then I did a sudsy set on the bench press.

I took a drink at the water fountain.

I wiped my lips with the hem of my shirt.

After Dad passed by again, I returned to the bench for another set.

Then I stood before the wall mirror and, when no one was looking, did a Hulk flex.

That was when I spotted Vince Voelker.

I did not recognize his reflection at first.

He was on the chin-up bar, faced away from me, wearing athletic shorts, wrestling shoes, and a tank top.

He was doing an exercise I had never seen, one that began as a pull-up and then transitioned, unimaginably, into a push-up when his head was above the bar.

I counted eight repetitions.

He had bulked up since wrestling season, if that were even possible, and his body seemed entirely devoid of fat.

But what was mesmerizing was the effortlessness of the performance, this slide-rule action, so smooth as to be antigravitational.

His shoulders and back were livid with anatomical action, the tendons and muscles rippling into a topographical map, with one particular grouping, dead center above his scapulae, distending in the shape of a bull’s head, horn tips to snout.

He released the bar and turned to face me.

He dusted off his hands, which I now saw were coated in chalk, and the morning light blasting through the high windows illuminated the tiny cloud.

He identified himself, as if it were somehow possible I’d forgotten who he was, a courtesy I considered almost comical.

He asked how my season had gone, and I told him.

He said, “Well, that means you won one more match than me as a freshman.”

I congratulated him for winning state.

I asked him where he was going to college.

He said, “Syracuse.

But I’m guessing it’ll be two years before I start.”

I asked him what he was doing this summer.

“You’re looking at it,”

he said.

Then: “Do me a favor?”

When I nodded, he asked, “Give me a spot?”

He led me to the incline bench; he had a forty-five-pound plate on each side of the bar, to which he added a twenty-five-pound plate on his side, an act I copied.

Across from us, on the flat bench, a man was bent over the face of his supine partner.

He placed his outstretched index fingers below the bar and exerted only the slightest pressure upward as his friend raised the weight.

“All you, ”

he brayed.

I took my place on the platform behind Voelker.

“Give me a lift off,”

he said, adjusting his grip, “on three.”

He counted down and then we raised the bar.

The plates gonged as Voelker lowered the bar and bounced it off his chest.

He made a sound like a piston at the top of each rep.

He did nine reps without my help, nearly failing on the tenth, and then hopped off and turned to me and said, “You’re up.”

“I can’t lift that much,” I said.

Voelker was already removing the plates.

“Not yet,”

he said.

Then: “Let’s start with twenty-five on each side.

The bar weighs forty-five.”

He took me through his circuit.

From his shorts pocket he produced a tiny spiral notepad and, from behind his ear, a golf pencil—which I didn’t notice because of his bushy hair—to record his weights and repetitions.

He flipped to a blank page and started recording mine.

“Want to know when you’ve had a good workout?”

he said.

He held up the implement.

“When you can’t lift this.”

At our final set of dumbbell rows, my father appeared.

He was pouring with sweat.

He’d hung a towel around his neck and dabbed his beaded upper lip with the tail.

When he introduced himself to Vince, he said, “Sheldon Hurt,”

in a voice so gravelly and out of the side of his mouth I thought the next thing he might do was spit tobacco.

From his notepad, Vince tore out my page and handed it to me.

“Tomorrow’s leg day,”

he said, “if you’re up to it.”

When I pointed at myself, he added, “Six sharp.”

Later, in the steam room, Dad said, “He seems like a nice young man.”

I recalled our match and shivered.

“Not if you’re wrestling him.”

The air in the room was on the verge of scalding.

I walked under the ceiling’s showerhead and reached for the pull chain.

My arms felt like pipe cleaners.

I let the freezing water hit me for as long as I could take it.

After I returned to the bench, Dad rose for his downpour.

I couldn’t help it: I’d been thinking about what Miss West had said about Rob’s dick for weeks and took a good look at Dad’s dong.

It was as fat as a Bartles four novels of our choice, as if that made it any better, plus The Sun Also Rises.

I half smiled at her and she half smiled back when I returned my transcript.

I noticed she’d done some reorganizing.

Dad’s clutter, which had collaged her desktop, had been arranged in several new office trays.

Her closet door, open behind her, revealed a file cabinet, its bottom drawer open.

She placed my transcript in a folder with my name on the tab.

She checked her watch and then got up from her chair.

“Come on,”

she said, and held up the reading list, “we can go to Shakespeare and Company and buy some of these, and then I’ll take you to lunch before your next appointment.”

At the bookstore, we separated.

I took my time, and this greatly pleased Mom, who came up to me now and again and said, “Isn’t wandering around this place the best ?”

I nodded brightly, though I was making my choices based strictly on the width of the spines.

When we reconvened at the checkout line, I’d arrived with the four thinnest ones I could find: Heart of Darkness, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Crying of Lot 49, and Seize the Day.

“Don’t get that,”

Mom said, frowning at the Pynchon.

“Get this instead.”

She handed me Goodbye, Columbus.

“It’s romantic.

Oh, and I picked this out for you”—she held up Moby-Dick —“because I know how much you liked that Farley Mowat book last year.

And these,”

she said, holding up Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady, “because they’re only the greatest novels of all time.”

I flipped through the latter and slowly nodded.

Four hundred plus pages of the smallest print I’d ever seen.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Even if you don’t read those this summer, you can have them for your library.

Should we go eat? All this shopping has left me famished. ”

We walked down Broadway.

Under this June-blue sky, the summer felt endless.

On the crossing islands trees, the light silvered the rustling leaves, so that they flashed like metallic pom-poms.

“I’m so bushed these days,”

Mom said, looking at her watch.

Her morning Pilates sessions with her clients had left her more tired than she imagined, she explained, and since she’d started her business, it was more of a challenge to make time for her professional class in the afternoon.

I told her I was tired too and mentioned my workout, explained to her who Vince Voelker was, our chance meeting at the gym, and that I was going to train with him this summer.

At this she gently took my scruff and shook it, then led us east, toward Columbus Avenue, the street shady, wind-sheltered, quiet.

Of everyone in our family, Mom had the least amount of actor in her, though I now detected a feigned boldness in her step, her chin tilted just a few more degrees skyward than normal, an extra fierceness with which she clutched her purse’s strap—all of this, I thought, connected with her clean desk and the several months that lay before her, in charge of Oren and me, in charge of her life, and Dad mostly gone.

We had the block to ourselves, so I took her elbow.

She turned to me and, because she was rarely one to make small talk, smiled, and I smiled back, and she said, “I’m glad we got that done earlier.

It gives you a chance to get ahead for next year.”

And I briefly laid my head on her shoulder.

Mom took us to Lenge.

As she opened the door, she looked back and said, “Have you ever eaten sushi before?”

When I shook my head, she said, “Well, you’re in for a treat.”

We were greeted by the hostess and followed her into a windowless dining room that seemed doubly darker and cooler given the brightness outside.

It was as quiet as an empty theater.

When we took our seats, Mom, who had lowered her voice, said, “Do you know what sushi is?”

When I shook my head again, she leaned her chest over the menu, clutching it from beneath, so that we were closer to each other.

Her eyes shined.

I could tell she was thrilled that she was introducing me to something.

“It’s raw fish served on rice.

Or wrapped in seaweed.

When I used to work with Pilates, he claimed that if your muscles were really sore and you needed to recover fast, this was the very best meal you could have.”

The waitress appeared and tonged each of us a rolled towel, so hot that steam rose from it.

Mom wiped her hands, an act I copied.

“We’ll have green tea,”

she told the woman when she returned, “and two assorted sushi.

Oh, and I’ll have a hot sake.”

When the waitress took our menus, Mom shrugged her shoulders and quietly clapped.

“That’s the sushi bar,”

she said, and thumbed behind her.

There were two chefs behind the counter in aprons and paper hats, quietly and intently at work.

“I like to eat there after barre sometimes and read.

And you can watch the chefs make the individual pieces and the rolls.

All the fish is kept in those refrigerated cases.”

“They look like observation cars,” I said.

“Don’t they?”

she said.

“Can you see the salmon? Isn’t it beautiful? And that long red piece of fish next to it, the one that’s almost cherry colored.

That’s tuna.”

The waitress reappeared with our appetizers.

“Don’t you love the spoons?”

Mom said.

“This is miso soup.”

She stirred her soup.

“Smell that.

It’s loamy, right? Like soil.

And those are mushrooms, and a bit of scallion.

And the tiny white cubes are tofu, which are also made from soybeans.

The greens are seaweed.

It has lots of protein and minerals, which are good for after workouts.”

“Can I try the sake?” I asked.

“It’s rice wine,”

Mom said, and slid me the tiny cup.

It tasted like hot rubbing alcohol.

“When your father and I were working at Radio City Music Hall I used to go out for sushi as much as I could.

We were doing four shows a day, seven days a week, with an extra show during the holidays, so I was always depleted.

They even had dorms in the theater.

Rows of beds like in a hospital, for the performers to sleep, the job was so round the clock.”

It occurred to me that I knew next to nothing about Mom’s life.

I knew her birthday but not the year she was born, and I had only the foggiest idea of where she’d lived growing up.

“Who’s older, you or Dad?”

“Your father is.

He was born in ’33, and I was born in ’38.”

“How did you meet?”

“At Radio City Music Hall.

I was in the corps de ballet, and he was in the chorus.

He had a solo.

The Toreador song from Carmen.

Do you know it?”

She hummed a few bars and I nodded.

I’d heard it playing on WNYC in the mornings a million times.

“And I’d think, Who is that handsome man? And then one day we’re in rehearsal, and I was dressed as a nun and someone comes up to me in a fox costume.

I mean like a Disney character with paws and a bushy tail.

And I can’t make out his face through the scrim in the jaws, and it isn’t until he takes off the head that I realize this person asking me on a date is your father.

We got married six months later.”

“That’s so fast.”

Mom shrugged.

“It didn’t seem like it.”

“What year was that?”

“Nineteen sixty-one.”

“You were working with Pilates and doing all those shows too?”

“No, I was Pilates’s demonstration model when I came to New York the second time, in, let’s see”—Mom, counting, touched her thumb with her long nails, which were as elegant as her cursive and looked as solid as marble—“that was ’59.”

“Why the second time?”

“Because the first time I wasn’t ready.

I stayed for less than a year.

I was studying at Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and working as a secretary and nothing panned out.

I was lonely and discouraged, so I went back to Portland, where your grandfather was stationed.

Actually, you know how I got back? Several people I was studying with, about six of us, we got a job delivering taxi cabs for the Portland fleet, so we drove them across the country, and I ate chocolate the whole way to keep awake and gained five pounds by the time I arrived.”

Mom’s laugh erupted.

This happened sometimes.

It sounded like a yelp, and I laughed with her, partly because it was funny but also so that she didn’t feel alone and embarrassed.

She covered her mouth, and we looked around at the nearby diners, who returned to eating.

“Is that where you mostly lived when you were my age? In Portland?”

“Well, I lived all over because of your grandfather and the war.

I was born in Falls Church, and then we moved to Puerto Rico until I was three.

Then after Pearl Harbor we had to leave Puerto Rico on a transport ship, and there was a lot of fear during the voyage that we were going to be attacked by U-boats.

And then we lived in Spring Valley with my mom’s parents, who were very dear to me.

Your great-grandfather Edward, he was an army colonel in World War I.

That was where I got sick.”

“Sick how?”

“My kidneys.

I had nephritis with nephrosis.

It’s inflammation.

Of the organ.

I started losing too much protein.”

She raised a hand to her mouth and whispered, “In my pee.

It could have been easily cured with penicillin, but all the antibiotics were going to the troops.

So my grandfather got me admitted to Walter Reed.”

“Was it bad?”

“I was there for nearly seven months.

I had to miss almost all of first grade.

I even went into a coma for ten days.

I’d just turned six and had to learn to walk all over again.”

“That must’ve been scary.”

“It was very scary,”

Mom said.

“Although in some ways the scariest parts were the children there who had polio and were in iron lungs.

Do you know what those are?”

“It’s the big tube, right?”

“In a room as big as a basketball court full of them.

And I will never forget this woman who had come out of one of the concentration camps, she was in the bed next to me for several days and told me that to survive she and the other prisoners had to eat rats.

That terrified me so much I couldn’t even talk to my mother about it.”

She was briefly distant, but then the waitress appeared with our sushi on thick pine blocks.

“These are tekka maki, ”

Mom said, pointing at the rolls with her chopsticks and naming them.

“And these are nigiri .

Dip the fish side of those in the soy sauce.

Not the rice.

Just a little.”

I followed her orders and then bit into half the piece.

“Where else did you live?”

“San Francisco, near the Cow Palace.

But for most of high school in Portland.”

“Did you have a lot of friends? Like Cliffnotes and Tanner?”

“No, my best friends were my mom and your aunt Maine.”

The waitress passed by and Mom ordered another sake.

“It’s hard to have best friends when your father’s in the military.

Everything’s transient except your family.

Do you know what ‘transient’ means?”

When I shook my head she said, “Impermanent.

Something that only lasts briefly.”

It occurred to me that Mom still did not have any good friends, none that I could name.

No one she went out with regularly.

No one but Dad.

“What about when you were dancing?”

“Then I moved around a lot too.

At least when I was dancing full-time.”

“When was that?”

“The winter of 1960 through the spring of ’61.

With the American Festival Ballet.

I was studying at Ballet Russe again, and then a woman I trained with asked if I was willing to travel, and when I said yes, she gave my photograph and résumé to Renzo Raiss, who was the head of the company.

And he gave me the job.

We went all over.

Uruguay.

Buenos Aires.

Argentina.”

“Was it fun?”

“It was not fun at all,”

Mom said.

“The dancers were all very cliquish.

And the schedule was brutal.

Do a matinee and then an evening performance, get on a bus and then drive all night, wake up, eat, rehearse, eat, and do it all again.

It was sort of an endurance test.

And it was lonely.”

Was Mom lonely now? I had thought about this several nights ago.

She’d emerged from her bath in her robe.

She appeared in my room and asked me to help her.

Her hips were terribly tight, she explained.

When I said yes, she sat with her back against my bunk bed’s post, the soles of her feet pressed together and legs butterflied, and asked me to push down on her knees until her thighs touched the parquet.

Her skin was still hot from the tub, and I felt no discomfort at this, being, I believed, an athlete too, glad for the contact, because she was so rarely physical with us, and I wondered if she ever asked Dad to do such things, because I couldn’t imagine it.

“Why didn’t you quit?”

“Because I’d made a commitment,”

Mom said.

“Because I’d done all of that training since I was a girl and was living the life, really, for the first time ever.

And I needed to see it through.

You find something very hard and warm inside of you when you do difficult things.

That no one can take away.

Like a sauna stone.

But it’s more precious and magic, really.

And it’s always there when you need it.

At least, that’s how I’ve come to think about it.

During a difficult class, for instance.

Or sometimes when your father’s away.”

I couldn’t help it.

The story Dad had told me about Millie occasionally gusted through my mind.

“Did you have a boyfriend before Dad?”

“You are full of questions today,”

Mom said.

“Yes, I had several before your dad.

Why do you ask?”

I glanced over her shoulder at the sushi bar.

The chef was stacking sushi on a wooden ship.

On the other side of the curtains, I could hear a group of men toasting someone in Japanese.

Why was I asking? Was it because I had always suspected that Mom and Dad loved each other differently? Because there was in Mom a loyalty that seemed unreciprocated? Because I needed to know if she’d married the great love of her life?

“Any you liked as much as him?”

Mom smiled reassuringly and shook her head.

“Your dad always has been and always will be my favorite.”

I smiled.

“Because he’s a fox,” I said.

Mom snorted, a little embarrassed.

She took a bite of her yellowtail and I ate the whole piece of pigeon-colored mackerel, and, after a few seconds, we both began waving our hands before our mouths and tearing up.

“Wow,”

Mom said.

“That was a big hit of wasabi.”

She explained what it was.

We ate some ginger and drank some ice water and blew air from our puckered mouths like the goldfish in the tank near the door.

And when the heat subsided, I asked, “What was your favorite thing you and Dad ever did together? Was it your honeymoon with Anthony Quinn?”

“Oh, most certainly not,”

Mom said.

“That was lonelier than South America.”

Mom poured herself the last of the sake and smoothed out the napkin on her lap, thinking.

“It was when we drove across the country together.

In October of ’63.

After we’d returned from Europe.

We flew over the pole—Paris to Los Angeles.

We stayed with Morris and Mignon.”

“Who?”

“Your father’s parents.

Zada and Babu.”

When I looked at her questioningly, Mom said, “It’s Yiddish.

For ‘Grandpa’ and ‘Grandma.’?”

She let my ignorance slide.

“We stayed in San Bernardino with them for a few weeks.

They gave us their Cutlass to make the drive back to New York and told us to sell it when we got there and send them the money.

The drive took seven days.

We’d bought Minou—do you remember our cat?”

“Barely.”

Which wasn’t exactly true.

I sometimes recalled her sadly meowing her name during the fire.

“We bought her from a Frenchwoman selling kittens on the street in Barstow, just before we picked up I-40.

The car’s air-conditioning didn’t work, and even with the windows down it got so hot going through the desert that by late morning Minou would get overheated.

She’d pant in her cage and it was so pathetic.

We’d have to stop at a hotel and cool her down.”

“Are you mad at me about her dying?”

“No, baby, it wasn’t your fault.”

She took my wrist across the table.

“None of it.

Do you understand?”

Because I had teared up, I fanned my mouth.

“Wasabi,”

I said, and then made a great show of drinking my water, which Mom watched intently.

“Griffin, what do you remember about the fire?”

The waitress came and refilled my glass.

“Not much,”

I said.

“I remember going into the closet with Oren.

With the candle.

And then I set the jacket on fire.

And then I heard Minou crying.

And then me and Oren—”

“Oren and I,” she said.

“Oren and I were in our room, hiding.

We were like, ‘It’s a real fire.’ And then we ran to tell you and Dad.

And then we all escaped.

To the lobby.”

Mom’s smile was mournful.

She still held my wrist.

“No, baby, that’s not how it happened.

Your father and I were in our bedroom.

We smelled smoke.

Dad found you, hiding in your room.”

“Where was Oren?”

Mom said, “Did you and Elliott never talk about this?”

I shook my head.

“That sweet little boy,”

Mom said.

“He was in the living room, looking for the cat.

He kept saying her name.

‘Minou? Minou?’ He was who you must’ve heard.”

I was rocked by this.

“And…then what?”

“And then we filled the bathtub and left both of you in there while we tried to put out the fire.

I ran pots of water from the kitchen to the closet to try to douse the flames.

Your father went to get the floor’s extinguisher, but it didn’t work.

So then we grabbed you and fled.”

Mom squeezed my wrist before letting go.

“You were just a child,”

she said.

“If the fault was anyone’s, it was mine for leaving out the candles.”

I was trying to make so many contrary thoughts in my mind jibe, I had so many images swirling in my head, that it wasn’t until the diners in the private tatami room behind us shouted, “Kanpai!”

that Mom came back into focus.

She raised her glass and drank.

“Where were we?”

she asked.

I was glad to change the subject too.

“Your favorite thing,”

I said, “you ever did.

With Dad.

You said it was that trip across the country.”

Mom shrugged, brightening.

“You know how your father is.

He can get distracted sometimes.

But he isn’t distracted when he drives.

Or maybe it’s that the driving distracts him and he can concentrate on other things better.

We drove and talked and kept an eye on the cat, and it was just the two of us for seven days.

But it seemed like a month.

In the best way.

Your dad’s left arm got so sunburned because he had the window down, and he had to wear a long-sleeved shirt by the time we got to Texas.

And when we arrived in New York, his parents told us to keep the money from the car, and we moved into an apartment in Jackson Heights.

We didn’t have a pot to piss in, but we were so happy.

Your dad started getting steady work.

I got the job at Carnegie Hall.

And then we could afford to move to Manhattan, to Lincoln Towers.

Two years later, I had you.

And two years after that, Oren.”

I imagine Mom and Dad now, driving across the country together.

First through hot and desolate desert scenes, movie landscapes: buttes in the distance and tumbleweeds rolling across the highway and Mom having all of Dad’s attention.

The kitten atop the bed with them, happy in the air-conditioned hotel room where they’d stopped for the night.

The pair waking before sunrise and jumping into the car, to get an early start and beat the heat.

Cities I have still never visited appearing on the horizon as they headed east: Albuquerque, Amarillo, Oklahoma City.

Mom faced forward, her husband at her side, her back to the future, the children she did not yet know she’d have, the kitten purring in her lap…

And finally New York.

That island whose skyline was just coming into view from the Jersey side.

When the Empire State Building still reigned as the city’s tallest, but seen from this far away not even measuring an inch.

It was a vista I knew well.

In the foreground first was the Hackensack River and then Newark Bay before they entered the Holland Tunnel.

Or did they bear north and take the George Washington Bridge, Mom unaware, as they ran parallel to the Upper West Side, that they were passing the building where they’d make their lives?—she certain she could rely on the warmth she now felt in her guts.

Now and forever.

Forever being a concept with which I parted that day.

In the silence between finishing our meal and paying the bill—Mom calculating the tip with great care—I tried as hard as I could to recall Oren and me in that bathtub and what must’ve been a comparatively calm, incongruous pause in that conflagration.

But perhaps it wasn’t calm at all.

Perhaps it was the most terrifying part.

Oren and I, facing each other as the water overflowed, while smoke crawled up from the doorjamb, billowed along the ceiling, and sank toward us.

What did it mean, I wondered—I still do—to not remember something so fundamental about yourself? Was it the same as if it never happened? Or was it still happening? Like the fire still smoldering beneath the forest floor.