TheBanyanTree: stories from life

[Tobie Shapiro]

September 22, 20000000000006

Dear Oh My Gosh,

	Tell me when to stop.  I'm having fun.  Even the wretched 
memories are fun to write down.

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Family Secret

	When I was only thirteen, on the cusp of womanhood, my father 
was having some sort of crisis.  He was quite hyperbolic, volatile, 
prone to behavioural extremes anyway, so whatever crisis this was 
played out ugly and damaging in the internal confines of the family. 
It was not uncommon for there to be what we called, "family scenes", 
when psyches were stretched to their limits and emotions ran intense 
and uncontrolled, lots of screaming, fear, twisted behaviour, usually 
perpetrated by my father.  It was hard not to think of these 
instances as planned.  I imagined he went off into his study, rubbed 
his hands together, and with a fierce and fearsome schadenfreude came 
up with new methods to torture us all.  Many decades of living away 
from the tight hub of the family have altered my views.  I think now 
that his plans to torture us were less premeditated and more 
extemporaneous.  But there were exceptions.

	On this occasion, the torture lasted a whole weekend.  As I 
said, I was thirteen, and at 6:00 on a Friday evening I heard the 
doorbell.  I opened the front door to find my father standing stiffly 
at the threshhold.  There was just something wrong in the way he was 
standing there.  And there were other ominous anomalies.  He had a 
key, and he always just let himself in, but here he was ringing the 
doorbell, waiting for someone to come let him in.  Then, there was 
the gaze, straight ahead, no eye contact.  And  then, he stood 
without moving, arms at his sides, at attention.

	I was confused by the scene.  It scared me.  He scared me. 
You never knew what he might do.  Then he opened his mouth, 
mechanically, and said, "May    I    come    in?"  He said it like a 
robot, in a monotone, and with short pauses between each word, 
without the rise at the end of the sentence that would indicate a 
question was being asked.  I instinctively turned around and ran to 
my mother.  I told her that her husband was at the front door and 
there was something wrong with him.  She went to the door and let him 
in.  He followed her stiffly, as if he were missing some joints in 
his body, up the stairs, down the hall, and into the kitchen, where 
my mother had to pull out a kitchen stool for him because he couldn't 
figure out how to pull the stool back himself and still remain a 
robot.  And that is what he did.  He acted like a robot, and spoke 
like a robot, all weekend.

	First, we tried to ignore it.  But that didn't work.  He made 
sure he was intrusive, not to be ignored.  Then we tried to imitate 
him, all of us acting like robots, but that was macabre.  We joked 
about it, asked him what was wrong, asked if there was anything we 
could do to help.  Nothing worked.  One night we took him out to 
dinner and he loosened up a bit in public.  He moved more normally 
and spoke in his usual voice.  But once we got home, on passing 
through the front doorway, he snapped back into robot mode.  My 
sister, luckily was away for the weekend; that left my brother and me 
to try to navigate the strange waters, hoping our mother could pull 
some miracle out of herself and cure the robot curse.

	The days wore on with increased uncertainty and mounting 
tension.  At the breakfast table on Sunday morning, my mother started 
to crack under the strain.  She told him to stop.  She screamed at 
him to stop.  This brought the first smile to his face that we'd seen 
all weekend.  But he suppressed the smile.  He announced, slowly, 
with space between each word, "Mickey,    there    is    no    need 
to    be    alarmed.    I    assure    you    that    I    will 
not    (he enumerated by counting on his fingers)    harm    you 
or    the    children.    I    will    be    considerate, 
rational,    and    calm.    I    will    not    be    disruptive 
or    cause    you    . . . "  He didn't get through with his pledge. 
My mother tossed her lukewarm coffee into his face and screamed 
again, stamped her foot, "I can't take it, Justin.  Stop!  You're 
acting crazy!"  The jet of coffee exploding in his face caught him 
off guard and he reeled back from the table, getting red in the face, 
and took a couple steps towards my mother, raising his hand 
threateningly.  But he forcefully collected himself and returned to 
his act.  Standing there dripping wet, he said, "Mickey,    you 
are    the    one    who    is    behaving    irrationally.    I 
have    done    nothing    to    warrant    your    destructive 
behaviour."

	"I'm calling my father, " she told him.  I'm going to bring 
the kids over to stay with them, and I'm taking you to the hospital." 
She didn't give him time to respond, but ushered us  upstairs to 
their bedroom where she instructed us to get our things together for 
an overnight at Gramma's and Grampa's house.  She picked up the 
receiver and dialed their number.  By this time, Justin had cranked 
up the stairs and was approaching the bedroom.

	We listened as my mother explained to Grampa what Justin was 
doing, and that she needed to bring us over for the night so she 
could take him to be admitted to the hospital.  My father inched 
toward my mother, and she retreated, inch for inch.  He stretched out 
his mechanical hand and reached for the phone.

	"Let    me    talk    to    Benny.    I    want    to    talk 
to    him."  He put out the words like nuts and bolts, hard metallic 
working parts that were made to precision.

	"Justin wants to talk to you."  She handed him the phone.

	As if someone had injected him with an animal tranquilizer, 
he went limp, took the phone, changed his voice and told Grampa, "I 
don't know what these hysterical women are worried about.  Everything 
is fine here.  No.  Everything is fine.  You know how women are."

	Daniel grabbed hold of me, and I grabbed hold of him.  We 
stood there shaking, looked at my mother who took the phone from 
Justin, at which point, he magically became a robot again.  "I'll be 
there in less than an hour," she told Grampa.  Then she hung up the 
phone and told us to get our things and meet her in the kitchen.  By 
the time we'd gotten our things together and come down to the 
kitchen, our parents were there facing each other at a distance. 
There was a look of pure horror on my mother's face, and a look of 
pure satisfaction on my father's.  I stood in the doorway, ready to 
protect my brother.

	My father turned rigidly to me and extended his index finger, 
pointed directly at my chest.  The robot spoke.

	"This    is    all    your    fault.    You    could    break 
the    spell.    But    you    don't    want    to    know    how, 
so    I    won't    tell    you."

	A wild panic rose inside me, and a black smack of chaos hit 
me across the skull.  I heard myself saying, "Noooooo," as I shifted 
my weight rapidly from one foot to the other.  "Noooo."

	The drive across the Bay Bridge was silent as death, my 
parents in the front seat, Daniel and I in the back.  When we pulled 
up to Gramma's and Grampa's, my brother and I poured into the house 
and cowered in a corner.  My mother came in, briefly, to settle us 
in, reassure us, and with constant looks over her shoulder to the 
car, backed out of the house.  The safe house.  My Gramma and Grampa 
were safe.

	We didn't talk about that weekend.  It was a family secret. 
Decades later, my brother and I realized together that neither of us 
had even told the story to our therapists.  It remains tabboo in the 
family, even ten years after Justin's death.

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Lost and Found

	I remember walking, wobbly legged, up the sidewalk away from 
our house in San Francisco, although at the time I had no concept of 
what San Francisco meant, nor even that locations had names.  I was 
drinking from a bottle, and I was still in diapers.  I can feel the 
hard concrete of the sidewalk against the pudgy round soles of my 
baby feet.  I was not wearing shoes.  If I looked up to my left, I 
saw cars parked along the curb.  Their chrome handles were shiny and 
the tops of the cars were like the rooves of skyscrapers, so far 
away.  I kept walking.  Then a woman came out of one of the cars. 
She had on a very full skirt and high heeled shoes.  I never saw her 
face, just her skirt, her ankles, her shoes and her arms as they 
lifted me up and put me down in the front seat of her car.  It was a 
rolly polly car with a soft overstuffed chair for a front seat.  I 
looked out the window.

	There are no emotions associated with this memory, not 
delight, or fear, anticipation, panic, not even a sense of being 
lost.  I was just fine where I was, sitting in the front seat of a 
strange woman's car on the street our house was on in San Francisco. 
Soon, the woman with the skirt and high heels got out of the car, 
came around, opened the door on my side, picked me up again, and 
handed me to my mother.  I don't remember any  language exchanged 
between the two women.  My mother carried me back home, kissing my 
cheek.

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Diving for Coins

	We had a swing set in our back yard in Maryland.  All the 
kids from the neighborhood came over and played on our swing set and 
the jungle gym bars that stabilized the set.  A bunch of big boys 
were over, swinging on the swings and hanging off the bars, chasing 
each other around the yard.  But they all raced over and gathered 
around to watdch my father stand on his head near the swing set.  He 
turned upside down and hoisted his legs in the air.  The cuffs of his 
pants fell down above his ankles, nearly to his knees.  And all the 
change in  his pockets tumbled out around his head and his hands that 
were balancing him.  He was doing tricks with his legs, separating 
them sideways and back and forth.  A dozen boys dived down to steal 
the coins off the grass.

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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net