Coming Clean: A Memoir (4 page)

“Mommy, where’s the man?”

My mother was in the kitchen making dinner. “He left.”

“Did he even look for me?” I was hoping that my hiding spot was so good that he finally had to give up, but I had a sneaking suspicion that that was not the case.

“No, honey, he left a few minutes after you hid.”

The fact that an adult would lie to me was painful. Sure, I lied all the time, but adults weren’t supposed to lie. My parents never lied.

“It was good that you crawled up on his lap. If you were an abused child you wouldn’t have done that,” my mother told me.

I appreciated what I assumed was a compliment but was eager to get life back to normal. “Where’s Daddy?”

“I don’t know where your father is.” This meant that they’d fought. I didn’t know why. Aside from the CPS guy abandoning our game, I’d thought the day went pretty well. Which meant that my mom should have stopped yelling and my dad should have stopped storming off.

“We need to talk about something, Kim.” My mom said. I was pretty sure that I was going to be in trouble. Usually when I did something bad, my mom would give me a countdown, but I would always acquiesce before she got to one. I wasn’t sure what would happen at the end of the countdown, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to find out. This didn’t seem to be that kind of trouble.

“Do you know what that man was doing here today?” My mom was always way calmer when I was in trouble than when Dad was.

“I lied and said Sheryl was my sister.”

“Yes, and they believed you, which just goes to show that some people aren’t too bright. Do you know why Daddy and I were so scared this week?”

I just shook my head. I had an idea, but I figured I’d wait for her to tell me in case I was wrong.

“Because our house is messier than other houses, and we
were afraid that the man who came here today would take you away from us.”

My friends lived in clean houses; I lived in a dirty one. I’d always known we were different, but until now I didn’t know that different was bad. Until now I hadn’t known that there were people who could take me away from my parents. There was something wrong with us, and now that I knew it I couldn’t unknow it. I loved my parents, and I loved my dogs, and my cats, and my panda, and my Sheryl, and I didn’t want to leave any of them. My mom didn’t have to finish the lecture.

“I won’t tell anyone about Daddy.”

S
HORTLY AFTER
I was born, my father left the office job he shared with my mother and took a job driving a New York City bus.

“Everyone was so happy when your father got a job with the MTA,” my mom told me. “He was such a nice guy that no one wanted to fire him, but his desk was piled so high with papers that he had to do his work on his lap.”

I could picture that. I didn’t understand exactly what my mom did, but I knew that she was the boss and that she “pushed papers.” I imagined her with a shovel, shuttling piles of papers back and forth all day. I couldn’t imagine my father being so harsh; he loved papers more than anything.

My mother left for work early in the morning, boarding a Manhattan-bound train before the sun came up. My dad left for his job later in the day after he had dropped me off at my babysitter, but on Thursdays and Fridays, otherwise known as Daddy Days, he was home to drive me to school. When he worked, he came home long after I had gone to bed, and my mom would wake me up in the middle of the night so that the three of us could steal a brief moment as a family. He’d pick me up and they
would sandwich me between them. Because of my parents’ incongruent work schedules, we were rarely together, and these family hugs were a nightly reminder that we were a team. Afterward my father would carry me back to bed and speed-read his way through a bedtime story, head-bobbing from exhaustion, before both of us fell asleep. He may not have been very good at bedtime, but he had morning wake-ups down to a science.

Step one: He would burst into my room, squealing, “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloohooom!” in a high-pitched voice while flicking my light switch on and off.

If, and usually when, step one didn’t succeed in rousing me out of bed, he would proceed to step two: singing “
It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning!
” repeatedly while tickling me.

This usually worked, but I was proud, and would pretend to still be asleep while writhing around fending off his wiggly fingers.

Step three started with an additional five minutes of sleep, followed by him popping his head into my room over and over again, each time bellowing, “Y’up yet?”

If I wasn’t up by the end of the triad, he’d steal my blankets and announce that I “better be up” by the time he got back. Neither of my parents was known for their disciplinary skills, but a serious tone was usually enough to scare me into good behavior.

Once I was up he was always a little unsure of what to do with me. Whenever he was in charge of feeding, hair-brushing, and clothing me, he’d generally ask my advice on how to operate the stove, use banana clips, or help me put on tights. For the most
part he took my advice on how to raise me. And I was fully willing to use his parenting insecurities to my best interest.

“Mommy says I don’t have to eat when Big Bird is on,” I yelled back at my father after he beckoned me to the kitchen table to eat breakfast one day before kindergarten.

He lifted one eyebrow and grinned at me. My father always seemed to find humor in the things other grown-ups got mad about, like my constant lying.

“Somehow I doubt that, and you have to eat at the table.” Faced with the reality that
Sesame Street
might be lost to me, I stayed firmly planted on the couch and started crying. My father was not one for saying no, nor was he one to interfere with anything deemed educational, which he had told me
Sesame Street
was. As I cried his focus faded from me. My father was prone to thinking spells—it was like someone turned off his switch, and he went from energetic playmate to reclusive overseer. He stood motionless for a moment, no longer looking at me but at a spot on the wall, and then turned and left, walking out the front door without so much as a good-bye. Confused, I stopped crying. I assumed my crying had made him so uncomfortable that he left.

He was gone for about ten minutes, long enough for me to worry that I’d been abandoned for bad behavior, but not so long that I would call my mom at work to tell on him. When he returned he was holding a pile of mirrors. He must have gone to the garage. I wasn’t allowed to play in there, but I’d followed my dad before when he was looking for something, usually a tool of some sort. The garage was off-limits to anyone but my father because it was dangerous territory. There was no room to walk around. When tasked with finding something amid the piles of
orderless tools, boxes, bags and tall mountains of newspapers, gears, paintings, clothes, and old things that smelled musty and spoiled, my father performed an intricate dance: lifting each leg high into the air and carefully placing it on a sturdy spot before attempting to hurdle over the piles with the other. Somewhere in the midst of the piles of forgotten stuff were those broken mirrors.

Without a word or a glance in my direction, he used the furniture separating our kitchen and living room as resting points for the mirrors and the books, magazines, newspapers, VHS tapes, and numerous tchotchkes that littered the living room to hold them in place.

“That should do it,” he said, taking a step back to examine his work.

“Sit,” he ordered.

He had aligned the mirrors in such a way that the image from the television reflected pinball machine style all the way through to the kitchen table.

Not only could I watch
Sesame Street
, but I could watch myself eating Cheerios while watching
Sesame Street
.

My father was the coolest person I knew, and I told him that. “Cool” was a new word I had learned from Jacob’s older siblings, and I had decided it was the ultimate compliment one could get.

He beamed with pride at his new adjective.

“You know, when I was your age, I used to think that Howdy Doody lived in the television,” he told me. “Do you know who Howdy Doody is?”

I had heard of Howdy Doody, probably from my father, but I didn’t know who he was.

“
Howdy Doody
was my favorite show, and one day when no one was looking, I took apart the television with my father’s tools to try and find him.”

“Did you get in trouble?” I asked. The truth was, I thought the same thing about my favorite cartoon characters, but I never would have considered taking the television apart to find them. My mom would have been mad.

“I had to put the TV back together,” he told me, and he laughed as if it was the first time he had ever heard the story.

My father, my mother told me, had almost no memory of his life before he was drafted into the army. He had blocked out most of his childhood, and the memories he did have he usually didn’t share with me. I asked him endlessly what his parents had looked like, what they did, and if he thought they would like me, but each time he told me he couldn’t remember and changed the subject. My mom told me that my dad’s parents were alcoholics and were both long dead by the time she had met him, but she had heard stories of them over the years, some from my father, but most from other relatives. “It’s better that he doesn’t remember, Kim. Let him be.”

When other daddies drank beer at barbeques or parties, my father stood alongside them holding a tan plastic Dunkin’ Donuts mug filled with tea. I never saw him drink alcohol. He carried his own stash of tea bags with him and was, it seemed, on an endless search for hot water. When I first heard the word
teetotaler
, I thought it had been created just for him, a man who totes his tea.

I couldn’t imagine my father as a boy my age. It was like he had started his life off as an adult.

“So, the Care Bears don’t live in the TV?” I was waiting for the big reveal, but Daddy was lost in thought and never got to the point where he opened up his TV and Howdy Doody was standing there… or wasn’t. Suddenly he was back, shaking off the memory like a mosquito. “Sorry, kiddo, the image of the Care Bears is transmitted through electromagnetic waves and then converted into viewable images by the technology inside the television.”

“Do they live somewhere else?”

“You could say that.” He smiled his big toothy smile. Daddy Days were fun.

Eventually we would have to leave. I was in an afternoon kindergarten session, so beforehand we would stop at a deli and he’d buy me a hard-boiled egg and a Capri Sun. We’d park by the water, throwing bits and pieces of stale bread to the ducks while we ate our lunch. My father always seemed to be genuinely interested in what I was thinking, not in the way adults often listen to kids with chuckles and feigned enthusiasm, but with genuine curiosity. On Daddy Days, my father would ask me what I was learning in school, discuss the news with me, and ask my opinion on the world I was growing up in.

My worldly knowledge was limited to our pets, my grandparents, and dance class, but I loved these talks and wanted nothing more than to impress him. I wanted him to think that I was as exciting as he was, so I’d make up stories, claiming to have swung from a trapeze during recess or saved a litter of kittens from the neighbor’s dog.

He listened intently to every detail and asked me questions
about my adventures, helping me fill in the blanks where I lacked for ideas to make each story a bit more daring, somehow convincing me that they were all my own. I never doubted for a second that he believed me.

E
VERY NIGHT BEFORE
I went to sleep, I would conjure the image of the actor George Burns in my head and ask him for the things I wanted most in life: new dolls, a best friend, and for my house to burn down.

Religion was not a solidly formed concept for me, but I had seen a movie about God once; he looked like George Burns and was in the habit of causing trouble and granting wishes. I accepted him wholeheartedly as my savoir.

My parents didn’t talk about God. My mother was raised vaguely Jewish, my father devoutly Catholic. They explained each of their religious backgrounds to me like they explained the countries their families had come from on heritage day at school. Germans are orderly, Catholics believe in Jesus, Austrians look like Germans only shorter, Jews had to put blood on their doors so that George Burns wouldn’t kill their firstborn sons. We were people who ate matzo on Easter and ham on Hanukah, and I was relatively sure that Christmas was somehow intertwined with my birthday. It all made sense to me at the time.

I prayed for the same things every night, but each morning I would wake up and I would have the same dolls I had gone
to bed with the night before (well, if I had a lost a tooth, the odds of having a new doll upon waking increased significantly); I was still lacking in friends, and my house was decidedly still standing.

Over the next two years, I continued to pray every night. The more I prayed, the messier the house got, but I knew that God was busy. There was a girl in my second grade class who had put her hand in a food processor when she was two years old; she had a thumb and part of her pinky finger left on that hand, but for the most part she had to do everything with her other hand. I thought she probably wouldn’t mind living in a messy house if she could have her fingers back. And she probably ranked higher than I did on God’s priority list.

My parents were rarely home, and yet the piles of junk and papers continued to fill each crevice of space, as if they moved in of their own accord.
Papers
is the generic term we used for my father’s piles, because paper was by far the thing he collected most, but the piles that took over our home consisted of much more than paper. There was no rhyme or reason to what my father deemed important, and “paper” could consist of anything from an actual newspaper to a broken picture frame, tools, sweat-stained hats, or items that had fallen out of the pockets and purses of his bus passengers. These papers took over our dining room table again, and eventually the space that remained on the couch until the center of all family activity was relocated permanently to the foot of my parents’ bed.