Finding Miracles (3 page)

Actually, Dad didn’t need to use the phone, but could he come in? “Nice place you got here.” He was looking around, like my room was for rent or something. Dad had been the one who had redone the attic just the way I wanted, putting in the seat at the dormer window and a skylight, which had not been easy to do on our old roof.

Dad tested my book stand. “Hmm,” he worried. “I should probably bolt this thing to the wall. It could fall on you if you leaned over to get a book from the bottom shelf.” Dad demonstrated. (The stand did not fall over.) I love Dad, but he has got to have the worst worst-case-scenario imagination going. Not that you can tell just looking at him. Dad’s got these cowboy looks, tall and lanky with a strong jaw, like no problem, he can handle any outlaw possibility in the world. But he worries! My New York cousins say he’s got a Woody Allen mind trapped in a Clint Eastwood body.

Dad was now kneeling in front of the stand, rocking it back and forth. “What I could do is reinforce . . . Nah, wouldn’t work.”

I sat down on my bed and waited. “It’s fine, really it is.”

“Well, anytime you need it bolted down, okay?” Dad stood and looked around for anything else he could offer to do for me.

Mom had obviously suggested Dad try talking to me. But Dad is not a big talker that way. Oh, he can discuss wall joints and two-by-fours and whether you want paneling or drywall. I think that’s why we gravitate toward each other. We have a certain understanding that words are not always the best way to communicate about the things that matter deeply to us.

“I guess I better be heading back to my dungeon.” Dad’s workroom was in the basement. He had trudged all the way up three flights of stairs to “talk” to me. His current project was a cherry footstool for my grandmother, Happy, whose birthday was always a big deal. This would be her seventieth, so an even Bigger Fuss would be expected.

“Dad.” I called him back as he was turning to go. “I did want to ask you . . . about when you . . . you got me.”

“Sure, Mil.” Dad waited.

“This new guy in my class.” Dad nodded. So Mom had said something to him. “He and his family are refugees. Mr. Barstow explained about Latin American dictatorships disappearing people and stuff.”

Dad shook his head the way people do when they feel bad about the state of the world. He often said he couldn’t bear the thought of how many people were living subhuman lives under oppressive regimes.

“Is that what might have happened like . . . to my birth family?”

Dad sat down on my bed. Suddenly, he looked so tired. “You know, honey,” he said, his voice sad and gentle, “we don’t really know.”

“How about my papers and stuff?” Maybe there was more information in The Box they kept in their bedroom? My hands had begun their tingling. Conversations like this always set my allergies off.

Dad was shaking his head. “I wish there were more answers for you,” he said when my face fell. “Maybe, who knows, maybe your birth family opposed the government and maybe...”

“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. We both knew
maybe
s didn’t add up to a story I could hold on to.

“I hate for you to lose sleep over this, sweetie.” Dad was already worrying about me. “Maybe it’d be good to get to know this new guy?”

“What for?” I snapped. I knew I sounded defensive. I didn’t want people pushing me to be friends with some stranger just because we’d been born in the same country.

“He might help you figure out some things.” Dad shrugged, as if to say
but what do I know?

I was scratching madly now. Dad looked down. My hands were covered with an angry red rash.

“Just my allergies again,” I explained. The doctor had said that my system was probably supersensitive to American allergens. Stress didn’t help any.

“Calamine,” Dad pronounced, like that would solve all my problems. Moments later he was back with last summer’s bottle.

That night, I went to bed, my hands soothed by that pink lotion. But I still couldn’t seem to fall asleep. I felt itchy
inside,
as if I was allergic to myself. Actually, Dad had offered a solution for that, too. But I wasn’t ready yet to try the friendship cure.

2

command performance

WHETHER OR NOT I wanted to hang out with him, Pablo had been taken up by my friends. It seemed like I could not get away from him.

He even turned up one day in Mrs. Gillespie’s Advanced Spanish class. The minute he stepped in the door, his eyes found my eyes.

“¡Hola, clase!”
Mrs. Gillespie began. Today we had a special guest! Mrs. Gillespie went on to explain that Pablo Bolívar had recently joined the ninth-grade class at Ralston. We were to go around the room, introduce ourselves, and tell our visitor a little something about ourselves.

I felt my heart sink. Meanwhile, my hands were burning up. Actually, I wished they would burst into flames. That was the only way I was going to get out of this room fast enough.

I sat paralyzed like one of those animals Dad sometimes surprises at night in his headlights. Up and down the rows we went, my turn getting closer and closer. I heard every name, every boring or cute detail . . . and then, I was next. I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“Milly?” Mrs. Gillespie reminded me.

“Ya yo conozco a Milly,”
Pablo spoke up. He already knew me. He shifted his gaze to Andrea, sitting behind me. The introductions moved on.

I felt a flood of relief and confusion. Had Pablo tried to save me from embarrassment or was he saying that I wasn’t worth getting to know?

What do I care what he thinks of me? I kept asking myself. I felt bad enough about myself.

I started avoiding everyone. Soon as school was over, I’d rush to the bus before Em could hook her arm through mine and tell me “our” plans.

I should have talked to Em. But every time I tried, I’d get the same stage fright I’d gotten in Spanish class. Nothing would come out.

What was there to say anyway? That I felt helpless and adrift not knowing my story, who my birth parents had been, why they had given me up? That the longing hurt too much and I was afraid of falling into a big black hole of sadness?

I remembered this myth we had learned in Spanish about a woman called
la llorona,
who cried and cried for her lost children. She had drowned in her own tears—at least in the version Mrs. Gillespie had told us.

I didn’t want to end up a basket case that everyone wanted to give away
again
.

“What’s going on?” Em finally asked me during one of our nightly calls. Something had changed, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “Are you mad at me for something?”

“Oh, Em,” I reassured her. “It’s just that my grandma’s birthday’s coming up, and she’s decided to have it here. Mom is a wreck, so I’m helping her out.”

“Happy?”

For a moment I thought Em was asking me how I was feeling. But no, she was just confirming that my rich and impossible grandmother, Happy, was going to be here at the end of the month.

Maybe because I was home-based these days, I actually started looking forward to my grandmother’s birthday this year.

Usually we drove down to Long Island, where Happy put us up at the local Sheraton. Some renovation was always going on in her mansion that made staying with her “inconvenient.” Dad’s sister, Aunt Joan, would come out from the city with her husband, Uncle Stanley, and our three wild and crazy cousins, Bee, Ruthie, and Nancy. Command performances, Mom called them. I mostly stayed out of the way. Happy was always polite to me, asking how my studies were going. (Mom and Dad
swore
they hadn’t breathed a word about my learning problems.) But I always got this feeling that Happy thought about me different from the others. Once when I told her I didn’t like math, Happy had given me this look. “Poor dear,” she remarked. “Mathematics has always been a Kaufman strong suit.”

This year, for her seventieth, Happy said she wanted a relaxed family gathering in Vermont. Mom flipped at first. Happy would be looking at everything with her super critical eye. Our house is one of those redone-ramshackle houses (Dad’s specialty), nothing fancy. Dad’s a carpenter; Mom, a part-time therapist—put their two incomes together and even this old house is more than we can afford. If it weren’t for Happy’s handouts, it wouldn’t even belong to us.

From the basement and the backs of our closets, we began to dig out stuff Happy had given us over the years: the silver napkin rings with our monograms; the dozen framed photographs of Happy with important, famous people; the crystal decanter and matching glasses; the gaudy menorah from Israel. (This we really couldn’t use. Dad’s a secular Jew, as he calls himself, with Mom always putting in “and a sexy one, too.”)

A couple of nights before they were all to arrive, Aunt Joan called up with the latest bulletin. Happy had told her that she had some things to “discuss with the family.”

“Oh boy,” Mom said, rolling her eyes. “Wonder what bomb she’s going to drop.”

“Let’s be positive,” Dad suggested.

“You’re kidding?” Mom said, looking at Dad with disbelief. Optimism was not Dad’s strong suit. But she kept her mouth shut. After all, Happy is Dad’s mom.

“I think it’s great Happy’s coming here,” Nate piped up. Nate’s the only unconflicted person in our family when it comes to our grandmother. The truth is, Happy dotes on her only grandson. She’s obviously grooming him to be the son her son never turned out to be. And Nate’s just Nate around her. Spilling over with eight-year-old enthusiasm and puppy-dog affection. Happy eats it up. “Maybe she’ll come and see my game, you think?”

“I doubt it, honey,” Mom said, not wanting Nate to be disappointed.

“Oh, let’s wait and see,” Dad reminded Mom. Last summer, Happy had come up for the Cub Scout sing-along, at which sixteen little boys sang campfire songs off tune for over an hour.

“I’m with Mom.” Kate was legitimately spinning the lazy Susan, looking for the salt shaker. “Her Highness is not going to hang out at some freezing rink in her mink coat.”

At this image of Happy in her furs, surrounded by screaming fans, we all burst out laughing.

All except Nate. He was looking from one to the other, his bottom lip quivering. “I don’t know why you guys have to be that way with Grandma.” Nate bowed his head, ashamed to be seen crying. Huge cartoon-type tears were falling on his broccoli stir-fry, which he hadn’t wanted to eat anyway.

What Nate didn’t realize was that it wasn’t us down on Happy, but the other way around, Happy down on us.

Or really, it was Happy never being
happy
. Talk about irony. Her real name was Katherine, but as a kid no one could make her smile. Thus the nickname. (My gossipy Aunt Joan was the source of most of our Happy-as-an-unhappy-child stories.) Happy was an only child of really rich parents,
the
Kaufmans of Kaufman Quality Products: “K is for Quality from Burners to Wrappers.” Kate and the cousins used to do a performance of the jingle for Happy when we were little kids. I’d get my usual stage fright and stand there, my mouth hanging open, my hands itching like crazy. “This one just is not a ham, is she?” Grandma would laugh, shaking her head at me.

Anyhow, Happy’s father was this genius who invented everything from burner bibs (it really isn’t worth knowing what those things are) to two-ply toilet paper and, of course, Happy Wrap, named after Happy. (“Seal in the Freshness, Bring out the Smiles.”)

Happy’s mom was the real sad story. She had come to America from Germany way back in the 1930s as a nanny, but the rest of her family stayed and later perished in the Holocaust. Happy’s mom never ever talked about it. Instead, she drank too much, and as it turns out, took lots of pills that didn’t agree with the drinking. She died of an overdose soon after Happy came out—as a debutante. I guess with grandparents you don’t really have to say that.

Happy married Grandpa Bob, who legally changed his last name to hers. If I didn’t know Happy, I’d say one big step for feminism. She had Dad, then Aunt Joan, then got divorced. Grandpa Bob died when I was four. Happy remarried three times but never had any more kids. She was like a Queen Bee, discarding husbands. Right now there was no one—that we knew of anyhow. But they crept up on you, Happy’s marriages and divorces. As a matter of fact, we wondered if the news she wanted to discuss was a fifth husband?

The night before Happy was to arrive, there was a knock at my door. “Just us,” Mom and Dad chimed when I asked, “Yes?”

Oh no, I thought. When your parents are at your door together, you know it’s more than a friendly visit. I put my hands under my covers so I could scratch them out of sight.

Mom and Dad sat on either side of my bed. It reminded me of the day way back when I was a little kid and they had told me.

“Milly, your mom and I, well, we’ve noticed . . . ,” Dad began. Suddenly, he looked helpless and flashed Mom a conversational SOS.

“We’ve noticed a change,” Mom picked up. “Is something bothering you? At school? This new boy—”

“You guys!” I said, exasperated.

“You’ve always chosen to be very private about this,” Mom continued quietly. “But it might be good to talk about it, don’t you think?”

“Children come to families in different ways.” Dad always quoted Mom when he didn’t know what to say during a heart-to-heart. Somehow it didn’t annoy me as much when Dad said things as when Mom did. “We couldn’t love you any more if you were...” Dad’s voice got all gravelly.

For a minute my own sadness fell away. “Are you okay, Dad?”

Mom reached over and squeezed Dad’s hand. When he didn’t say anything, Mom explained that Happy’s visit was stirring up stuff for all of us. “Dad’s probably just feeling a little sad about his own mother. Happy’s never made it easy for him.”

I knew the whole story. I mean, I had lived a lot of that story. Happy being furious with Dad for leaving the family business and going off to the Peace Corps. Then even more furious when Dad came back three years later with a non-Jewish wife, a baby daughter, and a sickly, foreign orphan girl. His stock went up briefly when he rejoined Kaufman Quality Products, then plummeted again when he quit and we moved away from Long Island to a state where you couldn’t buy a decent bagel. Periodically, Happy would try to pressure Dad to come back to Kaufman, and when he refused, she’d issue some threat. In fact, one of Mom’s theories about the birthday weekend was that Grandma was coming up to deliver her latest ultimatum. Recently, she’d approached Dad again about joining the family business, and Dad had again refused. “Get ready for the next disowning!” Mom had joked, out of Nate’s hearing that time.

“Grandma doesn’t really mean it, Dad,” I tried consoling him now. No matter how pissed Grandma would get, she always took us back. And she never stopped sending checks in the mail, which Mom and Dad couldn’t accept but ended up cashing because we needed the money. “I mean, I got thrown out once, and that was that.” I was trying for a joke, but the minute I said it, it didn’t sound funny at all.

Mom was looking surprised. “Honey, you weren’t thrown out. It’s just someone couldn’t keep you—”

“What’s the difference?” I guess the pain showed on my face. Mom put her arms around me while I struggled not to cry.

“You see why,” I managed, “why it doesn’t help to talk about it? Why I just want to forget about it?”

My parents didn’t look convinced, but they nodded.

“What do you think?” Dad asked, like I was some fashion consultant. We were in the mudroom, waiting for Happy’s caravan to arrive from New York.

“Truly awesome, Dad.”

Dad took a second look in the mirror. He was wearing his nice chinos, the L.L. Bean shirt we’d all pitched in to get for him for Christmas, and a beige cashmere cardigan that still smelled of mothballs. A gift from Happy.
Davey,
the monogram read. A nickname Dad dislikes, to put it mildly.

“I guess this is as good as it’s going to get.” Dad shook his head at his reflection. His hair was thinning in back, his face seemed more lined: he had that tired look middle-aged people always seem to have. “The truth is, you’ve got an old fart for a dad.”

“Dad, you’re like forty-five. That’s young these days.” Of course, I didn’t for a moment believe it. Forty-five was old. By then, I better have stuff figured out. But could that ever be for me? My whole life lay on top of a mystery that, like Dad said, no one knew much about.

Dad was now looking me over. “By the way, you’re the one who looks great.”

It was the top, I swear. I’d gone shopping with Em for a present for Happy’s birthday, some token gift, because really, as a fifteen-year-old on a ten-dollar-a-week allowance, earning five bucks an hour for occasional babysitting, what can I buy a multi-millionairess? I ended up using the money on this top at Banana Republic. The minute I tried it on and saw the impressed look on Em’s face, I knew the top was perfect for me. The golden wheat color brought out my best feature, my eyes. Its snug fit actually
gave
me boobs and curved in toward the waist, announcing a figure!

As for Happy’s gift, I ended up making her a homemade birthday card with a corny poem I found on a Web site about grandmothers. Relatives always act like stuff you make them is what they really wanted anyway. As I wrote out the poem inside the card, I actually got teary-eyed. Maybe it was suddenly realizing that Happy was my
only
grandparent. (Mom’s parents had both died in a car crash when she was in college.) I wanted—strike that: I needed all the family I could get.

I guess it was a lame excuse: using the money for my grandmother’s birthday present on myself. But part of my motivation for buying that top was to please her. I wanted to look good. I wanted Happy to approve of me, to be proud that I was part of her family.