I Mysterious
Obsession
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Friday, May 18, 1984
25
Continued from Page 80
camps. From the pictures in their
black photo album with its crumbl-
ing sheets of sepia-colored protective
paper, they seemed as ill-matched
then as later: standing on broad ave-
nues, under lamp posts, near monu-
ments, they could have been two
strangers brought together by a
photographer's whim.
But then I had not survived
bombings, beatings, near-starvation,
the death of all my family, so what
did I know?
"I didn't want marriage," Mom
said once quietly after I'd come home
with the news that my math teacher
was engaged. "It didn't mean any-
thing," she went on, smiling as if
surprised by her recollection. We sat
in the cozy eat-in kitchen that was
like a warm quilt drawn around you.
But your father wanted a new
start, arid children."
"But you — ?"
She shrugged. We had to. To
make up for what was lost, all the
dead."
"One kid isn't — !"
"Isn't enough?_" She nodded, and
I felt then more intensely what I
think I always did with my mother —
that I was not her son, not even a
child, but an adult whom she spoke to
across a distance no one could ever
cross or comprehend.
I wasn't angry being told I'd been
wanted not for myself but for reasons
that transcended individuals. I could
feel myself shrug inside, saddened by
the truth, but not really shocked.
It was later that same year — I
was 14 — that I raged at some-
thing she said. We'd been debating
abortion in social studies class and I
asked Mom what she thought.
Of course it isn't wrong. I had
one." And she said it so calmly, the
my father's rage — how could you be
intimate or loving with a block of
stone?
p
eople like to look back
and say "I saw it coming"
after times have twisted
it upon themselves, but I saw only
what I saw and didn't look ahead.
One Wednesday afternoon of my
sophomore year in college I walked
down our tree-graced clean street to
find my mother upstairs, in the bat-
hroom on her knees, scrubbing the
tiled floor with a heavy old brush.
Beside her, a pail of soapy water
sweetened and steamed the air.
"Mold," she said, pushing her
hair back with her free arm.
From the kitchen I heard her
scrub for almost half an hour and the
broken hissing was like a curse on
that floor.
When I went in later, the grout-
ing looked very white and I felt
foolish for not having noticed before.
"It was the smell," Mom said
over dinner. It wasn't much, but I
noticed."
Dad glared at her. "What?"
"Mold. There was some — "
"What are you babbling?"
Mom changed the subject and
Dad was soon reading aloud from the
Daily News, Accidents and crimes,
He savored them, blaming strangers
for not being more careful: They
should know better." Maybe he lived
in that violent little black and white
world because America had not freed
him from his past, had been only a
change of scene. Sometimes I won-
dered how it wasn't him in the paper,
thundering his delivery truck into a
wall, a house, lying splintered and
So I was a child of necessity, of duty to the past, named
not just for one lost relative but a whole family of cousins
in Lublin ...
way you'd mention something that
had merely brushed the edges of your
life.
"When?"
"After you. We couldn't afford
another child."
"You didn't want one."
She accepted my correction. For
days I wouldn't talk to her. I was so
mad I failed two exams that week,
the numbers and words I had to work
with boiling on the page.
It could've been me.
So I was a child of necessity, of
duty to the past, named not just for
one lost relative but a whole family of
cousins in Lublin: the Franks. Frank.
My incongruously American first
name was their memorial. Perhaps
that explained my mother's distance,
triumphant in the wreckage he had
made. I could see it happening.
But people said he was "a
sweetheart." Mom told me that with-
out irony. Who could've said it? Other
drivers? A union boss? Cops?
The mold was not the end.
Mom seemed to be doing loads of
wash whenever she wasn't cooking or
preparing for her Sunday classes. At
first I thought she had changed her
routine, but she still did laundry on
Tuesday and Wednesday mornings,
wheeling the loaded shopping cart in
which blaring boxes of detergent and
bleach bobbed and settled like buoys
in their sea of wash.
I offered to help but she only
smiled and said I did enough around
the house. Her extra washing wasn't
really excessive, just curious, I
thought.
"You did what?" Dad stormed at
her some weeks after the car acci-
dent.
In the kitchen before dinner, he
had said "Feh. It stinks in here." The
dinner smells battled ammonia and
some other vicious cleaning odor.
"After a day in the truck, of
course," Mom reasoned.
"Expert," he snapped.
I said nothing. I didn't want to be
his target more than I was already
that year when I kept changing my
major depending how well I was
doing in a course. But my silence only
provoked him.
"So? What are you today? Ha-
ven't made up your mind?"
My Regents scholarship and
work study paid all my school ex-
penses and I reminded him.
"Svolitch?"
That was bastard, in Russian, I
think. I flushed and went on eating,
red with shame, unable to look up
from my plate or even see anything.
"And who said we needed new
towels?" Dad asked Mom.
They were all worn."
"I never saw."
The silence seemed to echo and
mock his assertion: he never saw.
Well, I hadn't either — but who
cared about towels, they just had to
be dry and reachable. So what if Mom
bought new ones. Dad accused her of
wasting the money he earned with
his blood, his blootigeh gelt in Yid-
dish. She didn't say she earned
money too. That night, if they argued
any more, I didn't hear it. I retreated
to my stereo headphones, playing the
Stones, loud.
Our bathroom, windowless, was
at the center of the apartment off a
tiny hallway. I was so used to it that
the opaque windows in friends' bat-
hrooms startled or amused me. So I
was surprised when Mom started
complaining.
"We need fresh air," she said,
and so, in the morning, the windows
in every room except mine were
shoved open even though it was No-
vember and curtains flapped and
flared at themselves.
"It's too cold."
"We need fresh air."
"In Queens? There isn't any
fresh air in Queens."
And so my alarm clock became
the sudden temperature shift in my
room as Mom's fresh air surged under
the door to banish the night's heat.
The windows were down when Dad
got home and I never said anything. I
was still at the age where — for most
kids, I guess — parents are hardly
individuals but a grab bag of traits
and quirks and expressions, many or
most of them annoying. Mom's sud-
den concern about the air didn't dis-
turb me but just added itself to that
private condemning list adolescence
begins to write. She was strange?
Well, parents were strange. Besides,
she'd had an accident that shook her
up.
Our words for other people's pain
are sometimes criminally vague —
this was such a time.
The windows were followed by a
whirring beige plastic air filter,
hunched atop the toilet tank, that
turned on with the light. Noisy, ugly,
it nagged at me each time I even
passed the bathroom. Mom just said
the air vent wasn't enough.
Who said you could buy it?" Dad
challenged the night of its purchase.
Mom slapped the table with both
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