80 Friday, May 18, 1984 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS FICTION MYSTERIOUS OBSESSION The accident seemed to change Mom. She began scrubbing the house, opening windows, using heavy perfume BY LEV RAPHAEL Special to The Jewish News S ometimes, watching Mom at dinner, I pictured the wheelchair in the hospital in which she'd sat shrunken by fear, and I felt afraid myself. Dad yelled at her, of course, as soon as we knew there was no concus- sion, no internal bleeding, no visible, medical change or problem. "How could you drive through a red light? Twenty years driving and a red light you forget!" Mom shook her head, all the energy of Dad's words dissipated by her awful doubting voice. "I'm going crazy," she murmured, dark eyes sor- rowful, hands useless in her lap, like a defeated little girl. The accident had not aged her but torn away the years of work and stability. Mom taught Hebrew and Jewish history in our Queens congregation's Sunday school and she had always looked so firm and settled, buttoning the last button of her suit jacket on the way to classes — as if the neat little woman she was, curly red hair cut close at the sides, freckled face patient, seri- ous, had never known another life, had never walked down any street uglier or more dangerous than Queens Boulevard. ous heavy hands and mouth, his jerky eyes. "You're not crazy!" "I am. I must be." "What's wrong with you?" Her helpless painful shrug dis- gusted him and he shook his head at me as if to say "See? See what I put up with?" I didn't see, I never had. Dad's criticism of Mom was persistent, his- torical, like the character of a people or the climate of a land. Whatever she did or said in her quiet efficient way irked him and they always seemed to be wrangling somewhere in our cool dark apartment that faced the back of another almost identical six-story building of red brick. Mom. would sometimes explode and practi- cally bark at him, her thin voice high • and stretched, but mostly she ignored his pounding questions or filtered the words from the anger. They had met in Paris, after the liberation of the concentration Continued on Page 25 She was at those and other times like a wonderful cut-out doll with its cardboard stand, outlined in black. But the accident, which happened near home, had come like an invisi- ble hand to mangle that doll. "What's the matter with you!" Dad blustered. "You're not crazy!" If I'd expected the accident to change him I was wrong. Dad was one of those short stock men, broad shoulders and neck tensed forward, who seem to push themselves through life as if it were an unruly crowd. His words and looks could fall like hammer blows, pounding at your smiles or opposition. He was not a kind man — or better, he didn't know how to be kind, it was not one of his languages. And though he hung over her at the hospital like stifling dusty drapes, and tried to care for her at home, the anger lurked in his omin- Art by Lisa Syuerson .