Leaving his office one evening, he’d fallen down the stairs and now had amnesia!
Because he spoke German, he’d been recruited as a spy for the CIA and was now skulking heroically behind the Berlin Wall!
Suffering from some terrible and highly contagious disease, he’d had no choice but to remove himself from our presence. Now he rented a room in the apartment across the side street that both our mother’s and Lady’s bedroom windows faced. Every night, through powerful infrared binoculars, he watched over us all as we slept, our mother in her bed and the three of us sardined in Lady’s.
But of all our theories, our favorite, or at least the one we kept coming back to, was that our mother had killed him. Vee had proposed this possibility one night with a wicked smile, and we all liked it. We enjoyed speculating how our mother, that little woman, that lonely and abandoned waif, would have accomplished it, and what she’d have done with the body. We eyed the hallway incinerator with suspicion and a newfound respect.
Let us be clear. Our mother did not murder our father. Even as we entertained the notion, we knew we were doing just that: entertaining ourselves. There was something cathartic in imagining our father dead and our mother a powerful killer. It was far more satisfying than the fantasy of him watching us sleep, which, to be honest, had begun to feel creepy and sometimes gave Delph bad dreams. But the idea of a woman like our mother — another short, bosomy, and luckless ugly gosling — dragging a man to the incinerator late one night was rather invigorating. Therapeutic, one might say.
One final thing about Natan Frankl, and then we won’t mention him again. It really doesn’t matter whether he went back to Germany or found himself a second, superior family or was chopped into his component parts and fed to the incinerator. All that’s relevant now is that he was years older than our mother, closer to her father’s age than her own, and if he didn’t die back then, he’s surely dead now.
So no matter which version of the Father Stories you or we like best, the ending’s the same. We may not know the details, but we promise he won’t be showing up at any point in our story. We urge you to forget all about him. We assure you, as we were assured, it’s all for the best.
So back to the basement, back to no noose is good news. Back to Lady standing on that folding chair, Lady smiling a self-consciously wry smile as if she were on a stage and wished to signal her state of mind to the audience. She imagined that audience to consist of both our parents. She saw them smiling back at her, but warmly, encouraging her. She’d often thought about — had dreams about — how willingly and quietly each had left her. Now she found herself thinking about how willingly and quietly she was leaving Vee and Delph. Although the difference was, Vee and Delph didn’t need her. Vee had Eddie. Delph had Vee and Eddie.
Perhaps each of our parents had thought the same thing. The girls don’t need me. They have each other. Or perhaps — a new thought was coming to Lady — they hadn’t meant to leave us at all. Perhaps they’d meant for us to follow them. As Lady was doing now. Perhaps she hadn’t been abandoned after all; she’d just gotten lost for a while.
DNA as a trail of bread crumbs. Suicide as salvation. She felt awash with sorrow for herself, and it was this self-pity, that most delicious of emotions, that made the tears come.
To avoid these emotions, she distracted herself by reviewing her reasons again. She was alone. She was lonely. This was her daily dilemma: she wanted no one in her life; she couldn’t bear to live life alone. Also, she was tangled up with a dentist who seemed not to like her, and she was engaging in behavior that would cause the dentist’s wife pain — Patty, the woman’s name was Patty — were she to find out about it. To punish herself for hurting Patty — that was reason enough to do what she was about to do.
Not to mention the fact that she’d bloodied a Holocaust survivor’s nose with a screwdriver.
And then there was the rest of it. She was fundamentally incapable of taking care of herself or even, it seemed, of answering a phone or crossing a busy intersection or buying a simple hand tool. Her apartment had roaches and a switch plate as suicidal as she was. Also, it was definitely possible that she was an alcoholic, which would mean she should give up drinking, and why would she want to live like that?
But though the reasons were endless, the reasons were also meaningless. She was back to that again. There was something else driving her, something unsayable, just a feeling, just an urge, but a something that was so very strong. It was a something that Joe and the dentist and the dentist’s wife and the hardware store owner hadn’t a thing to do with.
She regretted this. She wished it were grief or guilt propelling her. She wished she were about to commit an act of heartfelt atonement. But that wasn’t what she was doing, not really. It was something else.
We’ve all struggled with this: how to explain the desire to do something most people find pathological at best, selfish at worst, incomprehensible always. We sometimes describe it as a chit we were each handed at birth, a card to get out of jail free, if one thinks of her life as jail.
Or we talk about the horizontal light, which is how we refer to the light that sometimes replaces sunlight, the light we see for a brief moment virtually every day, the light that isn’t golden, but is as silver as the nacre inside a seashell, and comes not down from the heavens but from beyond the skyline, oozing and seeping until it lies over the day like an opalescent blanket inviting us to slide beneath it. There’s no telling when we’ll see the horizontal light; it appears at a different time every day, and most days we overlook it — it tends to come and go in an instant — and on other days we see it and it lingers, but we manage to ignore it, or at least, after a while, to look away from it.
But then there are the days we can’t look away. “Man, the horizontal light was really strong today,” one of us will say, and the other two will say, “But you resisted,” and the first one will say, “Yeah, well, today I resisted. Who knows about tomorrow?” and we all say, “Who ever knows about tomorrow?” and we refresh our drinks.
Lady kicked off her flip-flops, stood on the chair. She looped one end of the rope around a ceiling pipe the way you’d loop an identification tag around your bag’s handle before a trip. She looped the other end around her neck. Her legs were shaking, but she was doing well. True, she was still crying, but she wasn’t sobbing; the only reason she knew she was crying was by the feel of her tears, silky yet itchy. No noose is good news would be her last pun, and this would be her final pleasurable experience: the warmth of big fat tears sliding down her cheeks, tippling off her chin.
Her feet were bare and sweating. She knew that by now they must be stuck to the chair’s metal seat and that it would require some effort to break the suction when she stepped forward. She would have to add this to her calculation when she made her move.
This must be the way an Olympic diver felt. Observing the conditions of board, of pool, of body. Perfectly poised, needing only to achieve the perfect mind-set, the Zen focus, the courage of one’s convictions. And then, the ability to say one-two-three-now.
She stood for what seemed like hours, sometimes getting to the one, sometimes getting to the two, but never getting to the three, never getting to the now. All she was getting was dizzy, so dizzy she began to worry she’d die of something else, something heart-related — a stroke or an aneurism. She didn’t want to die like that. She wanted her place on the chart.