Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
would swipe his thumb, coarse and reeking of tobacco, its whorls embossed with the blue ink used to stamp packages, against the side of my nose. He’d make an abrupt snatching gesture and I would startle, just as I did when the striped clown sprang out of my jack-in-the-box at Pop! goes the weasel, the tension between predictability and surprise culminating in pleasure. Then Roy would display the same thumb poking out between two fingers.
“Gotchernose,” he’d say. Then he’d sweep his hand back across my face and reveal his empty palm to suggest no harm done! and put my nose back on. Roy’s trick said that even the most dire loss could be reversed. You could make time go backward.
My mother shook her head and gave up. She was deluding herself to think that any speech of my father’s once begun could be aborted. She sank into the quiet splendor of her own defeat.
“Roy has died of lung cancer,” my father declaimed in his faux British stage actor’s voice. His professorial mode—formal and at the same time, intimate—implied that the dispassionate imparting of knowledge constituted his highest parental obligation.
“You’ll never see him again.”
A rush of unease started at my feet and settled in my stomach. Never. The unease swam up into my chest.
“He’s gone forever.”
Forever? I held my breath, sensing the possibility of some monumental loss, and instinctively tensed every sphincter in my body to avoid it.
My father’s black eyes riveted on mine. I looked back with equal intensity. I had my father’s dark hair and eyes, his full lips, and round expressive Semitic face. We matched.
In a flash, my father’s mood shifted the weather again, as he revved back up to excitement. “This is your very first death,” he said, “the first person you’ve known who’s died.”
I tried to take this information in. Death was what happened to my nine-year-old brother Paul’s fish when we found one of them floating in the bowl, belly up, bloated, scales sloughing off. With Paul crying in protest beside him, my father would snatch it with a net, carry it across the green living room carpet (my mother scolding him for dripping filthy fish water all the way) and flush it down the toilet.
If I didn’t comprehend fully that death could happen to people, my father’s words got my attention. First meant that other deaths would follow, and yours that Roy’s death belonged to me.
Whether through genes or upbringing, I was a child already overly attuned to loss. I grieved the duck’s head the handyman cut off my wooden potty seat to accommodate my growing legs; I felt sorry for metal railings gone to rust. If my mother disappeared from my sight even momentarily, I wailed, feeling like she had disappeared forever.
My mother saw the growing distress on my face and shook her head.
“Ira! Will I ever get through to you about how suggestible she is?”
At which point, my father repeated a typical pattern: after terrifying me, he rushed in to offer fatherly succor. “Roy will live on in your memories,” he said. “You can keep him alive in your memories.”
Great. Now I was a four-year-old responsible for keeping a dead man alive.
Even before Roy’s death, my father had begun to instruct me in the marvels and burdens of memory. He was dressed in his usual outfit—Jockey shorts—and in his favorite position, on the living room sofa with an infant’s splayed thighs and bent knees, two fingers poised over his eyebrow as if to physically trap the thoughts that moved too turbulently through his brain.
“Debeleh, wait.”
I startled and stopped.
“Something about how you walked by me just now reminded me of myself one day when I was a child. It was an ordinary day just like this, and I was sitting in the kitchen of our apartment in Detroit. I decided to conduct an experiment. Could I will myself to remember a random moment? And out of the blue, that moment came back to me, clear as a bell. You can do it too; you can will your memory.”
I wanted to be in on the experiment. “Okay, Daddy, show me,” I said.
“Look around the room. Take everything in.”
I panned the living room: the picture window that faced Teasley Street, the aqua walls, the deep green carpet, the red leather armchair, the open display shelves dividing the living room from the dining room. Their contents posed a challenge—all those figurines. My favorite: a painted ceramic squirrel that my mother brought down sometimes so I could touch him, and then put back on a high shelf so I could not break him.
“Okay, shut your eyes and make sure you’ve captured everything in the room.”
I concentrated. “Okay, Daddy, now what?”
“Say it along with me: Remember this moment, remember this moment.”
If innocence is freedom from regret about the past and worry about the future, I was innocent still, residing like a dog in a perennial present tense. The future extended no further than the next meal, or the next day, or the next birthday, or some vaguely imagined day when I would be grown up. What my father said thrust me simultaneously forward into my future and back into my past, and then even further back to the time when my father was himself a child, a yaw of time before I existed. Just realizing that I had not been there, had not existed, made me queasy. Hadn’t everything begun with me? Suddenly I realized: this moment, the very moment we were living, would soon be past, gone, lost. We were helpless to stop it. All we had was memory.
“Remember this moment, remember this moment,” I chanted along with him, beginning that day to tell the story of myself in my head.
One morning. I remember it as a time before my father’s lesson about death. I hopped from my single bed into my parents’ double and snuggled into the space between them. My mother wore her slinky, sky blue nightgown. I wrapped my arms around her neck and abandoned myself to the earthy sweetness of her just-waking body. Lush, hairless, porcelain. The hug only lasted a moment. “I have things to do,” she said.
My father held back, inviting me to play. Heavy stubble framed his fat cheeks, his full round lips. He held out his hands to me. He had been born with three fingers on one hand and two on the other, a short arm that did not rotate, and a short leg that required a built-up shoe. Although other children in the neighborhood sometimes reacted with skittishness to my father’s physical deformities, I did not find them disturbing; I found my father’s body wondrous.
I regarded the vast countryside of his chest and abdomen covered by a forest of soft black fur. Two hillocks of pink nipples protruded from the dark mass. He pushed a birthmark on his stomach and stuck out his tongue. “Pfffft,” he said. I laughed and examined the pinpricks of white on his enormous pink tongue that resided in a mouth cavernous enough for me to crawl into.
“Pfffft,” he repeated. I touched the whitish mole on the left side of his stomach and his tongue darted in; I poked it again, and his tongue darted back out. My father’s body had turned into another of my battery-operated toys, like the dog who barked and stood on his hind legs or the bunny who drank from a cup of carrot juice. Daddy’s body: personal funhouse amusement.
A sudden impulse sprang my father up from the bed and across the room. He turned back to me, now wearing his gorilla mask. Hunched over, he grunted, scratched under his arms, and hijacked my mother as she walked back into the room. She shrieked as he grabbed at her bottom, at her breasts, in between her legs. She jerked forward and back, batting his hands away.
“Cut it out, Ira,” she said, laughing at first. But he kept clutching, as if what resided between her legs was a small animal eluding his