Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
our house?” I said.
“Like looking at the mirror image of our house. Their house is just like ours except it’s flipped. Get it? Flipped.”
To our neighbors, of course, we were what was flipped: Jews with murky, trauma-tainted ancestries in Eastern Europe. My parents, liberal Democrats with Socialist pasts. All of us, loud, terminally anxious, and preoccupied with bodily afflictions, real and imagined. To us, our neighbors seemed overgrown, blue-eyed, strapping, militantly athletic people who took the health of their bodies and their release from them in the afterlife for granted. The fathers went off to work early in the morning; the mothers stayed home and volunteered for the Church auxiliary, Girl Scouts, and PTA. My parents worked side-by-side into the evenings, my mother always poised behind a typewriter, a stove, or a sink.
Our house on Teasley Street would be Ira and Eva’s last address, as they both—Ira in 1981 and Eva in 1995—would die in nearby hospitals. That was not the future they’d envisioned when they met in Detroit when Eva was fourteen and Ira eighteen. She was gangly and so self-conscious that she blushed if a boy so much as spoke to her. He had luscious dark curls and piercing eyes. A star of school plays and head of the debate team, Ira had grand plans—to be a Labor organizer, a crusader for the oppressed. Eva shared his idealism and would serve as a kindergarten teacher in an impoverished neighborhood. It was the Depression, and both believed a class uprising imminent.
Ira promised a way out of the apartment Eva had grown up in with her two sisters, parents, grandfather, and uncle over her father’s hardware store in downtown Detroit. Her grandfather and uncle, formal Russian men, had no tolerance for the noisy commotion of children, enforcing a household culture of silence. She remembered her uncle once kicking away a visiting toddler who tried to right herself from the floor by grabbing onto his leg. The silence deepened when my grandmother Gertrude’s favorite brother was killed in a streetcar accident. She went mute for a year.
Eva grew up accepting that the expression of any strong emotion was self-indulgent. And yet, she told me, “I was crazy about your father. He made me feel something.” Her family never forgave her for marrying my father. They regarded his birth defects as the outward manifestations of deeper mental deficiencies. That boy is meshuggeneh, they told her. They forbade her to go out with him. They told her that her sister Rose, who had no interest in dating, had to be married before her. From the beginning, it was too late; Ira had become my mother’s project, akin to the feral cats she took in but never succeeded at taming.
My father would blame his failure to realize his ambitions on his physical deformity. The city of Detroit would not let him into social work school, he said, because they told him clients would be put off by his hands. Even his own mother, Rebecca, favored his younger brother over him, he lamented, because Nathan with his pale eyes and soft blond curls was a beautiful physical specimen.
“Rebecca thinks that God gave me deformed hands to punish her,” he explained to me as we raced one Friday afternoon to pick my grandmother up at her house in Glendale and get her back to our house before sundown and the advent of Shabbos when Orthodox Judaism forbade riding in a car.
“My mother felt guilty for having enjoyed shtupping Sam,” my father said. “She thought my hands were God’s punishment.” Those misshapen hands represented a cosmic insult from which Ira never recovered. When children in the neighborhood stared and asked what had happened, he said, “God ran out of fingers by the time he got to me,” and if he was feeling more perverse, he’d add, “so Satan made my hands.”
Rebecca divorced Sam when Ira was twelve and Nathan eight. She could not abide his gambling, drinking, flagrant eating of traif, and general violation of the Jewish laws she and her parents held sacred. The brothers took sides—Ira cleaving to his maternal grandfather, who took him to shul every day and taught him the liturgy, Nathan siding with his father and embracing all his vices.
After my father fled Detroit for Arizona to escape the ragweed that gave him daily asthma attacks, my mother wrote him long letters every week vowing to join him. He tried to discourage her: “I’m not really solid husband and father material.” When she arrived in Phoenix, she found him ensconced in a by-the-week hotel, surrounded by prostitutes and poker players. As she walked down the hall of the hotel, a neighbor joked, “Oh, are you Zipporo’s girlfriend?” His neighbors had bestowed the nickname on him when, one day, he’d caught his member in his zipper. Fearing blood poisoning, he doused the cut, and just to make sure, his entire penis, with Merthiolate. The stinging caused him to run through the hotel halls, penis in hand, shrieking in pain.
My mother chased the prostitutes away and gave my father the pain medications she’d stockpiled for him. Soon afterward, they moved to California, fantasizing that Ira had only to knock on the door of the studios to be offered a job as a narrator. No one would have to look at a narrator’s hands. When that did not pan out, they started the insurance agency where my father’s oratorical gifts could be turned to sales. Periodically the fantasy of fame would resurface, and Ira would write a novelty song and try to get it produced (Oh the Easter rabbit thought he was a chicken so he laid a furry egg . . . and on for five verses and five ever more dysmorphic eggs).
After my parents married, La Crescenta attracted them with its claims as a health haven. Asylums, retreats, and sanctuaries for asthmatics, tuberculars, and mental patients abounded. Nearby in Montrose, at the Rock Haven Sanitarium, Marilyn Monroe’s mother was committed.
Unfortunately, by the mid-1950s, rather than providing the clean air the Chamber of Commerce’s brochures had promised, La Crescenta had some of the worst air in the country. It hung like grey sludge over the valley, its particles sticking to the hoods of our cars. In the back of my throat, I could taste metal. I just assumed it normal for breathing to hurt.
Our community also offered a congenial retreat for the far right. Nazis rallied at Hindenburg Park in the 1930s, and in 1964, George Lincoln Rockwell chose nearby Glendale, where Rebecca lived, as headquarters for the American Nazi Party. Within a few miles of our house, there were not one but two branch offices of the far-right John Birch Society. The editor of the local newspaper stirred up the populace daily with rumors of Communist spies hiding among us, and our neighbors built fallout shelters to protect themselves from the Russian attack to come. After purchasing the house on Teasley Street, but before moving in, my parents received threatening phone calls, suggesting that, as Jews, they would be happier living among their own kind.
In one of my mother’s ceaseless attempts to simulate normalcy, she bought my brothers linoleum flooring stamped with images of cowboys and Indians, horses rearing up, tomahawks and spurs, six-shooters, lariats, and ten-gallon hats. She covered our beds with pastel cotton chenille bedspreads dotted in orderly rows of protruding tufts. Eva had not anticipated that one of Paul’s nervous habits would be a tendency to unravel those tufts and stuff the threads up his nose, requiring her removal of them with tweezers.
In a concession to my father’s taste, our living room walls were painted an intense blue-green, a shade somewhere between turquoise and aqua, my father’s favorite color. On the wallpaper in the adjoining dining room, fanciful horses with bodies composed of sketchy loops of chalky pastel danced against a turquoise background. They leapt and twirled, the outlines of their bodies overlapping and bleeding color. I’d stare at them until my eyes blurred, until I could imagine myself made out of the same weightless ethereality.
The Finch house remained dark. Paul turned his attention to tracking the movement of some promising storm clouds. Ben came out of the bathroom, black comb in hand, fluffing the sides of his pomaded hair, honing his ducktail. He smelled like Brylcreem.
“What are you two up to, spying on the neighbors again?” Ben bellowed and scowled. “Someday they’re going to catch you and you’re not going to like what happens.”
“We’re not spying,” Paul said. “We’re observing phenomena . . . like scientists.”
“Paul was showing me how our house is backwards,” I said.