It's Alright, Jonah

My parents divorced on July 4th, 1993, while I was training for the American synchronized swim team at the community pool. Of course, they didn’t actually divorce on July 4th, 1993, which would have been supremely unpatriotic; they just decided to get a divorce that day. The actual divorce didn't happen until two years later, when they had both grown tired of slowly bleeding each other to death.

After shuffling me and my sister across several state lines and through a number of public school systems of varying quality (at least one of which was a breeding ground for Hitler Youth), my parents finally settled on a three bedroom, split-level, could-be-expensive-if-it-wasn’t-located-on-a-major-road compromise in suburban Long Island. Our new home was a step down from what my mother wanted, and a step up from what my father could afford, which meant no one was happy, least of all the two children who were now forced to attend school with pre-teens who measured a person's social value by the limit on their AmEx card. One year, a particularly wealthy classmate crashed his new red BMW convertible into a kosher Chinese food restaurant, killing two migrant workers in the process. But since the workers were illegal immigrants who barely spoke English, the classmate got off with a year’s probation and some community service, which he paid another migrant worker to do for him. Just like those immigrants, taking jobs away from hard-working Americans.


Eventually I found my niche in suburbia, among the freaks and geeks of my high school, of which there were more than the brochure would have you believe. Once I found friends, I started doing things that people with friends ordinarily do, like seeing movies, shoplifting insignificant trinkets from the neighborhood Hallmark store, and stalking Quentin, the hot waiter from the local diner whose name we didn’t actually know but who we thought looked like a Quentin, for no particular reason other than he vaguely resembled Quentin Tarantino if he had been sired by Brad Pitt. My clique might not have been popular or law-abiding, but we were creative.


Until my social blossoming, however, the community pool became my temporary escape for the summer months (during the winter months, my escape shifted between the local Blockbuster Video and a crawl space below my house). It was only a few blocks from our home, and it was free to local residents under 17, which meant I could spend the entire day there without having to ask my parents for anything, except permission to leave the house. They rarely denied my request, as it meant that I wouldn’t spend the day bugging them to turn up the air conditioning, which my mother routinely refused to do because of the expense.


“But I’m boiling in here!” I protested when she’d inevitably turn off the air conditioner on the hottest days of the summer. My mother grew up in what was, as far as I could tell, a tenement. I had only read about tenements in history textbooks, before the chapter on the war with the evil Germans and after the chapter on the other war with the evil Germans, but the descriptions of her childhood home seemed to have all the hallmarks of one – three people to every bed, a cast iron stove, crying babies who were routinely smothered by cockroaches. Thirty years later, my mother still made me walk four blocks to the nearest pay phone to call directory assistance, so we could save the twenty-five cents. You can take the girl out of the tenement.


“I just don’t understand why I need to suffer needlessly,” I continued, dramatically fanning myself with the living room curtain.


“That’s your problem, Jonah. You have it too easy,” she replied, dismissively. “Now go tell your fucking scumbag father that dinner is ready.”


My goal in those pre-divorce days was to go as long as possible without speaking to either parent. My personal best was eleven days, a streak only interrupted by a spider in my bedroom that required squashing. Poisonous insects trump uncomfortable conversation any day. My fucking scumbag father did it for me, without a fuss. I think it made him feel useful, like a real father, instead of just the resident scumbag. Somehow I doubted Mr. Brady needed to step on arachnids to demonstrate his utility to Carol and the Bunch, but I was happy that I could slightly increase the positive energy in the house, even if it meant the loss of innocent lives.


But any positive energy I felt from my father’s transformation into master bug squasher was far outweighed by the pure joy of the community pool. The attraction wasn’t necessarily the actual water, which was usually cold and uninviting, even if being completely immersed in liquid filled some neglected Freudian need. And it wasn’t the half-naked male lifeguards; I was old enough to know I was different, but I was too young to know how I was different.


For me, the attraction was in the “community” part of the community pool. For a few hours each day, I was part of a larger family, the pool family, whose hedonistic members were guided only by their desire for sun and, albeit placid, surf. Or sometimes, when I was feeling particularly social, I would pretend I was part of a real family at the pool, conveniently laying my towel close enough to a mother with a wide-brim hat reading Mademoiselle and lathering her children in SPF-45, so that outsiders might think that I was actually one of her fair-skinned brood (or, if the family was African-American, a child from her first marriage). Not that I ever actually spoke to any of my adopted families. I was only passively needy; I saved my aggression for violent video games.


Because I didn’t have many friends in those days, usually I spent the day alone at the pool, which aroused suspicion among the pool staff that I might be a homeless child, using the facilities to wash the track marks off my arms before rejoining a group of heroin-addled pre-adolescents. A few of them whispered to each other every time I passed through the turnstile entrance, grinning in my general direction, as if a forced smile from them would put me back on the path to the straight and narrow. My well-kept hair and ironed bathing suit should have tipped them off that I wasn't actually homeless, but some people just like being heroes, even when a hero isn't needed. An unnecessary hero is just a moron in tights.


A few weeks before my parents divorced, a woman approached me as I was toweling off from a four-hour swim, during which I had successfully completed a series of eight back flips in a row without coming up for air, another personal best. Her t-shirt proudly declared her to be the "Pool Manager." I thought that sounded like the coolest job in the world -- this woman spends everyday at the pool, bossing people around, and she gets paid for it, too -- except the shirt itself was a nauseating shade of green, and the "M" in Manager had faded, so she was really just the Pool anager, which didn't sound nearly as cool.


"Hi there," she said, bending down so that she was eye level with me. I hated when adults did that. It assumed that they were my superior just because they were taller than me. If she had tried tossling my hair I might have thrown her anager ass in the pool. "I'm Melanie. What's your name?"


"Jonah." I quickly put on my shirt. It's one thing to be half-naked when you're not socializing with anyone; it's quite another to speak to a stranger with your nipples exposed.


"Jonah, I see you here a lot," Melanie said. I could tell she was itching to tossle my hair. I instinctively took three steps backwards. "Is everything ok at home?"


"Yeah, everything's fine," I replied, marveling at her presumptuousness. Adults think they can say anything to kids without consequences. I doubted that she would ask the fifty-year old guy sitting behind us, guzzling beers and eyeing the 17-year old lifeguards, whether everything was ok at his home, even though everything clearly was not. But since she asked, and since I hadn’t yet learned the value of tact (a skill I’m still developing today), I gave her the complete answer. "I just can't stand my family."


Melanie stood up and shook her head.


"How sad," she said, picking the remnants of the "M" off of her shirt.


I nodded in agreement, and smiled to make her feel more comfortable with this apparently distressing news.


“I know.” But I didn't really understand her pity. What exactly was sad about it? I was enjoying a beautiful day at the pool, at least until Melanie had stuck her sunburned nose into my business. It was just warm enough so that I didn't get cold in the water, but not so warm that I baked when I was in the sun (I refused to use sunscreen, a small but palpable rebellion against my mother). I had my Walkman with me, and a new Gloria Estefan cassette geared up to play that inspirational song she wrote after she broke her spine in that terrible car accident. I had purchased a frozen Snickers bar with a dollar I stole out of my mother's wallet earlier that day, which was going to be my reward for my feats of aquatic strength. As far as I could tell, my glass was at least half-full, if not more.


Clearly, Melanie's baseline was far higher than my own.


And to top it all off, I felt I was getting closer to a spot on the American synchronized swim team. I was sure that being able to do eight back flips in a row without vomiting or passing out must be some kind of record. All I needed to do now was find out how to get in contact with the team's coach. I suspected that there was no listing for "American Synchronized Swim Team" in the Yellow Pages, but maybe Melanie knew someone. She was the Pool Manager after all. Hopefully I hadn't burned that bridge too quickly with my flip conversational style.


Unfortunately, my synchronized swim team dreams came to an end the same day as my parents' marriage, and just as abruptly. Not that most people wouldn't have seen it coming from miles away, like our next-door neighbors, who had become increasingly familiar with domestic disturbance laws since we moved in. Although they were lucky. They only had to call the police on us two times in as many years; our previous neighbors had called at least half a dozen times in the same time span. Still, it was probably two times more than they hoped for. People move to suburbia for peace, not war.


But it didn’t take familiarity with the New York State criminal code to predict my parents’ divorce. Just one look at their relationship was enough to see disaster ahead. They hadn’t slept in the same bedroom for the better part of a decade, originally because of my father’s snoring (which, granted, was disturbing in its intensity, as if my father was expressing all of his pent-up anger in between jagged breaths), but eventually because anxious discontent is easier to maintain with three floors between you. They even looked wrong together. For every pound he was overweight, she was a pound underweight. Personally, I found his girth reassuring – he would have made a great Santa Clause, if only my parents had seen fit to indulge my gentile proclivities – while her frailty was frightening, as if an overly slick driveway could leave me one step closer to the orphanage. Though now that I’m older, I’m glad I inherited her metabolism and not his. Santa Clause might be comforting, but he wouldn’t get much attention in a gay bar.


So anyone with two eyes and a rudimentary knowledge of the English language could tell that my parents weren't going to be celebrating these moments of their lives for much longer. But when anxious discontent is the constant mood of a household, it's difficult to predict just when a barely tolerable situation will cross the line into intolerable. For my mother, that line was crossed when my father revealed that he had clandestinely spent all of the money in our savings accounts, including the money I had received for my Bar Mitzvah, which was ostensibly a “gift” but which I considered payment for being forced to spend four hours with distant and unapproachable relatives. He claimed that he spent the money on necessities like food and flamingo nightlights for my sister, but his extensive pornography collection belied his claim (I received a slight return on my investment when my father left his pornography collection behind after the divorce, perhaps his absentee way of teaching me about the birds and the bees; for my taste, there were too many birds and not enough bees in his collection). It was the worst possible betrayal to my mother, and I doubt that any other indiscretion would inevitably have led to a divorce, which is precisely why he did it. If infidelity had been her Achilles' heel, she would have found escort services on his credit card bill. It doesn't matter what the straw is made of. The camel's back breaks either way.


Fortunately, my Olympic aspirations caused me to miss most of the fireworks that fateful July 4th. Though I imagine the conversation went something like this:


“Honey, I have something to tell you.”


“What is it darling?”


“I’ve stolen all of your money.”


“Oh, is that all? Well, I suppose we should get a divorce then.”


The actual conversation was probably much louder, and included more cursing and hair pulling (my parents come from the soap opera school of fighting, where nothing is out of bounds except healthy communication), but I suspect that was the general gist.


I left the pool a little early that day, in anticipation of our annual July 4th barbecue. It was one of the only "American" things we did, besides pay taxes and gossip about our neighbors. My father would operate the barbecue -- the only cooking responsibility my mother deemed "masculine" enough for her husband to do without shame -- and my sister and I would sit at the patio table, barking our meal requests to him. Of course, everything my father barbecued ended up being well-done (thus setting up my taste buds for future culinary limitations -- if it's not char-burned, it's inedible), but it didn't matter. If you squinted, we almost looked like a real family. I knew it was just a mirage, but it was nice to be on the inside looking out for a change.


I arrived home from the pool just in time to see my father load the last hastily packed cardboard box in the trunk. He spotted me walking down the street, and gave me a half-hearted wave before getting in the car and driving off. There wasn’t much he could say, at least not much that couldn’t be used against him in a court of law. At first I thought he was going to pick up some food for dinner, but when I entered the house and saw my mother crying at the kitchen table -- maybe the first time I ever saw her cry, at least without simultaneously foaming at the mouth -- I realized it would be hot dogs for two from now on.


Over the next few weeks, in between visits to an unscrupulous divorce attorney who I suspect spent his free time hanging puppies and producing Kathie Lee Gifford's Christmas album, my mother slipped further into a state of paranoid delusions – apparently my father had nothing else to do that summer except stalk her, and occasionally let the air out of her tires – while I began reorganizing my father’s record collection, in case he suddenly came home and wanted to locate a Barbra Streisand album with considerable ease (two types of men like Barbra Streisand -- Jews and gays, which perhaps explains why Babs felt compelled to take out a restraining order against me in 2002). Surprisingly, he had left all his records behind. This was an extensive collection, which had required a considerable amount of time and attention, so I wondered whether this was a sign that he might return. Then again, I also required a considerable amount of time and attention, and he had left me behind, too.


I didn't have too much time to devote to this task, however. With my father gone, my mother and I had to determine the new parameters of survival for our new household (my sister's temporary presence was nominal at best, as she would soon physically relocate to a dorm room 200 miles away, and in her mind, she was already there). Responsibilities that used to belong to my father had to be reassigned, and most of them were reassigned to me, as my mother didn't have much time between visits to the lawyer, locking herself in her bedroom, and crafting conspiracy theories that linked my father to Watergate.


I wish I could say I immediately rose to the occasion with good-natured aplomb -- viewing them as a challenge to meet and not a burden to overcome, much like the Pope must feel when he's forced to wear white after Labor Day -- but the new responsibilities weren't welcome. Only a few weeks earlier I had been practicing for the American synchronized swim team, and now I was picking weeds out of the front lawn and folding my mother's underwear. And since it was just me and my mother now, if I didn't take on the new responsibilities, no one else would, and then all hell would break loose; first an unrolled sock, then a dusty mantle, and eventually rats would be gnawing at my pajama bottoms. My Olympic hopes drove away with my father and a navy blue '89 Camry. I tried to keep up with my training, but it's tough to do a backflip in the bathtub.


Except for my mother’s sporadic fits of self-pity and rage, one of which found my sister fleeing the house amid a barrage of coat hangers (I'm not sure if my mother consciously borrowed this from Joan Crawford, or if coat hangers are the weapons of choice for overly wrought divorcees), the house was considerably quieter that summer than it had ever been before, especially after my sister left for college a month before the semester started. I didn't blame her, or if I did, I don't anymore; only a fool would stay in a prison cell without a lock. For me, the quiet was even worse than the shouting. At least when people are shouting they are engaging in some mode of communication. I was 23 before I realized there’s a middle ground between complete silence and screaming bloody murder.


The day my sister left, my mother had an appointment with her attorney, which was for the best since they hadn't spoken to each other since the wire hanger incident. I didn't know she was even leaving until I saw her bags at the door. Unlike my father's hastily packed boxes, my sister's bags looked like they had been ready for years. My sister began packing the day my mother suggested she get a nose job so she could "land herself a nice Jewish doctor." I think my sister was seven years old at the time.


"Bye Jonah," my sister said, inching her way out the door. She probably wanted a hug -- my sister not having developed this aversion to touching that permeates the Haslap clan -- but I only smiled at her, because that's what I did best, and went back to folding the bathroom towels. My father used to fold the towels in a square, but I preferred a rectangle. I considered this a minor act of rebellion, except I didn't really have anyone to rebel against anymore.


Once or twice a week, my grandmother would stop by and lend a modicum of normalcy to the house. She'd cook dinner, thereby replacing my regular menu of tuna fish sandwiches and cold pizza (since my father left there had been a substantial increase of junk food in the house, as food shopping was not high on my mother's list of priorities, especially when she began avoiding public places after she allegedly spotted my father following her at the Gap), and she'd show me how to properly fold underwear so as to prevent creases.


"Who cares if I have creases in my underwear?" I asked her.


"Emergency room doctors," she replied, in a thick Polish accent that always seemed to lend an air of respectability to otherwise irrational arguments. "They see creased underwear, they think you're poor. They think you're poor, they don't take care of you. They don't take care of you, you die."


It sounded illogical to me, but who was I to engage in a debate over survivalist techniques with a woman who had endured the Holocaust, lost two husbands, and lived through eight Republican administrations.


My grandmother and I didn't have many conversations during the summer. Most of the time she came over, did whatever needed to be done, sat with my mother for a few hours, and left. Sometimes I'd only realize that she had been there when I saw of a stack of tupperware containers in the refrigerator. I suppose my mother needed her more than I did. After all, she had lived with my father 22 years, and I had only lived with him 13 years. And my grandmother had known my mother way longer than she'd known me. It was just a matter of crunching the numbers, really.


Occasionally, I would run into my grandmother during one of her visits, and we'd make small talk, like we were both waiting for a bus in the upstairs hallway.


"How are you doing, Jonah?" I could tell that she didn't want the complete answer, and I didn't want to give it. Besides, I needed to save my spare time for reorganizing my father's record collection. He could walk through the door any minute, and Barbra was still mixed in with Bette (who also claims a significant gay/Jew/gay Jew fanbase) and the Beatles (more of a mixed following).


"Fine." I smiled at her, and she smiled back. It wasn't exactly a lie. I was fine. If you divided the world up into fine and not-fine, I was fine. But it still felt vaguely like a lie.


"Good," she said, patting my head. She was the only person who could pat my head with impunity, a concomitant benefit of being a grandmother, especially in a matriarchy. "Ok, your mother needs a glass of water to take her pill."


Pills, I wanted to correct her, but she was already gone.


A few days later, my mother and I found ourselves in the kitchen together at the same time, which was a rare event since my father left. We didn't exactly avoid each other as much as we just ran in different circles; I was busy with folding towels into rectangles, and my mother was preoccupied with creating new psychological disorders for future cataloguing in the DSM-IV. We lingered for a few minutes around the table, unsure of how to proceed. Just another stranger waiting for a bus.


My grandmother had left us Chinese food for dinner, which I didn't particularly care for but my mother liked, so I tolerated. Usually we would just take the food back to our respective rooms, but I had just vacuumed the floors and didn't want to make a mess, and I suspect my mother felt the same way (the obsessive compulsive apple doesn't fall far from the obsessive compulsive tree), so we sat down at the table together, for our first dinner together since my father left, and perhaps our first dinner alone together, ever.


"You haven't gone to the pool lately," she said, taking a spoonful of sweet and sour chicken. She looked even skinnier than usual. I wondered if I did too.


"No." I spit out half of my eggroll into a napkin and rolled it into my sleeve, a trick I had learned during the many years of being force fed various food items that I didn't particularly care for, like half-sour pickles (a half-sour pickle is a sour pickle that is denied its birthright), and anything with avocado, the most aggressive of the exotic fruits. Eventually my mother caught me hiding dinner in my sleeve. Of course, instead of taking responsibility for my somewhat unhealthy behavior by feeding me unsavory meals, she assumed I had an eating disorder (which begged the question of where the four boxes of Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies went each week). She became more convinced of this belief when she found a research paper I had written about anorexia for an introductory psychology class. It was a good thing I hadn't written about matricidal serial killers, I might have found myself on the receiving end of a pair of handcuffs and a revolver.


We ate (or, she ate and I rolled half-masticated food into my sleeve) in silence for several minutes. At this point during dinnertime, my parents were usually fighting about something of minimal importance to anyone but themselves, like my father's forgetting to fill the gas tank, or my mother's refusal to treat my father with a modicum of respect. Eventually my sister would storm away from the table to avail herself of the miniature liquor bottles she kept hidden in her closet (she thought my parents didn't know about them, but they did, they just didn't particularly care -- at least she was drinking at home), my father would retreat to his office/bedroom/hideout/pornography lair, and my mother would spend the next two hours yelling at all of us from various rooms in the house, even if we couldn't hear her. The yelling was an end in and of itself. If the American Family Council had caught a glimpse of what family dinners meant in my house, they might have thought twice before airing those advertisements about the benefits of family dinners.


But now there was just the silence, only occasionally broken by the sound of my mother's chewing or the howling of our next-door neighbor's cocker spaniel. It was a new dynamic, and one that I was not comfortable with. I missed my sister's covert alcoholism, and my father's not so covert isolationism. And if I didn't miss my mother's screaming, I at least missed her passion. The woman sitting across from me was defeated; no longer manic, only depressive. She could have spontaneously transformed into an African-American transgendered midget, and she still would have been more recognizable than the woman she had become.


"I thought you liked the pool," she said, reaching for the fortune cookies. I took some comfort in her desire for a fortune cookie. You don't want a fortune cookie unless you are interested in reading your fortune; the cookie is merely a cover for skeptics.


"It's ok." I pushed the food to the side of my plate, which made my plate look emptier, another trick I had learned over the years. Why couldn't my mother like McDonald's? I was pretty sure that if my mother liked McDonald's, my grandmother would start bringing us Big Macs instead of moo shoo pork. Maybe I could forge my mother's handwriting on a note to my grandmother asking for McDonald's. I had already perfected the art of forging my mother's signature on notes to get myself out of gym class. Though I suspected my grandmother was sharper than my gym teachers. She was definitely much more intimidating.


"You should go to the pool," my mother said, biting into her fortune cookie. "That's where you should be." She tossed the fortune in the trash, and disappeared into her bedroom. I removed the food from my sleeve, realizing that for the first time, I didn’t need to hide it anymore. She wouldn’t have noticed either way.


Eventually my grandmother's visits tapered off, as her attention got diverted to her other child and other grandson, both of whom also needed her more than I did. I was fine, after all, and I did smile a lot, at least, a lot more than they did. He who smiles most needs grandmother least.


Towards the end of the summer, my father's attorney began lobbying for visitation rights, whereby my father would be permitted to spend four hours a week with me, which was four hours more than my mother wanted him to spend with me. I suggested that for at least those four hours each week, he wouldn’t be able to stalk her at the Gap or let the air out of her tires, but she was unconvinced.


“He’s probably installed cameras to watch the house,” she replied. “Probably with that night-vision thing that lets him see in the dark.” I hoped she was right. Batman would be an even cooler dad than Santa Clause. Though I wondered why anyone -- my father, Batman, or Santa Clause, for that matter -- would watch our house at night if they had access to such advanced technology. Personally, I would have used it to spy on someplace more interesting, like the large white mansion down the block whose owners were rumored to be part of the mafia. At least that was the rumor in my house, although I don't think it was based on anything other than the fact that they drove expensive cars and had an Italian last name, which, according to my mother, was more than enough to indict them for racketeering.


My mother held firm to her opposition to visitation rights, until opposing counsel made it clear that if she wanted to start receiving those child support checks, she'd have to grin and bear it, or at least refrain from calling the police and claiming I was kidnapped when my father came around. There might be thirty miles between them now, but my father still knew the precise location of her Achilles' heel, which was somewhere between three and four hundred dollars a week. I was proud that my father was willing to pay so much just to see me – a hundred dollars an hour was worth a lot in those days, even if today it’s standard pay for babysitters -- but I’m not sure if he paid for the pleasure of my company, or the pain it caused my mother.


And so, three days before high school began, I saw my father for the first time since the July 4th barbecue that never happened.


My mother refused to allow my father to come within 500 feet of the house (which seemed like a pointless dictate to me, considering he was apparently watching her shower with his night-vision cameras), so my father picked me up from the drug store down the block. I arrived at the drug store a few minutes early, and thought about getting a card for this occasion, but I wasn’t sure what kind of card would be appropriate. Somehow I doubted “Congratulations On Being A Deadbeat Dad” was a best-seller for Hallmark. It might not be a popular time to celebrate, but it’s all a matter of baselines. A deadbeat dad was still better than no dad at all.


A beige Nissan pulled up in front of the drug store and honked several times, apparently at me. I didn’t recognize the driver, so I didn’t come out of the store. My mother taught me better than that. Very few Jewish kids are ever kidnapped, perhaps the only benefit of being instilled with extreme neuroses before we can crawl.


The car honked again, but I ignored it. Then the driver got out of the car and waved to me


“Jonah, come on!” he said, motioning to his watch. “I need to get you back by 5!”


The mysterious driver, who I had thought might have been related to the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby, was actually my father. Or, a version of my father. His moustache was gone, as was the grey in his temples. He had lost at least fifty pounds, and it showed everywhere – including his face, which looked significantly younger. Over the course of a summer, he had lost ten years, and I had gained twenty.


“It’s great to see you.” He hugged me, which again might be normal for some families, but was odd behavior for mine. I wondered whether he was drunk. He had never really drank before, but apparently this was a new Martin Haslap. Maybe this Martin Haslap drank mint juleps and hung around the Playboy mansion.


“You too.” I smiled, because that’s what I do best, and got in the car.


“You like it?” he asked, patting the dashboard, like it was a '69 Corvette, and not a '92 used Nissan. It was nothing special, but I nodded. It was a rhetorical question. “I treated myself.”


I wondered what his definition of "treating yourself" entailed. I always figured you treat yourself to something when you want to reward yourself for a job well done, but I couldn't imagine what job he had done that merited a new (used) car. I thought about the Bar Mitzvah money, and all the Archie comics it would never buy. Maybe some of my relatives would give me the gifts again if I could convince them I was dying.


“How’s your summer been?” Another question that the person really didn’t want the answer to. I wondered if this was just something that adults did as a matter of course. Ask each other questions, without actually wanting the answers.


“Fine.” Lying to someone is easier when the other person wants you to lie.


Of the fifty pounds he had lost, twenty of them were in his face. After so many years of being overweight, the skin didn’t snap back to its original shape, which gave it a latex-like quality, as if you could use the excess skin around his neck to bungee off of the Grand Canyon. But he still looked younger and healthier – and happier – than he had since I’d known him, though it was happiness with a curiously self-satisfied edge. Suddenly, I wondered what my mother was going to have for lunch. I hoped there was something she could eat in the refrigerator. She couldn’t lose much more weight, without fading into the bedroom walls.


“So where do you want to go?” I had forgotten that we were actually going to go somewhere during our visit, and I realized how little time I ever spent actually doing something with either of my parents. We lived together, sure. And occasionally we would all find ourselves watching television at the same time, especially when Married…with Children would come in, which we all appreciated for making our lives seem only slightly less dysfunctional. At least my mother had normal hair, and my father didn’t spend eight hours a day in the bathroom. But as far as actually doing things, I could count on a few fingers the amount of days we spent our free time together. Perhaps because free time is supposed to make you feel free, and time together had the opposite effect.


“How about the mall?” he asked, the skin under his neck gyrating while he shifted into gear. “I saw some things there I wanted to get for you.”


It was my first taste of divorced father guilt, and it wasn't altogether unwanted, or unwarranted. While some guilt-laden conspicuous consumption was appealing, I worried that we might run into some kids from my high school at the mall. Kids hanging out with other kids, doing kid things. Kids who reminded me that having fun is not synonymous with ironing boards.


“And we can go to McDonald’s for lunch,” he said.


I was sold.


So off we went, an old Jonah and a new Martin, in a used Nissan Sentra, to the busy mall, to buy me expensive items, so that I would be satisfied, and he could sleep tonight. Of course, my satisfaction would only last as long as the batteries in my new Walkman. Forgiveness bought with a credit card is worth the price you paid for it.


On the way to the mall, I fiddled with the car radio, which had a CD player in it, a definite step up from the basic AM/FM radio in the old Camry. In fact, though I hadn’t noticed it before, the entire car, with its automatic doors and windows, and car seats that adjusted on several different planes, was a step up from the Camry, which was bare bones in every possible respect. Maybe my mother was right about the night-vision cameras. The new Martin Haslap was obviously a technologically advanced individual, turkey neck and all. I made a mental note to bring CDs for our next visit, which could help fill the uncomfortable silences, even though there weren’t many of those. My father talked the whole way there, without saying much at all.

"It's been hot this summer, huh."

"I haven't heard from your sister in a while."

"I joined a gym, I'm benching 165 now!"

He looked at me for approval after each of these non-sequiturs. I smiled, which apparently gave him the approval he was looking for, because he didn't ask any follow-up questions.

I noticed that we had been driving on side-streets for a while, even though the highway led directly to the mall. All highways in Long Island lead to the mall.

"Why are you taking the long way?" I asked him, wondering whether we were driving through safe neighborhoods. We were passing apartment buildings now, which I always associated with high-crime rates. I wasn't sure if that was because the people who lived in them were necessarily criminals, or whether they were driven to crime because they had to put up with each other everyday, especially if everyone butted into everyone else's business constantly, as I fully expected they would. Walls are no replacements for boundaries.

"I thought it would be fun to do something different." I wondered what he'd think about my rectangular towels.


We finally arrived at the mall, with its glass roof and metal spires, rising high above any of the surrounding buildings. This was a feat of modern engineering, and modern capitalism. Busloads of Japanese tourists were unloading at the front entrance, excited about their highly anticipated trip to an American shopping mall. The Egyptians gave posterity the Pyramids. The Romans gave posterity the Coliseum. We would give posterity JC Penney's. And Disneyworld, of course.

The trip took twenty-three minutes longer than usual, twenty-three minutes that I could have spent cleaning the microwave, which sorely needed the extra attention after a disastrous culinary experiment earlier that morning. No one ever taught me that you can't cook french toast in a microwave, especially not wrapped in aluminum foil. I suppose some lessons you just need to learn on your own.

"So where do you want to go first?" he asked, again with a self-satisfied air, as if getting me to the mall had anything to do with him and it wasn't the credit cards in his wallet that really won the victory today. I turned away, and scanned the mall directory for my favorite stores, which ranged from the typical clothing establishments (apparently my father was already intimately familiar with the Gap, and I was already drawn to Abercrombie & Fitch, though again, I was too young to know exactly why), to offbeat stores that no one ever seems to step foot in but that somehow manage to stay in business, like those places where they can engrave your name on personalized toilet seats. I was a shopping dilettante.

We went to dozens of stores that day, at which I liberally filled both hands with merchandise that I neither needed or even wanted, but that somehow found its way into a shopping bag. We even went to the Sharper Image, a store that I had previously thought of as a place that only Madonna and Bill Gates could afford to shop. But nothing was too good for the new Martin Haslap's son.

"I really want that," I said, pointing to an entirely unnecessary talking glow-in-the-dark alarm clock that told time in eight different languages. I was prepared for an argument, to which I wasn't sure how I would respond, unless I claimed I had been taking Chinese lessons that summer and wanted to keep up with my studies.

"Then let's get it."


At Banana Republic, my father decided to "treat" himself again, and bought a bunch of clothes for his newly svelte figure.


"Jonah, how does this look?" he asked, trying on a new jacket. More questions without answers.


"Great." Just for asking me how he looked, I would get five pairs of pants instead of four.

At the register, the cashier asked to see my father's photo identification, which he handed to her, proudly.

"You've lost a lot of weight, Mr. Haslap," she said to him, smiling, while ringing up the fifth pair of pants. I wondered whether she was flirting with him, which made me profoundly uncomfortable. The man's not even single two months, and Cashier McRegisterlady already had her claws in him. In fact, he wasn't even technically single yet, which would mean she's committing adultery, and I was pretty sure that was still illegal, at least in the Bible belt. I briefly considered calling the police to get this she-devil hauled away, but this was in the days before cell phones. Good thing, too. She was pretty, and wouldn't have lasted a day in an all-female lockdown.

After two hours of this shopping spree, we retired to the McDonald's, where I ordered more food than I could possibly eat. My father didn't argue, though, just like he hadn't argued the whole afternoon. He just took out his wallet, which was considerably thinner now than it had been two hours earlier.

We sat down in a booth near the window overlooking the mall's foyer. People swarmed in and out with arms full of junk that would eventually find its way to the bottom of a closet, like squirrels burying nuts for the winter, except at least the squirrels could eat the nuts. I couldn't eat the glow-in-the-dark talking alarm clock. The neon was probably poisonous, or at least, unappetizing.


My father munched on a garden salad -- a stark contrast to his usual order of three Big Macs, four large onion rings, and a milkshake or two -- while I smothered my McNuggets with ketchup (I found the special sauce typically provided with an order of McNuggets to be too exotic for my tastes). My many purchases sat on the booth next to me, video games waiting to be played, CDs waiting to be listened to, flood pants waiting to be worn. I wasn't sure whether my closet was big enough to fit everything, but then I could always use my father's closet now. It was big and empty.


The mall filled up while we were eating, mostly with back-to-school shoppers. I saw a mother chasing her children into a Toys 'R Us, with the father following obediently behind, for the time being at least. He didn't want to be there, but he had no choice. Choices are only for the lucky; most of us have to play the hand we're dealt.

"This wasn't your fault, you know," my father said, offering me the last french fry. This was the part of the visit where he was supposed to recite divorced father cliches, and I was supposed to nod in agreement. Although the Bundys themselves never divorced, I watched enough dysfunctional family sitcoms to know the script cold.


"Yeah."


"Your mother and I just drifted apart, you know."


"Yeah."


"Things will get better, you know."


"Yeah."


"Everyone will be much happier this way, you know."


"Yeah."


My tray was still half-full of food, but I'd had enough. I felt vaguely guilty throwing out the rest, but I didn't want to take it home -- fast food doesn't microwave well, another lesson no one taught me but I learned on my own -- and there were no homeless people in my neighborhood, as I imagine the neighborhood watch had them carted off to towns with apartment buildings. I could send it to the starving children in Ethiopia, as my mother had repeatedly threatened when I didn't finish my dinner (which to me was less a threat and more a viable option), but I didn't think Chicken McNuggets would keep on the three-day flight. So my half-full tray found its way to the bottom of the garbage can, where it would surely feed some mall rats later in the evening.


I gathered up my comic books, video games, clothes, and other paternal replacement goods, and we headed out. The father that I had watched entering Toys 'R Us was now lingering outside of a Victoria's Secret, perhaps lamenting lost opportunities, or perhaps considering possible gifts for his wife. I hoped for the sake of his wife and children it was the latter.


My father put his hand on my shoulder, and bent down so he was eye level with me, like Melanie had a few months before. Maybe if the whole divorce thing goes through, I could set them up. At least then I'd be a real member of the pool family.


"I love you, you know."

Even though I doubted the motivation for the question -- which was intended to make him feel better, not me -- I didn't doubt its sincerity.

"Yeah."


Suddenly the bags in my hands got very heavy, and I wondered how I would walk the two blocks home from the drug store when my father dropped me off.


"So where to next?"


"I'm kind of tired," I replied, wondering again whether my mother had found something to eat for lunch while I was scarfing down McNuggets. "Do you mind if we go home now?" Of course, we weren't going home. I was going home, and he was going home, but they were two separate homes now, for two separate families, with two separate lives, and I was two separate people.


"Ok." He looked disappointed, but perked up quickly. "I can get to the gym a little early today, I guess. I told you I'm benching 185, right?"


My father took the long way home again, though I didn't mind as much this time. The apartment buildings we passed looked less frightening this time around, and I slipped one of my newly purchased CDs into the player to listen to on the way back. Everything looks less frightening with Rodgers and Hammerstein playing in the background.


When he dropped me off, we still had thirty-two minutes to go in our court-ordered bonding time. He took the last forty dollars he had out of his wallet and handed it to me. If he had had four hundred dollars in his wallet, he probably would have given me that. I felt a twinge of shame, as if my attempt to bankrupt him somehow sent the message that he could actually buy my forgiveness, instead of the message I had intended to send, that he was getting what he deserved. But I was wrong. None of us were getting what we deserved.


"I'll see you next week," he said, still handing me the money. I took it, but now only because he wanted me to, not because I wanted it. And in the years that followed, I took a lot more, always for the same reason. "Say hi to your mother for me."


It took twice as long to get home from the drug store than usual, because I had to keep stopping to pick up items that had fallen out of the bags, or just to rest my arms. I wondered whether my father would take me to his gym one of these days. I'd probably get special treatment, being the son of the great new Martin Haslap, who could bench 205 pounds with one hand.


When I got home, my mother was sitting quietly on the couch, listening to some health-related call-in show on the radio that only attracts hypochondriacs who came away from the show convinced they had four more ailments than they had when the show began. To my mother, radio talk show hosts were the closest thing to God that could be found in the media. I had a similar relationship with Martha Stewart.


I quickly shuffled my bags into a closet, a practice I repeated every subsequent time I came home from a visit with my father. She probably couldn't afford to buy me all the things he could buy me, but she did pay for the storage space.


"Hi ma." I was prepared for a full onslaught of "what happened?," "how did he look?," and "did he do anything illegal?," but she just stared at the radio. I was especially happy that she didn't ask how he looked, because I'm a horrible liar, and the truth would have been horrible to her. I noticed that the air conditioning was turned on high in the living room. I turned it off, even though it was sweltering outside. Electricity is expensive.


"I'm making salmon for dinner," I called to her from the kitchen. The McNuggets had not been nearly as satisfying as I imagined they would be, and I thought we could both use a home-cooked meal, even if I was the cook. I wasn't sure exactly how to go about making salmon, but I'd figure it out. It couldn't be much more of a disaster than the aluminum foil/french toast fiasco that morning, and I had the fire department on speed dial.


As I cooked dinner -- only setting off the smoke alarm twice -- my mother sat silently in the living room, lifting weights with her mind, while my father lifted them with his body, and I carried them on my shoulders. The salmon came out pretty well, if a bit dry, and my mother and I sat together and had dinner, just as my father and I sat together earlier that day for lunch. The meals might not be together anymore, but I was the constant between them. And after a while, the weights either get lighter, or you get more used to them, and you eventually adjust. Especially if it means the occasional shopping spree.


I never did make the American synchronized swim team, maybe because of the divorce, maybe because the ability to do eight consecutive somersaults in a pool was not enough to turn me into an Olympic hopeful. But sometimes dreams are meant to remain dreams, and the real accomplishment is just surviving.