“
Very
quick,” says my father.
“A very quick intermission so you can all stretch your legs. Thanks so much again for coming. Enjoy.”
Applause. My father kisses her and wraps his arms around her. He lifts and spins her before letting her down. She stumbles over a speaker wire as she’s lowered but quickly gets her balance. “And now,” my father says, “to introduce our feature film . . . Ladies and gentlemen, you know him, you love him: Gabriel Woody Allen
Greeeeeen
!”
When a man takes a woman and marries her . . . if she find no favor in his eyes . . . then he shall write her a bill of divorcement and send her out of his house. Deuteronomy 24:1
Rule Number 8 of the Green House Rules (Jacob’s Copy):
You will now be part of a joint-custody agreement. The agreement states that you will be “shared,” or parented, equally by both your mother and your father (although never again in the same home). Within the week you will have a second house in nearby Hayward, New Jersey. It is here you will notice that your mother is sharing a bed with
a man you’ve known as Dr. Nate. As this particular rental house has one bathroom, you will see this virtual stranger in the early mornings and often find yourself attempting to urinate next to him while he hums and shaves. He will be wearing black “banana hammock” bikini briefs and have a great deal of hair on his back and shoulders. In time his presence will become less strange and the very notion of his bearlike nudity, pressed up against your mother, will begin to dissipate. Every other Sunday until you graduate from high school, you and your two younger siblings will move back to your father’s house and spend a week under his parental guidance. Your older brother will have a choice. He can travel back and forth with you or he can pick one house and settle there until his graduation. Dr. Nathaniel Brody’s three-year-old daughter, Amy, will be on your schedule and she too will pack a suitcase each weekend and alternate between Hayward and her mother’s home in Evansville. Megan has been given a choice to remain at your father’s house but needed less than two seconds to decline. It is undetermined where she will move. You will have two rooms and two toothbrushes and two beds and two phone numbers and you won’t need to change schools or meet new friends. Your immediate challenges, given your age and level of maturity, are the following:
a. With puberty upon you, you may find this early “honeymoon” period between your mother and Nathaniel to be a tad more nauseating than most. Entangled legs, the stroking of earlobes, a glimpse of the sides of their tongues during overly affectionate greetings—all possible triggers. And as you are too young to voice this gripe with effective language, the resulting emotional outcomes range from irritability to anger to
varying degrees of depression. Knowing your history and the way your father handles fury, you are also in a high bracket to smash something with your own closed fist.
b. Also due to early sexual awareness, the sight of Dr. Nathaniel’s naked body will be more disturbing in that it’s a body with whom your mother has obviously commingled. When, for example, his penis is brandished during your time together in the aforementioned bathroom and, let’s say, draining like a fire hose into the toilet next to you, an early teen might have trouble erasing the sounds and smells of such image, and how it pertains to his mother and her use of said penis.
c. You may encounter at this age a grave sense of abandonment from this circumstance. Your dreams will often be scenarios in which you are left alone, trapped in small places, falling from great heights or submerged in sand, water, or some type of clingy mud. Depending on your emotional drive, you will either survive and fight your way out of these corners or just wait to die. You’re currently in a high bracket for the latter but dying in a dream state just means waking up all sweaty and frightened and uncertain where you are.
Rule Number 9 of the Green House Rules
Keep loved ones and people you trust close to you. Remind yourself that you’re truly and actually and technically not alone. And remember that most kids lose their fathers entirely when their mothers fall madly in love with their college professors and move with them to neighboring zip
codes. You’re lucky. You still have your father in these vulnerable and blooming years of early adulthood. And you know what’s even better? Your father still has you.
“Mmmmthinkmmmmmgonnathrowup,” says Gabriel, as he stands and gags twice like a cat. My mother leaps to her feet and puts her palm on his chest. “It’s okay, baby,” she says, pulling him into her arms. She kisses the top of his ear as he begins to cry in silence. “I’m
not
leaving you.”
I look at Asher on my parents’ bedroom floor, propped up by his elbows, his shoe tips pointed at ten and two. He peeks at me from the corner of his eye and lets his head flop backward between his shoulder blades. “Kabooooom,” he says softly, and my father looks his way. There’s a blur in the air as the truth settles in my skin, a slowing of time. I am awake, I think, as I touch my own face and eyelids, reaching for tears I can’t even feel.
“I’m not leaving any of you,” she says with a wobbly voice.
“Are you leaving Daddy?” Dara asks.
My mother pulls Gabe even closer and faces my sister. “Yes, I am.”
“I . . . worked very hard,” my father says, “to make this all go away.”
“I’m confused,” Asher says, a sarcastic tone. “Who lives
here
. . . and . . . where do I sleep on Tuesday?”
“Here,” my mother says. “We’ll all sleep here for now. I’m not going anywhere for a few days.”
“Why not?” he says harshly, sitting up straight. “Why draw it out?”
“Can’t you see your brother’s upset?” my father says. “Can’t you—?”
“We’re all upset,” says my mother. “I’m staying for a while,
Ash, so we can all adjust. So we can ease into . . . what has happened here.”
Gabriel suddenly looks up at her. His face is drained of all life, a ridiculous pale of confusion and fear. He burps and bends as his cheeks fill with air. My mother shuttles him to the bathroom and I run to open the door for them. The toilet seat clinks the tank and I hear the thump of Gabe’s knees as they hit the floor. We’re all frozen as we wait, listening to the mourning of this shocked little boy. Burp. Gag. Puke.
Puuuke!
“Good.”
Flushhhhhh.
“Good, sweetie. Any more?”
“I don’t knooooow.”
“Wait a few seconds,” she says out of breath. “Just wait.”
A somber whine pours from Dara’s mouth and she stands and walks to my father. He embraces her off her feet and wears her weeping body like a sash.
“Agaaain,” says Gabe before a burp. Burp. Puke. Puke.
Puuuke.
“Okaaaay,” says my mother. “That’s the one we needed.”
“I just want this to go away,” says my father. “I just want it all to . . .”
Flushhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I
T’S TWO HOURS
later when my mother ushers Gabe and Dara to bed. Asher stands slowly for the first time all night and walks without a word from the bedroom. My father watches him go, and waits for the door to close before covering his face with my mother’s pillow. I sit alone with him now amid the smells of their sheets and clothes and skin and wish, with a pain I can touch, that I could love him enough tonight. “I need to leave this marriage” is how she began, her hands out and cupped like
a Christmas caroler. There was a long beat of silence before Gabriel stood, and somewhere in that quiet, deep inside my mind, I actually felt free. My father pulls the pillow away and stands. He claps his hands twice and rubs his palms together. “I think I’ll do a little dance,” he says with a teary smile, and starts to tap dance on the carpet with his bare feet. I move back to give him more space as his arms whirl around and his feet go through the motions. When he stops after a minute his breathing is heavy and the sound of this fills the room. He sits on the edge of his bed again and looks over at me.
“How’s my boy?” he says, and a grim smirk lifts the corners of his lips.
“Okay” is what comes out.
He pats the mattress next to him. I stand, pretending not to see, and sit in my mom’s wicker chair near the TV.
“I . . . tried, over these last few months, J. I tried to imagine all your faces . . . when you heard . . . what you heard.” He fluffs her pillow and keeps it on his lap. “I tried to hear your mother’s voice and . . . tried to guess where she’d be sitting when she told you.” He tosses the pillow to his side and walks across the room to open my mother’s closet. With his back to me he runs his fingers down the sleeve of a striped blouse. “I saw you,” he says. “I saw you the clearest.”
He gently shuts the door and leans on it with the weight of his shoulder. “You held me,” he says as the tears roll from under his dark frames. “In my thoughts. That’s the first thing you did. You stood up, walked over to me, threw your arms over my shoulders, and . . . told me we’d get through this.”
I hear Gabe’s voice in the hall. I look toward the half-open door and my father walks to shut it closed.
“Do you love me?” he asks, with his hand still on the knob.
“Yes.”
He faces me and says nothing. I shift in my seat, unsure if he heard me.
“But do you love me as much as I love you?”
I look down at my hands. “I think so.”
“You think so? Is that what you said?”
“I mean, I do.”
“Because lately I’ve been feeling a distance between us. Okay? I come home from work and . . . you’re here and I know you hear me but . . . you don’t come to see me. You don’t come and ask me about my day.”
I sit taller in the chair and it squeaks beneath me. I keep my eyes from my father.
“And as you can see,” he says, pausing to swipe his cheeks, “I need that now. I need you to tell me it’s gonna be okay.” We stare at each other for a few seconds and I’m not sure if he wants me to say it right now.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I say.
“Then tell me that. Tell me that again and again. Will you?”
“Yeah.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Because . . . right this second, I’m trying to figure who I have and who I don’t have, ya know? So do I, Jacob? Do I have you?”
I nod when he looks up at me. “Yes.”
“Then tell me right now,” he says, moving toward me.
“Tell you . . . ?”
“Tell me.”
“That . . . it’s going to be okay?”
“No,” he whispers. “That you love me.”
He steps right up to my feet and I look up at him. “I love you,” I say.
He nods, and runs his finger along the wood of the bed frame. “It would be nice . . . if I could have a hug now,” he says. “It would be nice if I didn’t have to ask you to give me a hug when I need one.”
I stand and place my arms over his shoulders. He begins to cry and pull me against his chest and I can feel the coarse hairs of his beard pressing into my neck. He begins to whimper, to sob, his body shakes.
“It’s all right,” I hear myself say.
He shakes his head. His tears streak my face, my mouth and I tighten my lips to avoid the taste.
“I only have you,” he says.
His arms begin to squeeze my frame, tighter, closer to him and the weeping is now joined by a rhythmic hum. He starts to sway in this dramatic dance of grief that pinches the skin of my arms and presses my eyelids against the buttons of his shirt. He moves us closer to his bed with small steps and begins to lean onto it with my body beneath his. We then topple together like a cut down tree and bounce on the mattress. His weight is crushing my chest and I can feel the cold of his tears in the collar of my T-shirt. I try to push him off but I can’t.
“We don’t des
erve
this, Jacob,” he sings, mouth wide, an angel hair of saliva connecting his lips. “My family.”
“Dad.”
“My whole
life.
”
I try to move my legs but they’re entangled in his. I can feel his breath on my neck and chin.
“Don’t leave me. Never leave me. We need to be closer. Like you and Jonny.”
“Okay . . .”
“Your brother is so angry. Did you hear him? He’s . . . a
blamer,
he is; he’ll blame me till the day I die, he will. I
need
your love. How do I get that? Tell me!”
“Dad.”
“What?”
“I can’t breathe.”
“What did you say?”
“I just can’t . . .”
“Can’t what?”
“You’re hurting me.”
He shifts with a jerk and stares down at me. “I’m hurting you?”
“I just can’t breathe with you on me like that.”
“I’m
loving
you,” he says, lifting his torso from mine. “I’m holding you and letting you know that
I’m
hurting and I need you right now. You can’t give me that?
So
dramatic. ‘I can’t breathe, get off me, get off me.’ You really can’t
breathe?
”
“I can now.”
“I ask
nothing
of you. My life is turned inside out. I need you and all you can do is—”
“I just couldn’t breathe.”
“Or maybe it’s more than that, huh? Maybe you want to get away from me. Is that it?”
“It’s not that.”
“You got somewhere you need to be, right?”
“No.”
“
Any
where but with me. Alone is better than with me. Say it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Can’t hug your father for . . . two goddamn seconds?”
“I can.”
“Well, then
hold
me. Open your arms and hold me like I’m someone you love.”
From underneath him I place an arm over each of his shoulders. I turn my face to the wall and feel him staring down at me.
“That’s it? That’s how you hold me?”
I pull him closer with my arms and his chest presses into mine. He begins to cry, and as I hold my breath he suddenly rolls off of me with his legs still entwined.
“
Get
out of here!”
I look up at him. “I’m holding you.”
“I said
go!
” he screams, an inch from my ear and punches the pillow by his side. I wait a few seconds and push his dead weight with both my hands. I slide out from under his legs. When I get to my feet I walk quickly across the room and close the door behind me. I stand for a moment, blind in the darkness of the hallway and soon see my mother on her way up the stairs. I turn and walk quickly toward my room.