Cures for Heartbreak Read Online Free Page B

again,” my father said in the doorway.
    He stared at the puffy stars dangling above his head andpinched one, as if testing whether it was real. His glasses were as thick as storm windows, his face expressionless. “Stoneface,” my mother used to call him, in a not-so-joking tone. “Talk back! Speak to me!” she’d scream at him, and he’d slump on the couch and not respond. No matter what my parents talked about—the telephone bill, cleaning the gerbil cage, who’d bought the scratchy brand of toilet paper—they’d fight. They’d even fought in the hospital: my father wanted to bring my mother’s parents to see her, and she refused. She’d never gotten along with her parents, and she didn’t want to see them now. One afternoon my father had pulled my sister and me into the hospital corridor and said, “I’m bringing Omi and Opa.”
    â€œWhy?” I’d asked. My mother had seemed miserable enough already.
    â€œMommy doesn’t understand Omi and Opa. That’s the problem. She’s never accepted all they’ve been through.” All they’ve been through hung in the air above us heavily, unexplained, like everything from my mother’s life: her swastika-stamped birth certificate shoved in her dresser drawer; the space on the family tree my sister once drew for class, with question marks where our mother’s aunts, uncles, and cousins should be. After several phone calls to my grandparents, Alex had found out a few facts to add—the places of death for our great-grandparents and two cousins. Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt. My grandparents didn’t know thedates. Alex penciled the concentration camp names in on her strange and stunted drawing, a sickly tree with empty limbs.
    Omi and Opa still lived in Washington Heights, but they didn’t get a chance to see my mother before she died. It had happened so surprisingly quickly—my father hadn’t arranged their visit in time. At the funeral I’d stared at Omi beside me on the pew in her heaping wig, and Opa steadying himself with his cane; I’d wanted to extract my mother from them, whatever part of her that they held. They spoke little except for a few exchanges in German to each other.
    My father called them nightly now. His own Polish-born parents were long dead, his aunts and uncles relocated to Yonkers; only my sister, father, and I remained in Queens, half a block down from where my father had grown up.
    â€œI’ll wake you up at six-fifteen,” he said, and shut the door. I groaned. I’d been sleeping until noon every day, waking in a coma-like state. I dreaded getting up when it was still dark, to wait on the icy 7 train platform for the hour-and-fifteen-minute subway ride to school. I hated being smushed in the train car with dozens of commuters sweating in their winter coats, grumbling in ten different languages, reaching desperately for the silver poles as the train squealed and tilted like it was about to topple off the tracks.
    â€œI’m glad I’m going back,” Alex said during our nightly attack of the post-funeral food supply. She dug into ahalf-destroyed strudel; I ate the frosting off a cupcake. “It’s better than moping here.”
    â€œI like moping.” I didn’t want to face the level buzz of the lunchroom and the day packaged neatly into its eight periods, and I shuddered at the thought of seeing Jay Kasper; I hoped he hadn’t told people about our pity date. But I wrapped up a cupcake and a piece of strudel to take to lunch the next day. My father made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
    That night I dreamed I was back at school, telling everyone that my mom had died. In the dream they all said, “So what?”
    The Bronx High School of Science is a sprawling 1950s architectural monstrosity of glass and red brick, several long, cold blocks from the Bedford Park Boulevard stop on the