Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found Read Online Free Page B

possibly needed to speak to us about that couldn’t be discussed right there at the dinner table. After we had cleared the table and helped clean the kitchen, Peter and Daniel raced and roughhoused their way up the stairs while I lagged behind, for once not feeling the need to keep up.
    I had always loved my parents’ bedroom. The lingering scent of my mom’s perfume, my dad’s shoe polish, and the crisp smell of his dry-cleaned work shirts greeted me each time I entered their room. Danny, Peter, and I would often lie on their bed in our PJs, making funny faces into the reflective brass globes that sat atop the bed frame, our grossly distorted features reflecting back at us from the round shapes of the balls, keeping us in hysterics until we were writhing in pain from our laughter. We loved to wake them up when we were little, racing in after Saturday morning cartoons to beg for my mom’s French toast, or her matz-n-egg scramble, a family specialty, accompanied by my dad’s fresh-squeezed orange juice. We would climb all over them, my mother’s smell of sleep that I cherished and my father’s faint smell of Irish Spring mingling into the warm comfort of exactly where we belonged.
    That night, as we scrambled for our places on the bed, everyone wanting the middle, of course, my dad and mom slowly followed us in, closing the door behind them. My mom did most of the talking, and the only sentence I remember clearly is “Your dad and I have decided to separate.” I’d only seen my mom cry a few times before—after a few of my parents’ fiercer arguments—and I would feel so incredibly guilty, watching her cry and not knowing what to do to help her. This time, though, my dad was crying, too—inconsolably. I had never seen him cry, and I felt so helpless and terrified. My big, strong daddy falling apart was not something I could comprehend; it didn’t fit in with the world I knew and the father I loved. It felt so utterly wrong that I began to feel nausea rising along with my sobs. And I knew he wasn’t just crying for himself, but for the unbearable pain they were causing us.
    What I didn’t know then was that he was also crying out of guilt. Guilt that his own illness, his depression and mania—which my brothers and I knew nothing of at the time—had helped push this into motion. Behavior that I would someday recognize in my brother, another illness carried down, probably through generations as well. Right then, though, all that I saw was that the two people whom I loved most in the world were preparing to tear our world apart.
    As my brothers and I pleaded and begged for them to reconsider or try to work it out, my father told us, between his sobs, that it was what he wanted, too, to try to keep our family together, to stay together and work on it. My mother was clearer. She told us that she could no longer tolerate her children running down the stairs to try to stop a fight between them. The last straw for her had been watching Daniel race into the dining room, shove himself between them, and plead, “Daddy! Daddy! Pleasedon’t hurt Mommy!” She couldn’t bear the idea of us, her babies, feeling as though we had to protect her from my dad, and she did not want us to believe that our dad, who stood at least a foot taller than she did, could ever possibly hurt her.
    Danny, Peter, and I asked desperate, heartbroken questions, believing, the way children do, that we could somehow change the outcome of the adult world. Despite watching my parents fight more and more, I really thought we had the perfect family. My mother and father explained that they were going to first try a “separation,” though even then I could see by the look on my mother’s face that this was my father’s idea. We would stay in our house, and they would alternate staying with us. That sounded horrible to me, but still, I clung to it like a life raft. Surely, I thought, they would come to their senses.
    This was the last time that we