Riding Fury Home Read Online Free

had stopped having sex with his dad, who for years had been sleeping on the couch.
    Abe thought about leaving Gloria, but he couldn’t imagine losing his only child. When his mother had kicked his father out of the bedroom, his dad had stayed. The shame of his failure burned in his chest. Already withdrawn, he stayed, and retreated further.
    As the construction of the house neared completion, my mother arranged to sell her sister Rita their double bed. She planned to replace the marital bed with two twins.
    On moving day, my parents set up the twin beds in a house of mahogany and glass, a house of beauty and light, filled with estrangement and regret.

Chapter 5. Millstone
    OUR ULTRA-MODERN HOUSE, with its flat roof—wedged between two pre-Revolutionary colonial houses—looked as out of place as my Jewish parents felt in this small town, populated largely by the Protestant descendents of Dutch settlers. Only fifty miles from teeming, multicultural Manhattan, the center of 1950s Millstone, all four blocks of it, was frozen in a colonial time warp, oblivious that it was poised on the edge of changing demographics.
    Along the uneven slate sidewalks there still remained white wooden hitching posts for horses, while the town boasted the oldest working blacksmith shop in the United States. Directly across from our house on Main Street stood the Hillsborough Reformed Church. In its front yard, the town’s namesake rested in the grass—a waist-high gray boulder with a hollow depression in its top for grinding grains. A bronze plaque read: “THIS MILLSTONE WAS FOUND ON THE JACOB VAN DOREN FARM 1000 FEET SOUTH OF THIS CHURCH, ON THE SITE OF A LARGE INDIAN VILLAGE.” The plaque left unnamed that village’s native people, the Lenni Lenape. Of their disappearance—whether
they were massacred, relocated, or died from exposure to European germs—nothing was ever said.
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    IN SMALL-TOWN MILLSTONE, GOSSIP flew like dandelion spores, yet the burn of history went unspoken. My parents had purchased the vacant lot in 1953, two years before the house was built, since Frank Lloyd Wright always required that a structure be designed for its site. In Millstone, they discovered a prime lot right in the center of town. The property had a blackened hole, the charred remnants of the basement of a historic inn that had burned down in 1928.
    One afternoon, several years after we moved into our house, elderly Mr. Brezniak, a Slovak, who felt a common bond with Dad as an outsider, told him the story of the old inn’s fire. Dad and the old man were alone in his little grocery store, but even so, Mr. Brezniak looked out the front window to make sure no one was about to enter, and lowered his voice.
    One early morning before dawn, he was driving down Main Street in his truck, loaded with vegetables that he grew on his farm on the town’s outskirts. As he drove past the inn, orange flames lit the dark sky. Several men were dancing around the incinerating inn, roaring with laughter, their heads flung back. He thanked God they were too caught up to notice him witnessing their act of destruction. The vacant and decrepit inn had been bought by a Jewish couple who were renovating it. They were just about to move in and reopen the inn for business. Those men were making sure no Jews moved into town.
    No one attempted to burn our house down. But one morning, during the year our house was being built, my father found these words scrawled on the dust of his trunk: “Dirty Jews—Get out of town.”

    My parents never spoke to me about the hatred someone’s finger had etched onto Dad’s car. Just as I never told them that now and then on the school playground at recess a boy would come up to me and hiss, “You Jews killed Christ!”
    We had our own defense. Unlike our neighbors’ colonial houses that brightly faced the street with their open-shuttered windows, our house was set back from