didn’t know too many others. Maybe Mitchell was ashamed, maybe that’s why he seemed deflated as they walked into the lobby, but Laura was just sad. As much as she feared being home with Bruce, as much as she fought with her mother and lived like she had been dropped onto an alien planet, the more she wanted to stay there, the more she wanted to belong. To her mother. With her mother. There was the lure of seeing her dad, of TV and hamburgers and chocolate milk, but almost as soon as she got to her dad’s, she felt desperate to attach to her mother again, and Sunday seemed like a million hours away.
“Your kids are here,” the doorman spoke into the black receiver. He hung up and nodded to Laura and Mitchell. “Go on up.”
It would take all weekend for her to feel comfortable with her dad again, to reattach to him, to remember him and feel him as her daddy again, but then it would be just about time to go back.
Laura and Mitchell rode the elevator in silence. It was easier not to go there and start worrying about Sunday, easier to just wait out the weekend. The door to their dad’s apartment was cracked open for them to come in.
“You still haven’t cut your hair?”
Their dad’s first words.
They were directed at Mitchell, who didn’t bother to respond. Her dad wasn’t the only one obsessed with hair; it was everywhere. There were lots of jokes and comments, cartoons about not being able to tell a boy from a girl anymore. There was one
Lighter Side
comic where a guy tries to pick up a shapely-looking figure with long blond hair sitting at a bar, only to find out the girl is really a guy. Laura saw that one in
Mad
magazine.
There were a few familiar things in their dad’s apartment, furniture Laura remembered from their Brooklyn apartment: the narrow wooden side table that opened up for eating dinner, paintings that she used to lie on the floor and stare at. Her dad was in advertising. He was the art director for a firm on Madison Avenue, but once upon a time, he had wanted to be an artist; once upon a time, he
was
an artist, and it might have been part of the reason their parents split up. Their mother reminded him of everything he couldn’t be, everything he had given up. Young, for one thing.
Laura knew that before he had gotten married, her dad had taught some studio art courses at Pratt Institute. Some of his larger Abstract Expressionist oil paintings now hung in the apartment. Everything else had gone to their mother. But not the table and not the paintings.
While her dad ran his commentary on Mitchell’s long hair and blue jeans (“Only farmers wear overalls. . . . Don’t you care about your appearance . . . ?”), Laura fell into the one painting she had loved as a little girl. The colors swirled around, burnt sienna, cadmium orange. She knew it wasn’t supposed to
be
anything, but she rode a horse in the tiny bump of raw umber, and she smelled a Prussian blue flower that no one saw.
“Laura? Are you listening to me? Or are you smoking marijuana too?”
“What?” She whirled around. Mitchell had gone into the bathroom. Lucky he hadn’t heard that. He’d be out the door.
Her dad put out his arms. “Sorry, baby. Your brother’s just got me worked up. C’mon, let’s get you something to eat.”
LAURA wasn’t Jewish, not that she knew of, but she wished she were. At least that way she’d have a history of being a victim and a history of survival. She’d have a whole nation behind her. And there would be witnesses.
It wasn’t that Laura envisioned her situation like that of being in the Holocaust. No, it wasn’t that at all, but it was something about the way the whole world had turned its eyes away, even when the whole world knew what was going on. Or should have known. Of course they knew. So every time she felt hungry or cold, or felt the dark presence of Bruce at her back, she measured it in her mind against the annex, against Auschwitz, against Babi Yar.
She read