Stuffed Read online

  Seeing The Alamo with him at ten a.m. on Forty-second Street when I’m between jobs and the store is poised for lunch, my father shakes his head and says, “The Texas longhorn didn’t come up from Mexico until 1847.” He knows his stuff. Dad can tell, when we’re eating beef, what the cow ate: grass or corn. If it was grass, what kind of grass: rye or wheat. If it was rye or wheat, if it was fresh or hay. Facts this precise, this knowledgeable, led me to men who flaunt the arcane.

  My father sees his job as teacher. “Heels down! Toes in! Back straight!” he shouts when we ride. “Knees!” he barks. “Knees, Knucklehead!” From the moment Dad stands in one stirrup and swings his leg over, he is in command. He is boss. He rocks in the saddle as if riding is the way humans evolved to get around. Like Portuguese rejoneadors, he can ride without reins, controlling the horse with his knees.

  I wear my pony-skin jacket to ride, a sort of warning. “See this?” I lengthen my arm under the horse’s muzzle, letting him sniff the skin. “You better be good.” I want to be good for Dad. But no matter how much I trust him, I can’t believe I can control 1,200 pounds of flesh with my pinkies anymore than I can believe Lamaze will make childbirth painless or a tennis ball won’t blind me if I play net.

  My father learned to ride at the Pine Tree Stables in Prospect Park when he was six. James Sheriff, the family chauffeur, drove him there in the wicker rumble seat of a black Renault Cabriolet. Dad’s early schools were the Aitz Chaim Yeshiva on Thirteenth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street in Borough Park, P.S. 128, and the shul where his father was president, Tefrah Torah, at Eighty-third Street and Twenty-third Avenue. It was at Tefrah Torah that a rabbi punished Dad by locking him in a safe.

  “Were you good after that?” I ask him.

  “I haven’t been in a safe since,” he says.

  When Dad was nine years old, that rabbi called him out of class. “You’re wanted at home,” the rabbi said, then nodded toward the door.

  Dad knew his father was dead. To comfort himself, he rode the subway singing a song from his older sister’s dance recital:

  “Life is like a butterfly

  Da-da, dee-da, da-da-da”

  Jacob Volk had diabetes, but it was pneumonia that killed him. No antibiotics in 1929. He belonged to forty-eight philanthropic societies, but according to tradition, Jake was buried in a plain pine box. Gold coins were pressed over his eyes. Paid mourners wept, trailing his coffin through the streets of Bensonhurst, all the way to the Washington Cemetery on MacDonald Avenue. Dad spent the rest of the day watching the ice that preserved his father’s body melt into the back lawn.

  At twenty-nine my grandmother was a rich widow with three children. She sent my father to the Roosevelt Military Academy in Monsey, New York, where they forced him to become right-handed.

  “It was a dumping ground for kids,” Dad says. “Some of the boys were only five.”

  Roosevelt was run by Dr. Carrington, an Englishman who taught Latin with a .22 on his lap. When Dr. Carrington saw a squirrel, he’d open the window of his classroom and shoot it. Then he’d send a German shepherd named Mary out to crush its head. The students watched silently from their desks.

  Summers Dad was sent away to Saratoga Springs, where he boarded with the Qwas, a Native American family, and got to ride. When he was thirteen, his mother shipped him off to the Valley View Dude Ranch in West Cliff, Colorado, to earn his spurs and learn cowboy skills he would never use again. There he was accidentally shot on two separate occasions. The city boy made his way in this strange land by telling jokes. He still tells jokes. He’s compiling a joke book. Dad knows so many jokes, we play a game.

  “All right,” he says. “Give me a subject.”

  And I’ll think of the most ridiculous thing I can. “Okay, Dad— bubbles!”

  “Man walks into a bar with bubbles on his head,” Dad begins. . . .

  He likes to pretend he can’t remember my birthday, July 16:

  “Okay, Dad. When’s my birthday?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think, Dad.”

  “Two days after Bastille Day?”

  I grieved for the fatherless fact of my father’s childhood. I loved him so much, loved everything about him—how he brought the cold in on his coat, the way the feather looked in the grosgrain ribbon on his fedora, the sweet oakey smell of his breath, riding his shoulders to watch the Veterans Day Parade, the strange things he knew that nobody else did. I wanted to be good at the things he tried to teach me purely to make him happy, to show him an excellent teacher produces an excellent student. But what I was good at wasn’t what he taught. I could, for instance, do a perfect jackknife. I could get high, high, high in the air and then beyond when it was reasonable, at the last possible moment, jack my hips and touch my toes, a human isosceles triangle. I could dangle in the air like a picture on the wall before deciding, Why not make the descent? I could ride my bike downhill with no hands. I could hold my breath in the pool for two laps. I was ruthless at Ping-Pong, spitting on the ball before I served. I had an inborn talent for rendering. I could draw anything. And I could imitate famous people. I could sing exactly like Eartha Kitt (“Daddy”), Jimmy Durante (“Inka-Dinka-Doo” and “Ya Gotta Start Off Each Day with a Song”), Al Jolson (“Swanee”), Ethel Merman (“There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Yes, I Can!”), Betty Boop (“I Wanna Be Loved by You”), Marilyn Monroe (“Happy Birthday, Mr. President” and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”), and Carol Channing (also “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”). I wanted to make Dad happy. The idea was, if I could make him happy, I could somehow make it up to him that he’d grown up fatherless, shipped away, shot. Making him happy was my job. It’s why I was born.

  “He was nobody’s boy,” Mom says. “I would make him my boy.”

  Not growing up with a father, my father developed his own ideas about fathering. He committed himself to making sure I was fearless. If I could be cool in a crisis, I would survive. To that end, he pushed me so high on the playground swing, the chains went slack as it soared above the armature. This was supposed to make me not afraid of heights. Not being afraid could also save my life in a fire or flood. My parents had been traumatized by accounts of the Coconut Grove fire: 490 bodies piled up behind sealed doors in a Boston nightclub— a defining tragedy of the forties. My sister and I were drilled on how not to get trapped in a fire. Anytime we enter an enclosed public space, we are trained to look for the red EXIT sign and position ourselves as close to it as possible. If the movie or restaurant is crowded, we map with our eyes the path we’ll take when our nostrils detect smoke. We were expected to leap off lifeguard towers at Long Beach from the time we were three in case we had to hurl ourselves out a window.

  The best way to learn, according to Dad, is the hard way. Once you can do it the hard way, the normal way is a piece of cake. When I was five, he rowed to the middle of Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks and threw me overboard. Teaching me to drive, he insisted I master reverse before forward. “Anyone can go forward,” he said. “I want you to back around the Zissus’ driveway twenty times.” Round and round we went in the neighbors’ circular driveway until I mastered reverse. It was like trying to tie a bow in a mirror.

  In a restaurant family you don’t see your father much. It’s not the glamorous business lay people take it for. Dad was in the store by six every morning to inspect meat and fish deliveries, check prices, and determine the daily menu. If broccoli was up, the vegetable of the day was steamed cauliflower with herbed bread crumbs sautéed in beurre noisette or zucchini with onions and stewed tomatoes. By six thirty he’d be on the phone with the menu printer. He got home around midnight after closing. I saw him on Saturdays at the exquisite hour when my sister and I would get back from the double feature at Loew’s Eighty-third and Dad would be getting ready to go out, poking his studs in, sipping a Scotch, humming along with Lena Horne, George Shearing, or the La Playa Sextet on the radio. I’d sit on his bed and watch him take little
dance steps, stretching his neck as he knotted his tie. I counted my clothes in food. If a new dress cost $32, that was two orders of Lobster Newburg and one Coconut Ball with Chocolate Sauce Dad had to sell.

  I know my father’s scars as well as my own: The ones from getting shot in Colorado. The lung surgery. The white-waled dent on his back where a Ford V-8 rolled over him while he was pushing it up a hill for his pal Herb Kronish, whose mother once told my father, “Slit my throat when I’m dead to make sure I’m dead.” Knuckle and finger scars real restaurant men—the kind who can do any job in the kitchen—get. Some adolescent acne pits weekly radiation treatments couldn’t cure. Several eyebrow gashes from various racquetball and motorcycle skirmishes, the fingertip dent from the time he cut the end off and I had to go downstairs and find it in the sawdust and bring it to the hospital in a cup of milk. “Look around the band saw,” Dad said when he phoned home. “Try not to walk on it.” And his two scars from nocardia, a rare disease that has nothing to do with the heart. Dad gets it from being pricked by the cacti around his house in Florida because he refuses to wear long pants.

  Good manners are important to my father. As a restaurant man he spent long hours watching customers eat the wrong way. We heard stories about people who used bread as a pusher or rested their knives with the blade on the plate and the handle on the tablecloth. We heard about women who buttered bread on their palms, or poured sauce from the gravy boat instead of ladling it. People who cut all their meat into pieces before they started, then pushed the plate away when they were finished. People who spooned their soup from the front of the bowl or made an X of their utensils or picked their teeth. Mr. B., the customer who washed his flatware in his water glass. The mogul who gesticulated with a fork. Dad once saw a customer stab a piece of meat with a steak knife, then put the knife in his mouth. We were horrified. My father has flawless manners even when he eats strange things. From a crystal bowl he spoons Heinz ketchup on hooves, cheeks, and pickled pigs’ feet. He builds tiny tepees of chewed chicken bones on the rim of his plate. His favorite lunch these days is whatever’s left over— yams, steak, corn, coleslaw—minced with ketchup in the Cuisinart. No matter what goes in, it comes out gray.

  When my parents move to Florida, Dad duplicates his studio from up north, down to the floor tiles that look like Lobster Cantonese sauce and the ceiling-high supermarket aisles stacked with bins of nails, drawers of screws, coiled wires, brads, bits, leather pieces, plastic ropes, bungees, rusty debris he calls “mongo” salvaged from construction sites, grommets, glazes, antique tools, new tools, oiled tools, dry tools, acetylene torches, families of screwdrivers, clamps, and vises, and yellow metal restaurant fillet of sole tins brimming with paints, gessoes, glues, electric switches, and findings, old license plates, phone jacks, tap and die sets. This is Dad’s place, a place from which, if you had to, you could rebuild the modern world. It’s where he does his sculpting and his fixing.

  “Got anything that needs to be fixed?” he says, voice rich with fix-lust when I’m coming down to visit. This can be whatever— busted luggage, loose earrings, a stain on my favorite T-shirt. In the studio we put on soldering goggles, and he gets to tell me what I’m doing wrong. Our most recent project was making napkin rings out of copper tubing. I measured them, then marked the cuts with a grease pencil and used a heavy vise to hold the tubing while I sawed. I wanted to emboss the rings with personalized messages for each family member: EAT YOUR VEGGIES, USE THIS NAPKIN, YUM. To emboss, you have to tighten the copper in the vise, hold each letter down where you want it to imprint, then whack it with a sledgehammer. I was afraid I’d crush my thumb, so I lined up the letter, took my hand away, then hit it. Sometimes the letter jumped or didn’t come out deep enough, and I’d have to reline it up and try again, which, unless I did it perfectly, gave the letter a drop shadow.

  Dad watched. Steam shot out of his ears. He tucked in his lips and sucked air. “Chowderhead! That’s not the way to do it. You want to do it the right way or your way?”

  He lined up the letter, held it down with his fingers, and bonged it like John Henry. The letter came out deep and clear.

  “I’m afraid I’ll hit my fingers,” I explained.

  “You’re not gonna hit your fingers.”

  “Well, anyway,” I said, “I want these napkin rings to look man-made. I want them to have errors. I don’t want them to look perfect, Dad.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Last year he taught me how to solder. I heated up the soldering iron, cleaned the copper with sulfuric acid, and carefully dripped silver onto the join. Dad stopped what he was doing to inspect the work. I rose from the workbench so he could slide onto my stool. He flipped down his Optivisors and held the solder under his fluorescent lamp. He pulled it. He twisted it. He knocked it against the vise, hit it with a hammer, then slammed it onto the floor.

  “That’s a good solder,” he said.

  When I was growing up and we lived in Manhattan, my mother liked to throw dinner parties. A typical menu would start with Shrimp Cocktail, then a salad, then Sautéed Veal Baked with Marsala and Cream, Rice Pilaf with Onions and Sultanas, and, in season, Asparagus Beurre au Citron. Dessert might be Baked Alaska Flambé or Chocolate Mousse in a crystal bowl lined with ladyfingers. But before all that, before the ice bucket was filled and the doorbell began to ring, my father would go into the kitchen and prepare the canapés. He’d pull a long white cook’s apron over his head and tie it in the front. He’d roll up his sleeves. He’d stroke a ten-inch carbon steel chef’s knife against a whetstone. He’d take three loaves of perfectly square, perfectly presliced black bread, butter them six at a time, then drape smoked salmon over the tops. When six were complete, he’d cut the bread on the diagonal and trim it. Slivers of smoked salmon would fall off with the crusts. “Open,” my father would say. Like a baby bird, I’d bend my head back and open my mouth. He would laugh and drop the slivers on my tongue and only mine. My sister had been traumatized by a sea robin he caught when she was three and placed on her Mae West. She has never eaten fish since then and wears rubber gloves to prepare tuna salad for her husband. Mattie would be tidying up the guest bathroom and making sure the living-room cushions were plumped. My mother would be getting dressed. So my father and I were alone in the kitchen. And for the time it took to make three loaves of smoked salmon canapés, he was mine.

  The Volk Girls with our beloved beagle, Morgen. Together we’ve been on forty-four diets.

  CHOCOLATE PUDDING

  Beaming down the high school corridor, my big sister comes toward me. Why is she laughing so hard? Nearing her I can see: She is wearing my blouse. The blouse I saved up months to buy. The blouse I’ve never worn. She’s stolen it out of my closet. If rage could kill, I would be dead.

  Born eighteen months apart—both accidents—my sister and I fought daily. Knives were thrown. Ribs were kicked. My right thumb was slammed off in a door. Circle fights were the worst. Trapped in a room we’d hiss and snarl, grabbing weapons to maim with—hangers, hairbrushes, shoes—whatever you could reach without breaking the circle. Eventually my sister won. She always did. Then she’d pin me and drip spit on my face.

  “Someday you’ll love her.” My mother would smile.

  “I wish she was dead,” I’d say.

  And yet, and yet . . .

  Punished together, banished to our room, instantly we were allies. We plotted escape. We wrote musicals and did the cancan. We midwifed black mollies and developed our own language: A penis was a linga-linga. A fart was a foogee. A pretty girl, a shpagooli, and an ugly girl, a bashalaga. When our parents spoke French so we wouldn’t understand, we made up our own French:

  Shock on voo shawn on tain.

  Instun tain on poo sha.

  On Sundays, when Mattie was off, we’d cook. “Let’s make chocolate pudding!” my sister would say, and we’d race to the kitchen. She’d reach for a box of My-T-Fine from the pantry shelf, then take a bottle of milk out of the fridge. Cream
rose to the top then. We’d use all of it, then pour the My-T-Fine into an aluminum pot. The stove was gas. When my sister lit the match, blue flames shot out of black holes toward the ceiling. I stood back. The whoosh could singe your eyebrows.

  Since she was older, my sister would stir first. When she’d get bored, I’d stir and she’d tell me what I was doing wrong.

  “You’re going too fast!” “You’re going too slow!” “You’re going backward!” Mattie stirred in figure eights, rotating the pot so that every part of the bottom would get touched. But no matter what we did, the pot would scorch and the pudding would stick.

  When you saw the first bubble, the pudding was done. We’d pour it into four-ounce Pyrex cups. While it cooled, we’d fight over the spoon. If you cared about quantity, the pot was more desirable. There was more pudding in the pot than the spoon, even if it tasted scorched. But usually the spoon was preferable because it had a well where the pudding was thick, even though it made the pudding taste like wood.

  After we’d scrub the pot with Babbo, we’d take the pudding to our parents on a tray. They’d take a taste, say how good it was, then we’d get under their satin quilt. At some point during the snuggling, my sister would kick me or punch me or pull down my pajama bottoms.

  “Why did you beat me up so much when we were little?” I ask her.

  “What did you do that made me?” she replies.

  Last weekend, on a trip to Florida to meet her second grandson, my sister glares at me over a grapefruit. “How could you send the baby that gift?” she smolders. “You sent Daniel a silver cup.”

  “I did?” I say. “I’m supposed to remember that?”

  “How could you send Matthew a jumpsuit and rattles?”

  “That jumpsuit came from a very good store,” I say. “And the rattle thing had twelve rattles in it.”

  “They were plastic.” My sister says the word like she’s vomiting.