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mom ate whatever was left over, that
no one else wanted. Years later, with-
out quite deciding to, I assumed a sim-
ilar role. In that role, I nicknamed my-
self the Invisible Dishrag. Being a
dishrag extends beyond cooking, of
course. Sometimes I would find myself
deeply bothered and resentful about
my dishrag role. But most of the time
I found myself thinking, perhaps smugly,
Well, I’m capable. My dad often talked
about how intelligent my mother was.
To be a dishrag was not to be Jeannie
from “I Dream of Jeannie” (though I
loved her, too) but more like Saman-
tha, from “Bewitched.” Samantha was
powerful—she could, for example, tele-
port by wiggling her nose—but she
kept her power under wraps out of re-
spect for the man in her life, a guy
named Darrin. That I watched so much
television during childhood, wasting
away like that, I also somehow have be-
come O.K. with. Though it has left me
unable to watch any television at all
now, when television has supposedly
become so good.
There was one meal that my fam-
ily did eat together. That was the Pass-
over meal, which we usually shared
with the Scottish Jewish Orthodox
family who lived on the other side of
town, the Levines. To this day, my
brother and I still call roasted potatoes
Levine potatoes. What I remember
best about those Seders was how my
dad and Martin Levine, a dentist, were
capable of long discussions about al-
most any line of the Haggadah. They
debated the meaning of the line “My
father was a wandering Aramaean.”
Where and when had they got this
knowledge? My dad came from a very
secular family, but, in the Israeli Army,
he had won some sort of contest in
Bible knowledge. (This is also true of
Bertie Wooster.) That my father had
been in the Army—that fact felt to me
like fiction, though we had his old Army
water bottle under the kitchen sink.
For some reason, the inessential learned-
ness of those Seder meals impressed
me as something that I could never
accomplish but which resided in the
realms where true worth lay.
When my dad’s father died, he didn’t
tell me. My mom told me that my
grandfather had died, and that was why
my dad was away, but that he would
be home soon. When my dad returned,
he attended our local Hillel each Fri-
day, sometimes with me, to say the
Mourner’s Kaddish. Often, there weren’t
the required ten men present to have
a “real” service, with the Kaddish, and
this frustrated my father: he had come
for the Kaddish. As a child, I didn’t
count among the ten—
maybe also as a female. I
remember that my father
argued otherwise.
That Kaddish year gave
me a narrow but real peek
into my dad’s childhood. I
knew that my grandfather
put a sugar cube into his
mouth when he drank tea,
and that he told my dad
he wouldn’t understand the
movie “Rashomon” until he was older.
I think Tzvi said little to me about his
own childhood because he wanted to
let me have my childhood, and not
crowd it out with the inner lives and
melancholies and anxieties of adults.
He did say to me once, “Your mother
and I did one thing right. We made
sure that you and your brother got to
be children for a long time.” What he
felt worst about was that the family
had to move so much when my brother
was young; after I started first grade,
we stayed in place for more than ten
years. I’ve come to think that maybe
my childhood was happy mostly be-
cause it was childhood. When I moved
in with my partner and his children,
and later when I had a child, my own
childhood returned to me. I believe
that children arrive with their own life
of the mind, and that to the extent
that they get to spend time in that
world which they themselves have in-
vented—that’s pretty good. Much of
the rest is roulette.
The summer after my dad died, I
found myself studying at a women’s ye-
shiva in Jerusalem—I assume because
I thought I’d learn some of the Bibli-
cal knowledge mysteriously held by my
father. My family thought I was insane.
I may as well have been studying with
Scientologists, as far as they were con-
cerned. Most of the young women there
had, well, backstories. One was a pro-
fessional dancer who had been in a car
crash and broken her back. Another
was the daughter of a psychiatrist whohad been shot by one of his patients.
Another was just a very tall and very
slim woman who we all knew was “from
Oxford.” One of the rabbis who in-
structed us had blue eyes and had been
a d.j. and a ski instructor living in Berke-
ley before becoming religious. He told
us a long story in class one day about
how, through a series of
kooky chance encounters,
his son’s congenital heart
malformation was found
and immediately operated
on—and that this was be-
cause Hashem was watch-
ing out for him. At that
point, I decided that my
dad would have sided with
the rest of my family, and
wanted me out of there. My
dad’s voice has often been with me in
this way, generally amused, occasion-
ally in the mood for a fight.O
ne afternoon, toward the end of my
last year of high school, I found
pages from a magazine torn out and taped
to my door. The pages were titled “Mes-
sages from My Father,” and they were by
Calvin Trillin, in the June 20th, 1994, issue
of The New Yorker. The reason we had a
New Yorker subscription at all was that it
was advertised on one of those Sunday
mornings when my dad watched the
“fighting shows” at full volume, and I had
said that maybe we should get a subscrip-
tion, and he had said, “I don’t have time
to read it, but how about you read it, and
you tell me if there’s something in there
I should read.” The day that my dad taped
the Trillin piece to my door, he told me
that I should one day write something
like that about him. Ha-ha. Four months
later, my father had a heart attack and
died, at the age of fifty-three. I didn’t
write that essay. I didn’t know enough. I
barely even knew that my father was gone.
I was not many weeks into my first year
of college, and a substantial part of me
thought, I’ll see him when I go back to
Oklahoma. I had several dreams in which
he was sitting in a booth at a diner. When
my Spanish teacher learned, through
some conversation exercise, that my fa-
ther was a meteorologist, she told me
that she had always wanted to under-
stand how wind chill was calculated, and
she asked me to ask my dad about that.
I told her I would.