CHAPTER 1
The Man Who Wasn’t There
My father was long since dead, but never mind: we had each other. My stylish, petite, sardonic mother and me. There weren’t a lot of single mothers around, and the few we knew—heads together in the playground, Marlboro Reds gesturing furiously, given a wide berth by the married women sheep-dogging their husbands away—were divorced. Mom was a widow, without any of the usual indicators that archaic, weepy word implies—no black dresses, no red-rimmed eyes. He was too long gone for that. He was forgotten. We were a team: one big, one small. Two sparrow-boned, sharp-eyed blondes, hand in hand.
There was no trace of my dead father except an ancient white leather backgammon set, which I kept reverently boxed up under my bed. She’d married him not long after divorcing her first husband, and in the early weeks of her pregnancy, he was killed in a car accident when he stopped at a red light and the driver behind him didn’t. In a storm of grief she burned all his photos, including those from their wedding, at which she wore a borrowed ivory pantsuit that she dutifully returned. It was such a whirlwind romance that even the few friends she didn’t alienate—and the very few members of our family who were alive and speaking to each other—had never met him. Family, dead. Friends, moved away.
This story is, of course, total bullshit.
But I believed it. Why wouldn’t I? Parents in children’s books died all the time. I was a city kid, and as far as I was concerned, cars—in which I almost never rode—were gas-snorting, two-ton death machines.
I asked about him, anxious for the details.
“What did he look like?”
“Like you, Miss Mouse. Blond, gorgeous.” (I blushed.)
“Was he excited to have me?”
“It was too early, honey. He didn’t know.”
“Oh.” That stumped me, the specifics of pregnancy fuzzy at best. Then: “What was he like?”
She pushed up her glasses into her hair and sighed. “Elizabeth, this was all a long time ago. He was a good man. I’m sorry he’s gone, but he’s gone. Now, what should we read tonight?”
I worshipped her. I loved her smoky cackle and her jokes, even though most of them went over my head, and I loved her whole-body storytelling, and her habit of pulling me out of school whenever something more interesting was happening. I loved that she adored me above everything else on earth and told me so on a roughly hourly basis. I felt like the small, slightly ratty sun around which the galaxy revolved.
So how was it possible that she was lying to me?
The paucity of belongings wasn’t the problem. I could believe that a person could be swept away wholesale with nothing to show he was ever there. But the stories were such clear fabrications, haltingly told, a note of panic in her voice. She wasn’t a good liar, despite all the practice.
The other kids I knew who were missing a father hadn’t misplaced theirs quite so badly. Theirs came to pick them up for brunch on Sunday mornings, or dinner every other Thursday. They may have been shitty, and plenty of them were, but they were known quantities. Mine was a blank with a fuzzy blond halo and, apparently, a love for backgammon. Was he out there somewhere—in a Kips Bay divorced-guy apartment, or a row house in Queens—wondering if she’d ever let him meet me? Or unaware I existed at all? I surreptitiously scanned the faces of blond men on the street who looked to be about the right age. Is it you? Years later, when I donated eggs, I did the same with tiny blond toddlers with a mixture of curiosity and detachment. My anonymous genetic children were hypotheticals, but my father—he had to have been real. (Evidence: me.) But where was he?
Telling exorbitant lies was easier in the 80s. There was no internet, no way to track down the clues, especially for a six-year-old who rarely left the house. (“If any of your friends’ fathers touch you, you tell me,” she warned, even though she usually insisted playdates take place in our own living room, under her watchful eye.) She could reasonably believe that if she didn’t give up the truth, I would never find out. But I knew something was wrong with her story. She was reluctant to talk about him, and I suspected that her reticence wasn’t due to the patina of grief, but the fear of slipping up. What was she hiding?
The obvious answer, to me, was that he was still alive. When I was very young, I thought: A spy! An astronaut abandoned on a distant planet! The foreign service! Wrongfully imprisoned in a case of mistaken identity! Older and more cynical, I thought: married.
I knew perfectly well that there was a lie happening, somewhere, but I couldn’t parse out to whom it had been told.
I did have his name: Warren Steven Livingston. I repeated it to myself, turning it over and over in my mind. I printed it in careful capitals on the Hebrew school submission forms for trees planted in Israel in the name of a loved one in exchange for donations to the Jewish National Fund. I hung the certificates proudly on the wall, and my mother winced and averted her eyes every time she passed. One memorable day while she left my eight-year-old self alone for an hour while running errands, I called every Livingston in the New York City white pages, trembling, asking if they were related to him. No one was; their brusque voices softened when they heard my high-pitched child’s voice. But none of them knew a Warren Steven.
It will not surprise you—you will probably already have figured out—that no one recognized the name because she made it up. When she finally admitted the lie, that day in the living room, she told me she was afraid I would find the place where he’d died—a stretch of sidewalk only two blocks away from my childhood home—and make a shrine out of it. I’m skeptical. I think the real reason is that she was putting off the day I would find out her two shames: that he wasn’t Jewish, and that they weren’t married. Well: not to each other, anyway.
I speed-rifled through her room, paging through old photo albums, while she was down in our apartment building’s hot, airless laundry room. Somewhere, there had to be clues as to the story that was more and more evidently untrue. But my career as a pint-sized secret agent was short-lived and unsuccessful—her filing cabinet was locked tight, and I never could find where she hid the key—and I tried hard to forget about the man who wasn’t there. She must have a good reason, I thought. Anyone can learn to live with a lie.
And so: there we were. Mother and daughter. Senior and junior. A comedy act, a vaudeville team. But I had no idea who I was really living with, only that she transformed behind that locked apartment door.
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