In our New Jersey neighborhood when I was young, a family called the Adlers lived a few blocks away. If you can have a crush not just on one person but on an entire family, I had one on the Adlers. The father, mother, two sons and daughter seemed to be everything my small family was not. Their house was alive with comings and goings. Cars and bicycles filled their driveway. They always had visitors for weekend lunch, and dined outdoors in warm weather, the sound of their easy conversation drifting through the hedges that separated their backyard from the street. They were content with each other-a family who sought out the company only of itself.
Most Sundays, I would ride my bike in circles around their block until one of them would notice me and wave me over. The kids were all older than me, and they took me in, sort of the way you'd take in a cute but needy stray cat. I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and they would gently tease me. Harvey and Eddie Adler would tell me that they'd wait for me and marry me some day. They were both in medical school, and on weekends they'd bring home girlfriends-beautiful, sophisticated, long-haired young women who wore stacked-heel boots and dangling earrings, who were in law school or did social work or advertising. I wanted to be them. I wanted to skip my teenage years entirely and leapfrog into adulthood. I wanted out of my parents' quiet house and the feeling I couldn't shake that something was very wrong.
Sorrow had by then taken up a permanent place in our home. My father injured his back and underwent spinal--fusion surgery, which at the time was quite dangerous. Now I understand the chronic pain that would have driven a man to sign up for an operation that carried with it a real risk of paralysis. But back then, I watched my father fade into an angry, rigid, stricken figure who hung in traction from the door of our den, the folds of his neck squished around his face by a brace, watching Hogan's Heroes. I didn't know about the failures, both real and self-perceived, that had become too much for him to bear. I didn't know about the Valium and codeine that he had begun to abuse. I didn't know anything about my parents' marriage except that a brittleness existed between them, the air so dry that it seemed always ready to ignite.
It would be twenty more years before I would get the assignment from The New Yorker and, through the writing of it, begin to understand. I exhumed the ghost of my father's early marriage to a young woman who was dying of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma as she walked down the aisle. A woman whose name had never been uttered in our home but who was later described to me, by relatives and friends I interviewed, as the love of his life. As a writer, I assembled and arranged the pieces of my grieving young father on the page until they became a portrait-true to memory, reporting, imagination. A collage and an elegy.
All I knew then, with the canny survival instincts of a teenager, was that the Adler house was way more fun than ours. Harvey and Eddie played tennis with me, and on another neighbor's court I became a strong player, slamming the ball boy-style, low over the net, but mostly I was eyeing Eddie's thighs, his blond hair glistening in the sun. That tennis court, those young medical students, their noblesse oblige willingness to call me into their midst-those were the hours in which it seemed a door opened to a brighter, easier, happier future. Who knew? Maybe Eddie would wait for me.
The year I turned sixteen, the youngest Adler, a dark, wild beauty named Joyce, was found lying unconscious on the floor of her college dormitory room. She'd had a stroke-a freak aneurysm-from which she never recovered. She and I hadn't been close-I was an interloper, she tolerated me-but I had admired and envied her for what I imagined to be her perfect life. The first time I went to visit her, at a rehabilitation center in New Jersey, she was propped in a wheelchair, her eyes unfocused, her face contorted. She remained quadriplegic and unable to speak, but fully conscious, for the next twenty years until she died. This was my awakening. Randomness, suddenness, the fickle nature of good fortune. These drilled themselves into me, and eventually became the themes central to all of my work. I started sleeping with Eddie Adler when I was seventeen, and he very quickly broke my heart. Things are not what they seem. The Adler parents were never again able to look at me without thinking: Why not you? My father, pale and wincing in pain. A lazy Susan in the center of our kitchen table, slowly filling with narcotics. My mother, who hadn't paid attention to her wedding vows. For better or for worse.
From the chaise longue, the subway seat, the borrowed room, we see: a man hanging in traction, his angry wife, the strong, tanned thighs of a callow medical student, a beautiful, ruined girl. We see: a still and silent house, a bicycle circling, a girl who is lost, who is confused by all she sees, for which she doesn't have language. She will grow up to find the language. Finding the language. It's what we can hope for.
