The walls are painted her favorite colors — robin’s egg blue, and that green, celadon, the color of light through the glass bottles she’s always collected. Her easel is in the sunniest spot. Her writing desk, set up and ready. Her little collections already on the shelves. She’s feeling her way home.

I walk in and start to cry, kind of quietly.

“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Mom pats my arm. “I’ll help you get a nice place for yourself, too.”

I don’t know what to say to that. It has absolutely nothing to do with why I’m crying — not that I know why the tears have come myself.

We sit at the small table by the window with the salad she’s bought for us — walnuts, goat cheese, cranberries — and I try to find the words. Something about fierce pride in her, watching her reinvent herself so late in life. The light through the windows. The easel with its just-started study of color and shape. She’s painted the walls with her favorite colors, chosen the tiles, the fixtures. Soon enough she’ll be making things again — paint and feathers and buttons and poems written in gold ink across a new clean white canvas.

I tell her my tears have something to do with that. And with Dad.

“He has nothing,” I say. “Just the world of the bed in which he lays, day after day, waiting for the world to change.”

“I know it seems that way,” Mom says. “But your father never wanted anything. He tried to live like a monk, with less and less. He didn’t want beautiful things around him. He didn’t care about nature. Anytime I suggested something that would make our life better, he refused it. He wants it this way. I don’t know why. But he does.”

It makes sense, but I don’t know how — mainly because I can’t imagine making that choice myself. The help we offer is never right or good enough. Always perceived as disempowering, controlling. But his demands on our time and energy are all hard work, without any heart in it.

The phone rings. A nursing home has a bed. I listen to the coordinator, try to write down the details, try to breathe. Too far. Not right. I tell them I’ll call back and hang up.

Mom weeps. “I feel so sad that he has to go through this,” she says.

I just feel relieved. And empty.

“Is there anything I can do?” Mom asks.

“I could use that deed,” I remind her.

“Oh, yes,” she says — and miraculously produces it. Three weeks we’ve been searching. She’ll fax it to the Medicaid coordinator today.

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter, Darling, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

My mom’s actual apartment. This is the living room, years after she moved in. I was staying there on weekends (Mom had moved to Esther’s — but that’s another story. In another book.)

For now, notice the papers spread out across the sofa. That could actually be the chapters of this book. I was working on it, even back then. Or it might be Natalie Runs Away. You can see my journals on the chairs to the left. YOu can see Mom’s beautiful artwork in the corner. The sofa is facing French doors which open onto her studio.

But Dad lives with him — at least for now.

George is tall. Even lying down, under the blankets, you can see it in the long limbs, the lean bones, the big pretty face. A full head of thick white hair. All eyes, all hands — even now, even in the bed, his hands move constantly, framing photographs in the air. He worked for advertisers, for Vogue. They sent him everywhere — Paris, Rome, Milan, the Hamptons. He tells me about it the moment I walk in, not because I asked but because there is a body in the room and that is all he needs. The assignments. The faces. The lovers he names. He never stops talking.

His accent is New York twang with a touch of mid-Atlantic lockjaw — Katharine Hepburn, pure blueblood—and something scrappier underneath. He’d moved through very good rooms and knew how to belong in all of them.

When I walk in the room, “Oh my,” he says. “That bone structure!” Appraising, already composing. He shakes his head slowly. “Like Meryl Streep,” he says. “A soft quiet beauty that needs a camera to find it.” His hands lift, framing my face. “Lift your chin.”

I vamp, lift my chin, giggling. “Yes. There,” he says. A pause. “Oh, what I could do with that face if I had a camera in my hands.”

I can imagine him in his element — flirting, coaxing models, cajoling them into something they didn’t know they had. Turn this way. You’re laughing. You’re surprised. That’s it, darling. Gorgeous. Now look me straight in the eye. He’s a huge personality. Openly, flamboyantly, entirely himself — and had been, I gathered, all his life. A big life. A life that had taken him everywhere.

—

Across the room, Dad watches from his wheelchair. He’s wary. Already, Dad has seen the tide of George’s mood turn. Without warning, without transition. George’s mood darkens. The hands still. His eyes change.

Who are you. I don’t know you. They’re poisoning my food. I’m not like the other people here. I don’t trust them.

Sometimes George sobs. Great heaving sobs that shake his whole body — the Parkinson’s and the grief and the fear all moving through him at once.

Taryn, my friend at work, suggests he must be sundowning. A word I’ve never heard before. Her niece is a nurse. She says that people in institutional life — hospitals, nursing homes — often demonstrate mood changes, shifts in awareness as evening approaches. Dad takes George’s hand. Speaks to him calmly. Stays with him, offering presence as the tide moves through and George quiets.

They sit together. The television my sister ordered hasn’t arrived yet. They have only one another. When George gets antagonistic — hurling insults and accusations toward the person who just offered comfort — Dad rolls out of the room. Pushing himself along with one foot. He hasn’t qualified yet for a power wheelchair. He will. There are steps to take. We’ll get there.

“Two shaky old men, holding hands,” Dad says later, when we’re in the hallway.

—

The next day I should go back to Dad but Mom has the idea I said I would come to her new apartment.

—
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago.
The previous chapter, Applesauce, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

Dad is visibly disturbed to be here. I don’t blame him. They have assigned him to a nursing care floor that looks exactly like the hospital room he’s just left — except there’s no TV. You have to bring your own.

His roommate talks too much and doesn’t hear well and therefore carries on a constant, one-sided monologue. Dad is upset that the residents who dine together do not make eye contact or converse with each other.

“You could talk,” I say. “You could change everything. Be the one who starts the conversation.”

“I know,” he snaps. “I’m figuring it all out.”

“I can see that . . . I know you are,” I say, trying to soothe him — and myself.

—

But Dad’s right. At mealtime, the residents sit in wheelchairs at the same table and not a word passes between them. The nursing staff moves through the room, feeding them, talking to each other over their heads. There is no interaction between staff and residents except for the putting in and taking out of spoons from mouths. Dad, whose meals need to be pureed, receives the wrong tray. I take it back — and piece together a meal from what hasn’t been picked up: chicken salad, tuna salad, mashed potatoes. “Mix that all together,” Dad tells me. I stir applesauce into vanilla ice cream for dessert.

I leave Dad in his room and walk toward the nurse’s station. On my way, I pass through a corridor of wheelchairs. Along one wall, women sit, lined up in a row — dozing. One stares straight ahead, eyes vacant. Another slumps forward, chin to chest, drooling. Another group dozes in a circle around the television. In a sunny, wide open room filled with wheelchairs, an activities coordinator reads a newspaper story aloud. She tries to get a chat started about the news item she’s reading but no one says a word.

“Okay,” she asks them. “Would you rather have music now or a TV program?”

No one answers. No one is walking. No one can.

Which is when I realize: It’s the fucking Alzheimer’s floor.

The earth tips — that inner-ear thing I don’t have a word for. It happens to me sometimes when I am hit with a wave of… what do I call it? Seeing? Vision? I step back against the wall. Beside me, a woman in a wheelchair reaches for my arms. “Help me,” she says. “Help me help me help me.” I back away. She keeps calling.

And then — I don’t know how else to say this — a window of awareness opens to the right of my forehead. It’s happened before. I can’t make it happen. It’s happening now.

I see beyond what is in front of me. The whole lives of these women, spooling open. Not imagined. Vivid. The vibrational ghosts of who they were, layered over who they are now. A woman lifts a child. A woman walks a sunlit street. A woman stands before a mirror, watching her skirt fly out around her legs.

I feel my throat close with grief.

—

I march to the nursing station. I am going to ask straight out: Is this the Alzheimer’s floor? Why is my father here? He has none of the checkmarks for Alzheimer’s, for dementia. I want him evaluated — properly, by a competent physician. I stand there, waiting, while the nurse at the counter talks on the phone. I wait. And wait. Finally, she hangs up. And walks out of the room.

—

I go back to Dad. At least he is fighting. At least he is trying to keep his head above water. He is sitting in his wheelchair beside his roommate’s bed. His roommate is talking. Dad is nodding.

“Hey,” I call from the door. “Let’s go outside.” I push his wheelchair along the path — his first time out of doors in over two months. I am dazzled by the view. Overlooking the Hudson River, small boats flow by on blue, blue water. Clouds float overhead in the blue, blue sky.

“I told you it would be like this,” Dad says.

We stop in the shade of a little concrete hut. Some sort of lookout, I think. I carry a chair over from the lawn. We look out.

“It looks really nice,” Dad says. “But there’s no one here. They’ve all given up.”

“Don’t you give up,” I say.

“I won’t,” he promises.

—

But I’m giving up, I think on the way home. I can’t stand to watch him go through this. And I find myself praying: Not for help or comfort. I pray that he dies soon. I pray that he does not have to endure any more humiliation. I pray that his body does not betray him any further. I pray that he makes a friend or two and finds someone to play chess with.

Then I pray not to feel guilty for praying that. Then, as I pull into the driveway back home, I un-give up. If he won’t. I won’t.

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter, Tea, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

The Hebrew Home for the Aged had a bed.

I knew this place. Esther had told us about it — prestigious, impossible to get into, the kind of place you put on a waiting list years before you need it. I had taken Dad there a year ago. Though he could still walk with a cane, they made him sit in a wheelchair. I pushed him through the corridors while the tour guides looked past him as if he weren’t there.

Each time his head lolled forward — the stenosis, the CP, the exhaustion of simply being upright pulling at him — one of them would turn to me and ask: “Are you sure you don’t want the Alzheimer’s tour?”

“He doesn’t have Alzheimer’s.”

We moved on. It happened again. Right over Dad’s head.

“Are you sure you don’t want the Alzheimer’s tour?”

“Talk to him. He’s right there. And no, he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s.”

Three people. The same question. Again and again. As if Dad weren’t sitting right there in the wheelchair, listening to every word.

When we left, I agreed with him. He didn’t belong there.

But now there was a bed. And Dad was in Hoboken Hospital, beyond Nora’s capacity, beyond Mom’s, beyond mine. His body was making choices his mind refused to make. My mind, too, was having trouble making it.

The intake coordinator was walking me through the paperwork, the timeline, what would need to happen and when, and I was trying to write it all down and also trying to breathe, when the buzzer to enter my building rang.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Mrs. Oscar, we need your decision today. The bed won’t be held.”

I pressed the intercom to let my client up. “I’ll call you back,” I said. I hung up the phone.

I have to calm down. I closed my eyes. Took a breath. In. Took a breath out.

My client knocked. One more breath. In. Out. Then, I opened the door. My client whirled past me, straight to ‘her’ chair at the small wooden table by the window.

She was flushed, a little breathless. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said, peeling off her jacket, setting down her purse. “I am completely frazzled. I am having a hell of a time getting my father into a nursing home. He’s stuck in a hospital and these nursing home people are driving me insane.” She exhaled. Looked around the apartment. Looked at me.

“What a relief,” she said, settling into her chair. “To just come here and sit and have tea and talk with you.”

I put the kettle on - for both of us.

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter Coffee, Light and Sweet, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

On Yom Kippur, we spend the day with Matthew’s family. Fasting. Solemn self-reflection. That evening, I tell Matthew, “I don’t want to go to Kol Nidre.” I don’t know why. Something about atonement. Something about feeling stuck inside my own skin.

“Okay,” he nods, pulling on his coat.

As he’s pulling open the door, I call out. “Wait. I do want to go.”

On the highway, halfway there, something comes loose in me. I start picking at him. “I don’t like your hat,” I say. “Okay,” he says. He puts his hand over mine. We don’t say much. We arrive late.

—

About fifty people are seated on folding chairs, set in rows echoing outward from the piano, where my friend Lisa sits at the keyboard, her halo of white hair glowing. Her miraculous voice fills the room with the opening prayer as Matthew and I take our places by the door.

Then, Judith Rose, the celebrant, begins speaking. “On Kol Nidre the prayer is: Forgive us for all the lies we have told, the ways we have hurt others, the things we have stolen, for doing less than our best at work, in relationships. For being less than you, God, would have us be.”

“This remarkable concept — that this heart, which beats all of our lives, constantly, beginning in utero just weeks from the moment of conception — is the seat of pure, unstruck love,” she says. “The word, anahata, the Sanskrit name for the heart chakra, means unstruck.”

Tears fill my eyes.

“At the New Year, Jewish people thump their heart, asking forgiveness of their sins. It’s the only time we strike the unstruck heart.” Judith suggests we strike the chest gently, in gratitude for this gift that sustains us all of our lives.

How can I forgive myself for what I’ve done? Tears tracking down my cheeks as I strike my own heart. But what? What do I imagine I have done? What do I imagine I have not done? I can’t understand why I’m crying. Exhaustion? Regret?

I remember a story Caroline Myss told during my CMED training — about a woman whose entire family had died in a terrible accident, who walked through the funeral process dry, not one tear. And then one day her eyes began to stream. She still felt nothing but her eyes could no longer hold back the flow of salt water. It was the beginning of release, a melting of her defenses. Grief must flow out.

Judith’s voice breaks into my thoughts. “The Jewish concept of Atonement,” she says, “is interpreted tonight as At-One-Ment. Becoming so close to the resonance of God’s pure love, pure light, that you are transformed.”

It’s grief, I realize. So much is changing. So much that was is no more. I strike my heart again. But gently. So gently. I strike my heart with tenderness, repeating my own version of a prayer: I have done enough. I am good enough.

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter, Go Fish, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

The next day, at the hospital, Dad is still crying. The tears come in waves, he tells me — sneaking up on him when he least expects it.

I pull out the deck of Bicycle cards I tucked into my purse as I left the house.

Seeing them, his face brightens. He sits up a little straighter. “Let’s play something,” he says. “What games do you know?”

“Um... How about Go Fish?”

He cracks up. “Go Fish?! Sheesh. Are you my daughter?”

“How about Hearts? Or Gin?”

“Can you play Gin?” he asks, doubtful.

“Well, no.” I laugh. “You’ll have to teach me again.”

Dad can’t hold his cards so I deal out two hands and hold them both up. I try not to cheat. “Take the second card out and lay it face down,” he instructs. “Take the fourth one, too.”

Suddenly, he looks up. “Hey, Amy. How’s Jenny? I mean — how is she? How’s she doing?”

“She’s okay. She’s busy with the baby, with work.”

He sighs. “She’s hard to get close to.”

“Well, she’s quiet — so it takes some effort,” I nod. “But she’s worth it.”

“I know,” he says, choking up again. “I know.” Then: “I miss her,” he says, fresh tears rolling down his cheeks. “I miss her so much.”

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter, There’s So Much, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

“I’m crying a lot,” he says. “I go into this altered state where I am so deeply immersed in a memory — something from my past, something with one of you girls, or your mother, or some friends — that I can feel every detail. It’s all so real, it’s like I’m really there. And then I wake up, and the reality of what is going on with me — my body, where I’m living, being so isolated, no one visiting — is so overwhelming...”

He chokes up.

I pull my chair closer. Take his hand — the hand with the IV needle taped to it. The hand that still works. The hand he uses to pull the other hand, limp and lifeless, up and onto his belly to rest, patting it gently, the way you might pat a kitten. Or a baby.

“There’s so much,” he says. “So much I’m not going to do again. I’m not going to play poker this Friday night. I’m not going out for bagels and the Sunday Times. I’m not going to work at Camp Edalia this summer. I’m not going to swim in the ocean with Beth or build sand castles in Nantucket with Jenny.”

He pauses. Gathers himself.

“I’m not going to go to Parkwood to watch you swim. I’m not going to act in any plays anymore. And I’m not going to...” He chokes up again. “Do anything with your mother.”

Now I’m crying too.

Dad’s roommate arrived last night with pneumonia. On life support, his breath reminds me of the sound we used to make blowing eggs for Easter — like a straw sucking along the bottom of a cup, damp and gurgly and underwater. Every five or ten minutes, a bout of coughing so violent it lifts him from his bed. Then, as his throat clears, he slaps back down on the mattress. Fast asleep.

“I know it wasn’t a good marriage at the end,” Dad sniffs. “It wasn’t a real marriage. But at the beginning, we were good friends.”

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter, Linen Napkin, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

“I sold the house,” Mom says. “Do you want to tell your father?”

I drive to New Jersey to tell my father.

“That’s good. Good for her,” Dad says, the look on his face all blanked out. I’m reminded of an Etch-A-Sketch. That toy from my childhood - a little screen filled with sand where you could make simple line drawings. When you were done drawing, you could shake it and the screen reset - back to blank. That’s what Dad’s face looks like to me. An Etch A Sketch, vigorously shaken.

Two days later, Katie and I pick up a fruit and custard tart at Didier Dumas, the French bakery in Nyack, and set off on the one hour drive to Mom’s house. It’s her birthday weekend and we’re going to gather with Jen and Cerulean to help her celebrate — and get started packing up the house.

When we get there, Mom’s a wreck. The meal isn’t even started. She hasn’t got nearly enough boxes or packing tape. “Hey,” I say. “It’s okay.” I sit her down and warm up her coffee. Katie helps me set out a light breakfast. She makes the toast. I scramble some eggs. “This is only the beginning, Mom,” I say. “You’ve got a couple of months to pack before the closing.”

When the phone rings, I pick up my keys and run to the train station to collect Jen and Cerulean. By the time we’re back, Katie and Mom have set up packing stations in each room. Stacks of newspaper and tape. “We’ll need markers,” Jen says and searches Mom’s drawers until she finds them.

As we pack, Mom walks by. “What’s in that one? Are you sure you wrapped it carefully? Are you sure you haven’t packed anything I wanted to sell at the yard sale?”

We won’t live here anymore. I look around the room - my mother’s studio, filled with her belongings. Every object has a story - every corner, a memory.

Mom hands me a pack of Post-it notes and another one to Jen. “Stick one on anything you don’t want me to sell,” she says.

Jen and I walk through the living room, the dining room, sticking our notes on chests and storage cabinets. As we do, Mom follows us, removing the notes. “You can’t have that. It’s moving with me.” “That chair is going to Joyce.” “Oh, you don’t want that...”

Jen and I exchange glances as Mom peels off every note we’ve placed. “It’s the fucking house of Sisyphus,” Jen quips, and we laugh, because it is.

My cell phone rings.

“Hey.” My son’s gravelly voice. Calling from his first month of college.

“Hey, yourself! Happy Birthday!” Max, the first grandson, was born on my mother’s birthday.

“It’s not such a happy one, Mommy,” his voice cracks. “Jackie broke up with me. One of us had to do it but I’m really pissed she did it this weekend. It really sucks.”

“I’m at Grandma’s,” I tell him. “You’re only half an hour away. Want me to pick you up?”

“Yes,” he says. “I really do.”

I pick up my keys.

Two hours later, we gather around the table for pizza Jen convinced Mom to order instead of the fancy meal she’d planned. “We’re here to help you,” she says. “To celebrate. Lets make it easy.”

Max downs three slices and falls profoundly asleep on the living room sofa. Katie reads to us from her journal and Cerulean — five years old and very serious — sings us a new and very long song that he makes up as he goes along. As he is singing the fourth verse, Mom’s phone rings.

“It’s Nora,” I say, reading the caller ID.

“I’ve been calling your cell phone all day,” Nora says. “There’s been… an incident.”

I step into the next room. Mom follows me, gripping a newspaper-wrapped plate. “What’s wrong?” Mom asks.

“It’s Dad,” I whisper. “He’s been taken to the hospital.” I repeat the details as Nora gives them to me. “He woke up with a sharp pain in his eye. The eye was clouded with blood. She didn’t think it was an allergy. It could have been a stroke symptom. She didn’t want to take any chances. When it hadn’t cleared up in an hour, she called 911.”

“Oh, of course!” Mom snaps. Disgusted, she turns her back.

“Mom?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Amy,” she says. “Maybe it’s real. It’s just that all of my life, whenever anything starts moving forward for me, your father creates a crisis. I don’t know why he does it. But he always does. You told him I sold the house, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“See?” she says. “He always does this.” She falls into a chair. Then, “Oh dear,” she says, as if realizing it for the first time. “Your father’s in the hospital. Oh, dear.” Her whole body starts to shake.

“Grandma,” Katie coos. She pulls her chair closer to my mother, cuddles against her.

I bring Mom a glass of water and Jen wraps an arm around Mom’s shoulders. Cerulean, understanding only that his grandmother is sad, wraps his arms around Mom’s knees. “He’ll be okay, Mom,” Jen says.

“I knew this would happen,” Mom sighs. “It’s just that you’re never prepared. We tried to get your father to make this choice for himself. He is so resistant. So impossible to help. I didn’t want this for him. Now he has no choice.”

“There’s always some choice,” I say. “Now that he’s in the system, we’ll actually have a better chance at choosing the nursing home we want — the leverage of the emergency, I guess.”

“That’s good to know.” Mom sits quietly, folding and unfolding a linen napkin. “I just feel so sad for your father.”

—

Later, Katie and I drive Max back to school. As we part, I give him a long hug — so long that I think, he should push me away now, but he doesn’t. Katie falls asleep as we’re approaching the bridge home. In the dark silence, I return to the events of this day.

I imagine Dad being carried down the stairs and into the sunshine — the first time he’s been out of doors since June. At Mom’s house, the garden was in full end-of-summer flower, the phlox bending to the ground with the weight of their blossoms — white, dusty rose, purple. At Nora’s, the roses would be wide and shedding petals, the heavy-headed hydrangea hanging low. Maybe, as Dad was carried to the parking lot, he’d noticed them. More likely, he’d simply enjoyed the fresh air, the bright blue of the cloudless end-of-summer sky.

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter, Bear, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend.

To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

The first time I was there for it — really there, close enough to catch him — he came into the hallway in the night, his right foot tangling his left, and went down slowly, almost gracefully, his head coming to rest on a stack of my mother’s freshly folded towels. (I told that story in Orange Soda.)

But there had been others — and the next morning as my kids crunched corn flakes and I nursed a cup of tea, I asked him, “Are you falling a lot?”

“I fall, I get up,” he said, noncommittal.

Dad.

Silence. Then, “Last time I fell, I tripped on a scatter rug in the kitchen and went down cheek-first into the cat’s food dish.”

Max and Katie stared at each other across the table, not sure whether it was okay to laugh. “Mooky didn’t like that!” Dad told them with a chuckle. Reassuring them. But not me.

Then, he continued. He told me he’d fallen in the city and a group of strangers helped him up. He told me he’d fallen down the stairs — but just halfway. No big deal. But then, he told me about the driveway.

He’d driven home and stepped out of his car — or tried to. But somehow, between the open car door and the car, he went down. And then he couldn’t get up. He couldn’t roll to his side. He lay on his back on the concrete, right beside the car, and watched the clouds go by.

“How long were you there?” I asked.

“About an hour,” he said. “Maybe a little longer. I knew someone would pass by eventually.” He paused. “A couple of kids from up the block went by and I called to them but they didn’t hear me.”

“Oh, Dad—”

“It was a nice day,” he said. “Eventually, the garbage men came by and saw me. They got me up.”

I told my sisters. We huddled via email and text message and telephone.

That week, Beth subscribed him to Life Alert. Now he wears a button on a thick black cord around his neck. He can press it and speak with a dispatcher who’ll send help — the police, a neighbor — to stand him back up.

Now, every time he falls, I get a phone call. Often at one or two in the morning, after everything is already okay. Each time, I feel two things at once: I wish I’d been there. I am so glad I wasn’t.

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. Find all the scenes in order, with the Overview and Full Chapter Index, over at All The Books I’m Writing. Want to support the work? Leave a comment or share with a friend.

Three of her friends had already migrated to the public high school near where they lived - the river town of Nyack. To follow them, she’d need a Nyack address — so I rented a small studio space in town, something I’d wanted for years but had never been able to justify.

The space was tiny but bright with sunlight, a whitewashed brick wall and two long windows that looked out onto a back alley that was untended and wild with vines and broken bricks and the backs of other buildings. I placed the white wooden table I’d found at a thrift store there. It was all I needed. Two chairs. A box of tea.

I’d just graduated with certification to offer Spiritual Direction sessions. I saw my first clients there. I made them tea in the little kitchen. Stocked the little bathroom with scented soap and a stack of Yoga Journal magazines. On the floor, I placed my yoga mat.

Katie had to be at school by 7 so after I’d dropped her off, I came to my office and lay down on the floor, drifting between meditation and just … spaciousness as the sun crawled across the floor, across my body. It was the first time in years that I had a space to be alone. Just me and me. I wrote. I stretched. I made tea.

When I got antsy, I took little walks. Down to the river and down the embankment where I stood at the edge of the water. I let the water come up to the toes of my shoes. I made piles of small flat stones, but mostly I just stood there, staring. Under the bridge. Gazing out across the water. Trains snaking along the shoreline on the opposite side. When I got hungry, I walked up to Art Cafe, the new Israeli place friends had opened. It was a tiny place, squeezed into half of one of Nyack’s old Victorian houses, which had been rezoned commercial and repurposed into two small storefronts.

All of this was mine mine mine alone. The first time since the kids were born when it was just me.

When Katie joined the drama club and her days ran later, I took to spending the afternoons there — writing, talking with friends, eating dinner. There was a yoga studio on the same block. A place where I would make some of the best friends I’ve ever known. And where, eight years into the future, I would graduate as a yoga teacher.

But today, Max was the one graduating.

It’s funny how life times things - you miss something for months and then, there it is, just when it means the most.

This morning, when I padded up the stairs in my thick socks and the silence of the morning, I noticed something sticking out of the window. A little piece of straw had worked its way from the outside to the inside of the window sash. I pulled on it and . . . Peep.

What’s that? I crouched down, squinting at the space between the air conditioner and the window frame and there, backlit by the morning sun, was the silhouette of a bird. No, a family of birds! Two shadowy chicks rustled around, peeping and flapping while their mother pushed into the crowded nest with breakfast.

“I see you’ve found the birds.” Katie yawned.

“You knew about this?”

“They’ve been there since last summer.”

“How did I not know this?”

I had no idea — and discovering this today, as my eldest leaves the nest, leaves me breathless - and then I’m blinking back tears.

A deep, fierce love flashes with snapshots of every boy he's been: the bright-eyed newborn reaching for my face as he nursed; the toddler pulling me to the truck stop on the corner, naming every Dozer-Loader and Dump Truck; the earnest scientist explaining Brontosaurus versus Allosaurus over an egg sandwich in the sun; the kindergartener walking hand in hand with his best friend; the twelve-year-old who taught me chess. The Little Leaguer who couldn't hit a baseball and who, at his first soccer practice, was so overwhelmed when the whole team raced toward him that he ran off the field — into my arms.

At every stage, I loved a different boy. And they are all here, in this lanky eighteen-year-old towering over my head. Somehow, my newborn son has grown into the kind of person who is going to go away to college.

Of course, it’s not ONLY that - it’s everything. Dad. Mom. I’m stretched so thin these days I can barely feel my own life. And so, today, the one clear thought I have is this: let me have this day. Don’t let them interrupt this. Please, today, let no one create a crisis.

“What are you looking at?” Max asks, rubbing sleep from his eyes. We turn toward him — this lanky 18-year-old towering over our heads. “Oh, the birds,” he yawns, heading downstairs. We follow.

The week before, Nora had called. “Your father will be 80 this June. Do you want me to host the party?”

Party? My heart skipped a beat. Why? When? Wait —

Dad’s birthday is June 21st — the same day as Max’s graduation. I’d thought we’d fold them together, that I’d ask Nora to bring Dad to Max’s party, where we could have a special cake and sing Happy Birthday. But she thinks — and he thinks — his friends won’t travel all the way to my house, an hour and a half from Great Neck.

“Let’s have it at your mother’s house,” Dad decided. “It will be easier for everyone that way.”

—

It will be easier for everyone that way. I am looking at this note, chiseled into the page of my journal. I am feeling the bewilderment and overwhelm. I have such compassion for my younger self — caught between the layers of caretaking, unable to ask for what made HER life easier. Because to be sure, when Dad spoke of making it “easier” for everyone, he did not mean me. He did not mean easier for Nora, who, with Kit off for the weekend, would have to get him there and he did not mean Mom, whose home would be invaded by all of Dad’s friends. It wouldn’t even be “easier” for Dad himself. He hadn’t been downstairs in weeks. He was talking about his friends. If he made it easier for them, maybe they’d show up.

I’m remembering that day: How, instead of objecting or calling a foul on the play, I got to work. It had always been easier for me to just get things done - to just get through a hard thing than to ask for help, to protest, to say no.

I sprang into action. I went to Costco and bought double quantities of everything — paper plates, paper cups, plastic cutlery — and divided it all into two plastic bins in the trunk of my car. I called Dave at Harvest Moon Caterers and ordered the platters: deli sandwiches, vegetarian wraps, a tray of brownie and blondie bars. “I want the same order again the following weekend,” I told him.

“What do you mean?” he asked, confused.

“I’m having this party twice,” I said.

I went to bake the apple cakes — two Aunt Esther’s Foolproof Apple Cakes, one for Max’s party and one, a week later, for Dad’s — and I couldn’t find my bundt pan. I searched every cabinet before I remembered: I’d packed it away. I had to go up to the attic and un-tape a carton in my own handwriting — Kitchen, not essential — to dig it out.

Then I ordered three cakes — a custard tart topped with berries and mango, a dark chocolate ganache finished with curls of fourteen-karat gold leaf, and a strawberry shortcake from Didier Dumas.

It would be easier this way.

Katie can’t come to the ceremony; she has her first Regents exam. I drop her at Nyack High School and drive back just in time to enter the gymnasium and find my seat beside Matthew. I watch Max’s class file in. Two rows of folding chairs to the left of the stage. We parents, facing them, are seated to the right. In the front row of the audience, the kindergarteners file in. They’re graduating today, too. Into first grade.

And there are Katie’s friends - Marzy, Soli, Jess. As they file in, I wave — and they scan the empty seat beside me. They’re looking for her, I realize. I nod and shrug. I miss her, too.

The program begins. My son ascends the stage — pressed suit, dazzling grin — receiving a rose from a child half his size.

I turn out of the parking lot as a gentle rain begins to fall. Katie’s test should be over now. I head back to the Thruway. I’m moving beneath the overpass when, fwomp — a clump of debris falls from the girders above. I flinch as it hits the hood of my car and flies into my windshield where the wipers pick it up, slapping it up-down, up-down.

I have to pull over. I step from the car, reaching to retrieve it but as soon as it’s in my hand, I gasp - this is not debris. It’s a bird’s nest. Amazed, I turn it in my hands, examining the careful construction. Twigs and grass, studded with white feathers. And there, woven into the delicate architecture, a thin white strip of paper. I laugh then. And more tears come. It says: Kisses. The paper tab from a Hershey’s Kiss.

Awestruck, I place this precious gift on the passenger seat beside me. Then I drive to Nyack High School to get Katie and bring her to the party.

As we pull into the driveway, our guests are already arriving. Max’s friends pile on the lawn furniture, sprawl on the grass, heaped plates balanced on their laps. All afternoon, people come and go — people who’ve known Max all of his life. Matthew’s business friends. My mom comes with Esther.

I’m talking with friends when Esther walks up. “No one’s eating,” she says. “You should put this food back in the fridge.” Why argue? I think, but the minute I put it away, more people come, asking for food. I put the platter back out. I settle into a lawn chair. Exhaling.

Suddenly, Max and his friends stand and start walking toward the cars.

“Where are you going? You can’t just leave...”

“I never said I wanted this party,” Max says. “These are your friends. I’m going with mine.” He gets in the car and drives off.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, turning to my friends.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Julia says, putting an arm around my shoulders. “Sheesh. Teenagers.”

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. Find all the scenes in order, with the Overview and Full Chapter Index, over at All The Books I’m Writing. Want to support the work? Leave a comment or share with a friend.

His friends arrive, full of cheer.
But two hours later, he’s still not here.

“We started at 10 a.m.,” Nora says, when she finally gets him in the door. “But you know how long it takes to get him ready... just getting down the stairs and out to the car took an hour. Then we hit traffic.”

“Well, you’re here now,” I say. I reach to hug her but she pulls away.

“I can’t do this alone,” she says. “Getting here was so exhausting I almost called to cancel.” The words come fast now, like she’s been holding them. “Kit’s leaving in August. Back to nursing school. She’s the only one who can get him to eat — she brings him her mother’s soup, she makes him laugh, she — “ Nora stops, presses her lips together. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without her. I really don’t.”

“Kit’s leaving?”

She nods.

“Oh, no . . .”

She turns to face me, lowering her voice. “Listen, Amy. Your father hasn’t eaten anything in three days. He says he has no appetite, but I think he’s depressed. Sometimes old people do this. They stop eating. They … “ She doesn’t say starve themselves to death, but the words are there, hanging in the air between us.

I am carrying a deli platter from the kitchen when it hits me — I grew up in this kitchen. I know this room. . . and so does Dad. He’s out there in the living room, in his chair. The one by the television, angled the way it’s always been angled. His chair. His living room. His home.

Mooky finds him first. She jumps into his lap and settles there like no time has passed, like Dad never left, and Dad’s good hand comes to rest on her black and white fur.

I stand in the doorway watching them - watching him as he talks with old friends. But he’s not just celebrating a birthday. His eyes are all over the room: Taking in the bookshelves, the garden through the sliding doors. My mother’s paintings - and then, my mother enters the room and his eyes land. His house. His wife. His cat. His chair. He left here in winter. Six months ago.

I’ve been so busy. Two sets of paper plates. Two sleeves of cups. Making it all come out even. Getting the platters right. I was so deep in the logistics of the day that I never once stopped to think about what this day actually was.

This is the last time my father will ever be inside his own home.

He knows it. He has known it since the moment they lifted him into the car this morning — two hours of getting him down the stairs and into the seat and through the traffic, Nora frantic the whole way. He knew where he was going. He knew what it would be. And he came anyway, and he said nothing, and he is sitting in his chair with his cat, taking it in, saying goodbye to everything, alone, in a room full of people who came to celebrate him.

My eyes fill. All of it — the resentment I’ve been carrying, the why is this my job, the it will be easier for everyone — all of it melts, right there in the doorway, with the paper cups in my hands.

Oh, Dad.

I pick up a sandwich from the catering platter — turkey on rye, Russian dressing. Dad’s favorite. I find him in the living room surrounded by well-wishers.

“Hey Dad. Want me to put this in the blender for you?”

He nods, and a few minutes later I return with his sandwich in a beer stein. “Just put it over there,” he says, gesturing to the little card table in front of the TV.

“Hey, Amy,” he calls, as I turn back to the kitchen. “Thanks.”

He’ll eat that, I think, reassuring myself. It’s his favorite.

But later, when we’re clearing up after the party, I notice the pulverized sandwich still sitting in the glass by the armchair, untouched.

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. Find all the scenes in order, with the Overview and Full Chapter Index, over at All The Books I’m Writing. Want to support the work? Leave a comment or share with a friend.

“Oh, my God!” I sank into a chair. “Oh, thank God. It could have been so much worse.” I had no idea Dad was still driving. This whole time I’d thought, for some reason — maybe he lied to me — that when he’d moved to Nora’s, he’d handed over his keys.

“I wanted you to know. And I’ve told Ray I won’t help him drive any more.”

“Of course. He should never have been…,” I took a breath. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘If you won’t help me drive then who needs you, you’re fired!’”

“I don’t think he means it, Kit. He’s just embarrassed.”

“I know. And I understand. I’ll come by tonight and see what he says. My mother made him soup so I have to bring it over. But I told him, ‘I think you’re done driving, Ray.’ And that’s it.”

“Thanks, Kit. I don’t know how we got so lucky to get you.”

“I’m the lucky one,” she said, her voice breaking a little. “Your father amazes me. I love that guy.”

“He loves you, too.”

I am lying on my yoga mat in Suzi’s home studio.

“What yoga is really about,” Suzi says, “is this: there is a way we get so caught up in attaching our complete faith and attention to things that will never stay — things with no permanence, things that come and then go.”

“There is something eternal,” she says, “that will always meet us.”

Last summer, Suzi told us the story of her twenty-five-year-old nephew, a beautiful spirit who had lived his brief life without complaint.

“He was a teacher of love,” she told us. “Unconditional, bright, bursting love — even though he had cerebral palsy, even though his body didn’t work like everyone else’s did.” She told us he had literally died of joy — a seizure triggered when his nervous system couldn’t handle the excitement, at an amusement park.

How nice for him, I thought, that day. To have both cerebral palsy and joy. My father also has cerebral palsy. I don’t know that he’s ever felt joy.

Remembering Suzi’s story reminded me of the promise I’d made — to God, and to myself — to visit Dad every evening at 4:30, to drive an hour each way so I could help him with dinner, as feeding himself became harder and harder. A promise I began breaking the very next day.

I lay on my mat, listening to Suzi talk about the eternal something. Feeling nothing but numb brittleness — and then, suddenly, I felt myself coming apart.

I can’t explain it any other way. One moment I was numb but I was whole. The next, oh no, oh no, oh no, hot tears boiling at the back of my throat, and I felt myself bursting into flames. Not here. Not in front of everyone. My bones were kindling. The air in my lungs, fuel. If I can do this quietly, I thought. Just roll up my mat and walk out and up the hill to my car. Then I can cry.

But Suzi said, “Lie in Savasana.” And though she didn’t say it, I heard: Stay. Don’t run from this. Don’t turn it into a migraine or a blood disease or some philosophical principle — “his suffering is his own” — so you can push it away. Stay. Lie down while the class moves around you. Stay.

So I stayed.

—

The class moved around me — through Warrior One and Warrior Two, through Triangle and Ardha Chandrasana, my favorite pose, the one where Suzi sometimes says, “Shine, shine out like the sun.”

She didn’t say it this time. But I heard it inside my heart. And I let myself think about my father. I let it be possible that he could have both cerebral palsy and joy. I let it be possible that he could lose his keys and not die of grief. I let it be possible that I could show up for him — imperfectly, maybe, but well enough. That he might… that we might… that I might make it through this.

Then I stood up and rejoined the class and did Legs Up the Wall instead of Shoulder Stand.

And that was enough.

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. Find all the scenes in order, with the Overview and Full Chapter Index, over at All The Books I’m Writing. Want to support the work? Leave a comment or share with a friend.

I find Nora in the kitchen. We talk about Dad and about her kids and about the house and how nice it is that she has taken him in. Then Nora asks me about the goldfish.

“Do you think it looks sick?”

We peer into the small bowl, watching the bright orange fish flash around. I also see the cat watching it.

This is the second fish, Nora explains. The first, purchased on a whim and carried carefully home in a plastic bag filled with water, died after only a week. When she saw it float to the surface of the small goldfish bowl, Nora was surprised by how deeply she felt the loss. “I felt as if I’d let it down,” she says.

She went to the pet store and asked questions about food, water quality and oxygen. She learned that her fish had been a special kind of fish, and that it needed a different food. She came home with a brand new goldfish, a new kind of food selected by the trained salesclerk, a little sack of blue gravel that would help for reasons I don’t quite understand, and a small water plant that was, she said, supposed to do something to oxygenate the water.

—

A few weeks later, when I get there, she’s pouring filtered water from a Brita pitcher into a new tank. The second fish has died. As I unpack Dad’s groceries into the fridge, Nora tells me where things stand. She’d returned to the pet shop. The salesclerk suggested different food and said the tap water she was using was probably causing the problem. I give her an encouraging smile. Say, maybe the third time is the charm. —

“Nora is having a drama with a fish,” Dad says.

“I know,” I say.

“It’s not about the fish,” he says.

“I know,” I say.

“She takes things so hard. I’m worried about her.”

—

While Dad uses the bathroom, Nora shows me the new bubbler the salesclerk recommended. She tells me that when she put the bubbler into the tank, the third goldfish somehow got caught and churned up a bit in the gushing stream of bubbles. “He hasn’t been the same since,” she says, squinting into the tank. “He used to be so active, so full of life. Now he just lies there. Does he look sick to you?”

“I can’t really tell,” I say. “Maybe he’s just shaken up. He’ll be okay in a day or two.”

“He’s stopped eating,” she says ominously.

Three weeks later, when I come to visit Dad, the tank is empty.

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. Find all the scenes in order, with the Overview and Full Chapter Index, over at All The Books I’m Writing. Want to support the work? Leave a comment or share with a friend.

A young nursing student, Kit shares my father’s taste for bawdy humor — they joke about farts and poop like ten-year-old boys as she scrubs him with a washcloth, brushes his teeth, washes his hair, and changes his diaper. Sometimes, she tells him about her boyfriend (slow to commit, kinda controlling) and her other job as an LPN in a busy hospital.

As she walks him back to bed, he gives her advice: “Take it slowly, give the guy a chance, don’t make too much of things, let it go.”

Before Kit leaves, she sets his breakfast and lunch on his little table — a cut-up peanut butter and jelly sandwich which Dad has confessed he eats “like a dog. I put my head down and pick up a piece of sandwich with my mouth. It’s easier than trying to grab it.”

Sometimes, Kit leaves a glass mug of soup with a thick straw — cooked by her mother, who’s touched by Dad’s situation.

I bring Dad soup, too. My grandmother’s - or my version of it. Hers was still the best chicken soup I’ve ever tasted — rich orange broth with carrots and celery, served with matzoh balls or egg noodles. My Aunt Elaine and my mother whispered about the secret ingredient for years. Was it dill? Parsnip? Celery root? Was she purchasing canned stock? my mother mused. They never quite got it (and my grandmother never shared it) but years later, I figured it out: parsley and a sweet potato, smashed up into the broth.

From my job at Woman’s World, reading letters from strangers, I’ve learned how much remembered flavors and family traditions matter. People tucked recipes and tips, handed down from generation to generation. That’s why, when I come to visit Dad, we work. Also, it keeps me from falling asleep - which has happened when I come racing in from the hour long drive, from the week of meeting deadlines, of remembering school recitals. Of getting the groceries in between.

He lies on the bed, remembering. I sit beside him in the wheelie chair he uses to navigate the room, writing things down.

“When I was born, people with CP were institutionalized, confined to bed or wheelchairs, put in braces or even kept hidden in back rooms, or even closets. Your grandmother pushed me to speak, to feed myself and to walk.”

As he speaks, I can see her. Soft brown eyes. A crown of wiry gray hair. But back then, at the time Dad’s remembering, she was the young determined mother of three school-age boys. A first-generation Jewish mother, running a business — a shade and awning shop on Bell Boulevard. “When I cried, when my hands wouldn’t do what they were supposed to, she pushed me. ‘Try again. You can do anything you put your mind to.’”

Almost everything I know about my father’s history, I have learned in these conversations — threads of memory that I gather into the little notebook I always carry now.

I have learned that when he was born, in 1927, doctors urged my grandparents to institutionalize him. “He may never walk, talk, read or write,” they warned. But his mother, Ada — my grandmother — pushed him to do more, to reach farther. He walked, all right. Later than the other boys but eventually. I have learned about his brothers, who never excluded him. He played sandlot baseball and ran track in high school.

“I was hospitalized several times for surgeries. Experimental procedures that the doctors thought would make my body work better.”

“What kind of procedures?”

“I don’t remember. Little things. And each time, before each procedure, I’d pray, ‘Make it go away. Make me normal.’”

“I remember going to bed at night and trying to talk to myself about my CP. By the time I wake up in the morning, I would tell myself, it will all be gone. The doctor would give my mother some new lotion to rub on me and I would think: Maybe this will make it go away.”

On graduation day, my father was presented with a gift — a huge World Atlas, a book of color maps as wide as the coffee table in our living room.

“I hated that award,” he told me. “What was it for, being special? I didn’t want to be special. I wanted to be normal.”

“Your father was the most inspiring man I’ve ever met,” I’ve been told all my life. But my father has taught me to question their inspiration. “What’s so special about me?” he says. “I’m just doing the best I can. If people want to be inspired by that, it’s their business, not mine.” Other times, he just says, “Don’t put that shit on me.”

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. Find all the scenes in order, with the full chapter index, here, over at my other Substack: All The Books I'm Writing. Want to support the work? Leave a comment or share with a friend.

I have my own key so I can let myself in when Nora’s at work. Just inside the front door, there’s a set of stairs to the main floor. Nora’s rumpled bed sits in the living room.

I greet the cats, who weave in and out of my ankles as I walk through the dining room to the kitchen and set my grocery bag on the counter.

I unpack the glass jar of chicken soup, still warm, that I made this morning; and the Haagen-Dazs Coffee Chip and Double Stuff Oreos that I picked up on the way over. I take out the three jumbo straws that I got at Panera when I ordered his Frozen Mochacino.

Nora keeps asking me to bring her more straws, which, she says, Dad needs to drink his meals. I fold the brown paper bag and stash it under the sink. Then, I go up to see Dad.

The plan is that I’ll come by twice a week and do the interviews. Each time I return I’ll bring the typed pages for his review. But we only do it twice before he tires of it.

“Turn off the tape,” he says, falling back against his pillows and closing his eyes.

Dad says, “After the closing, when the house is sold, if your mother gives me any money—and I am not going to ask her for any—I will give it to you so you can buy a house. I will give it to you and your sisters. I just want to make sure that some of the money ends up with you girls and right now, I’m not sure that it will.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

I don’t know what he means.

I dream that I’m driving with Dad in a little red car. As we weave through the winding streets of an old European city I describe, with great enthusiasm, the place I’m trying to find: its wide hallways, arching entrances, velvet drapes and tapestries.

Suddenly, a deer dashes across the road and I slam on the brakes. I leap from the car and chase it, leaving Dad behind.

“I don’t want to be a burden,” Dad says. The phone connection isn’t clear. His speech is slurred and hard to follow. “You have your life. Only come if you want to come.”

“I want to come.”

He laughs. “Okay,” he says. “Then come.”

At first, Dad only wants to talk about my mother and about how betrayed and abandoned he feels. “She aligned herself to Esther,” he says. “The same way she once aligned herself to me. There was always someone to save her, to take care of her... a whole string of people all of her life.” He sorts through his thoughts like poker chips. Stacks them into theories. “She has to do this,” he reasons. “She believes she can’t take care of herself. I understand.”

He doesn’t want to talk about nursing homes or health care aides or how he’s feeling.

“The world breaks people’s hearts,” he says one afternoon, lying on his bed, addressing his comments to the ceiling because he’s unable to turn his head in my direction.

“Maybe our hearts break because we think things should be different,” I say. “We think we should be special; we...”

“What do you mean special?” he frowns.

“You know. We think we won’t get old, won’t fall apart, won’t die.”

“I won’t,” Dad says, and I laugh. And he laughs.

On the little card table where he takes his meals, there’s a heavy glass beer stein with a straw, through which my father, who has trouble using his hands, can sip his coffee, light and sweet the way he likes it. My teacup sits on the opposite side of the table, releasing steam.

Dad talks, rests, drifts and, as often happens when I visit, I find myself drifting too — into rooms where we’ve lived, up and down paths we’ve walked, together and alone. I release my hurry-up world of magazine deadlines, of teenagers who have to be somewhere on time, and my heart begins to pace his, just as I used to pace my strides to his longer, faster ones.

In this memory, I’m sitting on Dad’s shoulders, arms wrapped around his warm neck, my cheek pressed into the wool of his tweed cap. The neighborhood is blanketed with snow. Dad holds my ankles.

In this one, I’m younger, not yet walking. I’m sliding a braided scatter rug across the polished wood floor into and then out of a slash of sunlight. I am fascinated by the dust motes, swirling like stars. I can smell the smoke from my mother’s cigarette and the turpentine-soaked rag she uses to clean the oil paint from her brushes. Suddenly, my father’s face looms before me, a bright balloon that I swat at, delighted. I fall back, laughing, and he catches my head in his hand.

—

“I lie in bed remembering,” he says. “The market at Delancey Street was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Right over the Williamsburg Bridge. There were pushcarts there, on both sides of the street. My mother would buy Kosher chicken, meat and all the goodies there — Halvah, cashew nuts, stuff like that.”

“Frankfurters,” he tells the ceiling. “The butcher she went to, you had to go down some steps... it was in a cellar. In the back, older women with aprons on were plucking the feathers... working very hard, talking Yiddish.”

“You want me to write some of this down, Dad. We can record your memories together.”

“You don’t have time,” he says.

“I do. I could tape record our conversations and type them up for your memory book.”

“That’s a lot of work,” he says. “You don’t want to do that.”

“I do.” I pull out my notebook.

“There were clotheslines,” he says.

For the next 30 minutes, I follow my father through the tenements of the Lower East Side. I see the laundry lines strung from one apartment to the next, through the alleys where, in short pants and suspenders, my father played sandlot baseball with his brothers. He tells me about the markets: “It was right after the war and New York City put up buildings forcing the pushcarts inside a big open market the size of an airplane hangar. Some of the pushcart guys wouldn’t go inside there. Maybe they didn’t want to pay rent.”

As he rests between thoughts, my father’s face twists, one cheek tightening, an eyebrow lifting; the upper lip rippling across his perfectly straight, white teeth like a wave. This rhythm of tics and grimaces, caused by a misfire in the wiring of my father’s brain, is as familiar to me as the steady in-out of my breath. Yet this is the first time in 49 years that I’ve been able to really see it — because this is the first time he is not, as I watch him, watching me.

—

“I think that’s how David got the idea to raise pigeons on our roof. He was interested in homing pigeons with a splash of blue, dark blue stripes that ran across their wings. There was a little courtyard where you could climb out the window and get out in the yard. David built stairs up to the roof and he built the pigeon coop. But those stairs were crazy. He was only a kid, 11 or 12. The stairs were just boards held up by nails. Not safe at all.”

“Later on, when we’d go to the Concord, David would buy a pigeon...”

“He bought the pigeon at the Concord Hotel?”

“No!” he snaps, annoyed when my questions interrupt his reverie. “He bought it back home somewhere. He brought it with us. We kept it — I forget how, it was like a day trip — so before we left, he’d release it before we got into the car. I think he kept it in a cage in the car. Then, just before we left for home, he’d release it and see if it would beat us home. It always did.”

He closes his eyes, sighs. He’s exhausted.

“We can talk more the next time I come, Dad. Is there anything you want me to do for you before I go?”

He is almost asleep when I leave, kissing his wrinkly brow.

A note for readers following along: this scene has been revised. The ending you may remember has found its true home a little further on in the story.

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. I’ll tell you more about it as we go along. For now, I’m getting it set up over on my second Substack, All The Books I’m Writing. It’s one of several books I am making there, one chapter at a time.

Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend.

To receive the chapters by email, subscribe (free) to the other Substack there.
To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber there.

In this scene, Dad has nowhere to go. Mom is selling the house. This is where he lands.

Last year, as my parents were separating and Dad was deciding where to go, I asked him to dream with me. “Imagine there was no limit, you could go anywhere, how would you live? Where would you live?”

“By the ocean,” he said. “Beer in the refrigerator, an endless poker game in the kitchen. I could play or not play—and the people would be funny and warm and,” he added, “they’d probably be Jewish. As it turns out, I like Jewish people.”

Mom was selling their home, they’d legally divorced, the papers were in her name. She’d told him that a) he needed to stop driving and b) it was time that he moved into a nursing home.

Dad was not ready for either of those options. I’d offered to take him in, though I couldn’t imagine where we’d put him in our crowded house. Neither could he.

“Ideally,” he said, “I’d live in an efficiency apartment with a live-in aide. Someone who’d cook and clean for me in exchange for free rent.”

The problem with this plan was that Dad could no longer shower himself, feed himself, and it was becoming clear that soon, he’d be unable to walk. He was struggling to stay on his feet, to continue driving.

“Maybe my father could live with us…” I say, thinking out loud.

“Where would we put him?”

“I don’t know. In the living room?”

“Amy…”

“We could get a hospital bed. It’s just for a little while.”

“Think it through,” Matthew says. He says it softly, gently. “Think it through.”

“I am. I’m trying.”

“It’s not temporary,” he says. “Just the opposite.”

“You’re right. I know.”

“He has to stay at your mother’s house,” Matt says. And that’s when I start laughing —and for a while, I can’t stop.

“He knows he can’t stay here,” Mom repeats. “Even if I wasn’t selling the house, he can’t take care of himself anymore. He can’t afford full-time live in care. And I don’t want you giving up your life to take care of him. I’m selling the house and I can’t take him with me. Your father needs a nursing home.”

“Never mind the whole thing,” Dad says, pulling into himself like a starfish that’s been poked with a stick.

“Dad. I am trying to make something work for you and for my family at the same time and it’s causing me a great deal of stress…”

“Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, really? Fine? You’ll be fine. How do you figure that’s going to happen? You have no money. You have no plans!”

“I’ll work it out,” he says. “It’s really none of your business.”

In my journal, I write, NONE OF MY BUSINESS. Carving the letters into the page so hard the paper tears.

That night, Dad calls. “Listen, Amy,” he says. “I don’t want to live with you. There’s only one bathroom and I’d have to sleep in the living room. That’s not the place for me—and no way for you to live. I’m going to move in with Nora.”

For some reason, I find this hilarious. Even my father, who has no options left at all, doesn’t want to live here.

Matthew and I rent a van and pack it full of Dad’s belongings: A single bed, one kitchen chair, a clock radio, and three plastic milk crates filled with books. We drive to New Jersey where Nora, a Registered Nurse who’s been Dad’s friend for 15 years, has offered to take him in.

“He’ll be comfortable here,” she says, helping us carry Dad’s things into her condo.

It’s a really nice place but, “There are so many stairs,” I say, as we face the fourth flight. “Has Dad ever been here?”

“He has,” Nora says. “He’ll be okay. I put these handles here to help him.” The “handles,” lengths of torn bed sheets, are looped around the rungs of the banister on the stairs. Nora demonstrates how they work. She grabs hold of a loop of fabric and leans all of her weight backwards, pulling. “See,” she grins. “Try it.”

“That’s okay,” I say. I feel awkward and embarrassed. This is ridiculous, it would take an able bodied person an hour to maneuver to the top of three flights this way. What is she thinking?

She continues climbing, grabbing the next loop and pulling herself, hand over hand, up the stairs. “It’s easy. Really. Try it. Your father will love it.

I do try it and I’m worn out before I reach the first landing.

Dad will have his own room and bathroom. In exchange for rent and a fee, Nora will do his laundry, prepare his meals and coordinate his daily parade of home health care workers.

“We’ll make him yogurt shakes with organic berries and protein powder,” Nora says. “We’ll rebuild his nutrition. He’s been living on Ensure and cookies. We don’t really understand Spinal Stenosis,” she says as we say goodbye in the parking lot. “Maybe it’s symbolic, maybe he was twisting away from all the...” she stops, editing herself. I know what she was going to say: All the trouble with my mother. Dad has told her things that I don’t think are quite true.

“Maybe we can even straighten him out a bit.” Her eyes are bright with hope; and maybe she will work some miracle—fill his veins with nutrition, even untwist his spine with TLC and conversation.

With her halo of wispy white hair—tinted with stripes of bright pink—Nora even looks like an angel. “I will keep him here and take care of him until the end of his life,” she promises, holding both of my hands like a prayer sandwich in between her own.

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The Project Overview and Chapter Index lives on my second Substack, All The Books I’m Writing.

To receive the chapters by email, subscribe (free) to the other Substack there.
To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber there.

We drive across the river to meet Jackie, who looks stunning—her hair upswept, her face framed by curled tendrils, her tiny body wrapped in a body-skimming white gown.

I stand with her father and a cluster of parents I’ve never met, eating potato chips and making small talk. The words slip out before I can stop them: “We had a fire.”

“When?” they ask.

“Two days ago.”

They cock their heads, looking at me as if to say, Why are you here?

Yet, besides this strange compulsion to blurt, I feel nothing—a great big nothing, an emptiness that starts at the center of my belly and glows out to my edges, eclipsing everything.

After a while, I leave Max with Jackie and drive home. As I pull into the driveway, a huge tractor-shovel is lifting a dead horse into the air.

Three Days After the Fire, I rise at dawn for the Family Music Festival. “Go pick up the ice,” Gail says. She’s the manager. I’m the assistant. She gives me the receipt, printed with the name and address of the ice place - Abbey Ice.

I follow printed directions from MapQuest—this is before Google Maps—and wind up facing a brick wall, lost in the tangle of back streets of Monsey. I find my way back to Route 59 and pull into a 7/11 parking lot, where I put my head on the steering wheel, wondering what to do.

Just then, a white panel truck pulls in beside me. Abbey Ice is painted on its side. I ask the driver if I can follow him to the warehouse.

This is the kind of thing that happens to me—all the time.

At Abbey Ice, a young man loads my car, but there’s a mistake in the order. He sends me inside to speak to the counterman, a burly, middle-aged man.

“We don’t sell 20-pound blocks of ice,” he snaps. “They come in 25-pound blocks.” Confused and embarrassed, I try to explain. I show him the pre-paid invoice, which clearly says 20-pound blocks. His impatience escalates. “Your order is complete!” he shouts. “Go pick it up!”

Out of all proportion to the situation, I burst into tears and run from the room, across the loading dock, and straight into the arms of the plant manager.

“What in the world?” he asks, astonished. Then, seeing my tears, he wraps his enormous arms around me and holds on.

My body takes over—quaking, shaking, releasing buried hurt. Face smeared with tears, I stammer, “I’m sorry! But how can I be expected to know you don’t sell 20-pound blocks of ice? I am not an ice person.”

“No,” he soothes, patting my back, “you are not an ice person.”

Four Days After the Fire, an ill-tempered man in a pickup truck starts patrolling the property. He bangs on the back door to bully Matthew about trash disposal rules.

“It’s like we are just tenants now,” Matthew says into the darkness of our bedroom.

“We were always tenants,” I say.

“But we were never treated that way. We were part of the family. Now . . . “

Five Days After the Fire, while I’m at work, the landlord’s daughter-in-law shows up.

“She as much as said, ‘You’re a piece of shit, and I’ll be glad when you’re gone,’” Matthew tells me.

“Why?”

“The back rent,” he says.

“What back rent?”

“You knew,” he snaps. But I didn’t know—and now I do.

Six Days After the Fire, the house begins falling apart.

“The toilet’s broken,” I say.

“I’ll fix it,” Matthew replies.

“The dishwasher won’t start.”

“Gimme a minute.”

“The storm window fell out of its frame.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he says.

“Matt, it’s a rental house. Let them hire someone.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he says.

The landlord’s daughter emails: “We need you to clear all your things out of the garage.” A dumpster arrives, and Matthew begins to fill it. Lawn furniture, scraps of wood, broken exercise machines—all of it goes. Among the detritus, he finds the model of our wedding chuppah.

“This is liberating,” he says. “I feel life pouring back into me.”

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. I’ll tell you more about it as we go along. For now, I’m getting it set up over on my second Substack, All The Books I’m Writing. It’s one of several books I am making there, one chapter at a time.

Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend.

To receive the chapters by email, subscribe (free) to the other Substack there.
To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber there.

I published this one on my other Substack: All the Books Im Writing

This is Chapter Two of The Wild Book — a book being written one chapter at a time, in the story way of things. It’s a book about learning to stay in your own color. About finding what you like, what you remember, what you are made of.
→ Find the Chapter Index and Overview here.

Iguana

It’s November 2017. I’ve driven to the Gulf Coast of Florida, parked my car and stepped onto a little white speedboat. I’ve been ferried out of a cove where pink flamingos lift and set down their feet. The water opens around us — crystal clear, and a sky so blue it’s almost purple. I am headed toward Little Gasparilla Island. I have no idea what it is. I have followed my teacher here.

The first thing I notice, once the speedboat has pulled away, is the silence. No cars. No trucks. My whole body exhales—I mean that my cells begin to release tension. My bones begin to release what they have been holding onto, for me, for years.

I hear the waves. The birds. A woman in shorts—beach-blond hair tucked under a baseball cap, her skin the red-gold leather of everyday sun—pulls up in a golf cart. She loads our luggage into the back and we three writers pile in to be ferried along sandy footpaths to the waterfront, where a house with a screened-in porch quietly waits.

There are no stores on Little Gasparilla and our supplies, I later learn, will be ferried to the island by the chef who’s been contracted to prepare all of our meals. I have no idea how this weekend will work because I don’t care. I am here for a different reason — because Joyce invited me, along with a hand-picked group of other writers, to participate in a special weekend workshop on memoir.

The workshop is led by Joyce Maynard. Best-selling author. Fierce, feeling truth-teller. Author of the controversial memoir of her time with JD Salinger, after her article “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” appeared in the New York Times. Later, when the Salinger affair was over and she was married with three small children, Joyce wrote the NYT column, Domestic Affairs, which is where I first encountered her, Sunday mornings over bagels and lox. Later still, after the column closed, Joyce launched a zine of the same name, continuing to tell her stories about parenting and marriage and life in a small New Hampshire town.

Her work made me think I might write about my life too, and when I was a young mother of toddlers, I sent her a brave letter. She wrote back — and she published my letter. My first byline — ever.

In those early years, Joyce and I exchanged many letters. I think we talked on the phone once — a few years later. When she called, asking about self-syndication, which I’d mentioned in a letter. By then, I had my own parenting column in Kids & Company, a local magazine and each month, after one of my stories was printed, I made copies and mailed them, in hand-addressed envelopes to all the parenting zines in the US. Somehow, I’d gotten a list.

Kids & Company was paying me $200. The other zines — $25 to $100 per publication. There were some essays that garnered me real money; on one of the more popular ones, I’d earned more than $600. All of this happened, I told Joyce, because she’d published that first piece in her zine.

Later still, when she started offering workshops, I saved up my nickels and finally attended one — on Star Island, off the coast of New Hampshire.

Now I’d followed her to the Gulf Coast of Florida. A little island with no cars or stores. A circle of women with writing to share.

Joyce stands beside a whiteboard, holding a dry erase pen, and turns to me.

“Amy, what do you like?”

The story continues over here with a realization about my own trauma story - which arrives with a memory of an iguana.

Learn more about The Wild Book here.
Learn about All the Books I’m Writing here.

I know the right answer here. Catherine has taught me that, from the perspective of Chinese medicine, “Everything has a front and a back.” Everything we do to the body—anything we swallow or rub into our skin—stimulates a response: an equal and opposite reaction. Life is beautifully, perfectly balanced.

“This is a blood deficiency,” Catherine says.

“I’ve always been anemic.”

“Well, yes, from a Western perspective, you’re anemic. From the Chinese, it’s about blood volume.”

“Blood volume?”

“Your liver is starving,” she says. “There’s not enough blood in your body.”

“I’m sorry? How can a person not have enough blood and still be walking around?”

She smiles. “We can build more—with leafy greens, Chinese herbs, and lots of water.”

She tells me I’m at the beginning of my Wisdom Phase—the end of the seventh seven-year cycle of my life. But I don’t feel wise. I feel desperate—a winged thing trapped between two panes of glass.

My children, almost grown, are scanning college catalogs at the kitchen table: study- abroad programs, summer institutes. My son considers sports medicine, international business, neuroscience. My daughter, two years younger but more certain, is interested in one thing only: film.

My friends are traveling. Japan. India. Even my parents are starting over—getting a divorce, selling the house.

“You’re kidding,” friends ask. “Why now?”

“Let’s open up some closets today,” Catherine says, placing needles along my body. One in the center of my chest, one in the valley between my fourth toe and little pinky, and the last at the midpoint between my pubic bone and belly button.

Afterwards, I scan my body as I walk to the car. Do I feel different? This treatment is supposed to open the “closets” where we stash un-metabolized trauma, the pain and energy we couldn’t process when we were too young, too vulnerable.

Is it working? Nothing happens. Nothing happens. And then, three days later, I burst into tears in a meeting at work. “I’m sorry,” I gasp, rushing from the room. Horrified. Mystified. What the fuck?! The tears come for no reason, with no pattern. At the grocery store. In a yoga class. At the dentist. Huge waves of raw emotion sweep through me, moving upward, pouring outward.

When the tears stop, the agitation begins. I argue with my husband. I am restless at my desk. It feels as if there is a new and completely separate body inside of my usual one, and it is made of bees. They are buzzing. Constantly. They are moving around.

Something is happening. I feel frightened but also, incredibly alive.

I take my daughter practice driving. She giggles as the car lurches forward on the dirt road behind our house, down a hill past the stable to where the woods meet Saddle River Road, and back up past the riding ring.

The horses watch as we pass, again and again. As we loop around, she starts to sing, belting out the theme from Wicked: “Something has changed within me; something is not the same…”

The car windows are open. It’s spring.

In the middle of the night, I wake suddenly. Red lights swirl across the ceiling of the bedroom. Matthew leaps out of bed, shouting. “Get up! Get up! Get up! The barn’s on fire!”

Bleary with sleep, I peer outside as a fire engine roars up the driveway. The digital clock glows in the dark: 2:17 a.m.

“Wake up! Get out of the house!” Matthew bangs up the stairs, rousing the children.

We move in darkness, stumbling to find shoes and pull sweatshirts over our pajamas. I can feel the heat through the walls as we reach the back door. Just 200 yards from our home, the barn is a wall of white, hot fire.

“Go back upstairs and take the things that matter to you,” I tell the children.

Katie freezes. “You mean, we might not come back?”

“I don’t know, honey. It’s a big fire. If it spreads to the house... I don’t know. Let’s just be sure we take what we couldn’t bear to lose.”

She runs upstairs. I grab my sisters’ artwork, a drawing from my mother, the necklace I made of pink pearls and my grandmother’s Swarovski crystals. I put on the earrings Max gave me last year—glittery, Indian chandeliers, the first gift he purchased with his own money. I slip my engagement ring back onto my finger and stuff two shopping bags with photos.

Katie returns with her laptop, her video camera, a stack of journals, and her stuffed dog. Max holds a framed photo of his girlfriend Jackie, his cell phone, and his track team sweatshirt.

We step, star-struck and dazzled, into a night on fire.

“Move the cars,” Matthew calls.

Firefighters, silhouetted against the bright backdrop, run back and forth, shouting over the hot white roar that shakes the ground as if a train is rushing through.

Neighbors cluster around our landlord. She’s staring at the fire, shivering, stiff as a sail in high wind. Matthew wraps his jacket around her shoulders.

Hoses snake across the lawn, spraying streams of water at the barn, the surrounding trees, the cottage closest to the blaze.

Helicopters circle the house. News vans pull to the curb across from the farm.

“This is your house?” my friend Hank appears beside me in the dark. Like a phantom hero, materializing out of the dark, dressed in his firefighter gear. The feeling of his hand on my arm reminds me this is real.

Three hours later, when the blaze is under control, Katie shows me the footage she’s taken on her video camera. In the recording, the fire is thirty feet high. In the real, glowing red embers smoke and steam.

The fire chief walks over. “Can we go in the house?” Matthew asks. The chief nods solemnly, clamping a hand on Matt’s shoulder.

We go inside and climb into bed, leaving the cars—packed with our most precious possessions—parked willy-nilly on the other side of the lawn.

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. I’ll tell you more about it as we go along. For now, I’m getting it set up over on my second Substack, All The Books I’m Writing. It’s one of several books I am making there, one chapter at a time.

Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend.

To receive the chapters by email, subscribe (free) to the other Substack there.
To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber there.

“I never heard a sound. I found him in the morning, just lying out there in the hallway on the floor. ‘How long have you been there?’ I asked him. ‘About an hour,’ he said. He was inching his way along, down the hallway. ‘Let me help you,’ I said. But you know how he is. He snapped at me, like he always does. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’”

This happened four years ago. But today, lying on my sticky mat in yoga class, I’m thinking about it.

“Simply open the heart,” my yoga teacher says. “Let your shoulders slide onto the floor. Let go.”

I lie on my sticky mat with my eyes closed.

“The awareness is so big,” she says and I send my consciousness searching for the seam, the edge, the cliff where the awareness ends and (this is what I’m having trouble with) something else begins.

“Simply open the heart,” my yoga teacher repeats and I start to cry. I lie on my sticky mat and let the tears slide out of the corners of my eyes and fill my ears.

How can my heart possibly open to this?

One morning, when I was sleeping in the twin bed in my sister’s old room with the door ajar, my father fell again. I heard him come into the hall. I opened my eyes. I watched as his right foot tangled up his left, tripping him. He pivoted in slow motion, his body spiraling leftward, downward. He landed almost gracefully, on his knees beside the laundry basket, the top of his head resting on a stack of my mother’s freshly folded towels.

By then, I was beside him.

“Don’t worry about it,” he shouted—almost deaf, he had trouble modulating the volume of his voice. “I can manage.”

“Let me help you, Dad.” I said it carefully, respectfully, trying not to push while, at the same time, insisting. There was a pause. I waited as he tried to get himself sorted out. Then, yielding to his situation, my father thrust an arm to the sky. I squatted beneath it and took his weight along the back of my shoulders. I pressed upward, thighs aching, back arguing against the added weight. As my knees straightened, I leveraged my father to his feet.

Then, “I’m fine,” he snapped, pushing me away. “Go back to bed.”

Stricken, as if slapped. I stood frozen in the cold dark hallway, watching my father lurch toward the bathroom.

That lurching gait had been mistaken, countless times, by unobservant strangers on sidewalks, as the stuttered pace of a man who’d had too much to drink. To the observant—or experienced— eye, it was clear that this was the distinctive step-hop-skip of a man with cerebral palsy.

We didn’t talk about my father’s disability much.

It’s funny how memory, once it gets going, skips ahead like hopscotch, picking up pebbles and shiny coins from the sidewalk.

In this one, my father is chasing my sister Beth around the house. At 8, she’s pure tomboy, out-scrambling him, skittering around the back of the sofa as he lunges for her. When he, never as sure-footed, finally gives up, she escapes, slamming to freedom through the kitchen door.

I’ve been cheering for Beth since the whole thing began. But now that it’s over, my insides twist. I’m glad he didn’t get her but I wish that he could have.

I wish he was normal.

In this one, my father is a few steps ahead of me on the sandy path to the snack bar—an overturned sailboat where my father will buy me a hot dog and a cold orange soda—at Surfside, our favorite Nantucket beach. I am 9-10-11-12. I don’t know.

Maybe I’ll ask for a frozen Snickers bar or Chocolate Fudge Cake! A Good Humor bar—vanilla ice cream with a candy bar inside.

As I’m considering my choices, two women dressed in bathing suits, sunglasses and the scent of gin walk past him and glance back, whispering, “That poor man.”

I stop cold.

“My father is not a poor man,” I shout. “He’s better than you are any day!” And of course, that’s a lie. I didn’t really shout that—though the memory is distorted by the fierce wish that I had. Instead, I stood there hurling impotent daggers of rage at the women’s backs as a single tear hit the sand with a hiss, a small wet pebble of confusion and rage.

“What’s wrong?” Dad asked when he saw me but I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him. Ever! He knelt in the sand. Eye-to-eye, he scanned my tear-streaked face for clues, my body for bleeding. “What happened?” he asked.

I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him. It would hurt him.

He held me for a little while. Then, he rose to his feet. “Okay,” he said, wiping sand from his hands and knees. Whatever it was seemed to be over—we could leave it there, beneath the overturned rowboat on the beach.

A few minutes later, I swallowed that secret with big salty gulps of hot dog, mustard and orange soda.

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. You can read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here.

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To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here.
To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber.