The Pieces, pt. 1

I. Renovation

My father used to be slightly overweight. It was just a few pounds, and as a child, I never noticed. He had also thrown his back out a couple of times, and the combination made him nervous; he was only forty-five and I think he felt as though he was losing control of his body. He hired a personal trainer to come every other morning. My father, with the trainer’s guidance and motivation, would run laps around my block, do crunches and pushups in the living room, and do pull-ups on an apparatus installed in a doorframe that looked straight out of an infomercial. When my father started with the trainer, he could barely do five pushups. A year later, he could easily knock out twenty-five. Anyone who knows my father is familiar with his strong sense of determination. Being as I was in the throes of teenage insecurity, particularly in regards to my body, I especially admired him.
I don’t think my father knows this story: I was fifteen, and this morning, as with many mornings, I was running late for school. My father had just finished his workout and seemed to be under the impression that I had left, but I was in my room looking for a clean pair of socks. I overheard him talking to his trainer. His words formed at a slow, thoughtful pace that suggested he had thought about this often and was, after much reflection, ready to impart his wisdom. “I didn’t think I would be a good father. I was terrified.” I don’t think he would have said something like that if he had known I was listening; he wouldn’t have wanted me to know that sometimes, he felt like he couldn’t give my brother and me all that he felt we deserved. I, on the other hand, have never known him to do anything else.

My mother went into New York Hospital on June 17th, 1992, for a checkup. New York Hospital was on 72nd Street and York Avenue at the time; the building I was born in has since been torn down and rebuilt. I have always known I was born at New York Hospital; this was unique because all the other kids in my class at school were born at Mount Sinai Hospital. My parents often made jokes about this. We were the outliers.
When my mother went in for the checkup, it was three days past my due date. The doctor told her I had an irregular heartbeat and I had to be born right away. They gave her an IV with hormones to induce labor. My father arrived as quickly as he could, but they had already started with the hormones. He was furious. My father was once a victim of serious head trauma and woke up in the hospital having had surgery performed on him unknowingly. Even though he understands it was necessary, he has been very anxious about surgery ever since. His protectiveness over my mother (and all of my family) only amplified his anxiety, and he expressed this through anger.
My father has always had a temper. There have been mornings (although not for a few years now) when he has punched holes in closet doors before I even leave for school. Mornings like these would make me upset, of course, and even angry that he couldn’t control himself. What upset me the most, though, was that I couldn’t help him with whatever was angering him or with controlling his temper. Often, I would never know what brought on his anger those mornings, and I learned creep out of the house, nervous to do anything to further aggravate him. Although my father’s temper is always present, on a hair-trigger when he is stressed, it usually is not so extreme. His temper is sharp, eloquent, and articulate in character, designed to get things done. It scares me but it is a comfort, too, knowing what someone would have to go through if they hurt my mother, my brother or me. I learned from him how to use my words and my emotions to protect those around me.
Ultimately, the hormones didn’t help my mother, and I was a c-section. My father wasn’t allowed in the prep room, and this, as both my parents told me, infuriated him all over again. I imagine him pacing in the waiting room, his face red and eyebrows knit like I’ve seen him so many times. “I’m still angry about it to this day,” he told me recently. This doesn’t surprise me. The pain of my father’s loved ones is his pain too, but magnified. He takes it as a personal offense.
My father remembers holding my mother as the doctors removed me from her womb; the hormones made her shake violently, and he held her in part to comfort her and in part to restrain her. He remembers feeling the doctors tugging on me. “As soon as I saw you, all the anger and anxiety melted away.” I can imagine his physical reaction: the muscles in his face and shoulders relaxing, finally, at the sight of little, pink, wrinkled, baby me. “You were perfect. C-section babies are beautiful. Their heads don’t get all squished.”

My parents would sing to me in the nursery in the hospital. My mother would sing me Joni Mitchell. My dad would sing me James Taylor’s “Mockingbird” as he rocked me in his arms, which my mother remembers better than what she herself would sing to me. When I asked them about it over the phone, they both sang me snippets of the song. I might rise above, I might go below, ride with the tide and go with the flow…
The music my parents played for me was an integral part of my childhood. My father used to put Frank Zappa or the Beatles (my favorite was “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”) on the record player and dance with me around the living room, and when my toddler legs couldn’t keep up with him, he would lift me up and swing me around. He would put on Paul Simon’s Graceland when we took car trips; when in high school I started listening to the album of my own accord, I discovered I already knew all the words. When I was an infant, my parents made a tape of all the songs they would sing to me. Joni Mitchell was there, the Weavers were there, James Taylor was there…They called it “Sleepy but Not Sleeping” and they played it for me when my eyes were fluttering. I haven’t found the tape yet, but I know it exists still. I want to listen to it, to listen to the first music I ever knew well, to listen to the songs that meant the most to my parents when I was small.

I am the only member of my nuclear family with red hair, and this is always point of interest at large gatherings of my extended family and their friends. These gatherings are a popular activity in my family, turning every birthday, Jewish holiday, or big anniversary into a huge affair. There is one story of my birth in particular that I have known for as long as I can remember. My father loves to tell it, and those gatherings are the perfect place for him to do so over and over again. I was born with red fuzz on top of my head. My dad got on the phone with my Nana, my maternal grandmother, and cried, “She has hair!” Nana was my first visitor. She showed up with barrettes. “Not that much hair,” my father laughed. I’m not sure why my father loves this story so much, but I think it’s because it represents for him the first time he saw me, the first time he was proud of me.

About three days before I was born, my parents moved up the block: 4 East 89th Street to 40 East 89th Street. “What possessed us to move right then, I don’t know,” remembers my dad. “But we felt we had to move right away.” This doesn’t surprise me. When it comes to the happiness and wellbeing of our family, my father and I share an exaggerated sense of urgency.
The new apartment was barely ready by the time I came home. For the few days that my mom was in the hospital post-partum, my dad was running back and forth between being at her side and installing doorknobs and molding. My dad is the landlord of the building we live in, and he likes to do things himself. He has served as the contractor for each of the three major renovations on our home he has undertaken over my lifetime. In part, he does this because the renovations are very satisfying for him; I think he wishes he had been an architect instead of a real estate manager. In part, he does this because he doesn’t trust anyone else enough.
Luckily, the end of the renovation chaos coincided perfectly with my arrival home. Unluckily, my first week home from the hospital was the week the city decided to tear up the section of Madison Avenue on which my building was situated. They did this at night. I’m not sure why they thought this was a good idea. My father didn’t understand either. He stood in front of the machinery, yelling for them to stop. I imagine it must have looked something like the photograph of the protester in Tiananmen Square. The machines had orders and wouldn’t cease their construction (or destruction), so my father spent the night walking up and down the seventh floor corridor with me in his arms because in the corridor, there were no windows for the noise to come through.

For the first six weeks of my life, I was not a happy baby. I cried constantly, was perpetually ill, and wouldn’t nurse. My parents hadn’t yet realized that I couldn’t digest dairy or wheat, and the presence of these things in my mother’s diet made me very sick.
“Hell, man, that was a rough six weeks.” My father and I speak with a very similar vernacular. “Mom was terrified,” he told me. “You were always crying, Mom was always crying…so I decided to plant a garden.” At the time, my parents were renting a cottage in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. My father, I imagine as a stress outlet, took one weekend and drove up there, rented a power tiller, and tore up the ground in front of the house. I don’t know what he planted, nor do I remember the garden; in fact, I didn’t know this story until I asked my parents about my birth. I wasn’t surprised, though. My father and I both relieve stress by doing things: he gardens, woodworks, or in extreme cases takes on those large-scale renovation projects. I cook, embroider, or write. I think that production helps remind us both how much we are capable of when we are feeling out of control.

When I decided to call my father to talk to him about my birth, I expected my father to have a very specific physiological reaction. My father is a crier. I anticipated him choking back tears for the sake of vocal clarity, his nose turning red like mine does. (The shape of my nose is equal parts my father and my mother, but everyone says I look exactly like my father.) Usually when he cries with me, he is proud of me or I am in distress. I come from an empathetic family, but my father’s connection to my emotions is more than empathy. My father cries because he recognizes the pain I am experiencing, recognizes its origins and its characteristics, understands the anxiety and frustration I experience because it is the same as his own. He cries because he can’t fix it for me. But he cries out of pride, also, and his pride for me goes beyond my accomplishments, academic, personal or otherwise. He told me once, long ago, “I think you’re the best thing I’ve ever done.” My father takes on a lot of projects, so I know that this is a pretty big compliment.