Page 36 of Past Present Future

“I should probably study for finals,” I say, and I think we both know it’s a terrible excuse.

Except when he leaves and I’m alone in the empty dorm room, I can’t help wondering if it’s too late to tell him that I changed my mind.

Thanksgiving morning I spend with Lawrence Kohlberg and his stages of moral development, which my textbook explains with an example called the Heinz dilemma.

In this story, Heinz is a middle-aged man with a wife on her deathbed. The only drug that can save her costs two thousand dollars, but it only costs twenty dollars to make. Heinz tries his best to collect enough money but can only pull together one thousand dollars—which the drug seller refuses to take.

There are three options to solve the dilemma:

Heinz doesn’t steal the drug because stealing is illegal.

Heinz steals the drug, but he should be punished by the law.

Heinz steals the drug, and he shouldn’t be punished by the law.

The third option is the most developed set of morals, the realization that right and wrong aren’t rigid concepts. Heinz’s wife’s life is more important than the money is to the store and more important than whatever consequences await him for breaking the law.

While all of it is intriguing, it’s not a particularly easy read. Because of course I can’t help seeing parallels to my dad, although no matter how many times I read through the dilemma, I don’t find any rationalization for what he did. There is no explanation for his drastic mood swings when I was little, how sometimes he couldn’t get out of bed and I’d secretly be glad, because once he did, he’d find too many things to be angry at.

“Dad’s just really tired today,” my mom would say, and I assumed all adults were like this. That their grown-up jobs and lives were so stressful that sometimes they needed to sleep half the day to make up for it.

I still cannot fathom that kind of violence from someone I share half my genes with. It’s something that used to terrify me most late at night, when trees threw shadows on the walls of my bedroom and I grew desperate for answers where there weren’t any. So I remade my identity at school, turned myself into the stoic overachiever. I couldn’t let it define me, didn’t want anyone to assume what kind of person it made me. As though his crime was some kind of reflection on my own morals, which of course it wasn’t—but my younger self couldn’t have known that yet.

There is no universe in which he would have sought therapy or medication. He was a man who believed in sharp boundaries between genders, and “talking about feelings” was something he often scoffed at for being too feminine. None of my interests matched any of his—not the dance classes my mom had me take to help with my coordination after I started wearing glasses, not my books, not academics. He couldn’t even fake that he cared about them, the way I imagine most parents do when they proudly display their kids’ finger-painting art on their fridge. For Lyle McNair, there was only you’re still doing that girly stuff? and fucking look me in the eye when I’m speaking to you, and a hundred other things too painful to repeat. Things that even now make me squeeze my eyes shut against the memories.

But I can’t stop myself from flicking through the DSM, attempting to diagnose him.

A futile task. The therapist I saw for a few years talked about the dangers of that, how it wouldn’t do me any good to try to rationalize my father’s behavior. I know there is nothing in this book that could excuse or explain what he did—what landed him in jail, but also how he treated us growing up. No son of mine when he caught me rehearsing for dance class or picked apart the secondhand books on my shelf. And his tempers, so unpredictable that my mom would try to get my sister and me out of the house when he started to raise his voice. He never lifted a fist to any of us, or at least, not that I know of.

But he didn’t have to break skin to break our hearts.

I close my textbook, wondering how it’s possible to be trapped between a desire for understanding and the simple wish for all of it to go away.

* * *

On Friday I sleep in much too late, which I never do, after an evening of dining hall turkey and stuffing and a phone call from my mom at my grandparents’ place in Bend, Oregon. I’m groggy all through the afternoon, which I fill with more reading.

After a few sluggish hours, my gaze drifts from my linguistics book toward the window. Fuck it. There has to be something going on out there better than this. It’s a Friday night in New York, after all.

It’s… Shabbat.

Of course. I’d wanted to get involved with the Jewish community at NYU, but I’ve been so preoccupied that it hasn’t been top of mind. There’s even a flyer on the bulletin board on my floor, one I pass at least three times a day.

NYU REFORM SHABBAT AND FREE DINNER! it says, bold letters on bright yellow paper. JOIN US AT HILLEL! DID WE MENTION IT’S FREE? They certainly know how to catch the attention of broke college kids.

New York has many more Jews than Seattle, and I feel both a sense of belonging and otherness when I pass Hasidim on the street, men with shtreimel hats and long black coats and sidelocks called pe’ot. We are similar, but we are different in that similarity. My family hasn’t regularly observed Shabbat since Natalie and I were younger, but the Roths do it every week, and I’d often join them during the summer. Of all the things I’ve loved doing with Rowan, that one is near the top of the list.

The Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life is only five minutes away, and yet I find myself speed-walking.

“Shabbat shalom,” says the girl at the entrance with a warm smile.

“Shabbat shalom,” I return, my heart lifting in my chest as I grab a kippah. I already feel like however Jewish I am, whatever my level of observance, it will be welcomed here.

The sanctuary is small, four rows of chairs with slim prayer books on the seats. When I was younger, I used to go to synagogue with my mom all the time, though we’ve gone less frequently over the past few years. There was always a test to study for or an extra shift for my mom to pick up that felt more important. My dad isn’t Jewish and never had any interest in religion, but it was one thing he never judged us for. A small freedom.

Ridiculous, too, to view it as a freedom—something he allowed us to do without getting angry about it later.

There I go, thinking about him again.

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