Walking home in the afternoon, getting waved across Dorset by a crossing guard with a bright orange belt, he’d say, “You’re a hell of a sport, listening to this rinky-dink stuff all day. You’re going to put in some work, and people one day are going to be bragging you were their teacher.”
Mom was less sure. Whenever Dad called me a musician, she looked down and starting paying angry attention to whatever she was doing. We sent little signals of hate and stubbornness to each other whenever she walked past me watching TV, or napping on the couch, or doing anything that wasn’t pretending to plan on going back to college. Before she went up to bed to read each night, she’d put a hand on my shoulder, tired from all the quiet fighting, and almost say something but then not.
My leaving school was only the latest thing to disappoint her, the easiest thing to put a name to. She’s always been dreamy, private, a little fed up with everyone she knows. She’ll sometimes let bits of complaints slip—“How long has your father lived here and he still doesn’t know where the can opener goes?” “If Uncle Walter doesn’t want to be alone, then he should do something about it”—but they just feel like spoonfuls from a bath. She doesn’t belong on the East Coast, she’s not interested in the women in Chevy Chase, she feels cheated that she’s fifty and all she’s done is raise children (and furious when she senses someone thinking that all she’s done is raise children). She has dark tea bags under her eyes, and for three, four hours a day she’ll sit in her blue chair and read the Post, looking disappointed. When she’s reading about politics she talks to the paper—“Unexpected by you, maybe,” “Oh, ho, ho, you are an idiot”—but if you ask her what she means she doesn’t answer. She clips her favorite “Doonesbury”s and uses them as bookmarks.
When she was twenty-one she took a bus from San Francisco to D.C. for a protest. She got arrested and put in the Redskins stadium for the night with thousands of other people, and sitting next to her on the field were four loudmouthed friends with beards and sweaters. They were in a jazz band, they told her, and the shortest, shyest one—the one who laughed like he had to think about it, who offered her his coat when she started to fall asleep—was Dad. She stayed in their house after they got out, and Dad convinced her to come on tour for a couple of months. She’d been looking for a reason not to go home.
She spent almost a year driving with them to clubs in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Delaware, even a few in Miami, only sleeping in the D.C. house a couple of nights a week. “I felt like an outlaw,” she says now, “sitting around smoky bars at three in the morning. It was divine.” But when the bassist quit to get married, Mom decided to go to nursing school. She loved doctors’ offices, loved medicine, loved the idea of spending her days so busy and helpful and serious. But at the end of her first year she got pregnant with David, and that summer, after explaining to everyone she knew how women went through nursing school pregnant all the time, she dropped out. (She still has her medical books in a box downstairs, though, all of them heavy and covered in furry dust. When I was in fifth grade I used to sneak down to read the part in Human Biology on orgasms—“… a series of involuntary muscular contractions followed by …”—and I’d go back up feeling as if I’d been downstairs with a prostitute.)
Dad had been managing a sheet music store in Georgetown while she was in school, and a few years after she dropped out he got a job teaching music to seventh graders in Gaithersburg. At night, instead of practicing, he’d stay up working on his lesson plans. “Those who can, do,” he likes to say. “I don’t kid myself about it.” Sometimes he actually sounds sad when he says it, but usually he sounds like he’s just trying to be modest, and hoping you’ll realize he’s just trying to be modest. Mom says—and you can see Dad wince whenever she says it—that she knew he’d teach for the rest of his life the minute he came home from his first day in the classroom. “You certainly don’t do it as a get-rich-quick scheme,” he says, but the truth is he doesn’t need a get-rich-quick scheme. When he and Mom were in their thirties, just before I was born, they inherited a lot of money from Dad’s parents. Mom, still good with a thermometer, still quick with cool washcloths, never got back to work.
In the pictures from when she was in her twenties she’s smiling, sitting on a porch I don’t recognize holding a cigarette, or standing in front of a mirror with Dad’s sax around her neck, looking like a girl who might make me nervous. Her hair was still all brown then and her skin didn’t hang and she liked to wear long, silvery earrings. Sometimes she sang with Dad’s band. When I was little, before she was sad or maybe just before I realized she was sad, she used to sit on the edge of the rocking chair next to my bed and lean over me, singing in her whisperiest voice.
But now her happiest moments, or at least the ones she cared most about, came on Sunday nights when David would call from New York. She’d be ready with questions about a new show at the Whitney, or a new Spanish restaurant in Soho. “Will you get the phone?” she’d say, not moving. “Will you please get the phone? Someone get … that … phone! God damn it.” On the damn she’d clap her hands and stand up. Once she’d convinced herself that at least one Elinsky had lived well that week, she’d hand me the phone, still hot from her ear. After a minute he’d say, “I’m beat, man, I’ve got to get to bed. I got up at five this morning, and then tonight we went twelve innings. Completely fucking brain-dead ump. My guys were getting reamed out there.”
My brother, a resident in dermatology, lived with his girlfriend, Lucy, in her parents’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her parents weren’t there, though—they lived in a house with a fountain in Connecticut and only came to the city for birthdays and operas. Lucy has a doughy face that gets flushed after half a glass of wine or a few minutes without air-conditioning, and a long, pale body she likes to show off. She’s a painter, but I don’t think she’s ever sold a painting to anyone who isn’t related to her or a close friend. Her parents put together a show for her in their house once—David sent us the catalog—and the paintings all had names like Never/Always and Music for Trilobites. Never/Always is about September 11, David says, and it’s just a long red line on an all-blue canvas. When David first started dating her he really was doing all the things Mom wished he was—on weekends he took cooking classes and went for walks through the Met—and he bought two of Lucy’s paintings to hang above his bed. When my parents talked about her, before David moved into her apartment, Dad just called her “the artist.” He said it teasingly, pretending not to have learned her name, and so Mom, for reasons having as much to do with Dad as with Lucy, started saying it respectfully, the way you’d say “the judge” or “the senator.”
She and David came home this year for a weekend at the beginning of June, and that’s when David invited me to come to New York. Lucy brought gifts for both of my parents and me—they were just cubes of wood, a little bigger than sugar cubes, each side painted a different color. When Dad unwrapped his cube he tilted his head back to look through the reading half of his lenses and said, “Wow,” each time he turned it. She’d forgotten that Walter lived with us, so she rushed out to the car and came back with a blank cube, and while we talked on the front porch she sat there painting it with her “travel set,” as careful as a Christmas elf.
OK, I’ve never liked her. And not just because she’s pretty enough to make my mouth dry or because David gets to have sex with her every night, but those things certainly don’t help. I try not to think very much about how many girlfriends I’ve had, but: one. Two if you count Lisa Gabardine. David’s life didn’t used to be like this—sharing slices of cake after dinner, picking out necklaces for Valentine’s Day, going to bed-and-breakfasts in Pennsylvania with hot tubs on the porch. On Friday nights when he was in high school he’d take me to the movies and we’d have to sit in the back of the theater so nobody in his grade would see him. He hid a stack of greasy Penthouses underneath his rock collection. At night he closed his door and made radio shows on his stereo—I’d hear him through the wall trying to sound booming. He met Lucy at a gallery opening just after he moved to New York, and she was only his second serious girlfriend. She’d turned him into the kind of guy who owns shoes for every occasion. When he’s eating she’ll lean over