English.
Mama’s exotic looks and jalapeño personality seemed to fit with a savory mixture of languages. She was full figured, had red hair, and sleepy blue eyes set deep in a face with a peaches-and-cream complexion. I’m sorry to say that her face would soon be marred by wrinkles of worry and crow’s-feet from too many sleepless nights.
The first inkling that things weren’t right with me came early one morning right after I turned seven. By then we were living in Sunset Heights.
“Look, Papa, look!” Ben roared as he and I raced down the hall and barged into the bathroom where my father was shaving.
“Where’s the fire?” Papa asked, his face full of shaving lather as he set his straight razor on the sink. Hearing Ben’s excitement, Mama came quickly from the kitchen, where she had been cooking breakfast, and gazed at the scene unfolding in our tiny bathroom.
“Look!” Ben demanded. We were positioned back to back with the somber countenance of rivals about to duel. It was plain to see that I stood two inches taller than my ten-year-old brother, Ben. “This isn’t fair. I’m supposed to be bigger.”
Mama and Papa didn’t seem happy. I remember that when Ben had gone through growth spurts they celebrated. They even recorded a history of those passages with a grease pencil on the bathroom wall. But this time things were different. My growth would never be a source of pride and delight. As I remember it, Mama and Papa looked worried. I took it all in.
I would soon also outgrow my mother. Within a year, I would outgrow my father as well. My parents didn’t scare easily. Papa had survived as a Jew in the Russian Army, faced down Boxers during the rebellion in China, and immigrated to the United States with twelve cents to his name. He’d worked in Rocky Mountain boomtowns like Leadville and Silverton, selling to silver miners out of a pack on his back. Mama was his equal. When my father left for America, she had to fend for herself in Poland, raising Ben on her own for two years until they had amassed enough savings to immigrate. In the face of crisis, my parents remained dignified and resourceful. But what they were up against with me was different.
It was right after they realized I was taller than my big brother that the incident with the shoes took place. Even though I was only about seven and a half at the time, I recall everything vividly. It was Sunday, at sunset. Shadows slowly draped the untamed cholla and tumbleweeds in my family’s backyard. Those shadows made their way through our borderland window above the apron-front farm sink and slowly robbed our little kitchen of light. That’s when Papa raised his voice. It seemed to me, hunkered in a kitchen chair, as I watched him pace back and forth like an interrogator, that he didn’t speak but roared.
“Are you sure those shoes don’t fit?” Papa stopped and peered down at me. He was strong but seldom stern. He had gentle blue eyes and the kind of good looks that turned heads. His first job in the United States was as an artist’s model. Papa had ridden in the Russian Cavalry and his presence on horseback was so striking that he stood out in the crowd. He had huge forearms and gentle hands with dexterous fingers, which suited him for his work as a watchmaker. His demeanor was formal but our family mostly knew him to be warm and loving. So I was startled when the thunder of his question bounced off the ceiling and walls and rattled the black cast-iron frying pan and the purple ceramic pot that hung next to the doorway. It’s funny how a parent’s anger can come back in an instant with a photo’s clarity.
For what seemed like an eternity, the only sound in that kitchen came from the tick-tocks of the handmade gingerbread clock on the mantle above the stone fireplace in the next room. Sitting there in the center of the kitchen, at the family’s secondhand tiger’s oak table, I avoided his eyes.
I remember squirming on the chair and picking at my patched, gray knee pants. They were held in place by cut-down black suspenders that originally held up my father’s, then my brother’s, trousers. The blue hue of my short-sleeved shirt had all but disappeared. My clothes were threadbare, but clean and well-pressed. The only part of my wardrobe that weren’t hand-me-down were my shoes, because my feet were bigger than my big brother, Ben’s.
“I can’t believe it. That’s not possible—your mother just bought them,” Papa bellowed.
The tone, rather than the words, wounded me. It was not a superficial injury, the type that came from tripping on one of the clumps of red caliche that dotted our unpaved street or from being thumped by an itinerant elbow from Ben. I’d heard my father speak harshly to others, but never to me; he didn’t have to.
I was an aware, sensitive boy, a good son, and a helper. I was the type of kid who would think before reacting, almost always measuring my responses; a young dam that cautiously released water to irrigate, not destroy, the valley below. I automatically tuned into what I thought others expected. That would become a real problem for me. I knew my parents had high hopes for their sons. Throughout my life, I’ve never wanted to disappoint them. Though I was only a child, like the desert tortoises in the nearby Franklin Mountains, I understood how to blend in. As a child of immigrants, that innate ability—one I would soon lose—served the family well. I was gentle, like my father; all the more reason to be upset by his uncharacteristic display of what I read as hostility. I never got into trouble. When Ricky Feuille invited neighborhood boys to play with matches and smoke Camel cigarettes behind the Bernat’s house, I was the only one to refuse. Whenever mischief beckoned, I imagined the look of sadness in my mother’s eyes. Throughout my life, I’ve felt that, at times, my conscience has hog-tied and handcuffed me. As a child, it was as if I had a premonition that foretold the anguish I would soon cause my parents. Looking back after all these years, I see that that uncanny ability to see the future robbed me of my boyhood.
Be still, I remember ordering myself, as I waited for what my father would do next. Trying my best to be a good boy, I sat on my hands. I pressed my palms into the wooden breakfast room chair so hard that I almost levitated.
“Look at me when I talk you!”
I remember my father’s voice like it was yesterday. I looked up at him, but only for an instant. I couldn’t bear to see him angry. I never could. I noticed that he was only using English. Languages have a special way of communicating feeling. English is good at icebox coldness. A pleaser by nature, I was devastated that my father was displeased. Invisibly, I trembled.
“Let me see them,” Papa ordered. I reached down and picked up the shoes from their place by my stockinged feet and presented them to him. That was the third new pair of shoes I had gotten in the past six weeks. Generally, my mother was the parent in charge of shoes. When my shoes got too tight, I went to her. Papa took hold of those shoes, examined them for some anomaly, and muttered to himself. He resumed pacing.
I wondered why my father, a man whom I respected and adored, a man who worked from sunrise to late at night six days a week in our little family store, would not only be interested, but mad about my shoes.
Does he think I’m not telling the truth? I remember asking myself. Truth was important to the Erlichs. And it has always been important to me. I recalled the day my father lectured and spanked my big brother after he lied about a case of eggs purchased especially for Passover that had gone missing. Ben had appropriated them as a secret weapon to heave at the neighbor boys in a dirt-clod fight.
“In German, Erlich means honest,” he’d said. Although I was an innocent bystander, he’d lectured both of us. When Papa enunciated the word “honest,” I had thought of our name as a badge of honor. I visualized my family as Apache Indians in the Sonoran Desert, brandishing our war shields, announcing to everyone who we were and what we stood for.
“When you don’t tell the truth you bring shame not only on you but on your family,” my father warned. Looking back, I can say I feared shame more than I feared my father’s belt, which on occasion I’d seen him use on Ben.
Though it was wintertime and not at all warm in that unheated kitchen, I began to sweat. “Papa, my shoes don’t fit anymore,” I insisted. “I’m not lying to you. I swear.”
“I know, I know,” my father said, in a quieter but still stern voice. Papa stopped pacing and kneeled in