Once Upon a Time — My Truth

Could it be a regression or an unnatural journey?

In my writing about family members and their misgivings as I perceived them growing in the shadow of their anger, I chronicle history and its shaming effects they impose. Yet, I write about my family with a sense of trepidation, an act of laying bare their shortcomings as I saw them through younger eyes. But I can tell you this: I know my family’s anger and violence intimately.

And this is the story

On this one Saturday morning, I sat in front of our house. Overhead in the enormous sky, birds fluttered their wings and twitted. Insects, attracted by my moist skin, flew against me with a loud buzz and a cutting force. The hot sun was beginning to climb above the palm trees that lined either side of the narrow road that led to our house, and the air grew warm. These tall date palms had trunks surrounded from the ground upward in a spiral pattern. Their tops held more than a thousand dates that matured from yellow to reddish-brown.

My uncle

Suddenly, his lean and wiry body appeared in my view, striding down the road toward our house. He wore baggy pants and shoes encrusted with dry sand. A sheen of sweat lay upon his face and wisps of his curly hair pasted to his forehead. My uncle had eyebrows knitted into one unbroken line, under which settled small dark eyes that looked at me with a mixture of gloom and disapproval. I felt judged and impaled by his cold and demeaning stares. I was frightened of this man. Almost every summer, he’d come to our house when school let out for the summer and demand that I spend the summer at his home.

“Ima!” I called out.

My mother swung open the front door of the house, surveyed the approaching figure. “Oy, gevalt!” she groaned. Standing with her hands on her hips, her red hair ablaze, she appeared to be controlling herself with enormous difficulty. Striding angrily from the door she advanced toward her cousin. Brandishing fingers at each other, they exchanged heated words in Yiddish. My uncle kicked a rock. The sound bounced off a tree trunk and reverberated through the charged air. He took three long strides and stopped in front of my mother, who seemed to shrink.

“Avrum!” My mother called in the direction of the house, but my father, who was usually either physically or mentally unavailable, was of little help.

Syllables complete with curses that made the air boil

In a bout of single-minded dedication to nurturing their irritations, the cousins continued with their noisy exchange, their faces sullen with anger. There was a grim seriousness about them, a humorless stiffness — an inflexible version of an Eastern European survivor’s rigidity. But my uncle was relentless, demanding in gasps of authority and imposing his patriarchal façade, which was his most poisonous legacy.

I listened to their words, unable to fully grasp their meaning. Their fiery behavior had a foreboding quality that washed over me like a stormy wind — an immensity of something momentous, something unresolved. They were acting as though the future would continue to be the same, a lasting hurt, adversity, a deficiency that existed between them. They personified the connection that binds people to their past and the bonds of memory from which they could never free themselves.

At some point, my mother, summoning up the last reserve of dignity, altered the course of her delirious flow. She shrugged and expelled a long-exasperated breath, as though she had just made an enormous personal concession. Why did she acquiescence? I don’t have an answer for that. But I don’t have answers to a lot of things.

With my hand lodged inside my uncle’s, we moved under the shadows cast by the trees. I walked alongside him in the thick air, my eyes upon the ground, trying to think only of each next step my feet must take.

This went on every year until I was old enough to realize that I no longer had to absorb humiliation as if it was my due, and I did my best to avoid him. I never much liked this uncle. Blessed with a cheerless smile and a boastful manner, he had an insatiable desire to show off and dominate a room. His torrent of discourse included mimicry of those who were in his presence. An angry, impatient, sarcastic man who radiated darkness, he used sarcasm as a way of avoiding meaningful conversation.

For once, I’d wished my mother would win one of those fights and let me stay home. While both were equally unpleasant to be around, I was inclined to feel miserable in my own home with its familiar sadness. Such was the tenuous grasp on sanity that I had become a student of the arts of wishing, which fueled my determination to become the thing my parents could never be.