In June, I called Mimi for her birthday. In a delighted voice, she told me that Mom had tied balloons to the mailbox that said, “Happy Birthday, Mimi.” She sounded like a child instead of an adult turning twenty-seven. My heart constricted with pity. I didn’t know how to respond.
Two months later, when Keith and I returned to our apartment after weeks away, we heard the phone ringing as we unlocked the front door and switched on the light. I recognized my mother’s voice being recorded on the answering machine. She hardly ever telephoned, and although I was jet-lagged, I picked up the receiver.
She hadn’t called to welcome us home. She’d lost track of when we were returning. She wanted to talk about Jordan. In a voice trembling with emotion, she said that Jordan was no longer in New York. He’d moved to California without telling her or Dad. Once there, he called them to say he was transferring to Santa Cruz. He berated them at the same time that he demanded money from them. He said he hated them, and they had ruined his life.
Mom was crying. “I’m so badly hurt I can’t express it. I loved Jordan, my only son, lousy as he is. I thought I had suffered enough from rejection, but I guess life wasn’t through dealing me these blows.”
In the ensuing silence, I hesitated. Did Mom want me to reassure her that Jordan loved her after all? Did she want me to condemn his ingratitude to make her feel better? To get it wrong risked her anger.
“Did you hear what I said?” Mom demanded. “Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, I’m listening,” I said. Suddenly, I felt the weight of my exhaustion. “It’s only that we just got in, and we’re tired from our trip.”
“My heart’s breaking. It really was a special relationship, and I miss it more than I can say. But it’s gone now and can never come back. That’s what I called to tell you. But I’ll call you back when you’re not too tired to listen.” With these last seven words, Mom’s voice dripped with sarcasm.
I felt my happiness from having been away evaporating. It was always like that. I would return from vacation in a good mood, and Mom would instantly destroy it. She wanted a sounding board, and when I didn’t echo her, she directed her anger and disappointment at me.
Jordan’s transfer to Santa Cruz didn’t pan out. He was back at Columbia that fall, but he was still planning to leave. He called me in December to tell me his application to Berkeley had been accepted. I invited him to lunch at the Mill Luncheonette. He ordered a mug of plain hot water.
“I don’t know when I’ll see you again,” I said.
He left without saying goodbye.
After the new year, I was in the post office when I caught the eye of Dale Earnest. He motioned me over and told me a story about my brother. He said that in December, he invited Jordan for dinner. He had planned to take him out for a drink first, but Jordan didn’t drink, so they went to his apartment. Dale lived in a high-rise apartment, and Jordan admired the view. Dale’s wife had prepared a Southern dinner for them before leaving for her night shift, and Jordan ate two helpings of black-eyed peas and rice but refused the meat. Dale told me that he co-signed the lease agreement for Jordan on the rental car he drove across the country. He even gave Jordan his American Express credit card number. I was too surprised to ask him if he regretted it. Dale said that when Jordan left the apartment that night, and he walked him to the elevator, Jordan told Dale that he never could have survived New York if not for him.
“This is going to sound strange,” I said to my husband that night, “but I feel a little hurt that Jordan didn’t come to us. I find him unpleasant to deal with, and I don’t trust him when it comes to money, but all the same, we’re his family.”
Jordan’s second California sojourn was equally short-lived. Before the end of the month, he was back in New York, but he had given up his place at Columbia. We took him in and let him sleep on our foldout couch. He was an inconsiderate guest. He didn’t clean up after himself. He left dirty dishes in the sink. Our living room soon smelled like his dorm room, of unwashed laundry.
“There are coin-operated washers and dryers in the basement,” I reminded him.
He was supposed to be working things out with Columbia and finding a place to live. Mom and Dad called my apartment and wanted to speak to him. When I didn’t know where he was, they yelled at me. The situation was also taking its toll on Keith.
When Jordan spoke about our family, I thought his mind was unhinged. The way he talked, he was a superhero and possessed powers over the rest of our family. He seemed to think he was subtle and cunning. I thought he was deluded. After two weeks, I only wanted him to leave.
He said he had decided to go back to California, and that he was leaving on a 6:00 PM flight that Saturday, which was Valentine’s Day. Keith and I were gone from the apartment all day, and when we came back that night, Jordan’s stuff was still there. We assumed he changed his mind about leaving.
I stuffed his clothes in a laundry bag and piled his books and papers into shopping bags. I took everything down to the basement. If Jordan returned, he could collect his stuff there.
A week passed without word from Jordan. I called home and spoke to Dad. He and Mom hadn’t heard from Jordan either. Dad sounded defeated. I told him we would try to find Jordan. Jordan had talked about going to a residence hotel on West 110 Street. I telephoned, but they had no record of him. I thought of Dale Earnest, but when I went by the post office to ask him about Jordan, he said he didn’t know that Jordan was in New York. Keith inquired at the Columbia Registrar’s office but came up empty. We were at a dead end.
A family friend found Jordan in Berkeley, California. Jordan had gone to his old address to pick up the belongings he’d left there. He’d been in California nine days without calling anyone. I told the super to dispose of his things I had stored in the basement.
I remembered a story my maternal grandmother told me when I was in college, and I was interviewing her for a “life study” psych paper I was writing. She, too, had a troubled younger brother, our great-uncle Ephraim. When Mom and her brother were growing up, Grandma helped Uncle Ephraim leave home in Louisville and move to Birmingham. She got him a job as a bookkeeper for her friend’s scrap metal business, and he lived with her and Grandpa and their two children. One day Grandpa said to her, “It’s your brother or me. If he doesn’t leave, I will.”
“I didn’t think it would come to that,” said Grandma, “but when it did, I chose my husband. Ephraim had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized. But I guess he’s all right now.”
Uncle Ephraim lived by himself in a studio apartment and ate all his meals at Bogue’s, the local restaurant. He never went outside without wearing dark glasses to protect his weak eyes. Every Sunday he came over to our house for a visit. He made a ceremony of giving us each a stick of Dentyne chewing gum. Then Mom would sit with him in the living room. They usually talked about their physical ailments. After a while, Uncle Ephraim would leave. Whether he was really all right was anyone’s guess, but he lived on his own and self-supporting.
Jordan was difficult and ungrateful. He had disrupted our lives. Keith was in a demanding graduate program, in classes all day and in the studio until late at night. On the weekends he worked as the sous-chef in a restaurant. I was worn out by my teaching commutes, the cold winter weather, and the constant breakdowns of the New York City subways. On the days I taught in Brooklyn, I would wait for that moment when the N train surfaced on the Manhattan Bridge and gaze out the smudged, dirty windows at the view of New York harbor. Sometimes it would be raining, and streaks of rain would slide across the window before we headed back underground. At other times a yellow radiance would break through the clouds and light up the surface of the water.
The brief interlude where the train emerged from darkness to the view of the harbor, before it descended into darkness again, held a perilous beauty for me, yet I experienced it as pain, a constriction in my chest. I yearned for a different life from the one I was leading. So much seemed impossible to me then. I longed for a loving relationship with my family. I longed to be seen for who I was. I longed for my family to leave me alone. Attached as I was to my expectations, I set myself up for failure.
* * *
After our parents’ deaths, I volunteered to go through their personal papers while Mimi and Lois, as executors, were preoccupied with legal and financial matters. On the shelves of Dad’s darkroom, I found two large boxes of letters from us that our parents had saved, as I was retrieving other boxes of negatives, prints, and color slides to be sorted, organized, and scanned.
As Mimi and Lois went through financial files in Dad’s office, I wiped away the dust on the dining room table and spread out the letters. Most were from Lois or me. There were quite a few from Stacy, too, but not many from Mimi. That surprised me. Given her closeness to Mom and Dad, I thought she would have written them more often when she was in college and graduate school in California, before she moved back in with them. But if she had, the letters weren’t in the boxes. I found half a dozen letters from Jordan, too, from when he was at Columbia or Berkeley. Each was essentially the same: a list of his expenditures and a demand for money. There was no salutation, no words of affection, or even of gratitude, only an accounting.
I organized the letters into piles. Our handwriting is as different as we are, I thought: mine slanting and even; Mimi’s neat and upright; Stacy’s big, round, and childish; Lois’s so square it looks like printing; and Jordan’s tiny and frustratingly hard to read. I intended to give Mimi and Lois their letters right away and save Stacy’s with the rest of the items she was coming to collect. After I showed Jordan’s letters to Mimi and Lois, I planned to discard them.
In the hot May afternoon, with only the hum of the air conditioner disturbing the quiet of the dining room, I reread some of my letters to my parents. In one written in college, I described having dinner with my father’s favorite law professor. Dad had urged me to attend the dinner and introduce myself. I had, and Dad had written to tell me the professor had contacted him afterwards. “I don’t know how Professor Freed could say I have a legal mind,” I replied to my father. “I hardly said a word at dinner. He did all the talking.”
Whenever he wanted me to do something, Dad put pressure on me. He pressured me to become a lawyer. While I often did what he wanted to win his approval, I resisted his wish that I attend law school.
As I sat at the table contemplating my decades-old letters, I remembered the effort it had taken me to be newsy and entertaining and adopt a cheerful, upbeat tone with my parents. It seemed I was always assuming a pose. In order to justify my decision not to attend law school, I felt I had to prove that I was not just a “good” writer, but that I had the ability to write something “great.”
Rereading the grandiose claims I had made about my writing to my parents, I felt a searing shame. How wrong I’d been! I’d never written anything “great.” Instead, I’d experienced years of rejection. Many people would consider me a failure.
A great sadness descended over me like a burden. I had hoped to earn my parents’ affection and regard by my accomplishments, just as in the past I had earned their praise for my academic successes. But in the quiet of my parents’ dining room after their deaths, I understood, as clearly as I could see the dust motes that speckled the air, that none of that ever mattered. They were never going to give me their love, kindness, or approval, not as long as I sought to be independent from them. I brought needless suffering on myself by trying too hard and aiming too high.
Mimi and Lois were gathering bags of documents to take to Dad’s accountant to be shredded, but there was nothing in my letters that could benefit anyone. I did not want to add them to the archive of my papers. I threw them away with the recycling.
* * *
On a cold February day, four years after Jordan abandoned his belongings in our apartment, I took the subway to Family Court in lower Manhattan. A Columbia law student accompanied me as a volunteer. She was not allowed to represent me legally or even to escort me into the courtroom. Her purpose was to offer moral support. Tall and blond with blue eyes, Ingrid towered over me, radiating good health and wholesomeness. We chatted on the way downtown. She was from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She told me that when she was growing up, she traveled on horseback to high school in fine weather. In tribute to her background, she was wearing red leather hand-tooled cowboy boots with her lawyer’s gray suit. They added a Western flair to her appearance and looked elegant on her long legs.
I did not know what to expect from Family Court, not from the court itself, which was not housed in the grand courthouse on Federal Plaza, but in a hulking modern building on Lafayette Street. Along with my purse, I carried a tote bag holding a tape recorder and a tape. Recorded on the tape were Jordan’s threatening voice mails. I intended to play the tape for the judge as evidence of Jordan’s harassment.
That was my first miscalculation. Ingrid and I had to pass through a metal detector to enter Family Court, and my tape and my tape recorder were confiscated. I would not be allowed to take them into the courtroom to offer them as evidence, although I could collect them on my way out.
But I’d also made transcripts of the threatening messages. With notarized affidavits from Keith and Lois, they would have to do.
We went upstairs to a crowded waiting room with scuffed floors and battered plastic chairs. Small children were playing on the dirty floor or running around making a racket. Their mothers slumped in chairs, looking tired and harassed.
The room was too hot. The air smelled of sweat and anxiety. I waited in line for a clerk who filled out an official document called a Family Offense Petition based on information I gave her, with me as Petitioner and Jordan as Respondent. She wrote slowly, by hand, identifying the Respondent as my brother: “Petitioner says Respondent has engaged in a pattern of harassment against her and has made repeated threats against her.” I signed and dated the petition and handed it back to her. She gave me another slip of paper with a docket number scrawled on it and told me to sit and wait for my name and number to be called.
Ingrid and I found two chairs next to each other and sat with our coats on our laps. I was nervous. Speaking in public is not my forte. Ingrid gave me pointers on how to approach the judge. “Answer her clearly and respectfully, and look her in the eye,” she advised.
We waited for what seemed a long time. Every now and then, a clerk would come into the room holding a sheet of paper and call out a number and a name. “It’s 1987, and yet everything is still hand-written,” I marveled. “You’d think at least they’d have a couple of typewriters, if not a word processor.”
It was also Ingrid’s first time in Family Court. When my name was called, she stood up, too. “I’ll be waiting for you,” she promised.
An officer opened the swinging door into the courtroom for me. The room was wider than it was long. Straight ahead of me, seated behind the bench, was Judge Miriam Zimmerman. In late middle age, with iron-gray hair and steel-rimmed glasses, she looked like someone I might meet at a function in the suburbs. I began to walk towards her.
“Don’t approach the bench,” she barked at me. “Stand back while I read your petition.”
I waited. It didn’t take long. “Your complaint is about your brother?” She sounded disbelieving and annoyed.
I nodded. I could tell she was thinking, What is this upper middle-class white woman doing in my courtroom complaining about her brother? My time is too valuable for this. My courtroom is for people in real trouble.
“Please,” I said. “My brother has been harassing me. He came back to New York this past fall and started calling me, abusing me verbally, and threatening me. Before that, I hadn’t seen him for three-and-a-half years, since he left New York without telling me.”
“I don’t have time for a long story,” interrupted the judge with a frown. “What did he do?”
This was not going well. I felt desperate. “He’s been leaving threatening messages on my answering machine. I believe he’s staying in my neighborhood. I’m afraid he’s going to hurt me. I’m no match for him physically. He’s a lot bigger than I am.”
“But what does that constitute?”
“I have transcripts of his messages. Will you read them?”
I could see her hesitating. “All right. But just one. You may approach the bench.”
I had printed each of the transcribed messages on a separate sheet of paper. There were five of them, paper-clipped together. Four were short, and one was longer and worse than the others. I took them out of the brown manila envelope, and on an impulse, I handed her all of them with the two affidavits.
I watched her again as she read, her eyes flickering left and right. I saw her eyebrows rise in surprise, like a circumflex accent. They stayed that way as she turned the page, and then she turned the next page. She read all the pages and looked down at me from her lofty bench.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll give you what you want. I’m granting you the Temporary Order of Protection as of today. After you leave my courtroom, you must wait in the designated area for your copies of the Order and a copy of the Petition to be served on the respondent. You understand that the Order must be served on the respondent for it to be in effect. If you wish, the court will furnish you with a list of process servers that you may engage at your own expense. You will have to return to court in the future to extend the Order. Now you may go.”
I wasn’t sure of Jordan’s address, but I had an idea, and I turned out to be right. Jordan was renting a room in an apartment on Riverside Drive only a few blocks north of us. The process server told me that Jordan opened the door for him, but when he attempted to hand Jordan the papers, Jordan refused to accept them, stepped back, and tried to shut the door in the server’s face. However, the server managed to leave the papers over the threshold of the door. That was sufficient for the Order to be in effect. Now I had the affidavit that the Order had been served. I was still afraid, but my fear abated.
Photo by Ximena Nahmias on Unsplash
