“You should read her college essay,” said my mother. “She’ll never let me look at it. I’m worried she might try to do something creative. She’ll end up at some awful state school.”
“I’ve had some very bright graduate students who went to state schools,” my father replied calmly. “And if she just wants to major in English or something like that, it doesn’t really matter where she goes.”
In the end I did show my college essay to my mother. I didn’t tell her that Anton Kirschler, the artist I wrote about, was a character of my own invention. I wrote that his work was instructive for how to maintain “a humanistic approach to art facing the rise of technology.” I described various made-up pieces: Dog Urinating on Computer, Stock Market Hamburger Lunch. I wrote that his work spoke to me personally because I was interested in how “art created the future.” It was a mediocre essay. My mother seemed unperturbed by it, which shocked me, and handed it back with the suggestion that I look up a few words in the thesaurus because I’d repeated them too often. I didn’t take her advice. I applied to Columbia early decision and got in.
On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk.
“Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?”
I shook my head.
“It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding.
“Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me.
“Orgasm,” my mother whispered.
“Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said.
“That warm fuzzy feeling.”
“It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.”
“For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.”
“Men don’t attach as easily. They’re more rational,” my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, “We just want you to be careful.”
“He means use a rubber.”
“And take these.”
My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills.
“Gross,” was all I could say.
“And your father has cancer,” my mother said.
I said nothing.
“Prostate isn’t like breast,” my father said, turning away. “They do surgery, and you move on.”
“The man always dies first,” my mother whispered.
My dad’s chair screeched on the floor as he pushed himself away from the table.
“I was only teasing,” my mom said, batting the smoke of her own cigarette away from her face.
“About the cancer?”
“No.”
That was the end of the conversation.
Later, while I packed up to move into the dorm, my mother came and stood in the doorway of my bedroom, holding her cigarette out behind her in the hall as if it would make any difference. The whole house always smelled like stale smoke. “You know I don’t like it when you cry,” she said.
“I wasn’t crying,” I said.
“And I hope you’re not packing any shorts. Nobody wears shorts in Manhattan. And they’ll shoot you in the street if you go around in those disgusting tennis shoes. You’ll look ridiculous. Your father isn’t paying this much for you to go look ridiculous in New York City.”
I wanted her to think that I was crying over my father’s cancer, but that wasn’t quite it. “Well, Goddamnit, if you insist on getting weepy,” my mother said, turning to leave. “You know, when you were a baby, I crushed Valium into your bottle? You had colic and cried for hours and hours, inconsolable and for no good reason. And change your shirt. I can see the sweat under your arms. I’m going to bed.”
A realty company managed my parents’ property after they were dead. The house got rented out to a history professor and his family. I never had to meet them. The company handled the maintenance and gardening and made any repairs necessary. When something broke or wore out, they sent me a letter with a photo and an estimate. When I got lonely or bored or nostalgic, I’d go through the photos and try to disgust myself with the banality of the place—a cracked step, a leak in the basement, a peeling ceiling, a broken cabinet. And I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived. They weren’t my friends. They didn’t comfort me or give me good advice. They weren’t people I wanted to talk to. They barely even knew me. They were too busy to want to imagine my life in Manhattan. My father was busy dying—within a year of his diagnosis, the cancer had spread to his pancreas, then his stomach—and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer.