Cyclorama, p.11
Cyclorama, page 11
Franklin yelled over the tumult, “Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, this is Carrie; Carrie, these are my grandparents, my dad.” Franklin’s father raised his hand over his head and offered a greeting midway between a wave and a salute. His grandmother waved cheerfully. His grandfather glowered. “You get those prescriptions filled yet?” he asked.
“I’m getting them, I’m getting them, I only left fifteen seconds ago and I just said I was getting umbrellas.” Franklin grabbed two from the hallway coatrack, gave one to Carrie, and kept the other for himself. “Back in a flash!” he shouted, and Carrie followed him downstairs.
“We can take my car if you need to get the medicine quicker,” Carrie said.
“They have plenty,” said Franklin. “They just get anxious when they’re down to a couple days’ worth. Do you mind if we walk? It’s a Saturday, so I don’t like being in a car.”
“Are you Orthodox or something?” asked Carrie.
“No, but a lot of the neighbors are, and driving past them on Saturdays when they’re not supposed to drive feels disrespectful.” Big drops of rain were falling on the lawns, pooling in the potholes of the alley they were crossing. “I’m just sorry you’re here on such a dull, dreary day,” he said.
“That’s okay. So what’s the deal with the big, secretive location, anyway?”
Franklin squinted. “You mean the Chicago thing?”
“No, I get that, but I mean no name on the buzzer, no number on the apartment door.”
“Oh, yeah—a mixture of Old World and New World paranoia,” Franklin said. “My grand M, she’s afraid of Nazis; my grand P, he’s afraid of pogroms; and my dad, he’s an investigative reporter and he’s working on this story for the Trib about police brutality and he’s worried about payback from the cops. But it’s not like keeping the name off the buzzer is gonna help. The Nazis are too old to chase us, there are no more Cossacks, and the police, if they’re looking for my dad, they know how to find him.”
Along their way, Franklin greeted neighbors. A woman in a salmon-colored suit with white piping asked how his grandparents were and he said fine, thanks. “That’s the rebbetzen—you know, the rabbi’s wife,” he told Carrie. “She escaped Berlin with her family right after Kristallnacht and lived out the war in this tiny Jewish community in Shanghai.”
The boy Carrie had seen playing basketball in a driveway was still practicing layups in the rain. “What’s up, Frankie?” the kid called out.
“Not much, Reuben,” Franklin called back. “That’s Reuben Samuelson,” Franklin told Carrie. “He dropped out of Mather a couple years back and he’s running a snow shoveling and lawn mowing business with his dad. When it’s cold and there aren’t any sidewalks to shovel, all he does is shoot hoops, do a bong, then go back to sleep, but he’s a good guy.” At Devon Avenue, Franklin pointed out the bike shop where he worked. “One of the guys there, he’s a real interesting cat,” he said. “He was a paratrooper in the war, and when he came back he was so shell-shocked, he couldn’t get on a plane again. He couldn’t even ride in a car or a bus. That’s why he likes bikes so much.”
A tall, slim kid loped by carrying a plastic bag from General Camera. “How’s it goin’, Muley?” said Franklin.
“Pretty good, Frank,” the kid said.
“That’s Muley Wills,” said Franklin. “Good guy. He was on a show on NPR for a while.”
Carrie thought of her Wilmette neighbors—the Primers next door, the Mazers across the street, Mr. Sucherman at the corner. She didn’t know much about them save for their names and occupations: a psychologist and his wife; a pair of jewelry salespeople; a retired judge. Was she rude? Or pathologically incurious? Were their stories less interesting? Or was everyone on her block so busy getting in and out of cars that no one had time to learn anyone else’s stories? “How did you find all this out?” she asked Franklin.
“From my dad, in a way,” he said. “You know who he is? Ted Lichtenstein?”
“I think I’ve seen his name in the paper.”
“Yeah, well, what he says is, if you’re interested enough in what people have to say, eventually you get to know their story.”
They kept walking—past a kosher supermarket with faded newspaper advertisements in English, Russian, and Hebrew in its window; a photo studio with a display of framed family photographs, most of which looked like they had been taken in eastern Europe at the turn of the century; an Israeli restaurant; an Indian pizza place; a dingy little record store called It’s Here with life-size cardboard stand-up figures of Grace Slick and Peter Frampton.
“This place, it’s amazing,” Carrie said.
“I guess,” said Franklin. “But that’s the thing about places you see every day: pretty soon you don’t appreciate how amazing they are, and then it’s too late. It’s the same with people.” For a moment he looked far away.
“Do you mean someone specific?” asked Carrie.
“Oh, I guess I do.” They walked past a kosher bakery—shuttered until Sunday. “We’re having a nice conversation,” Franklin said. “I don’t want to be morbid.”
“That’s okay,” said Carrie. “I like morbid.” This wasn’t remotely true, and it sounded dumb, but Franklin didn’t seem to notice or care.
“Well”—he took a breath—“if you really wanna know, I was kinda thinking about my mom, which I only do about eight zillion times a day. Right after she died, I figured there’d be a day when I wouldn’t think about her all the time, but so far it hasn’t really worked out like that.”
“I’m sorry,” Carrie said. “How long ago did she—”
“About three years ago now.”
“I’m so sorry.” Carrie thought of her own life; the grandparents who were gone had died before she was born, and everyone else she was close to was still alive. The only person she knew who had died was a girl who had had a fatal asthma attack in the summer between first and second grade, but that had seemed so surreal that she had never really processed it as a death: the girl was there in June; come September, she was gone. It didn’t seem all that different than if she had moved out of town. Carrie took Franklin’s hand as they crossed Richmond Street. “I can’t imagine,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s pretty tough,” said Franklin. “I’m not over it. I’m sure I never will be. There’s something ironic about it, though, her dying the way she did. After all she went through: loses her family in the camps, comes to America by herself, gets married, loses her first husband—Korea. Then she settles down in Chicago with my dad, has a kid, starts going to school to become a nurse, and BAM! Car accident. It’s like her luck just ran out.”
“Oh my God,” Carrie said.
“Yep. Morning, she drops me off at school; three hours later, my dad’s pulling me out.” He forced a laugh. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You come over, we go to get medicine, and I tell you the uplifting story of how my mom died.”
“I wish I knew you then,” Carrie said. “I would’ve liked to help.”
“Better you didn’t,” he said. “I was pretty messed up. I smoked so much pot, it was like I was on a permanent high.”
“When you were twelve?”
“Yeah, I guess hearing you say that makes it sound kinda insane, but it seemed normal then. I don’t do it too much anymore, but it helped.”
“What changed?” asked Carrie.
“It’ll sound corny,” said Franklin.
“What?”
“A movie. I was with my grand Ps, and they were watching Here Comes Mr. Jordan. It’s like Heaven Can Wait or whatever, about these angels who come back to life in other people’s bodies. I’m not religious. Are you religious?”
“I mean a little, like Hebrew school and whatever, but not really.”
“I’d like to be, but religion never really made sense to me. When I saw my mom at the hospital, I figured that’s pretty much it. But then I thought, ‘What if it isn’t? What about the one in a billion chance that my mom’s up there watching? What if she sees me blowing off homework, smoking a bowl before and after school?’ So I decided I’d live my life as if she were really there, watching. That’s one of the lousy parts of having a dead parent they don’t tell you about: when they’re alive, you pretty much know when they’re watching you; when they’re dead, they’re with you all the time.”
“Well, if she’s watching us now, I hope she’s happy.” Carrie waved at the gray sky. “Hi, Mrs. Light.”
Franklin looked up at the sky too. “Yeah, hi, Ma,” he said.
They picked up the medicine from Rosen’s Pharmacy, along with a Robert Stone paperback that Franklin said he wanted to read and a copy of the Tomorrow, a free alternative weekly. Then, at the Russian delicatessen next door, Franklin bought a big jar of borscht and two small jars of herring with onions. Carrie laughed. “Are you joking?” she asked.
“No, why?”
“Herring and onions?”
“Yeah. My grand Ps, they sure do like their Old World foods. Whenever you ask them about where they came from, they don’t wanna talk about it; you have to keep bugging them before they tell you anything. But if you ask what food they want, it’s borscht or herring or kreplach soup all the frickin’ time. Why’s that funny?”
“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” said Carrie. “When Declan found out you were playing Peter and he wasn’t, he said he wanted me to eat herring and onions before our kissing scene.”
“Why would he want you to do that?” Franklin asked.
“Oh, just because—” Carrie didn’t finish the sentence. “Never mind. Maybe it isn’t funny. Declan just gets weird sometimes. I’m sorry I brought him up.”
By the time they got back to the apartment, the rain had let up. Franklin’s grandparents were on the couch in the living room watching the news, and his dad was still on the phone.
They occupied the time before dinner in the building’s basement laundry room, then up in Franklin’s room, where Carrie watched Franklin fold his father’s and grandparents’ clothes. His room was small, cluttered; every surface—desk, dresser, night table—was full of books and papers.
“I’ve never seen anyone our age with so many books,” Carrie said.
“I bet you have just as many,” said Franklin.
“Yeah, true,” Carrie said. “But no one else I know.”
On the desk there was a typewriter, an old, pale green IBM Selectric the shade of government file drawers; beside it, haphazard stacks of onionskin typing paper, one with STORIES scrawled in black marker across the top page; the others were marked POEMS and DOODLES and ROUGHAGE. Carrie made as if to pick up a page, then stopped. “Sorry, I’m nosy,” she said.
“It’s okay,” said Franklin. “You can look. It might not be any good, but I’m not private about it.”
She took a sheet from the STORIES stack; it was one long block of text, a sentence that seemed to go on forever. “You have something against punctuation?” she asked.
“That’s when I was getting high way too much and I was going through my Beat phase,” said Franklin. “I was reading Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg—you know, those cats—and I thought, if I wanted to be like them, I should write like them. It was kind of a habit, writing like the people I was reading. One time I was reading Ordinary People and I wrote this story kind of like it. My dad read it and made me see a shrink because he thought I was suicidal.”
“Were you?”
“No, just sad.” Franklin piled underwear in a mustard-colored laundry hamper.
“So,” said Carrie, “that’s what you want to do? Write like your dad?”
“Yeah. But also not like him. My dad, you know, he’s rooted: one place, one job. I respect the hell out of that, but I couldn’t live that way. I want to be a foreign correspondent, something like that. I want to write novels that take place wherever I’m living. Maybe someday I’ll settle down, but there are so many different places to live, different lives you can try out. That’s one thing I learned from my mom: nothing’s permanent. If you can accept that—and that’s a pretty fricking hard thing to do—you start seeing the world isn’t as small as you think. It’s like Anne Frank: you think about those people who could never leave their annex, then you realize how free you really are, and you can’t take that for granted.”
Maybe she was tired, maybe she felt relieved that she wasn’t with Declan, maybe she felt Mrs. Light looking down at her. Or maybe she was thinking too hard about the life Franklin was describing—the freedom of it, the adventure—and wondering whether she could ever live that way. Whatever the reason, tears filled her eyes; they skidded down her cheeks and she shuddered. Franklin put his arm around her and she cried into his shirt. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t even know why I’m crying.”
“That’s how it always works,” Franklin said, sighing. “I tell people my story, and they start to cry.”
Franklin wiped Carrie’s tears with something soft, but when she saw what it was, she laughed. “You’re wiping my tears with a sock?”
Franklin laughed too. “That’s all I have.” He walked to his bookshelf and took down a paperback: The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino. “This one’s my favorite lately,” he said. “Whenever I get sad, even thinking about it makes me happy. You can borrow it if you want, and when you’re done, you can bring it back and tell me what you think.”
“What’s it about?” asked Carrie.
“A boy who climbs up into the trees and never comes down.”
When Franklin and Carrie got back to the living room, Franklin’s dad was off the phone and had gone into his bedroom to write. Carrie could hear clacking on a typewriter behind the closed door. Franklin’s grandparents were sitting on the plastic-covered couch. A sketch of John Demjanjuk sitting in a courtroom was on TV. Yes, he had lied about who he was so he could come to America, but he had never been a Nazi prison guard; they had confused him with someone else, he said.
“Grand M,” Franklin asked his grandmother. “Do you recognize that man in the drawing? Could you identify him? They say he was at the camp where you were.”
Franklin’s grandmother squinted, then shrugged. “They were all dogs, every one of them,” she said. “Who could tell them apart? Who knows whether he was or wasn’t? That was years ago, and everybody looks old now; how can I recognize him when I barely recognize myself in the mirror? Go on, Frankeleh, change the channel. Maybe there’s a movie or a comedy program we can watch.”
*
On Saturday nights Franklin’s family ate takeout, so he and Carrie went to pick up dinner. The sun was down and the Orthodox neighbors were all getting into their cars, and Franklin said it would be okay to drive. “Where’re we going?” Carrie asked once they were in the car.
“Yen Ching, for Chinese,” said Franklin.
“I thought you said they only liked Old World food,” said Carrie.
“For Jews, Chinese counts as Old World food.”
In the restaurant, the food wasn’t ready yet, so they waited on the lobby’s red vinyl couch, eating mints from the big glass bowl by the register. “I think I figured it out,” Carrie said.
“What?”
“Why I was crying.”
“Why?”
“It’s that I miss this so much.”
“Miss what?”
“Having a friend. I used to be best friends with Amanda when we were little; now we barely talk to each other, and when we do, we don’t have anything to say. Declan—we’ve been boyfriend and girlfriend so long, pretending like we’re adults, it’s like I forgot what having a friend even means.”
“Oh, that’s cool,” Franklin said. He seemed like he wanted to say something else, but he just let out a deep breath.
“That came out wrong,” said Carrie. “I mean it’s just nice to have someone you can be yourself around, who lets you be who you are, and you don’t have to worry they’ll tell you you’re doing it wrong.”
Their eyes met.
“Takeout order for Light,” the woman at the register called out. “Two orders spring roll, two orders vegetable dumplings, one crab Rangoon, one hot-and-spicy bean curd, one garlic chicken, one Mongolian beef, two hot-and-sour soups, three egg drop soups.”
During dinner, Carrie hoped she might learn more about Franklin’s grandparents’ histories or about the article Franklin’s dad was working on, but those topics didn’t come up. Isidore and Beileh said they’d be going out of town for the summer but didn’t know where: in winter, they went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, but you couldn’t go in summer because temperatures got up to 110 degrees, and why pay to shvitz when you could do it at home for free? Meanwhile, Ted Lichtenstein kept getting up from the table, walking to the drawn blinds, peeping out, then rubbing his head with his palm before he returned to the table, only to get up again a minute later.
“What’s out the window?” Carrie asked.
Franklin laughed. “My dad always thinks someone’s casing our place,” he said.
Ted Lichtenstein looked ticked off. “That’s because cops do case our place,” he said. “You don’t think it’s true? You don’t think cops want to intimidate me after what I’ve written? That’s exactly how CPD operates: they’re the goddamn Gestapo, no different. They want you to know they’re always watching.”
“Okay, dad,” Franklin said, but Mr. Lichtenstein kept going: “When my tires got slashed, but everyone else’s were fine, you think that was just random?” he asked. “Do you really think your mom died because of faulty brakes when I had just had them checked?”
“Dad!” Franklin looked demonstratively over to Carrie, then back.
Mr. Lichtenstein took a breath, let it out. He sat back down. He spooned some sweet-and-sour and mustard sauces onto his plate, swirled them together with a chunk of spring roll, and took a bite. “I’m sorry,” he told Carrie. “I’m not some kind of conspiracy nut. It’s just the more you look into the way things work in this country, the more you realize some conspiracies are real. Everyone’s for sale; everyone’s cutting some deal.” He went back to the blinds and looked out. “Jesus,” he said. “I should just go down, knock on the guy’s window, ask him up for coffee.”
