Maybe He Swings from the Chandeliers (Two Doors and a Window Part 2)

“Two Doors and a Window” is a series of essays that I wrote in 2020.

Besides, she left me other things. I may not have gotten to know Meryl as an adult, past most if not all parental obligations. But my mother is with me every day. My sister, her three daughters, and I are stamped from Meryl’s mold, visibly recognizable as relatives to anyone who knows any of us. And what I have long called “The Kalem Charm Offensive,” that thing that the Clifton StrengthsFinder tool calls “WOO” or “Winning Others Over” and that my brother and sister and I have in spades, for better or for worse — that came from Meryl. She is with me in the mirror, she is with me as I navigate other humans.

The chasm between who I am at 48 and who she was at that age — divorced, remarried, a small business owner, mother of one teenager and two kids in their twenties — may not be easily bridged. We never talked about adult things. For example, I can count the things she said to me about sex on three fingers: When,  in response to my asking to get on The Pill at age 19, she took me for my first trip to the gynecologist (her gynecologist, Dr. Davoli, a little old man with hair coming out of his nose), and she told me in the waiting room that, when she divorced my father, her own mother thought her hymen grew back. On the way home from that medical visit, she told me to always pee after sex. And the third thing was simply one of her many aphorisms: “Maybe he swings from the chandeliers,” meaning, who knows what happens between two people? (I always assumed that the he in question was swinging from the light fixtures by his penis, which is why I classify this as sex talk.)

I managed to figure the sex thing out, through trial and error (and Jacqueline Susann and cable TV). And she left me those charms that helped me succeed in relations both romantic and not.

I honestly think that, aside from blood and water, charms and stories are all that I’m made of. I haven’t written about my mother’s death in the 19 years since, not really, despite the fact that I was a weekly journalist and a blogger at the time. Despite the fact that writing is the best way for me to investigate and process my experience. But Meryl gave me charms and Harv gave me stories, so Harv is easy to tell stories about.

Meryl at my Bat Mitzvah, Harv before my brother's law school graduation some ten years later.

For example, I can tell you this one: My adult relationship with my dad began to be built the night we smoked weed together.

Harvey and Meryl met in the Physical Education department of Long Island University in the mid-1950s. He was there thanks to the G.I. Bill, having served in the Air Force. She would briefly teach swimming between college and the birth of her first child, my sister. Harv briefly played minor league baseball before becoming an elementary school gym teacher one school district over form mine. He had also been a head counselor at a day camp and taught driver’s ed, briefly owned a Donut King, and was in an “athletic” club as a kid on the mean streets of Brooklyn that was probably some sort of gang. So yeah, my dad was pretty basic butch.

But shortly after he retired, he started exploring other parts of his personality: Reading classic literature and modern mysteries, playing golf, and rekindling relationships. One of those relationships was with a high school buddy, Sam, who had gone on to become a visual artist, supposedly of some renown. Sam took my dad to hangouts in the Village and, I’d come to find out, helped furnish his new pot habit, which was rumored to have started during his short marriage to his second wife, Phyllis: My brother had once arrived unannounced to Harv and Phyllis’s apartment to find them opening windows and spraying air freshener. My mother’s response to this story was to recall the time she tried pot for the first and only time, when she and Harv were still married, after an Ice Storm-sounding double date with their suburban neighbors in the 1970s. “And your father got so paranoid,” she told my brother and me. “I just can’t see him doing that again.”

  But the summer I was 18 — the first summer I didn’t come home from college, instead staying with friends and working —  Harv was definitely flirting with bohemianism. When and Sam and Sam’s son, Eric, came to visit me, we spent the day at the Dali Museum in St. Pete, had lunch on the water (with my first jello shots, which someone else ordered) and then, on the drive back to my apartment in Tampa, when Sam and my dad got out to gas up the car, Eric — in his mid-20s, home for a bit from teaching English in Japan — turned to me in the back seat and asked if I smoked pot. At that time I did. Passionately so.

“Do you know that your dad does?”

“I’ve heard that he does, but …”

“Do you want to get high with him?”

After dinner the next night, on the walk back to the car, Harv awkwardly confessed to me “that he likes a little grass.” This prompted Sam to enthusiastically announce that we should roll a joint when we got back to my place, a student ghetto apartment I was crashing in that summer with a rather large group of young men. And that’s sure as hell what we did: My dad, Sam, Eric, and me, sitting in a circle in the living room. Also in the circle was my best friend Therese, whose boyfriend lived in the apartment. In a larger circle surrounding ours was said boyfriend and at least three of the other guys who lived there, observing in mute fascination as we passed the joint around. (This was the 1990s in Central Florida. Such things were not done.) My dad and Sam each took a hit or two. Eric stayed in a little while longer, and Therese and I finished it off. At some point my dad started waxing rhapsodic about the furniture in our house in Oceanside, NY — a house I moved out of at age 7, when Meryl and Harv split. He was particularly nostalgic about a black leather ottoman of which I still have no recollection. When it was time for them to go, Sam said he’d “leave us enough to roll another.” He left us enough for a bowl.

The whole thing was clunky and off-kilter and never repeated in any way. But I did recognize at the time that it was significant. I had smoked pot with my dad! Not long after, it became a story for me to tell. Writing had been currency for me as a child — poetry, stories, and essays the first things for which I’d gotten consistent positive reinforcement — and telling them became social currency for me in my 20s. Harv, a campfire storyteller and master letter writer, had written a story with me right there in that grey-blue, randomly furnished, overpopulated apartment, making it weird for everyone else but passing on a narrative that I could shape and share.

Decades later, when he was long retired and way past any interest in or access to weed and I was, for the most part, too anxious to partake recreationally, we could still joke about it. Harv wrote to me when I was away at summer camp and college, both times I moved across the country. I think the last letter I received from him was three or four years before he died. He would write to me about his morning and evening rituals — coffee with a cigarette and the crossword on his deck in the morning, ice cream in the wee hours when he couldn’t sleep — and send me lists and advice (and lists of advice). The advice and lists shifted tone once I got into my 20s, not long after we’d shared that awkward joint: Always take time to smell the flowers, don’t make any life decisions when high on grass, don’t get caught up in your introspection.

Our adult relationship turned out to be pretty solid, considering it really began that one weedy night when Harv took a risk in sharing that part of himself with me. Certainly sturdier than the reasons that I moved to Oakland in 2001. My relationship to myself — and my life in 2020, despite the world’s uncertainty — now feel pretty sound. But the genesis of my second move to California has made me feel like I can’t look at it too closely. It’s built on tragedy and chance. And I don’t want to see how vulnerable to tragedy and chance that means everything might always turn out to be.