By Liz Dubelman

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t think it would be more fun to still live at 500-A Grand Street.  The address seemed so majestic — Grand Street – and there were parks you could walk to.  Englewood Cliffs had no parks.  We were confined to our back yard, where we could be watched.  There was an overall sense of impending doom and an overshadowing of ghosts.

I remember the little, slightly rusted aluminum rocking chair.  The seat and back were a dirty plastic mesh of green and white stripes.  I guess it had been my older sister’s and maybe it still was.  I was about three and was rocking my one-year-old brother on the flagstone walkway in the back yard.  I suppose Mary (our black southern nanny) was watching us.  My mother was barbecuing chicken for dinner.

Englewood Cliffs is located just a mile or two north of the George Washington Bridge.  A post-war town built on the Palisades after the builders learned to control dynamite.  All the streets were named after people in the builders’ lives.  We lived on the corner of Laurie and Stephens.

My parents moved from the city when I was 2.  The story goes that my mother was walking back from Tompkins Square Park when my sister ran ahead.  My mother called out, “Debbie, stop.”  And some homeless guy (back then they were called “bums”), upon hearing her name, called out to her, “Come here, Debbie.”  They bought a house the very next weekend.

My parents weren’t just escaping a city full of bums.  They were running from memories – from the unthinkable, the unimaginable.  They had had a son, the first born.  He was born with a terminal blood disease (an illness that can be cured now, which offers no relief to my mother).  David was born bruised, his whole tiny body black and blue.  He lived to be two and a half and was sick his whole life.  Periodically, throughout my childhood, I would find odds and ends of David’s short existence – a microscopic dot of blood on a slide or a brittle yellow newspaper clipping of a new medical advance.  I never knew him but I would try to feel like he was my brother.

My mother basted the chicken.  My father would be home any minute.  We knew this because even in 1966 he had a mobile phone.  It was very large and came in – no, was part of – an attaché case.  It was also heavy, because the power source was like a small car battery.  The phone was more like a ship-to-shore radio.  He would pick up the receiver and call into it, “Mobile operator, mobile.  Mobile operator, mobile.”  The operator would answer, “Mobile operator.  What number, please?”  “LO 8-4214.”  My father always called just as he was crossing the GW so my mom could start dinner.

The evening was just starting to break the heat.  My seven-year-old sister was hovering around my mother.  I was rocking my brother in the old chair.  Maybe I rocked him too hard, or maybe the little chair was half on the grass and half on the flagstone – anyway, it fell over.  He cracked his head.  He didn’t cry.  He just lay there as the magnitude of what I thought I’d done washed over me.  I screamed.  Mary and my mother came running.  They picked him up and I could see a small drop of blood on the muted colors of the flagstone.

He was fine, really, but my mother was so agitated she wasn’t sure she could drive.  Mary didn’t know how to drive.  My father wasn’t home yet.

Though my parents never let us out of their sight, my mother left my sister and me alone to take my brother to the hospital.  Mary went along, either to keep my brother or my mother calm, I don’t know which.  I was exhilarated and terrified.  I thought at first that being alone in the house with my sister was an adventure.  Then the thought crossed my three-year-old mind that by hurting my little brother, I’d done something so terrible that I made my parents go away.

But, in a real sense, neither of them had ever really been there.  I think losing a child (maybe especially a first-born) makes it difficult, if not impossible, to become truly attached to a second, third or fourth.  My parents’ contemptuous tone toward each other was a constant reminder of how they blamed each other for not being strong enough to save David or to take away the lingering pain of his death.  Maybe the birth of each child was a futile attempt to connect, but my parents were scared to love too much.  Another loss could be more than they could bear.

My parents lived together in this semi-detached state for over 40 years.  At some point my father had an affair with a prostitute half his age.  He used all his ingenuity to save her.  He enrolled her in college, he paid the tuition and, when she was flunking out, he spoke to the professors.  But she was a lost cause.

My mother found some letters and filed for divorce.  My father fought as hard as he could.  Maybe he couldn’t take another loss.  Each set up camp in separate bedrooms and refused to move from their suburban home.  He hired private detectives, tapped her phone, and made up vicious lies.  He filed court papers saying that she was plotting to kill him.  He was old, frail, wily and paranoid (a lethal combination).  They couldn’t reattach and they couldn’t part.  They stayed locked in this purgatory for more than four years.

And then one hot-as-hell evening, in that very same home built on rock, a very small thin-tailed creature ran through the house.  (I have always found mice to be creepy.   They appear to have no bones.  Like a memory they can fit through the smallest hole.)  My father, quite insane by now, chased the thin-tailed creature with a hammer.  He slipped, fell, and hit his head.  He went to sleep that night and blood filled his head, pouring out of his ears and nose.  He never woke up.