But Mark had made up his mind.
I set off back toward the corner myself, satisfied that I would be praised for having followed directions. (It occurs to me now that following directions that seemed arbitrary was good early training for being an astronaut.) I got to the corner, crossed, and turned back toward the house. The next thing I heard was car brakes squealing and the thump of a collision, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something the size and shape of a kid flying up into the air. The next moment, Mark sat, dazed, in the middle of the street, while the frantic driver fussed over him. Someone ran for our mother, an ambulance came and took them to the hospital, and I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening with my uncle Joe, pondering the different choices Mark and I had made and the different results.
As our childhoods went on, we continued to take crazy risks. We both got hurt. We both got stitches so often we sometimes would have the stitches from the previous injury removed during the same visit new stitches were put in, but only Mark was ever admitted as an inpatient. I was always jealous of the attention he got when he was hospitalized. Mark got hit by the car, Mark broke his arm sliding down a handrail, Mark had appendicitis, Mark stepped on a broken glass bottle of worms and got blood poisoning, Mark was taken into the city for a series of tests to see whether he had bone cancer (he didn’t). We both played with BB guns recklessly, but only Mark got shot in the foot and then damaged by a botched surgery.
When we were about five, my parents bought a little vacation bungalow on the Jersey Shore, and some of my best memories from childhood are from that time. It wasn’t much more than a shack, with no heat, but we loved going there. My parents would get us up in the middle of the night, when my father got off work, and load us into the back of the family station wagon in our pajamas with our blankets, where we’d go back to sleep. I remember the feeling of being rocked by the car’s movement, looking at the telephone wires out the windows and the stars beyond them.
At the shore, in the mornings, Mark and I would ride our bikes to a place called Whitey’s, a boatyard where we bought bait for crabbing. We’d spend all day on the dock behind our bungalow, waiting to feel a crab nibble on the bait. We built rafts out of spare fence planks, on which we set sail from the lagoon house on the approach to Barnegat Bay. We had a kind of freedom my own children never had. I remember falling off the dock before I knew how to swim and sinking into the dark and murky water of the lagoon. I didn’t know what to do about it. I simply watched the bubbles of the last of my air rising. Then my father, who had seen my blond hair drifting just above the water, grabbed a handful and pulled me out.
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MY FATHER WAS an alcoholic, and sometimes he would take off drinking for long periods of time. I remember one weekend at the Jersey Shore when he disappeared, leaving the three of us with no food and no money. My mother explained to us that he had taken our only car to a bar; somehow we got a ride over there to find him. It was a ramshackle place, set off in the marshes that lined Barnegat Bay, built of brown pressure-treated wood that had been bleached by the salt air. He refused to give us any money or to leave with us. I remember my mother’s face as she led us out of there. She was upset, but her face showed determination: she would get us through this. We didn’t eat that weekend, and I’ll never forget how that felt; it affects me to this day when I hear of people who don’t have enough to eat. The physical feeling of hunger is horrible, but much worse is the bottomlessness of not knowing when it will end.
When Mark and I were in second grade, our parents sold the place on the Jersey Shore so they could buy a house “up the hill.” They wanted us to be able to go to a better public school. We moved onto a street lined with giant green oak trees, aptly named Greenwood Avenue. I remember the smell of springtime on that street, trees with new leaves and azalea bushes of pinks and purples. It’s odd that once we moved, we hardly ever saw our family on Mitchell Street again. My father was often not on speaking terms with various friends and family members, so it’s possible he had burned through all those relationships by the time we moved.
We may have lived up the hill now, but in socioeconomic terms we still belonged down the hill, sort of like the Beverly Hillbillies we saw on television. We stuck out among the wealthier Jewish families who lived nearby. Mark and I used to get into scrapes with neighbor kids—snowball fights, rock fights, apple fights with the crabapples that fell off the trees. We threw them at adult neighbors too, and we discovered that the grown man next door had a pretty good arm when he threw them back. We were like juvenile delinquents who never got arrested, probably because we were the children of a cop.
In the summertime, my father and his cop buddies would have cookouts in a nearby park, and those days were always fun—at least, at first—as we ate hot dogs and played softball. But as the day went on and the empty bottles and cans piled up, you’d have twenty drunk cops getting into arguments, things turning nasty. My father would finally load us into the car, blind drunk. As he went careening down Pleasant Valley Way, swerving into the opposite lane, we’d be screaming at him not to crash the car.