When Grandma wasn’t around, my life was bafflingly full of terror. I say bafflingly because my childhood, albeit eccentric, was outwardly perfectly secure: my parents divorced when I was small, but they’d done so amicably, and each remarried a stepparent I loved as fiercely as if they had all given birth to me. There I was, a nice little girl with two big front yards, climbing apple trees and peeling Elmer’s glue off my hands at recess with my friends, except for the moments when my comfortably ordinary world incomprehensibly fell to pieces.
Take the day my friend Erin and I locked her little brother in the bathroom, and Erin began belting out a loud rendition of “The Farmer in the Dell” so her parents wouldn’t hear him hollering for us to let him out: one minute I was singing along with her, and the next I was clutching Erin’s arm for dear life, as if she might pull me out from under the avalanche of fear now suffocating me. “Stop,” I begged her. “We have to stop. They played music to drown out the screams of the children when they were killing them.” Years later Erin recalled that she’d been so upset by what I’d said that she’d run crying to her father.
“What did he say?” I asked her.
“He told me you came from a family of Holocaust survivors with a lot of bad memories to cope with.”
All I could think was, I wish someone had told me that.
With the clumsy logic of a small child, I tried to protect myself from these episodes by constructing scenes of perfect domesticity in which everything was ordered and beautiful: careful dioramas I fitted into Kleenex boxes or arranged on the shelf beside my bed, elaborate habitats I squirreled away in hideouts behind the bushes of our front walk or tucked under my mother’s desk. I would spend hours imagining myself away from the world and into these fictitious universes. If you had asked me, as a child, what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would have told you a career—ballerina, scientist, senator—but what I really wanted was my own home, a place to keep me safe from the lurking menace of destruction, the horrible crumbling feeling I knew was never far-off.
The habitats I created were of no use at night. I kept my shoes near the front door, so I could grab them quickly if we had to escape in a hurry, but then I’d lie awake and worry we’d have to use the back door instead. Biding my fearful time until I fell asleep, I would calculate how quickly I could jump out of bed and dress and count the places I might hide. I wished I were grown up and more graceful; I believed I was resourceful enough, but not tall enough, to survive. I grieved in advance for the loss of my cozy home with the books on the shelves and the bright bedspread, brush and comb on the dresser, fire in the woodstove, food in the fridge.
I would call out for my mother to come sit with me, hoping she could keep my nameless fear at bay, and pepper her with questions.
“Could someone steal our house?”
My mother always took me seriously, and she replied to my questions honestly, which meant her answers were rarely as reassuring as I wanted them to be. “No,” she would say. “Not usually.”
“But sometimes?”
“Well, if something happened.” There would be a small pause as she considered what she would and would not explain. “For example, if you had to go away for a long time, someone could move in, or steal the papers saying you owned it, or make new ones saying it was theirs.”
“What if you came back?” I’d press.
“Well, you would have to prove that the house really was yours.”
“How could you do that?”
“Well, you could go to court, if the government were still intact.”
There was also the question of fire. What if someone burned our house down?
“That’s not very likely.” Her calm, dry voice was silent another moment in the dark room. “Really. It’s very unlikely.”
But no matter how many times she reassured me with rational considerations of likelihood and risk (no one in our household smoked; we didn’t have a furnace; we owned three fire extinguishers), my mother could not give me the gift of certainty that every child craves. What I longed to hear was That will never happen. But how could she say that? In our family, everyone had lost a home. The unspoken question that nettled me at night was not whether such a thing could happen but how many homes you could lose in a lifetime.
In my dreams, when sleep finally came, I’d pack quickly for my flight. Only the essentials. Coat, matches, pocketknife. I’d get bogged down as I tried to plan ahead, to think of all the things I would lack: change of underwear, soap, raincoat, antiseptic ointment, adhesive bandages, toilet paper, candles, shoelaces, string, a sweater, powdered milk, wool socks, long johns, tarp, hat, scissors. Pots and pans. A hammer. Stamps. Wallet. Photographs. Some sort of container for holding water. Rubber bands. Gloves, not mittens. A sleeping bag. Salt. Sugar. Towel. Needle and thread.
All the dreams were the same, except for the ones where they got me before I had time to pack. Sometimes I’d end up in a train, occasionally they’d shoot me right away, and always, afterward, I’d wake to a world drained of color, thick with a desolation so familiar I never even thought to mention it to anyone. I preferred the dreams of flight: in those, my grandmother would come back for me, wrest the excess baggage from my hands, and push me out the door.
Anna and Miranda in Pearl River, New York, June 1984.