“Amy, go get me the wooden salad bowl from the basement.”
Her voice was sharp, like a prod. I was annoyingly slow with errands. Prone to daydreams. And it was while doing just that, protractedly loitering on our split-level steps, salad bowl in hand, that I remember being paralyzed by the most unremarkable and vivid of childhood memories, one that illuminated nothing in particular, but yet somehow everything. There were dust motes floating in the sun coming in from the window, jigging in the air. I was ten—ten!—and I would never be ten again. But then I thought maybe I could come back to this moment someday if I tried to remember it. So I blinked my eyes, hard, including in the frame the steps and the junction where the three flooring treatments met: the brown patterned basement carpet, the tan foyer linoleum, and the green living room shag carpeting, its sea anemone arms waving, the air above it sparkling with bits of ordinary-like diamond dust. I’ve always wondered why I chose that moment to single out for memory, but now I know that the image didn’t matter as much as the place itself. Sitting on the stairway, the purgatory between floors, was a real time-and-space eraser. I was a split-level child of the ’80s; maybe I was fated by architecture to a future of feeling torn between two geographical places.
“Amy! Salad bowl!” (Also by design, the split-level required parents to project their voices, turning them all into hollerers.)
A while after I’d left the kitchen to reinstall myself on my favorite chair, my dad walked in the door and commenced his evening routine. After unpeeling the tight black overshoes from his wingtips—he called them his “rubbers”—and hanging up his coat in the coat closet, he stood on the landing and waved at me, his hand up high in the air. Shy with emotion, Dad felt more comfortable declaring his love for us in grand pronouncements, usually on a schedule: once in the morning before work and then again when he came home. “He-ya, Amy!” he shouted. “She’s the best girl there is! It’s love!” I leaned harder into the chair in preteen mortification.
My dad was a car dealer, as his parents had been, but he embodied a quieter version of the cliché: He had the sport coats and dress pants, a pocket protector of pens at his chest, and the cigar—but none of the stereotypical car dealer’s bluster. He spoke quietly and evenly, unless he found something to be excited about, at which point his volume rose, as if someone had bumped the stereo knob and unwittingly turned it up. We knew that he could carry dozens of eight-digit car VIN numbers around in his head, and that the bottoms of his wide feet were smooth and pale, almost custardy, having been worn to a rubbery softness in his wingtips as he pounded the asphalt car lot all day long. His fingertips were smooth and dry from pushing paper. As for the cigar, in lieu of smoking he merely chewed it, discarding the earthen black plugs in an ashtray.
When he came home at 7:00 after a long day, he was officially off duty. He didn’t mow grass or change lightbulbs, and he didn’t ever think to pull our heavy living room shades shut while he was watching TV, so that by the time darkness fell outside, the enormous picture window was like a television itself, broadcasting our wide-screen suburbanlike existence out onto the street. Every night my mom swept by and huffily tugged them closed.
At this hour, we fell into our roles. My brothers, hopped up on the snacks they’d stolen from the back candy table, played loudly downstairs. I twirled around the living room, practiced my splits, and watched TV as my parents canoodled over their drinks.
Reclaiming my usual post in the rust-colored chair, I jumped on the warm upholstered seat to work out the priest juju and then leaned backward over one of its beefy, bodybuilder wing arms, my support for going into a full backbend. Just as my dad eased his feet every morning into his stiff wingtips with a shoehorn, I used this chair to ease out. To unwind. As the tips of my hair brushed the floor, my gut rose into my chest and the throbbing in my belly lessened a bit.
I hung like that until it was clear that upside-down was no longer working. I was really starving.
—
From a kid’s perspective my parents were just a high-strung, dramatic couple and perfectly matched. When they got along, their tastes dovetailed. They squabbled over major details of their life, but the minor things—the dailies—they largely agreed upon: cocktail hour, vacations without children, and a pound of meat per person. They never, ever, fought about the steaks.
Steak was a weekly administered rite in our house, and on special occasions we ate surf and turf: rib eyes and lobster tails, lit by candlelight, with those little spitting butter warmers, the whole deal. Consuming this much steak was no common thing in our town; many people lived here because our proximity to state forests and open land gave them the opportunity to hunt and fish to their absolute saturation. Ground venison was a mainstay for many, and judging from the enormous display of ground beef at the grocery store, the town consumed a fair amount of that, too. But my dad had grown up the only child of car-dealer parents in a white stone house on the Mississippi River, eating prime rib roast and popovers, so steak was what he knew. My mom had been raised in a tiny rambler eating cheap chuck roast cooked in slabs to mimic steak, wearing clothes her mother had sewn (“I didn’t even know my dress size until I got to college”), and was happy that they had the means to buy all five of us our own slabs of beef.
As was popular back then, we had an indoor grill, a wrought-iron-rimmed beauty tucked into the back corner of the kitchen. Standing in front of it was my dad’s honey spot. When he got to grilling, he had to turn on the fan, whose suction was so powerful that you could feel it gently pulling at you as you walked by. My mom, who tended to supervise any cooking taking place in her domain, trusted him with the beef.