Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Can you hear me praying?

Anything I’m saying?

Papa, how I love you

Papa, how I need you

Papa, how I miss you

Kissing me good night 23

My grandfather Al didn’t get a first-born son, his own ben-Albert. His first child was my mother, Beverlee, born in 1933. A chubby, frizzy-brown-haired, big-personality little girl, one who decided, very early on, that she was not going to be ignored — a defining moment of my mother in childhood is a cinematic one, captured on old Super 8 film: My grandfather loved taking home movies, and we have a flickery scene of a dozen assembled kids where we see my mother determinedly pushing (shoving?) herself to the front of the crowd to wave and beam and mug for the camera. All her life she would envy the slim blond Gentile girls around her. But if she wasn’t ever going to be blond or thin or pretty, she was always going to be noticed, damn it, be the star of the show.

But her father adored her — this according to my mother, who loved telling me the stories of his adoration, spoiling her with riding lessons and fancy clothes and taking her off to Chicago jazz clubs when she was only fifteen and sixteen and (then voluptuous) could pass for twenty-five. Whatever made her happy. Through her two marriages and two divorces he still always did for her, took care of her; he would always be the dependable male presence in her chaotic life, always be the Papa, the benevolent Daddy-King who enabled and indulged her, paid her bills, bought her jewelry and furniture and cars, babysat her own daughter (me) so she could both remain a child and keep the wild party going, stay at the center of every shot, every scene. She filled the screen, indeed, was larger than life, charming and charismatic, needy and narcissistic, and entirely exhausting.

She and my father divorced when I was twelve, and in the following years her unthinking dependency on my grandfather increased. (Her dependency on me, too — it became my responsibility to take her contact lenses in/out every morning/evening, because her porcelain fingernails were too long. For an example picked at random.) She clung harder to my grandfather, relied on his willingness to manage the majority of life’s basic logistics for her, while simultaneously plunging into a crazed second adolescence: She and a flock of other fortysomething, recently divorced and disoriented, once-voluptuous, now-overweight women established a favorite booth at a local supper club, where the befriended waitresses and bartenders would comp their drinks or slip an extra baked potato onto a shared steak dinner, and they could drink martinis and dance disco and distract themselves from their upheavaled lives three or four nights a week.

There began a stream of men in and out of our house — my mother and I shared a bathroom, and I never knew what strange guy might be exiting the shower in the morning, a flowered beach towel around his waist. These were generally unsavory characters, guys who were typically unemployed or unsavorily employed: Drug users and dealers, mostly, guys with records and rap sheets, guys in between their “own place” (hence, their presence in our house), guys with nagging ex-wives and girlfriends and assorted children, guys who would disappear from my mother’s giddy frame of reference (and our house) after a few appearances and soon be replaced by another.

My grandfather was increasingly annoyed, frustrated, appalled. I was busy at school, with friends, with my first after-school and weekend job at a bakery; I didn’t question any of it. I was usually asleep when my mother came home in the middle of the night, wafting cigarette smoke and martinis and the latest guy’s syrupy aftershave. I didn’t mind that I began eating dinner and sleeping over at my grandparents’ house even more often, spending several nights a week watching TV and slurping those root boor floats with my Grandpa, or happily going clothes shopping together. I thought it was edgy and sophisticated when my mother threw parties where strangers got black-out drunk on generic vodka or snorted coke off the modular glass coffee table it was my responsibility to Windex twice a week. I was unaware when my mother planned to mortgage our house to cover some guy’s bail, a plan that finally galvanized my grandfather to anger; fearing I would wind up homeless, he flat-out refused to “help her” with the mortgage process. I heard about that one only several years later. Maybe that particular guy is still in prison. But my grandfather’s anger and resentment took hold, began to boil. This is not how a woman should live her life. This is not how a woman must behave. Not a mother. Not his daughter.

Some things I cannot, I will not, allow!

The final blow came while I was far away; I was twenty-one, on a scholarship year in France, lonely and disoriented and drinking way too much myself, when I heard there had been a blowout between my grandfather and my mother. I have heard multiple versions of the story over the years from various family members: No two versions match. But the essential moment seems to be a disrespectful comment made by my mother to my grandfather; in some versions it is an ill-timed teasing, a foolishly blurted joke; in others it is an all-out nasty “Fuck you, Dad, I don’t need you or your help! You don’t own me!” Either way, my grandfather swore he was done with her, forever. She was disowned, dismissed, cast out from the flock. Declared dead.

My mother was hysterical. She left him desperate phone messages, wrote desperate letters, pushed and shoved herself as best she could to the center of the frame. She pleaded and implored, and not just with my grandfather, but with my grandmother, too, begging her to mend the rift — which my grandmother, very ill and very soon to die, was unable to do; my grandfather was unpersuadable— Chava is dead to us! We will forget her! — and I imagine my grandmother lying helplessly in her bed, crying, dying, consumed by this new failure, this new guilt.

And so my mother begged me to intercede, to persuade him. After all, my grandfather adored me, was so proud of me, never denied me anything. Surely he would listen to me.

But there was, in fact, a Tradition! in our family: My grandfather’s habit or ability to “be done” with people, to assign blame and villainy and all the evils of the world to someone he decided had done him wrong — an old business partner, a family friend, a brother-in-law, his own sister. This affectionate, generous, loving man had a reserve of impressive angers that would coalesce and be visited upon the latest person to betray or insult him, to question his dominance, and that would be that: An emotional pogrom. He had no religious faith, but he held a strong, unquestioning belief in his own authority as Head of the Family, to have the final word at home!

I was the adored granddaughter, yes, one who had never done a single thing to displease him, and yet. . My grandfather’s love was precious to me. It was the thing to be treasured. It meant the golden warmth of home, far more than the house I shared with my mother, the place I could always go and curl up to sleep on a comfy couch, even as an adult, here in the home I love , secure under the portrait gaze of a solemn-eyed, black-garmented man — a watchful ancestor or a protective god. My grandfather’s love provided balance. A steadying glow. It was not something I was going to risk. Not even for my mother. Because if my Grandpa could deny his own once-beloved daughter this way — if a father’s love was indeed so precarious — could his anger not also fall upon and obliterate me?