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  “Look. Gray.” My father wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin and leaned toward me. “There are many people . . . artists . . . who want to make it, but don’t. Not everyone makes it.”

  “People can’t just give up on their dreams,” I said.

  It was perversely gratifying, getting behind these clichés. No one could stop me from loving and dreaming.

  “In real life,” my father said, spearing a few hash browns with his fork, “most people have to give up on their dreams. Do you know how competitive stand-up comedy is? He’s no Lenny Bruce. He’s no George Carlin. And what are you going to do, spend your life lolling around in seamy comedy clubs?”

  “Guess so,” I said. “We’ll even live in comedy clubs, because we’ll be too poor to pay rent. One day, we’ll raise our children in them.”

  “Now, Gray,” my mother said, but my father cut her off.

  “You might think you don’t care about money,” he said, “but you will. Eventually, everyone cares about money.”

  “You gave up law to pursue your dream!” I said. “And it’s not like Mom’s slaving away at some corporate job.”

  My mother worked as a floral designer, her slim fingers cutting tulip stems at an angle, accenting bouquets of white roses with hyacinth.

  “We’re not rich,” my father said slowly, “but my salary is steady. I always put food on the table.”

  “So what are you suggesting? Should Mikey be just like you? I’m sure a steady salary has made you blissfully happy.”

  My father jerked back like I’d spit in his eye. The strange thing was, until that moment, I’d never thought much about my father’s happiness. He laughed a lot. But he often made mean jokes at the expense of others. He often aimed to make people feel as if his life were more fulfilling than theirs. I looked at his belly inside his button-down shirt. It strained against the plastic buttons and touched the metal edging of the table. I understood, uncomfortably and suddenly, that my father was unhappy. And at the same time, I realized that I must have known for years. How else would I have been able to say what I’d just said? You don’t always realize it until you’re under attack: You are intimately acquainted with your loved ones’ weak spots.

  My father’s lips tightened into a knot. He huffed heavy breaths through his nose. When he opened his mouth, I thought he was going to yell. But instead, his voice was measured. “Mikey isn’t Jewish.”

  “So?”

  He stared at me, narrowing his eyes, blurring me into nothing. I stared back. I didn’t speak. And that was when he exploded.

  “What the hell is the matter with you, Gray? ‘So?’ Are you a child? That’s all you have to say? ‘So?’” He paused, panting, and gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “Do you know the first thing about Judaism? How your people have suffered? Do you? Answer me! You don’t have any idea about anything!” he shouted.

  I could feel strangers’ heads all around us, swiveling. My father would have loved for me to pound my fists on my plate, upsetting the silverware; to scream until my lungs ached; to kick him under the table. So I didn’t react. I sat motionless. All I could feel was my heart, buried deep inside me, panicked.

  My father’s breathing sounded labored. Finally, he leaned back in the booth, spent, balled up his napkin, and threw it on his plate. “I should have done better,” he said, shaking his head. “I gave you too much leeway. You should have been wearing long skirts. I should have started years ago making shidduch for you.”

  “I’m out of here,” I said, sliding out of the booth.

  My mother said, “Gray, don’t go. Let’s talk.”

  “You haven’t said a word,” I said. “I’m done talking.”

  I left my parents in the diner. I thought, Mikey will make it as a comedian. I thought, I am about to change my life.

  I never told Mikey about that fight, but I didn’t have to. He knew he’d bombed—onstage and in person—with his girlfriend’s parents.

  Back then, he was getting only three or four spots a week, many of which were open mics. Humiliatingly, open mics cost him five dollars a pop. For his other spots, he was forced to “bark,” selling tickets in the street for several hours before a show to earn seven minutes of stage time. It was a thankless and demoralizing cycle: “Until I get good, I won’t get work. But if no one will give me work now, if I can’t even get onstage to practice, how am I supposed to get good?”

  He studied comedians on HBO. He sat in the back of the Comedy Cellar and watched the regulars perform under the low ceiling that made them look larger than life. “Gray,” he would say, “these guys have been doing comedy for twenty-five years. I can’t wait twenty-five years for a break.” He chain-smoked. He angrily tended bar on the day shift. He gripped his pen like a weapon and wrote vitriolic jokes. Sometimes he would say to me, “Tell me if you think this is funny.” He would run the heel of his hand up the spine of his open notebook and read to me from its pages.

  Sometimes I thought his ideas were funny; other times, I worried. He wrote one joke, for instance, about his girlfriend having too many pairs of shoes. How could he not know that was a cliché? And if he didn’t know, didn’t that mean he was, like my father had predicted, never going to make it? And if he never made it, would I one day have to tell my father, “You were right. Mikey didn’t make it. And like you warned, I now want money and a baby”?

  “I don’t think that’s so funny,” I said about the shoes.

  Mikey’s face crumpled a little, but then he sighed. “You’re right. It’s hack.” We were on the 6 train, heading to one of his “bringer” shows—a racket even more degrading than a standard open mic, requiring comics to contribute seven friends to the audience in exchange for five minutes of stage time. The subway was crowded. All around us, people sat staring blankly at the floor or reading the same best-sellers. We stood, sharing a pole, gazing at each other. “I think I just wanted to write something about you. I missed you today when you were at work.”

  I leaned my face on his chest and smiled into his T-shirt. Even when Mikey couldn’t make me laugh, he could usually make me smile. I thought of my cubicle at the advertising firm where I spent my days crunching numbers, of the tiny letters spelling GO FUCK YOURSELF STRAIGHT TO HELL that some previous inhabitant had scratched into the wood. I looked up at Mikey. “What if I barked for you? I could sell tickets in the street.”

  “I can’t ask you to do that, Gray. No.” Mikey tucked my hair behind my ear.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “No girl of mine is going to work in the street.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “Don’t repress me.”

  I made a deal with the owner of Big Apple Comedy Club: For each ticket I sold, I would get a cut of the price and Mikey would get stage time. I started barking on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. At the same time, Mikey was barking for shows at other clubs. We started doubling his weekend spots.

  “Let me run a few shows a week,” I told the club owner. “Give me the nights you aren’t filling up. I’ll sell every seat in the club.”

  I started approaching other clubs. “Let me run your Friday night early show . . . Let me run your Sunday night show . . . Let me run all three of your Saturday shows.”

  Within six months, I was able to quit my office job, which my father’s friend had given me. By then, I was running three shows a night—twenty-one shows a week at clubs all over the city. Mikey was performing in all of them. I traded, too: I would book a comedian who ran another show if he would book Mikey on one of his shows.

  Within a couple of years, Mikey could hold his own at Caroline’s, at Gotham, at Comic Strip Live. He could work a crowd with perfect reflexes. His size became his niche, and he took a stage name: Big Mike. And then came a starring role in a potato chip commercial. A brief appearance on HBO. A less brief appearance on Comedy Central. The Montreal Comedy Festival. He quit bartending. He passed his audition at the Comedy Cellar. And gradually, the clubs I was booking sta
rted paying him the way they were paying comedians who had been in the circuit for ten years. Colleges started booking him. Corporate parties. Even a few casinos. He bought a used car for all the road work. He was making it as a comedian.

  Two years had passed since I’d seen my father. He had long since stopped calling, but my mother still tried to run interventions.

  “He misses you,” she would call to say.

  “He can let me know when he’s ready to change.”

  “People don’t change, sweetie. You’re asking too much.”

  And then a third year passed. Three whole years I withheld myself from him.

  Until two weeks before my twenty-sixth birthday, when he called me and I answered.

  “Come home,” he said. He sounded older than I remembered. “Won’t you please come home?”

  My father died on my twenty-sixth birthday in the parking lot of Morgan Rye’s Steak House. It was June. The sun had only just begun to set. I’ll never forget how the sky was bleeding—messy red-pink smears across the wide blue face of twilight.

  Nearby, an old woman stood caged in a walker. A child holding a shiny balloon asked, “What’s more important, the clouds or the trees?” Overhead, an airplane moaned in exertion. A woman yelled, “Dang it! I forgot my doggie bag!” And the last sound that came from my father was a sigh. It sounded like other sighs—the one he’d released after finishing his steak, the one he’d always heaved upon sitting in his armchair, his first-sip-of-scotch sigh, his that’s-some-good-jazz sigh. Often, when I think of that night, I remember my father, sighing.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Three weeks after the funeral, just before I headed back to New York, my mother told me that my father had left me in charge of his will. “We all know I’m no good with that stuff. You, on the other hand . . .”

  “This makes no sense,” I said. “I suck at finances.”

  “You do not. You’re a whiz with organization. Practical matters.”

  “I don’t feel like dealing with practical matters.”

  “I know,” my mother said. “I don’t want to do anything. I want to crawl into a hole.”

  So did I. I wanted to lie in a wooden box and be lowered into a hole. In between my sleepless nights, I was filling my days with food. Already, my pants were leaving indentations on my waist, the sides of my bras were bulging, and my cheeks looked vaguely inflated. Hunger felt so much like panic, and fullness like despair.

  I did not make an appointment with Saul Weiss, the fiduciary of my father’s will. Instead I went back to New York and made silent deals with my father: If you switch off my appetite, I will stop booking comedy clubs. I will tithe to Jewish charities. I will wear long skirts. I will leave Mikey. Please. Please. Please.

  But he only laughed and laughed—a deep, echoing, dead-person laugh—and turned up the volume on my hunger.

  I shut down my business anyway. Laughter sounded dark and desperate; I no longer wished to sell it. A friend got me a job tending bar on the Lower East Side, at Little Mermaid Grill, land of the maritime kitsch wall decorations, of the clam rolls and fish-and-chips and popcorn shrimp (the greasy, fetid aromas of which seeped into my hair, soaked my clothing, followed me home); where I had to wear an androgynous blue polo shirt like a cabana boy, where the weekend crowd consisted of loud, hair-gelled Jersey guys who demanded Jägerbombs, and whose girlfriends wore stilettos that matched their dresses and ordered Malibu Bay Breezes or Vodka Red Bulls.

  At Little Mermaid, I indulged in self-pity, silently narrating my life in the third person, past tense: This was the night a man from Long Island reached across the bar and grabbed for her breast.

  This was the shift that was so slow, she sat in the alley on an overturned bucket, smoking the fry cook’s Parliament Lights.

  Were she to die just before a Friday rush, Little Mermaid would have to close for the evening.

  This was the month she split the seams on two pairs of pants.

  I ignored the voice mails that clogged my cell phone—comedians who hadn’t heard the news, creditors after my father’s money, daily warnings from Saul Weiss.

  I had no energy for any of it. I had energy only for food: egg rolls that burned the roof of my mouth, pizza with crusts that scraped my throat, Cheetos that left indelible stains on my hands, and nameless birthday cakes from the bakery counter. At a friend’s apartment one day, catching sight of her bottle of prescription muscle relaxers, I shoved my hands into my pockets to keep from grabbing it, tipping my head back, opening my mouth, and bingeing.

  Six months passed like this. It occurred to me that I should ask for help, that I should sit down with someone who cared about me and confess what I’d done to my father, confess that I couldn’t stop eating. I knew I had a problem. Happy people didn’t spend their days eating; they ate when their bodies required it.

  But bingeing on food is not like binge drinking. I was not the sad, mysterious girl at the bar. I had no stories about waking up in a duck pond or making a ruckus with a tambourine. I was no skinny, tortured smoker, wearing a nicotine patch like a badge on my arm. There is no sexiness in a family-size bag of Bugles, no trophy for speed-eating fettuccine Alfredo, or for missing, day after day, the ding-ding-ding in the brain that says “full.”

  In the apartment, I would wait until Mikey was gone before running down to the corner bodega. Or I would order Chinese delivery—so many menu items, the bag would arrive with three sets of chopsticks, as if I were having a dinner party. I would make pasta and cover it in cheese. I would buy jumbo-size packages of Chips Ahoy! cookies, two for the price of one. I would eat the second package of Chips Ahoy! cookies. I began to recognize other bingers. Their clothes were ill-fitting. Their foreheads looked worried. In the snack aisle of Duane Reade, among the processed, chemical-filled, cheerily wrapped foodlike things, we avoided one another’s eyes.

  It occurred to me that my father had had secrets, too.

  • • •

  In mid-December, my mother called me. “You didn’t take care of the will! You said you did. Months ago! Saul just called me. Who do you think has to bail you out if you get hauled off to jail? You want to put me through that? You want to burden Mikey?”

  I made the call to Saul Weiss, an old law school friend of my father’s.

  “I know this is unpleasant,” he said, “but other people are waiting for your father’s money. You need to—”

  “Who?”

  “Well, for one thing, your father left a trust for a woman in Virginia.”

  Such a funny word—“trust.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t . . . I could guess. But . . .”

  “Does my mom know about this?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I closed my eyes, the phone pressed to my ear, and asked Saul for a name.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A small gift—that the woman receiving my father’s money was Azalea Bellham; it took seconds to learn from the Internet that she was a social worker and therapist in Bridger Heights, Virginia. Her shoddy website displayed her head shot—her mirthless smile, her 1980s hairdo (a thin gate of bangs with more bangs above them, blown back and sprayed). The home page said, “Sometimes reaching out is the most difficult step to recovery. Call me.” The website linked to her blog, which, for the next six months, I would refresh on my computer screen seventy times a day: Tales of a Single Mother.

  The first post I read was called When Life Throws You Lemons, Make Lemon Meringue Pie Cupcakes: A Recipe Even Your Teenager Will Love! A handful of readers left comments like, “I tried this recipe with white chocolate sprinkles. Perfect refreshing dessert after a lazy summer barbecue!”

  Azalea wrote in a vague way about raising children, spouting clichés as if she’d learned about child rearing from bad sitcoms (“Do you ever get the feeling that your child has gotten too smart? LOL!”), but she never mentioned her own child.

  Until, one day, she did.

  I was read
ing comments on a post she’d written about children and the Internet. In response to a commenter’s lament about her son’s password-protected blog, Azalea wrote, “My teenager left her blog up on her screen last night. Who knew my kid has a blog??? Apparently she hated the grilled Hawaiian and hazelnut chicken I made for dinner! Fifteen-year-olds!”

  Fifteen.

  My heart jerked in my chest. Fifteen years ago was the period I’d always thought of as my father’s midlife crisis—when he switched careers and began to pray.

  I googled “grilled Hawaiian and hazelnut chicken.” And I found Azalea’s daughter. And I realized that when I was eleven, Azalea must have told my father that he had a second child.

  Azalea Bellham’s daughter didn’t reveal her name on her blog, but I read her posts until I gathered enough information to narrow my Google search.

  Eden.

  On her blog, Chef Girl, Eden focused primarily on her cooking classes, on the recipes she was trying, on her dreams of becoming a chef and her opinions on various shows on the Food Network. But some posts were simply expressions of teen angst. She thought her mother was an idiot. She hated everyone in her high school. She hated girls who shopped at Anthropologie, who dyed their hair, who paid for French manicures. She hated boys who loved those girls. She knew that her real life would begin in culinary arts school and she wished the time would just hurry up and pass.

  I clicked on her pictures over and over—Eden with her southern cooking class; Eden holding a baby; Eden alone at a desk, alone on brick steps wearing a sweatshirt with a hood, alone on a bed and in a car and in a Santa hat.

  Eden’s skin was dark. Her eyes disappeared into slits when she smiled for the camera. She had a thick stomach, fat arms, and skinny legs. She was fat on top and skinny on the bottom, her weight a virus that hadn’t finished spreading.

  Yes, I saw my father in her. He was in her forehead when she squinted at the sun, in her mouth when she half-smiled. He was everywhere in her body.