Smoked Fish on a Saturday
By Alan Winnikoff
April 15, 2023
April 15, 2023
The drive from the Valley took us over Mulholland, through twisting auburn canyons, past the lush gardens, high, whitewashed walls and imperious gates of Beverly Hills and south down to Pico. Small and cramped, the restaurant was easily missed if you weren’t looking for it. It could have used a good scrubbing and a fresh coat of paint. The grimacing waiters, thick dark mustaches, stained aprons around their waists, were not much for conversation. But I knew my father didn’t care about any of this. He loved good food and loved knowing where in LA to find it.
The smoked fish platter for two – oily lox, cod, whitefish and sable, glistening pinks and milky silvers layered under bright, unfiltered lighting - appeared before us as if by magic, as if my father could simply summon this feast, these sublime delicacies he’d taught me to appreciate. I knew not to steal a taste until we were both ready to dig in. That was the rule. No sampling, no nibbling while we finished slathering our bagels thickly with cream cheese and prepared our plates. This ritual was part of any meal shared with my father and it was one I’d come to embrace – the long quiet moment of enhanced anticipation.
Between mouthfuls, we exchanged the latest we’d heard on the Dodgers, Rams and Lakers – a comfortable and easy topic. My father wanted to know how school was going and about any girls I might have taken an interest in. The conversation went in one direction. For all his surface garrulousness, my father was not a man inclined to reveal himself – certainly not to his son. I wouldn’t have known where to start and I wouldn’t have gotten far had I tried.
____________________
From an early age, I’d had an interest in drawing. On weekends, I could often be found bent over my sketchbook at the round table in our cheerful, yellow walled kitchen, the spindly branches of our backyard orange tree brushing against the wide, uncurtained window just above my eyeline. My project during this time was an elaborately conceived comic book series. I had set about writing and illustrating the worlds I envisioned so clearly in my head – masked superheroes and scaly monsters flying across the pages, through cities and jungles, battling for world domination.
I’d been at it for a while that Saturday morning when I heard my father padding heavily down the stairs, the flip-flapping of his well-worn slippers betraying his arrival. A moment later he was standing before me in his familiar checked bathrobe, thinning gray hair falling forward across a shadowy, unshaven face.
He extended the brunch invitation with a kind of impishness, one corner of his mouth lifting, as if we were about to get away with something secret and covert. There followed a quick side-eyed tilt of his chin in the direction of my mother, standing at the sink observing, up to her elbows in soapy water.
I was both surprised and happy to be asked. My father’s one-man law practice often kept him away, an absence the three of us – me and my younger brother and sister - felt most acutely during those times when fathers were expected to be family focused. He cobbled together his business with a colorful mix of small-time clients – b-level Hollywood strivers, divorcees, accident victims. Anyone suing or being sued was a candidate for his services. Though these characters had personality, few had much money, so my father needed a lot of them around at any one time to keep his practice viable. He was perpetually hustling, always on the lookout for the next case, seeking the big score. On Sundays, our family room became his auxiliary office, his baritone voice ringing through the house as he dictated letters and briefs into a recording machine. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I was aware of the microphone clicking on and off, the steady rhythm of him revising and editing in real time.
_____________________
We pushed away from the table and staggered toward the front door, empty dishes and greasy napkins scattered in our wake. Thick necked and round bellied, a one-time tight end on his small college football team, my father wasn’t supposed to indulge like this, certainly not after his first heart attack and the surgery and hospitalizations that followed. But, so long as he was away from the watchful eye of my mother, he seemed able to convince himself that what he ate would have no effect, like the dieter who believes calories don’t count if they are taken off someone else’s plate.
Gnawing thoughtfully on a toothpick, he paid the ancient cashier at the ancient cash register. We emerged onto the sidewalk, squinting in the piercing sunlight, the metallic, ashy LA smog settling onto my tongue and itching my eyes. I felt my father’s meaty palm come to rest gently between my thin shoulder blades as we strolled at a languid pace toward his two-seater German sports car parked along the curb a short distance away.
“I’m going to need to stop at the office,” he informed me as we settled into the soft bucket seats. He shifted gears, the engine roared and we shot into traffic. With a quick flick of his wrist, the gnarled toothpick caught the breeze and disappeared out the driver’s side window.
I might have groaned. A Saturday office visit held little appeal. It was boring. And there was no way of knowing how long it was going to take. Even as we neared the building, I continued to harbor the vague notion I might somehow be able to talk him out of it.
“Why do you have to work now?” I asked after a long silence, my pre-adolescent voice nasal and cracking, poutier than intended. “What do you have to do there?”
His wide shoulders lifted with an air of diffidence. “I don’t know… check the mail, pick up a few files.” He paused and added with a throaty chuckle, “Go to the bathroom.”
________________
The black mirrored tower, swooping up to the sky from the sprawling concrete plaza at its base, had the desolate feel of a ghost town. Eerily quiet, lobby lights dimmed, it was as if this silent, hulking shell was not destined to come alive again first thing Monday morning but would, instead, remain in its same torpid state, permanently and irreversibly abandoned.
Exiting the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor, I sensed my father’s energy transforming, keys and change jangling as his pace quickened. The suite where he worked housed perhaps a dozen attorneys, all solo practitioners. Unattached to LA’s deep pocketed firms, wholly reliant on themselves for their livelihoods, these lawyers could afford a prestigious address only by banding together and pooling resources. It was not until many years later that I came to fully appreciate the effort it took to appear more successful than you were.
We approached the thick wooden double doors - I took pride in seeing my father’s name among the others, lettered impressively in gold script – and pushed through. Once inside, my eye fell upon the handful of shadowy figures, my father’s office mates, floating like apparitions along the periphery of the deserted secretarial pool. Those few times I’d visited during the week these men had been in suits, hair slicked, freshly shaven. There was something that appeared off to me now, seeing them in their weekend attire, dressed down in polo shirts and khakis or unflattering, loose-fitting jeans that didn’t do much to conceal their spreading middle aged girth.
I struggled to keep up with my father’s long purposeful stride as he veered toward the receptionist’s desk and commenced pawing through the tall stack of office mail that had been dropped there. The envelopes flashed smoothly between his fingers, like a magician showing off his sleight of hand. Now and then he would take a long second to stare hard at a return address, as if unable to comprehend what could possibly have possessed that particular sender to write to him. These letters were tossed aside, unopened, to be dealt with at some other point.
He continued to make his way through the mail, pulling out what was his. But then something changed, I felt his bearing suddenly shift. I heard a sharp intake of air, a kind of rasping bark, followed by a few mumbled words I couldn’t make out. To my eye, the letter in his hand, so thin and unassuming, could have been easily overlooked. Yet, it was apparent this was the very thing he had been searching for, had been hoping to conjure up. I observed mutely, both mesmerized and unnerved, as he tore into it with an unrestrained ferocity I didn’t often see from him. He shook off the envelope, ripped and shredded, and let it drop away. What remained, clutched tightly between his fingers, was a small, rectangular paper, neatly folded in two. I followed his eyes as he took in the scrawled writing, before carefully smoothing it out and setting it onto an uncluttered corner of the desk. I knew what it meant, of course. I was old enough to understand that checks were money and money was a necessity.
Standing by his shoulder, I waited, caught up in the moment, silently rooting for more of these special envelopes to reveal themselves. But as he dug deeper into the stack, it became evident the bounty we were both wishing for was destined to remain unrealized. When he reached the last of the mail, he froze, as if perplexed. Stroking his lower lip with a thumb, he fingered the lone solitary check. Then he turned back to the big pile spilling across the desk, less orderly now that he’d so thoroughly rifled through it. For a moment, I feared he would start again from the beginning, an effort even I could see would be futile and pointless. Instead, he scooped up what there was and moved slowly and deliberately down the hall, head bowed, shoulders slumped, his wide, square face a troublesome shade of red.
Preoccupied and otherwise focused, he seemed to lose track of me, to forget I was there. I knew better than to follow him into his office, though he absent-mindedly left the door ajar, allowing me to loiter outside and eavesdrop as he picked up the phone and dialed. I had no idea who was on the other end. It wouldn’t have meant anything to me anyway. But it didn’t matter. The substance of the conversation was easy enough to follow; how much money was at hand, what had come in, who needed to be paid immediately, who could wait. At times, it seemed, my father was arguing with himself. I lingered by the door, through long stretches of silence, a desperate quiet punctuated by the rumble of his persistent throat clearing, the steady exhalation of cigarette smoke – another forbidden vice - drifting toward me.
At last, I grew restless. It was clear we weren’t leaving any time soon. I knew I could find paper in the cramped closet-like space where the Xerox machine sat, humming and blinking. I grabbed a handful and headed toward the conference room. Dropping into one of the cushy, high-backed chairs surrounding the long wooden table, I sensed I was being observed. One of the attorneys, short, balding, narrow eyes under bushy brows, was hovering in the doorway, framed by the rows of thick legal books resting in built-in shelves lining the walls.
“You’re Norm’s son,” I was told – a statement of fact, not a question. The man held my gaze for what felt like a long time, before sliding past with a half-smile. I heard his office door click, echoing from down the hall, and I was alone again.
I did my best to immerse myself in my art. Yet, after a short while, I had to abandon it. It was difficult to concentrate and I grew frustrated by the limited surface area I had to work with. I preferred expansive palettes. My elaborately drawn characters needed space. They were not to be contained by standard 8x11 paper.
I wandered through the secretarial pool, rows of IBM Selectric typewriters hibernating under snug black vinyl dust covers. Lifting picture frames off desks, I scrutinized images of spouses, kids, dogs, squinting into the camera in various familiar settings - Christmas, beach scenes, graduations. I tried to decipher the sloppy handwriting across a desk calendar, read the inscriptions on the insides of birthday cards, pocketed a pen that appeared particularly enticing. I pulled open drawers, drawn toward a deeper level of intimacy, curious to uncover what these unknown women kept hidden. I fingered lipsticks and scrunchies, packs of gum, tubes of lotions. At the bottom of a deskside file cabinet, I discovered a package of Oreos. Munching one, I palmed a second and continued my tour.
It was when I stumbled across an open box of tampons that my explorations abruptly came to a halt. With a furtive glance back toward the closed office doors across the way, I shut that drawer emphatically and scurried away sheepishly, ashamed at having crossed a line, at having committed such an egregious, if unintended, violation.
________________________
The drive home was somber, my father silent, lost in his own head. I gazed at the rows of palm trees lining the streets between curb and sidewalk as we made our way back up out of the city, toward the same brush covered canyons from which we’d descended earlier. The car radio, first classical music, then a ball game, filled the quiet between us. Stealing glimpses at my father as he steered us toward home, his expression distant and unreadable behind mirrored sunglasses, I contemplated what I had witnessed. Why this urgency to hunt for checks that he wouldn’t be able to deposit until Monday anyway? What did it mean that the day’s returns were so meager? I wanted to understand how it all fit together. I wanted a better sense of the state of his - of our - finances. I wanted to know whether I needed to worry. But I knew better. Any questions would have been rebuffed or, more deflating, met with stony silence. Fretting, hands clasped in my lap, I kept my focus on the passing scenery.
By the time we reached the familiar houses and yards of our neighborhood – late day shadows falling across bicycles carelessly dropped onto well-manicured, stubbornly green lawns - my father’s dark mood had lifted. My parents always had Saturday plans – a dinner reservation or a neighborhood cocktail party. My father had an ability to look ahead, to put earlier events, whatever had occurred up to that point, behind him. For me, on the other hand, the confusing emotions of the day took hold, leaving me edgy and off balance. Though unable to deconstruct the full implications behind what I’d experienced, it was the visceral nature, the intensity of the day, that had drained me. I began to wish I hadn’t gone with him at all, that I hadn’t seen what I’d seen. I would have preferred to remain ignorant, to retain my innocence about his world a while longer.
Only when the new school week started, and with it the resumption of my predictable, well-worn routine, did the anxiety consuming me finally began to ebb.
__________________
I had no way of knowing it then, but that Saturday would be the last brunch I would share with my father. It was not long after this that his health began to decline, first gradually and then all at once. He would be dead within a year.
After his passing, my mother was hit with debts and bills, many of which she’d had no idea even existed. Never much of a saver, my father left her with little to fall back on. She sold the only house we’d known and we moved into an apartment complex in the shadow of the freeway, fronted by dirt patches dotted with tufts of yellowed grass. Somehow, I made it through high school, applied to colleges, got grants. I left my mother and younger siblings behind, escaped to the other side of the country and never returned. Shortly after graduating as a graphic design major, I took a job with a large advertising agency. I have never had the desire to be my own boss with my own business, as my father had done. I prefer to be a cog in a company, with its reliable pay and steady benefits. I know this about myself.
________________
What we like to think of as security is no more than artifice, an illusion. Yet, as parents, we are compelled to perpetuate this illusion to our children as best we can, for as long as we can. When I look back on those years, I’m able to track how my own sense of security, the very thing a child most wants to believe in – needs to believe in – began to fall away. Though my father’s death was, of course, the final, irreversible blow, its steady erosion had started well before I had ever begun to grasp the gravity of his condition.
Recently, on one of my infrequent visits back to LA, I was driving west down Pico, inching through the late afternoon traffic, watching the sun slowly dip toward the Pacific. I wasn’t looking for the deli, or even thinking about it, and so was initially disoriented to see it appear suddenly, right there before me, seemingly unchanged by the years, half hidden between an Apple store and a Starbucks. In a rare bit of LA parking karma, there was an open spot just up the block. It had to be a sign, I thought, and I pulled over.
The acrid, biting tang of cured fish and rye bread, wafting out to the sidewalk, instantly stirred up those long-buried memories. I went through the glass entrance, smudged by the countless grimy fingers that had come before me. A dark-complexioned man in a dirty white apron approached and wordlessly held out a menu. Reflexively, I reached toward him. But then, seized by a sudden change of heart, I retreated hurriedly back outside. Pausing briefly, I took a final glance back before ducking into the car, relieved to rejoin the multitudes creeping along.
On the plane home a few days later, gaining altitude, the limitless Southern California sprawl receding as we broke through a layer of morning clouds, I was overcome by regret, by opportunity lost. I lamented my passivity, my impulse to flee, my failure to grab hold of the moment.
In my mind, I don’t rush out the door. I see myself accepting the menu from the scowling waiter, entering at a measured pace, taking in my surroundings. I am seated and I order the fish platter, though I know it’s far more than I can possibly eat by myself.
The food arrives and I spread cream cheese across a bagel. I inhale deeply, letting the anticipation linger, savoring the moment, as I had been taught to do.
In my mind, I am transported, awash in memory and nostalgia. In my mind, it is precisely as I want it to be.
The smoked fish platter for two – oily lox, cod, whitefish and sable, glistening pinks and milky silvers layered under bright, unfiltered lighting - appeared before us as if by magic, as if my father could simply summon this feast, these sublime delicacies he’d taught me to appreciate. I knew not to steal a taste until we were both ready to dig in. That was the rule. No sampling, no nibbling while we finished slathering our bagels thickly with cream cheese and prepared our plates. This ritual was part of any meal shared with my father and it was one I’d come to embrace – the long quiet moment of enhanced anticipation.
Between mouthfuls, we exchanged the latest we’d heard on the Dodgers, Rams and Lakers – a comfortable and easy topic. My father wanted to know how school was going and about any girls I might have taken an interest in. The conversation went in one direction. For all his surface garrulousness, my father was not a man inclined to reveal himself – certainly not to his son. I wouldn’t have known where to start and I wouldn’t have gotten far had I tried.
____________________
From an early age, I’d had an interest in drawing. On weekends, I could often be found bent over my sketchbook at the round table in our cheerful, yellow walled kitchen, the spindly branches of our backyard orange tree brushing against the wide, uncurtained window just above my eyeline. My project during this time was an elaborately conceived comic book series. I had set about writing and illustrating the worlds I envisioned so clearly in my head – masked superheroes and scaly monsters flying across the pages, through cities and jungles, battling for world domination.
I’d been at it for a while that Saturday morning when I heard my father padding heavily down the stairs, the flip-flapping of his well-worn slippers betraying his arrival. A moment later he was standing before me in his familiar checked bathrobe, thinning gray hair falling forward across a shadowy, unshaven face.
He extended the brunch invitation with a kind of impishness, one corner of his mouth lifting, as if we were about to get away with something secret and covert. There followed a quick side-eyed tilt of his chin in the direction of my mother, standing at the sink observing, up to her elbows in soapy water.
I was both surprised and happy to be asked. My father’s one-man law practice often kept him away, an absence the three of us – me and my younger brother and sister - felt most acutely during those times when fathers were expected to be family focused. He cobbled together his business with a colorful mix of small-time clients – b-level Hollywood strivers, divorcees, accident victims. Anyone suing or being sued was a candidate for his services. Though these characters had personality, few had much money, so my father needed a lot of them around at any one time to keep his practice viable. He was perpetually hustling, always on the lookout for the next case, seeking the big score. On Sundays, our family room became his auxiliary office, his baritone voice ringing through the house as he dictated letters and briefs into a recording machine. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I was aware of the microphone clicking on and off, the steady rhythm of him revising and editing in real time.
_____________________
We pushed away from the table and staggered toward the front door, empty dishes and greasy napkins scattered in our wake. Thick necked and round bellied, a one-time tight end on his small college football team, my father wasn’t supposed to indulge like this, certainly not after his first heart attack and the surgery and hospitalizations that followed. But, so long as he was away from the watchful eye of my mother, he seemed able to convince himself that what he ate would have no effect, like the dieter who believes calories don’t count if they are taken off someone else’s plate.
Gnawing thoughtfully on a toothpick, he paid the ancient cashier at the ancient cash register. We emerged onto the sidewalk, squinting in the piercing sunlight, the metallic, ashy LA smog settling onto my tongue and itching my eyes. I felt my father’s meaty palm come to rest gently between my thin shoulder blades as we strolled at a languid pace toward his two-seater German sports car parked along the curb a short distance away.
“I’m going to need to stop at the office,” he informed me as we settled into the soft bucket seats. He shifted gears, the engine roared and we shot into traffic. With a quick flick of his wrist, the gnarled toothpick caught the breeze and disappeared out the driver’s side window.
I might have groaned. A Saturday office visit held little appeal. It was boring. And there was no way of knowing how long it was going to take. Even as we neared the building, I continued to harbor the vague notion I might somehow be able to talk him out of it.
“Why do you have to work now?” I asked after a long silence, my pre-adolescent voice nasal and cracking, poutier than intended. “What do you have to do there?”
His wide shoulders lifted with an air of diffidence. “I don’t know… check the mail, pick up a few files.” He paused and added with a throaty chuckle, “Go to the bathroom.”
________________
The black mirrored tower, swooping up to the sky from the sprawling concrete plaza at its base, had the desolate feel of a ghost town. Eerily quiet, lobby lights dimmed, it was as if this silent, hulking shell was not destined to come alive again first thing Monday morning but would, instead, remain in its same torpid state, permanently and irreversibly abandoned.
Exiting the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor, I sensed my father’s energy transforming, keys and change jangling as his pace quickened. The suite where he worked housed perhaps a dozen attorneys, all solo practitioners. Unattached to LA’s deep pocketed firms, wholly reliant on themselves for their livelihoods, these lawyers could afford a prestigious address only by banding together and pooling resources. It was not until many years later that I came to fully appreciate the effort it took to appear more successful than you were.
We approached the thick wooden double doors - I took pride in seeing my father’s name among the others, lettered impressively in gold script – and pushed through. Once inside, my eye fell upon the handful of shadowy figures, my father’s office mates, floating like apparitions along the periphery of the deserted secretarial pool. Those few times I’d visited during the week these men had been in suits, hair slicked, freshly shaven. There was something that appeared off to me now, seeing them in their weekend attire, dressed down in polo shirts and khakis or unflattering, loose-fitting jeans that didn’t do much to conceal their spreading middle aged girth.
I struggled to keep up with my father’s long purposeful stride as he veered toward the receptionist’s desk and commenced pawing through the tall stack of office mail that had been dropped there. The envelopes flashed smoothly between his fingers, like a magician showing off his sleight of hand. Now and then he would take a long second to stare hard at a return address, as if unable to comprehend what could possibly have possessed that particular sender to write to him. These letters were tossed aside, unopened, to be dealt with at some other point.
He continued to make his way through the mail, pulling out what was his. But then something changed, I felt his bearing suddenly shift. I heard a sharp intake of air, a kind of rasping bark, followed by a few mumbled words I couldn’t make out. To my eye, the letter in his hand, so thin and unassuming, could have been easily overlooked. Yet, it was apparent this was the very thing he had been searching for, had been hoping to conjure up. I observed mutely, both mesmerized and unnerved, as he tore into it with an unrestrained ferocity I didn’t often see from him. He shook off the envelope, ripped and shredded, and let it drop away. What remained, clutched tightly between his fingers, was a small, rectangular paper, neatly folded in two. I followed his eyes as he took in the scrawled writing, before carefully smoothing it out and setting it onto an uncluttered corner of the desk. I knew what it meant, of course. I was old enough to understand that checks were money and money was a necessity.
Standing by his shoulder, I waited, caught up in the moment, silently rooting for more of these special envelopes to reveal themselves. But as he dug deeper into the stack, it became evident the bounty we were both wishing for was destined to remain unrealized. When he reached the last of the mail, he froze, as if perplexed. Stroking his lower lip with a thumb, he fingered the lone solitary check. Then he turned back to the big pile spilling across the desk, less orderly now that he’d so thoroughly rifled through it. For a moment, I feared he would start again from the beginning, an effort even I could see would be futile and pointless. Instead, he scooped up what there was and moved slowly and deliberately down the hall, head bowed, shoulders slumped, his wide, square face a troublesome shade of red.
Preoccupied and otherwise focused, he seemed to lose track of me, to forget I was there. I knew better than to follow him into his office, though he absent-mindedly left the door ajar, allowing me to loiter outside and eavesdrop as he picked up the phone and dialed. I had no idea who was on the other end. It wouldn’t have meant anything to me anyway. But it didn’t matter. The substance of the conversation was easy enough to follow; how much money was at hand, what had come in, who needed to be paid immediately, who could wait. At times, it seemed, my father was arguing with himself. I lingered by the door, through long stretches of silence, a desperate quiet punctuated by the rumble of his persistent throat clearing, the steady exhalation of cigarette smoke – another forbidden vice - drifting toward me.
At last, I grew restless. It was clear we weren’t leaving any time soon. I knew I could find paper in the cramped closet-like space where the Xerox machine sat, humming and blinking. I grabbed a handful and headed toward the conference room. Dropping into one of the cushy, high-backed chairs surrounding the long wooden table, I sensed I was being observed. One of the attorneys, short, balding, narrow eyes under bushy brows, was hovering in the doorway, framed by the rows of thick legal books resting in built-in shelves lining the walls.
“You’re Norm’s son,” I was told – a statement of fact, not a question. The man held my gaze for what felt like a long time, before sliding past with a half-smile. I heard his office door click, echoing from down the hall, and I was alone again.
I did my best to immerse myself in my art. Yet, after a short while, I had to abandon it. It was difficult to concentrate and I grew frustrated by the limited surface area I had to work with. I preferred expansive palettes. My elaborately drawn characters needed space. They were not to be contained by standard 8x11 paper.
I wandered through the secretarial pool, rows of IBM Selectric typewriters hibernating under snug black vinyl dust covers. Lifting picture frames off desks, I scrutinized images of spouses, kids, dogs, squinting into the camera in various familiar settings - Christmas, beach scenes, graduations. I tried to decipher the sloppy handwriting across a desk calendar, read the inscriptions on the insides of birthday cards, pocketed a pen that appeared particularly enticing. I pulled open drawers, drawn toward a deeper level of intimacy, curious to uncover what these unknown women kept hidden. I fingered lipsticks and scrunchies, packs of gum, tubes of lotions. At the bottom of a deskside file cabinet, I discovered a package of Oreos. Munching one, I palmed a second and continued my tour.
It was when I stumbled across an open box of tampons that my explorations abruptly came to a halt. With a furtive glance back toward the closed office doors across the way, I shut that drawer emphatically and scurried away sheepishly, ashamed at having crossed a line, at having committed such an egregious, if unintended, violation.
________________________
The drive home was somber, my father silent, lost in his own head. I gazed at the rows of palm trees lining the streets between curb and sidewalk as we made our way back up out of the city, toward the same brush covered canyons from which we’d descended earlier. The car radio, first classical music, then a ball game, filled the quiet between us. Stealing glimpses at my father as he steered us toward home, his expression distant and unreadable behind mirrored sunglasses, I contemplated what I had witnessed. Why this urgency to hunt for checks that he wouldn’t be able to deposit until Monday anyway? What did it mean that the day’s returns were so meager? I wanted to understand how it all fit together. I wanted a better sense of the state of his - of our - finances. I wanted to know whether I needed to worry. But I knew better. Any questions would have been rebuffed or, more deflating, met with stony silence. Fretting, hands clasped in my lap, I kept my focus on the passing scenery.
By the time we reached the familiar houses and yards of our neighborhood – late day shadows falling across bicycles carelessly dropped onto well-manicured, stubbornly green lawns - my father’s dark mood had lifted. My parents always had Saturday plans – a dinner reservation or a neighborhood cocktail party. My father had an ability to look ahead, to put earlier events, whatever had occurred up to that point, behind him. For me, on the other hand, the confusing emotions of the day took hold, leaving me edgy and off balance. Though unable to deconstruct the full implications behind what I’d experienced, it was the visceral nature, the intensity of the day, that had drained me. I began to wish I hadn’t gone with him at all, that I hadn’t seen what I’d seen. I would have preferred to remain ignorant, to retain my innocence about his world a while longer.
Only when the new school week started, and with it the resumption of my predictable, well-worn routine, did the anxiety consuming me finally began to ebb.
__________________
I had no way of knowing it then, but that Saturday would be the last brunch I would share with my father. It was not long after this that his health began to decline, first gradually and then all at once. He would be dead within a year.
After his passing, my mother was hit with debts and bills, many of which she’d had no idea even existed. Never much of a saver, my father left her with little to fall back on. She sold the only house we’d known and we moved into an apartment complex in the shadow of the freeway, fronted by dirt patches dotted with tufts of yellowed grass. Somehow, I made it through high school, applied to colleges, got grants. I left my mother and younger siblings behind, escaped to the other side of the country and never returned. Shortly after graduating as a graphic design major, I took a job with a large advertising agency. I have never had the desire to be my own boss with my own business, as my father had done. I prefer to be a cog in a company, with its reliable pay and steady benefits. I know this about myself.
________________
What we like to think of as security is no more than artifice, an illusion. Yet, as parents, we are compelled to perpetuate this illusion to our children as best we can, for as long as we can. When I look back on those years, I’m able to track how my own sense of security, the very thing a child most wants to believe in – needs to believe in – began to fall away. Though my father’s death was, of course, the final, irreversible blow, its steady erosion had started well before I had ever begun to grasp the gravity of his condition.
Recently, on one of my infrequent visits back to LA, I was driving west down Pico, inching through the late afternoon traffic, watching the sun slowly dip toward the Pacific. I wasn’t looking for the deli, or even thinking about it, and so was initially disoriented to see it appear suddenly, right there before me, seemingly unchanged by the years, half hidden between an Apple store and a Starbucks. In a rare bit of LA parking karma, there was an open spot just up the block. It had to be a sign, I thought, and I pulled over.
The acrid, biting tang of cured fish and rye bread, wafting out to the sidewalk, instantly stirred up those long-buried memories. I went through the glass entrance, smudged by the countless grimy fingers that had come before me. A dark-complexioned man in a dirty white apron approached and wordlessly held out a menu. Reflexively, I reached toward him. But then, seized by a sudden change of heart, I retreated hurriedly back outside. Pausing briefly, I took a final glance back before ducking into the car, relieved to rejoin the multitudes creeping along.
On the plane home a few days later, gaining altitude, the limitless Southern California sprawl receding as we broke through a layer of morning clouds, I was overcome by regret, by opportunity lost. I lamented my passivity, my impulse to flee, my failure to grab hold of the moment.
In my mind, I don’t rush out the door. I see myself accepting the menu from the scowling waiter, entering at a measured pace, taking in my surroundings. I am seated and I order the fish platter, though I know it’s far more than I can possibly eat by myself.
The food arrives and I spread cream cheese across a bagel. I inhale deeply, letting the anticipation linger, savoring the moment, as I had been taught to do.
In my mind, I am transported, awash in memory and nostalgia. In my mind, it is precisely as I want it to be.
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Alan Winnikoff’s adult contemporary novel, Not Sleeping, was published by Crowsnest Books in 2021. His novella, The Weekend, (Books To Go Now) was released in 2017. His short fiction has appeared in New Feathers Anthology, Bright Flash Literary Review, and After Dinner Conversation.
Winnikoff is the founder of a public relations and social media firm in New York City. He lives with his family in the Hudson Valley. |
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