“I’m not leaving them. I’m finding myself,” Mom says. “Do I have to remind you they have a father to take care of them while I’m gone?”
“I’m not happy about this,” Dad says.
“I don’t need you to be happy,” Mom says. “I need you to take some responsibility.”
“Don’t talk to me about responsibility,” Dad says. “You won’t like what I have to say.”
“What do you have to say?”
Dad glances towards us.
“Not now,” he says.
“Now is a perfect time,” Mom says. “Let’s get it all out in the open.”
“I’m not the one who destroyed this family. That’s all I’m saying.”
“What do you mean?” I say. I was there the day the divorce papers showed up. Divorce papers from Dad. “What’s he talking about, Mom?”
Mom doesn’t answer.
“That’s all I’m saying,” Dad repeats, looking at Mom.
There’s silence in the room. Sweet Caroline sniffles and rubs her nose with her sleeve.
I look towards Mom, still waiting for an answer. None comes.
“Fine,” Dad says. “You need to go off on some insane escapade to India? I can take care of the kids for a little while. I’ll move into the house.”
“Not the house,” Mom says. “I’m subletting the house out to the yoga center.”
“No!” Sweet Caroline says.
“Why would you sublet?” Dad says.
“Because I need the income, Joseph, and you can’t give it to me.”
“But we can’t live at Dad’s place,” Sweet Caroline says. “It’s too small.”
“Where will they stay?” Dad says. “I’ve got my workshop.”
“You can’t clean out a bedroom for your own children?”
“I’ve only got two of them,” Dad says.
“In India, two full families could live in that apartment,” Mom says.
“That’s why I don’t live in India!” Dad says. “And I don’t crap in a hole in the ground, or whatever they do over there.”
Sweet Caroline slides over and pulls me down the hall, all the way into her bedroom. Mom and Dad continue to argue behind us.
Sweet Caroline closes her door.
“We’re dead,” she says.
She looks at me, fear in her eyes. She’s not often afraid, so it freaks me out a little.
“I was right about Mom,” I say. “You see that now.”
“You were right,” she says.
It’s sad that the one time I get my sister to admit I’m right is the one time I don’t want to be.
“She doesn’t even care about my bat mitzvah,” Sweet Caroline says.
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” I say, remembering my own bar mitzvah after the divorce. The two sides of our family were so far apart and angry, Herschel said I should have hired Henry Kissinger as a party planner.
“I’ll kill myself if we have to live at Dad’s,” she says.
She slumps down on her bed, biting savagely at a nail.
The Israeli rhythmic gymnastics team looks down at her, a pyramid of smiles. “I thought you liked Dad.”
“I love him. But I don’t want to live with him. That would be terrible.”
“What’s so terrible?”
“Who’s going to do the laundry? Who will buy us clothes?”
“Dad, I guess.”
“Come on, Sanskrit. He’s been wearing the same khakis since 2003.”
Mom might be distracted, but at least she keeps the house running. Dad’s apartment looks like a scene from a hoarding show. Zadie’s house was the same way, only with more expensive junk. They say that’s common among survivors. They lost everything once, so they refuse to throw anything away now.
“He’s not a good father, Sanskrit. You know this.”
She pulls off a chunk of nail, wincing as she draws blood.
I say, “You never talk like that. I wasn’t sure we were even living in the same family.”
“I don’t mean all the time,” Sweet Caroline says. “He’s a good weekend father when he only has to have fun with us and make sure we’re not kidnapped. But he’s not good with the other stuff.”
“Neither is Mom,” I say.
“That’s true,” Sweet Caroline says. “But we know how to work around her.”
Dad shouts in the other room, “My place is too small!”
“So get a job and buy a bigger place!” Mom says.
I wince. It’s painful to hear them cutting at each other like this. It reminds me of why they got divorced in the first place. At least why I thought they got divorced. Now I’m not so sure.
Sweet Caroline is looking at a gymnastics poster, tracing the pattern of a girl’s leotard.
“What are we going to do?” she says.
“I think I have a plan,” I say.
Sweet Caroline looks at me, hopeful for the first time.
“Maybe we can keep Mom here,” I say.
“You can’t convince her,” Sweet Caroline says.
“You know how Mom gets when she makes up her mind about something.”
“I don’t need to convince her. I need to convince him.”
“Dad?”
“The guru.”
“I want to talk man-to-man.”
The guru is sitting on a meditation mat when I say it. He’s alone in the small yoga room in the back of the Center. He doesn’t open his eyes or even flinch. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was expecting me.
“An excellent idea,” he says.
“In private,” I say, and I close the door behind me.
This is what I told Sweet Caroline I’d do. Tell the guru to back off and leave Mom alone. It’s probably what I should have done in the first place, but I was too afraid.
“We will talk,” the guru says with his eyes still closed, “but I think of it a little differently. I see us less as man-to-man, and more as spiritual being to spiritual being.”
“I’m not interested in word games,” I say. “I talked to my mom. I know you’re planning to take her away.”
“Sanskrit. I like to say your name. It gives me joy. As it does your mother.”
“She likes to say my name?”
“She gave you the name, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, but she’s usually frustrated when she says it.”
“It was her gift of love at your birth. A name is the first and greatest gift we give one another.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“What else would a name be?” the guru says. “A curse.”
Like the Zuckerman name. Like growing up as the grandchild of a survivor and everything you do is supposed to prove that God had a reason for allowing the Zuckerman line to survive. But what if God had nothing to do with it? What if it was just luck? Or fate?
Or nothing at all. What if it happened just because?
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I say. “I want to talk about you taking my mother away.”
“You’re wrong about that,” he says.
“You’re not going to India together?”
“We are going on a journey. That’s true. What’s not true is that I’m taking her. She’s choosing to go.”
“She has children.”
“I realize this.”
“But you have no problem letting her abandon us.”
“I don’t understand. You have a father, don’t you?”
“More or less.”
“So you are not abandoned.”
“We’re abandoned by her. Not by him.”
“I see. It feels like abandonment to you,” he says.
“What would it feel like if your mother left you when you were a kid?”
“My mother died at an early age.”
“Oh.”
I sit down on the mat in front of the guru. “So you lived with your father?” I say.
He shakes his head.
“I did not know him, Sanskrit.”