Bridge of Sighs

happened to them? The supermarkets. Can’t you see, Lou? Corner stores are going the way of milk in bottles.”
    Even I would’ve known better than to say what my father said next. Worse still was the silence that stretched between them, until he finally said, “Milk’s better in bottles.”
    Then, to my surprise, it was my mother who was crying. “Oh, Lou, Lou,” she sobbed. “Can’t you see it doesn’t matter what
you
think? People have decided. They want supermarkets. They want milk in cartons. Who cares which is better? When people want the wrong thing, they still want it. Usually they want the wrong thing more than the right thing. You’ve been outvoted.”
    It was only then, when she put her head on her forearms and continued to cry, that my father finally acknowledged I was standing there. “I bought Ikey Lubin’s,” he explained, unnecessarily. I must’ve looked frightened, because he added, “I don’t want you to worry about it neither. I don’t want you to worry about nothing.”
             
     
    L OOKING BACK, I think my father’s purchase of Ikey Lubin’s was a greater seismic event for our family than moving from Berman Court to the East End. Here again my mother and I remember things differently. As she recalls it, Ikey Lubin’s was just one more thing she had to resign herself to, one more circumstance over which she had neither control nor choice. My own recollection is that my father’s announcement set in motion a struggle that played itself out over many months, during which my mother was far from resigned. Right from the start she refused to enter the store, ever. What was done might be done, but she made it clear that Ikey’s was my father’s folly, not hers, and she wouldn’t dream of giving up her bookkeeping accounts. I was allowed to help out after school if I wanted to, on either Saturday or Sunday but not both. Yes, she’d do the books, but only if my father brought home the cash register receipts, vendors’ bills and other documents she’d need. Otherwise, he was on his own. That he should’ve taken such a step without consulting her was…she didn’t even know the word for it.
    For many weeks my mother seemed to vacillate between depression and dark, inarticulate rage. In the grip of the first, it was as if she could see into the future and knew that what was marching inexorably toward us in the end couldn’t be prevented, or that she and my father would have to see things the same way and share the same fears, something they’d never done. Other times her grim, mute fatalism turned into fury, and she would fire angry questions at him, one after another. “What
possessed
you? What is
wrong
with you? Is it so difficult to just
look
at things, Lou, and see them for what they are? Why do you always have to…? Why must you be so…?”
    Here words would fail her, and when they did, the rage would slowly leak away. My father never argued back, just stood there waiting—silent, patient, hangdog, shrugging his shoulders, as if all this was as mysterious to him as it was to her. Eventually it became clear to my mother that he didn’t intend to speak, ever again, if necessary. When I happened to be present, she’d study me, too, but if she expected me to take up my father’s argument, to give voice to whatever he couldn’t find words for, she was sorely mistaken. Then her eyes would fill and she’d look through the blinds at the darkening street outside, at Ikey Lubin’s across the intersection, as if the only way she could control her emotions was to pretend that we were no longer in the room with her.
    I was always glad when her rage morphed into grief, because I couldn’t bear those despairing, unfinished questions. “Lou, Lou, why do you always have to…? Why must you be so…?” Try as I might, I couldn’t help feeling they were addressed as much to me as to my father. Didn’t we share the same name? Didn’t I always see things with the same optimism? Was I not, as Gabriel Mock Junior had pointed out, his spitting image? If something was wrong with him, wasn’t I equally to blame? Worse, I couldn’t banish the fear that someday she’d finish one of those why-do-you-always-have-to questions she was forever trying to articulate and that when she did it would mean the end of our family. It was as if she knew, too, knew full well, that what she was about to say had the power to atomize us, and getting halfway there was terrifying