Sea of Tranquility

• July 1969 •

My mother met Eddie Lipper in the Catskills on July 4, 1969, and married him in Las Vegas sixteen days later. She claimed they were pronounced man and wife at the exact moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I didn't believe her, but I was twelve years old that summer and would have welcomed just about any man into our lives. My mother was thirty-five, and I know the same was true for her. We were a family of four: me; my mother, Ruth; my twin sister, Sarah; and our younger brother, Seamus—a name recommended to my mother by our neighbor Mary Murphy from County Cork. My name is Seth. Seth Shapiro. Ruth said she selected all of our names because she wanted our initials to represent how strongly we were connected: SSSSSS. She called us her chain of love. She was right, of course — the four of us were deeply and painfully bound together — but over time I have come to see these letters as an ideogram for silence.

• • •

My parents met at NYU. My mother was an undergraduate there, and my father was in the medical school. Throughout her teenaged years Ruth had been overweight and mentally unstable. At sixteen she was hospitalized after an especially bad psychotic episode. She regressed into an infantile state, blathering in baby babble and covering herself in her own feces. Four years later, she had lost fifty pounds and learned to keep herself calm with cigarettes and tranquilizers. For her second date with my father, she brought him home to Long Island for a Sabbath dinner. He proposed one month later. By the fifth year of their marriage, my mother had given birth to three children. In the seventh year of their marriage, my father made an important medical discovery that gilded his career. His photograph appeared in a Life magazine story about one hundred outstanding young Americans. He was an overnight star and left my mother for a young woman from France who had come to Boston to spend a year as a postdoc in his lab. My mother was twenty-nine.

At that time we were living in a small house in a Boston suburb. After the divorce, my mother moved us to a four-room apartment in New Jersey in order to be closer to her family. She began dating not long after we moved. I'm sure she was in no condition to look for another husband, but her sister and father viewed my mother's divorce as a shame, an embarrassment. I felt exactly the same. Not having a father around, I was as self-conscious as someone with two noses. My mother was usually fixed up with men by her older sister, Rhoda—a depressing assortment of widowers or odd, bland, thoroughly second-rate men. Still, I viewed every man she went out with as a potential father, and I watched her get ready for her dates with hope and amazement. She always enlisted my help in fastening her girdle-and-brassiere contraption. I didn't like this job, but I was the only one with the strength to do it. I didn't like how the thing felt so stiff and heavy with metal components. I didn't like the columns of flesh that formed down the length of my mother's back as I placed each clasp in its eyelet. I needed all my strength for the last couple of clasps, by which point her back would look like a Torah scroll. Sometimes when she called for my help I would catch my mother admiring her breasts in the mirror. They were pendant shaped and enormous, mapped with bluish veins beneath skin so pink and shiny that it appeared translucent. She would cup them, lift them, lower them, then say with a sigh, "Jesus, I have great breasts."

The next morning I would pump her for news about her date, but she was always indifferent. One man might have been too old, another not well educated enough for her. She would give me these reports as she studied a crossword puzzle through a haze of cigarette smoke. The real problem, we both knew, was that any man was too far a step down from my father—a handsome, vital, successful doctor.

One weekend, Rhoda and her husband went to a Catskills resort. Eddie was the recreation director, and Rhoda handed him Ruth's phone number. Two weeks later, my mother drove up to the Catskills on a Friday night to meet him. My brother, sister, and I stayed with Rhoda and her family. I loved Rhoda's ranch house. When I opened her refrigerator, I was dazzled by the bounty of bright fruit—cherries, grapes, peaches, oranges, and bowls of melon balls. The pantry was neatly lined with enough food to last for five years. They had owned a color television since 1965, built right into the brick wall of their family room. Their finished basement was furnished with ping-pong and billiard tables, and the closets were brimming with toys. Someday, I vowed, I would live this way.

Excerpted from A Stranger on the Planet by Adam Schwartz Copyright © 2011 by Adam Schwartz. Excerpted by permission of Soho Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.