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Lisa doesn’t think that her father is in God’s hands. As far as she’s concerned, he’s in her hands, and as a matter of incredibly dumb fact, her hands aren’t nearly big enough. She’s fourteen. Her whole life story now is her mother’s death, but it’s not the same story as her father’s; it’s not even the same mother, who’s grown, for her father, out of a loving wife into a shining image of perfection, holy mother looking down from a heaven hardly even Jewish. Lisa knows better. She knows that if she worships that Mother, she’ll lose her true mother even worse. She closes her eyes and squeezes her father’s hand when he asks her to remember Mom. But she does it as an actress. It’s necessary if she is to take care of him, yet hold onto the mother she remembers. She has her own ways of keeping in touch. The pictures she paints, mostly watercolors on Bristol board, she paints for her mother. And when a painting’s done, it’s not just a gift, nor just a way of keeping in contact; she reads the watercolor as if it weren’t hers but her mother’s, a letter from her mother. When she practices violin it’s to her mother. She speaks to her mother before sleep. It’s not prayer; her mother isn’t God or an angel. But talking keeps Mom real. It’s hard to hold scraps of her real mother before they dissolve into her father’s version. Which makes her mad. But she knows, more and more, it’s her job to take care of him. When she hears him weeping, when she hears him talking to himself, it scares her. What might happen to him? She knows he’s taking pills to feel okay. Suppose|3| they stop working? Then what? Morning after morning she hopes he’ll begin to shave again, make his beard neat again, not sloppy. But the beard fills. There are times now when he simply blanks out and—say at the kitchen table—is hardly in the room at all, and it’s her job to retrieve him. “Dad? DAD? You want to hear something absolutely great? Dad? Listen to this.” Like a slow computer, his eyes come back. She invents a story about, oh, some idiot at school, until he asks, “Isn’t that the girl you told me about last week?” “Yes,” she says. “We call her Fabulous, because it’s her favorite word.” Stories about Fabulous. Lisa starts from real events but shapes them around an invented classmate so they have something to talk about. She needs to keep him in contact. When it’s time to sleep, she goes to his study. Almost every night since she was five, Adam and Lisa or Shira and Lisa have chanted “Shema Y’isra’el. . . .” Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. . . . And the prayers that follow: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. . . .” The music of the prayers is necessary to her, a sweetness. Now, she has to remind him. “Dad, is it time for the Bedtime Shema?” Not that he’s always spaced out. Usually, in fact, he wants to know everything about her day, about her friends, be part of everything about her life. And that’s exhausting. He’s more excited about her soccer games than she is. In fact, she stays on the team only because it seems to mean so much to him. She comforts him. She’s his life. She knows it. She doesn’t have to be smart to know; he says to her, “You, you’re my life.” She’s supposed to nod and dip her head and look touched. But when he says this, he’s pretending it’s an exaggeration, meaning simply, I love you. It’s not. It’s exactly not. But she can’t let on. Because he needs to believe that he’s taking care of her. And in a number of ways—be fair—he is. He provides their home, her clothes, drives her to Somerset School, cooks most of their meals. He’s a good cook. Some nights he’ll spend two hours cooking a meal, mid-week, for just the two of them. But she’s the provider of life in the| 27 Mitzvah Man...
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