Imaginary Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

stumbled through transliterations of blessings and songs and sneaked out at night to smoke with the boys. I didn't see the aunts again for eleven years. They stayed in touch, thoughchatty letters on pastel stationery arrived several times a year.
Debs continued to live in seclusion on her houseboat. She became involved with the Humane Society, gave up meat, and adopted a variety of dogs and cats. Ava gave up Judaism, a faith she claimed only barely to have embraced, for the teachings of an Indian avatar named Meher Baba. When I was about fifteen she sent us a photograph of him with his finger to his lips. Her letter said he'd taken a vow of silence more than twenty years before and that she was going to India to live in an ashram with his followers.
I wasn't too surprised to learn in the mid-60s that Ava and her husband were living in a religious commune near Orlando and that Debs, who'd been hitting the bottle again, had been persuaded to join them.
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I like to tell my friends that I was the poster child for my familythe one with something wrong that no one could fix. After

 

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Fran married, she moved into a split-level home ten minutes away from my parents and had four children in quick succession. I tried not to hold it against her that my parents never complained about her, that she was my mother's idea of a model daughter. My own interactions with my father and mother over the following years went something like this.
"Have you met any nice boys lately? What about that boy Maury introduced you to? What does his father do? Is he going to college?"
" What boy?"
"Maury's friend."
"Maury who? "
"Your Aunt Florence thinks you should go to college here in town. What's wrong with George Washington University?"
"It's here in town."
"She hates me. My own daughter hates me."
My brilliant report cards failed to impress them. In my mother's eyes, I was valuable cargo waiting to be unloaded. Then her marriage mode would set in: invitations, napkins, and matchbook covers with a red embossed heart and my name intertwined with the name of someone nice, someone they approved of, someone Jewish. Caterer. Photographer. Bridesmaids' gowns. Ushers' handkerchiefs. Dyed silk pumps. And me, dressed up in white, an offering to the same God my mother served at her donor luncheons.
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At last I graduated from high school and won a scholarship to a college in New England, a Yankee after all, my father complained. I didn't come home for the summers. After college, I went to Europe for a year. I threaded my way across the continent on a Eurail pass, picked grapes in Italy, and worked as a secretary in London. I pictured my relatives speaking of me the way they used to speak of the Florida branchwith the slightly disapproving nonchalance reserved for the inexplicable. My parents sent me a couple of hundred dollars every month, an emotional blackmail I gladly extorted knowing they felt helplessexcept financiallyto influence my life.
It was a beautiful fall day when I picked up my mother's letter from general delivery in Edinburgh, where I was visiting friends from college. General delivery was the only address I used that whole year;

 

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it gave me the illusion that I never had to settle down, that I was beyond the reach of family. The letter was marked URGENT and explained that Fran was very sick. It ended with a plea for me to telephone as soon as possible.
"She had a tumor on her spine," my mother said when I finally reached her. "We think it came from a bad fall when she took the kids roller skating. They removed it," she whispered. "It was malignant.''
The word "cancer" filled my mind, hordes of fiddler crabs with their pincers upraised like the ones I'd chased every summer as a child along Biscayne Bay. I tried to imagine Fran with a life-threatening disease but could only produce the image of her with baby after baby in the maternity ward of the hospital. "Will she be all right?" I