They had married at nineteen and twenty, right before our father was drafted. That way, our father thought, if he were killed in action, at least our mother would get his benefits. After the war, when he was still serving in Italy, he wrote long, loving letters to our mother that planned out their future together, including the number of children they would have: at least four, possibly five.    

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     There were supposed to be at least twice as many of us. There were supposed to be at least two more after me, the youngest, but after I was born our mother miscarried, and then something must have happened.​​

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     Even after our father got his three degrees on the GI Bill and had a solid university job, he still felt the wanderlust he had first experienced after the war, when he stayed in Italy and did a little traveling before coming home. So every summer from the time I was little, we used to drive for days to pitch a tent somewhere in the middle of nowhere: Glacier, the Tetons, Aspen, the Badlands, Bar Harbor, the Gaspé Peninsula. Places that are famous now, but at the time were well-kept secrets known only to a few fringe families like mine who liked to explore wide-open spaces. We kids would alternately love each other and hate each other in the wide-open territory of the back seat of a 1956 dark green Chevy Bel Air four-door sedan. It was the days before the advent of seat belts, so we were free to roam in a space that was small but felt enormous. We’d play game shows of our own devising, winning faux washing machines or dishwashers. A big deal in those days when housewives were mopey drudges and men were too busy being providers to be bothered with the little details of helping out at home. Our mother was nervous about driving, so every now and then she’d admonish us not to disturb “the driver,” aka our father, while he was chauffeuring us around, especially in the patina of twilight when our mother insisted that all the accidents happened. He loved driving, though, and especially loved nothing more than to torture our mother in the wide-open spaces out West by pulling out his harmonica and steering with his knees while playing his favorites like St. James Infirmary Blues. 

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     She’d yell, “Cecil! Cecil!” at him, in her Newark-tinged Philly lilt. “You’re setting a bad example for the kids!” We’d laugh, because he was the unconventional father who didn’t follow the rules, after all. He’d even tried to smuggle a few bottles of tequila under the front seats when we’d driven home to Cleveland from the Yucatán one summer. Surely such an unorthodox father wouldn’t do us wrong by steering us off the road, no matter how many times our mother got mad and pretended to sulk. Still, he’d put the harmonica aside and hold her hand and they’d exchange that smoochy-eyed look that told us all was right with the adult world again. And then she’d smile and say, “Okay, Cec, but both hands on the wheel,” and he’d dutifully put both hands on the wheel to make her happy, but he’d still have a smile on his face, and her hand would be on his knee and she’d still have a smile like his on her face, and we kids would settle back for another couple hundred miles or so until one or both of us would start a chorus of “Can we stop soon? I’m bored.”

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     When we finally got to where we were going for the day, we’d pitch the tent. First we’d find the flattest space, then clear it of brush and pebbles, then we’d lay down a tarp. Both of us kids had to stand in our own corners, our father manned the center pole, and our mother supervised from a safe distance. We’d knock in the stakes and pull the heavy, khaki canvas tent taut. Our father would find a safe, sturdy tree branch where we could store the food high up and away from bears. In those days, you had to expect that bears would pay you a nocturnal visit at least once a trip. If there was a sighting, all your neighbors would grab their pots and pans and start clanging, hoping to scare the bear away before any major damage was done. Nobody really considered maulings then, because it was the safe and magical sixties. But many’s the time we’d be setting the picnic table for lunch and some lean bear would amble by not ten feet away and take a swipe out of someone else’s tent. Or in the middle of the night a bear would shred open someone’s aluminum case full of food like it was made out of cardboard, just because they made the mistake of storing highly desirable cookies in their food safe.​​

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     Anyway, we’d pitch the tent, I would gather kindling, my sister would set up the sleeping bags and luggage, and our mother would cook some compilation of canned goods that normally we’d turn our noses up at. After a few rounds of gin rummy using matchsticks for money, our mother would win the big pot like she always did. We’d take turns brushing our teeth and going to the far-off toilet in the dark with the ribbed silver flashlight, get in our pajamas, and then it would be kerosene lights out by 9:30.

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     Then came the glorious nighttime, when there would arise a quiet undercurrent of exhalations from the nearby tents, and the snores, gasps, and careful, controlled breathing floating in our own briny family tent air. Maybe a few thrashing feet as someone tried to turn a mummified body in its tight, hunting-motif Sears flannel sleeping bag, all of which I’ve inherited and now sit morosely in my storage unit in the basement, huddled together like tightly rolled green cephalopods. Then stillness. The vibrating blackness would become unbearable in my half sleep, leading to childish considerations of the inevitability of death, although I was still young enough to think I was the only person who might yet beat it. Doling out escalating pacts with a golden god, whittling elaborate escape plans, selling my soul for a song. Then inevitably I’d have to pee in the big jar we always kept just beyond the tent flap for such emergencies, and the spell would be broken. Outside, there was nothing but the soft, bloated black ceiling of the night sky.

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     The car was our refuge. Left behind was our bigoted neighborhood, where the geography of religion ostracized our singular tiny household of Jews. Even as a child, I saw it coming, prophet to my own exclusion. The boy up the block chasing me home with a knife. The kid across the street aiming snowballs packed around rocks at my head. My sister defending me from the jeerers calling me hairy. Someone in my homeroom accusing me of stealing our father’s ubiquitous khaki army hat. All this coincided with a particularly rocky time in our parents’ marriage, when our mother frequently threatened to move back to her mother’s home in Philly—to be honest, that home didn’t even exist anymore. So our mother would really be moving in with her sister, brother-in-law, and their three kids in the tiny split-level house in a subdivision where they had generously taken in our grandmother, and our mother wouldn’t even have a room to call her own. She would have nowhere to bed down, perhaps a temporary mat in the rec room a few stairs down from the kitchen, or she could share her own mother’s double bed. Sometimes she got as far as pulling a trim, scuffed tan plaid suitcase down from the high shelf in the closet before our father quietly talked her out of going anywhere. Her fantasy was washing her hands of us, leaving us all behind like so much flotsam and jetsam, wiping the slate clean while conveniently forgetting that she had lived with our father her entire adult life since she first married him at nineteen, with a brief interruption for a few years while he served in WWII. She’d worked as a secretary in a pretzel factory while he went to college and then got his PhD on the GI bill. For the rest of her life, she felt inferior because she only had a high school degree.  

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     But in the car, while we were driving hypnotically from state to state each summer, none of that mattered. Nobody was abandoning anyone else, nobody was discussing scientific theory, nobody was getting yanked from their rightful god-given place. We were stuck together like a chronic infection, something molecular and genetic that we couldn’t quite shake. Even though we stopped at regular intervals to see massive reddened gouges in the earth or glacier-topped mountain ranges, a green concrete diplodocus or a Coney Island wiener stand shaped like a hot dog nestled in a thirty-foot, mustard-slathered bun, it was noticeable that each day we spent in each other’s company was drearier than the day before. We were lost in a map of the American West, our first-generation parents firmly clutching their hard-won US status close as we drove from one attraction to the next, as if the skittish assimilation that had ultimately eluded them could somehow rub off on us.

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     It was the era of analog maps, those appealing foldable gifts of thick paper that fit neatly into a rectangle, bookended by attractive colorful cardboard that shouted out destinations in assertive fonts: Michigan! Montana! Maine! We were simple American tourists, and our maps and thick guidebooks were our tickets to access everything the country had on tap. From the guidebooks we could coax a good story from anywhere we went, something that transformed a stagnant town into a glorious lifelong memory.

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     The chief map reader was our mother, who I now realize, through the gauze of time, probably had a topographical disorientation, something I’ve inherited, because like her, I have trouble distinguishing right from left and north from south and cannot read a map to save my life (Thank God for the nice lady on Google who soothingly helps you find your way.). Half of the time our mother held the map misaligned to our actual direction. Our father was usually patient, reaching over after a glance to reorient the roadmap for her while he steered. But one day, we had driven hundreds of miles in the wrong direction in beautiful but deserted terrain and it was late in the day. No motels dotted the landscape as they do now, and there were no cell phones or even phone booths. Being lost meant the difference between sleeping in our crowded car in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road, and finding our campground where we had a reservation for the night.

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     Our father realized we were in trouble. Our mother, defensive, started to cry. Our father swerved to a quick stop on the shoulder. Our mother pretended to turn the map the right way, completely flummoxed. Our father impatiently swatted our mother’s hands away as he grabbed the map to quickly figure out where we were.

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     “You hit me!” our mother wailed. Those words settled over the car like a dark storm cloud smeared forever onto the horizon of our family dynamic. For our father, lost time and hungry kids were paramount. For our mother, the canyon between our father’s credentialed brilliance and her paltry high school diploma always hovered over every rift, real or imagined. 

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     “I’m sorry,” our father said, still ticked off but aware of the audience in the back seat. “It’s just, we have so many miles to make up now.” 

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     Our mother sulked the rest of the way. Our father also didn’t speak, either still annoyed or contrite, it was hard to tell which. We didn’t get to where we needed to be until very late that night. Because we had been driving so long, alone in the dark, in complete silence, on an invisible road through brooding, almost unworldly mountains, we never stopped to pull out the camping stove to make dinner. None of us complained, because our parents’ marriage suddenly felt so tenuous.

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     It took many days for our mother to return to an almost even keel with our father. We, on the other hand, felt the ramifications of the imponderable rupture reverberating throughout our little family long after that trip. The ground had opened and threatened to swallow us up. Just the threat of it happening again was enough. But right then we were trapped in the car, hurtling like tourists through a forced adventure. How small we all felt in our separate corners. If there had been a full-size mirror in our vehicle, the faces we would have seen would no longer have been our own. A family is infinitely elastic, until it is not. It was the beginning of the end of my childhood.​