Family Business

My father never once read my diary. I know this because I would place a small hair inside of it, from my own head, to see whether it had been disturbed. I had gotten the idea from reading about the Russian dissident poet Anna Akhmatova. She had done this to determine whether she was being spied on by informers. She almost certainly was, and knew it, and so she would make her friends memorize her poems and then she would burn the papers on which she had written them over a thin yellow flame. The ashes fell down to make a small white lump in an ashtray, a grave. She wrote perfect poems—her life’s work—in this way. The poems were carved inside of her, honed to perfection, clean and white as bone.

But my father was not a poet. My father was a cop. A detective. My mother had left him—us—when I was a baby, so it was just him and me. My mother had left us and sent my father a postcard that read Greetings from Florida! in green letters against a bright blue background framed by palm trees. The card was blank on the other side. She did not write again.

My bedroom window was framed on one side by the thick limbs of an ailanthus tree, a virulently invasive species in New York City. My father worked long and erratic hours as a detective—a homicide detective—and so I spent a lot of time on my own. In the 90s, this was not unusual, not the way it is now.

The day I made the discovery, my father slept in. I didn’t know when he had come home, I had fallen asleep the night before with the TV mumbling and the window open wide. Black flies flew in through the busted, fraying screen, along with the heat and the horns and the choking garbage smell of late August. In the stained white t-shirt I’d slept in, an oversized castoff of my father’s, I pulled a Stouffer’s mac and cheese from the freezer and knifed its plastic film cleanly down the belly before zapping it in the microwave. My bare feet stuck to the yellow linoleum floor and made a sucking sound each time I lifted them. I sat on the counter while I waited and swung my legs back and forth. They bumped against the white particle-board shelf beneath me, standard issue in city rentals.

Outside, Alfred was waking up too. I could hear the dull rumble of glass and aluminum being displaced, smothered by their plastic bag, as Alfred rolled over, stretched, moaned. Once, my father had filled our biggest silver pot with boiling water and opened the window and poured the boiling water out. Alfred screamed and swore even though my father had missed. Probably on purpose, I’d thought. Fuck off, Alfred. Go on, git. Ah, fuck you, Murphy, you fucking pig. Alfred, what’d I tell you about sleeping in the entry. Next time I’ll bring you downtown my fucking self, you fuck. He’d slammed the window shut and placed the pot back on the stove, on the back left burner. He flicked a kitchen towel over his shoulder, went back to shaping raw gray meat into balls. Dad’s meatballs were better than any restaurant’s, even the ones on Arthur Avenue where he would take me for dinner on rare evenings he was home.

Someone’s gotta clean this city up, he said to me. This city’s a goddamn hole. He smiled. Go set the table, kid.

The microwave beeped and I hopped back down to the sticky floor. I was careful to wipe away the yellow cheese splatters after I’d pulled out the tray. My father believed in cleanliness. He would clean between the bathroom tiles with an old toothbrush, body bowed and head bent, on his hands and knees. He was meticulous, precise. But he did not take any pride in it. Instead, it gave him the power of humility, an embattled righteousness.

I was small for my age and could still fit on the ledge beneath the window in the kitchen. I wedged myself in, bare feet against the wall, black plastic tray balanced on my knees. A pigeon landed on the fire escape beside me, its feathers snarled and filthy. Already, it was too hot. My t-shirt stuck to my back, wet with sweat.

My father came in with a jangle of keys and creaking leather. He was already dressed, gun in hip holster, buckling his belt. Morning, Banana. He leaned over, yawning, kissed my forehead and opened the door of the fridge in a single movement in our narrow galley kitchen. What’d I tell you about eating crap for breakfast? Get yourself something better for lunch, you hear? Take this. I opened my mouth to show him the chewed-up noodles in it and he threw a wad of crumpled singles at me, some falling to the floor. You’re a savage, he said. A delinquent. He smiled.

He pulled on his jacket even though his collared shirt was already ringed with damp beneath his arms. My father wore a suit every day. All the detectives did. They were very serious about it. And my father was particularly fastidious about his appearance. At least once a week, he would climb out onto the fire escape to buff his sleek, pointy shoes with a soft cloth and rub polish on them. He would set them carefully on an old towel beneath the window to let them dry overnight. They were impossibly clean, always.

Jacky’s picking me up today, I pulled a case. It’s gonna be a long one. Don’t wait up for me. And Anna Banana? He paused to ensure I was paying attention. Be good, huh? I looked up at him. Mrs. O’Connell was running her mouth to me again about kids hanging around the building outside, fucking around. Don’t give her reason to get in our business. All right? I nodded, my face burning. All right. Love you. Have a good day.

After cleanliness, my father’s next most important concern was “our business.” Mrs. O’Connell on the second floor was not the only busybody around, they were everywhere, thick as weeds. The schools were full of busybodies, and so was the doctor’s, the church, the deli on the corner. There were eyes everywhere. Prying. Watching you. As a detective, my father knew this better than anyone. Except, perhaps, for the criminals.

Our business is our business. Family business. We don’t let no one get involved in family business. You hear me? I always heard him. I always nodded, yeah Dad.

After my father had gone, locking all the locks on the door behind him, I took the screen out of the kitchen window and crawled out onto the fire escape, kicking at the unruly pigeon with my foot. Alfred had gone. On the corner, women leaned heavily against the bricks of buildings, fanning themselves with magazines. Even the cars crawling down Hudson were sluggish. It would be hours before any kids my age were out, except for the ones whose mothers screamed them out early to get them out of their hair. The sun wanted to bleach the city clean and clear, to scorch the people on the sidewalks below like a child sprinkling salt on a slug. As if it knew how much need there really was.

I pulled my t-shirt over my bare legs, pushing my toes in and out of the metal slats, already burning. I could smell myself, I could smell my sweat, my private animal scent. I pulled thin black hairs from my legs one by one. A black fly dove at me and I slapped it to death against the hot brick.

Back inside the apartment, tripping over my own feet and banging my hip against the edge of the fridge. My limbs had lengthened, and I was always banging into stuff, I couldn’t tell where my body ended and where our home began anymore. I pulled shorts and a top from the overstuffed drawers of my chipped white dresser. I shoved my feet into sneakers and my keys into my pocket.

My sneakers shrieked when they slapped against the stairs in the hallway outside the apartment. Two flights down was the second floor. Mrs. O’Connell’s apartment door was the first one on the left side of the hallway. She had a small square of mat in front of her door which she swept with a broom every day, sucking her teeth at the dirt she displaced there and the dirty people who’d let it accumulate. Beside her door was a large, ornately carved wooden cross. This she polished each day with a small cloth, fondling all its curves and edges until it was free of dust, naked and gleaming. I took a breath and bubbled spit on the mat, a fat wad I globbed up from deep in my chest. All city kids are asthmatic, polluted.

Down the last flight of stairs and out the door into a wall of heat and wet air, steam and hot sun that blurred my eyes like sleep.

Fucking Mrs. O’Connell. And her fat old mouth. The problem was not that she would see me out there too, doing god knows what with the other kids. The problem was that she wouldn’t. That was the problem for me, anyway. I headed north on Hudson, my dad’s crumpled bills in my pocket urging me on through the fug.

I was not popular. I did not know how to wear my hair. The year before, the pimples had come and my waist had gone. Vanished, poof, just like that. Would things have been easier for me if I’d had a mother? Maybe. Probably not if it were my mother, though. Better for my mother to be gone-gone versus there-but-gone, I imagined. Better her annihilating total absence than her cauterized attention, her mute and brutal indifference.

My eyes were always squinty from reading too much in bad light. I was clumsy. My clothes were atrocious. And my legs and armpits were unshaven. This, I believed, was the final straw, an offense too great to stand unpunished. Every girl in my grade had been shaving her legs for at least a year, more.

I turned right on 14th. The bus on the corner burped and jeered to a stop and fell to its knees. The women on the corner clambered in slowly, flip-flops slapping at their peeling heels. Inside the Genovese drugstore, I made my way through the narrow aisles to the plastic razors in their cases. There were pink ones with daisies on them and a whole row of shaving creams in round bottles, each a different scent. Powder-fresh. Tropical Breeze. Moonlit Path.

My father forbade me to shave my legs. Though I would be going into the ninth grade in just a few short weeks, he still would not budge. Shaving your legs is something only whores do, I knew. And I didn’t want to be a little whore, did I? A little slut? I did not. I knew about whores. I knew about what happened to them in the city, at night, in the dark, on the streets. I understood my father. He had told me enough about his work, about his cases, about what happened to women.

A fat man in a red collared shirt, an employee, circled the aisle nervously, wet blooming beneath his large breasts. I had lingered too long. I hissed at him and turned away, grabbed a bag of Cheetos from the next aisle and paid at the counter. When I stepped outside, the sun burned small red splatters into my eyes.

Back inside my building, I took the steps two at a time before pausing on the landing beside the first floor. Some mornings, if the husband had worked the night shift and was just getting home, you could hear the young couple in the corner apartment fucking. Harder, Daddy, harder. You like that, say you like it! I could hear the headboard banging against the wall.

Is that you there, Anna Murphy? What are you doing there?

Mrs. O’Connell’s shiny red hooked nose preceded her as she leaned down over the railing. I stomped up the stairs and made to pass her.

What are you doing there, sneaking about? She pulled her housecoat closer around her, an accusation.

Nothing.

Nuthin, she aped me. Why are you always creeping, sneaking around like that? She retreated into her apartment, closing the door nearly all the way, curled into it. The other kids don’t want to be playing with you, is it? I wouldn't either, would I? And you’d go running to your da over every little thing. Her teeth were gray, what ones were left. You know what they used to do to people like you back home? She sucked those gray teeth. And how your da lets you run wild, we didn’t used to do that with our girls. Shame on him. Go on, you motherless wretch. She slammed the door.

I ran up the stairs and slammed the door behind me. I was furious with shame, it pricked at me, itchy and insistent as a louse. She was a busybody. She was always sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. It was all Mrs. O’Connell’s fault, all of it.

I almost never entered my father’s bedroom. My father believed in privacy, demanded it. You don’t fuck with someone’s things. You don’t have the right. I didn’t leave the hairs inside my diary because I did not trust him. I left them there because I did. And each time that I looked and saw them lying there, undefiled, was a testament to him.

But I knew that he kept a spare set of keys to his car on his bureau in case of emergency. I grabbed the keys and walked through the apartment door, flew down each flight and out again into the street.

My father’s car was parked just down the block, I had seen it on my walk to the pharmacy. It was a detective’s car, a broad dark sedan, obtrusive and obvious by the fact of its determined unobtrusiveness, its anonymity.

My father kept his toolbox in the trunk of his car. I would need a hammer, the curved sharp talons at its end, to claw the cross from Mrs. O’Connell’s wall, to topple her idol. I would get her back for being a busybody. For reminding me of my own shame and humiliation, my failure, my friendlessness.

I tried each key before I finally came to it, the last one on the thick ring. It took several moments before I was able to get the angle right, before I heard the decisive pop of the lock.

Inside, the trunk was neat. There was a plastic tarp carefully shrouding the interior floor and the curving sides. My father did not like mess anywhere. Even the front of the car was spotless, no greasy brown take-out bags or half-empty paper cups of stale coffee like all the other cops. The toolbox was just where I thought it would be, its lid clasped securely shut. To the right, however, I was surprised to see the blue and white plastic Igloo cooler that my father filled with beers for him and sodas for me along with plastic containers of bait that we would take with us fishing out on Coney Island on occasional summer weekends. Perhaps my father was planning to surprise me with a trip, one last day at the ocean before high school began.

I reached inside the toolbox and found the hammer in its tray, exactly where it always was, unimpeachable in its proper row. I put my hand on the top of the trunk and went to pull it down. But first, I would just take a look. Had my father already gotten the sodas, filled the cooler? Maybe my father wanted to surprise me as early as today, this afternoon even.

I slid the cooler toward me, just an inch. It felt cool to my touch. I lifted the lid.

There, centered impeccably in the middle of the cooler, was a foot.

A white foot, expertly severed at the place where the ankle gave way to the obscene curve of calf, each toenail polished red. Flames burning over a grave of ice.

~

When they found me, I was shoeless in Washington Square Park. I had managed to keep hold of the hammer but had lost my shoes somewhere along the way. I did not remember then nor can I recall now where I had been, what I had done, all those hours out alone in the city.

It was night, dark. Given the throngs of people in the park at night, I cannot imagine how they would have spotted me. But they did. And when they guided me into their car with tender hands over my head, I did not fight or argue. They mumbled over the radio in the extravagantly careless, macho way of beat cops and told me that my father would be home soon, my father was on his way, not to worry. They were taking me home, I’d be home soon, nothing to worry about. Don’t worry.

I let myself in with my own keys. One of the officers offered to walk me upstairs but I waved him off. Still, he got out of the car and stood beside it and watched me climb the stoop and go into the building. When I looked out the kitchen window, I saw him standing there still.

I opened the refrigerator door. Closed it.

My father came in, all in a rush, one hand in his hair, the other reaching out for me. He pulled me to him roughly, kissed my head, pushed me away from him without letting go, without relinquishing his hold on me.

Anna. What the fuck? Are you all right? You all right, kid? He dragged a hand through his hair, the immaculately groomed flop of it. You scared the shit out of me. You all right?

I nodded, yeah Dad. I felt far away, like our apartment had gotten much bigger or I had gotten much smaller.

Are you hurt? I shook my head. No. Sit down. Sit. Come.

I followed him into the living room, he guided me to the armchair in the corner with the cracked brown leather and the ancient dusty moth-eaten afghan we kept on top of it. It scratched at my bare legs. He sat in one that matched it precisely, just across from me, a pair.

Can you tell me what happened? Where you were? I shook my head, no. Did someone hurt you? Touch you? No. Won’t tell me? Or can’t?

With effort, I realized I could still speak. I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything.

He ran his hand down over his face and back up over his chin, smooshing his lips and cheeks together, pinching his nose, exhaling. He looked down at the floor between his knees, nodded. Nodded again. Put his hands on his knees, flat.

Anna.

I looked up at him.

Kiddo, what were you doing with the hammer?

I was gonna knock down Mrs. O’Connell’s cross. Outside her door. For running her mouth.

My father’s eyes opened wide, and he sat back in his chair. He folded his arms behind his head and laughed silently, shaking his head back and forth. He sighed as if he’d had a good laugh—can you believe this kid, huh?

He smiled at me. Where did you get the hammer, Anna?

Over and through the din outside, over the horns and the buses and the cackling hairless teens, I heard Alfred dragging his bag of cans and bottles behind him, like chains scraping the sidewalk, ancient and dusty as the road to Calvary.

From the trunk. The trunk of your car.

He nodded. He knew that. Now he was sure, he knew that. And what else did you see in the car?

I shook my head. He nodded.

Anna, I want you to know. He smiled, friendly, white teeth catching the light from the streetlamp outside. Whatever you thought you saw. I nodded. Whatever you thought you saw. Someone needs to clean this city up. You know that? It’s my job, Anna. It’s my job to clean this city up. No one else is gonna do it. It’s all on me. It’s my life’s work, Anna. And it’s hard. It’s a hard job, Anna. It’s not an easy job. I work myself to the bone. To the bone! You know that. Barely get to see my own kid. Barely got a life. But we have a life here, Anna. You and me. And I’m doing my best. I do my goddamn best every day of this life. Nothing’s easy. Nothing comes easy in this life. You know that? You’re a smart kid, Anna. A good kid. I know you. You know I’m here for you. It’s just me and you, kid. We take care of us. You hear what I’m saying to you?

He had stood without realizing it, it seemed. He sat. He stood again. Held his arms out wide at either side, palms facing out, beseeching. Vulnerable.

I nodded.

~

I did well in high school, one of the elite specialized high schools in the city. Grades had never been a problem for me. School had never been a problem. That came easy, and since I wasn’t winning any popularity contests, I didn’t have to worry about a social life distracting me.

I mostly kept to myself. I was friendly with a couple of girls, also quiet, also friendless aside from one another, and we got along fine, bobbing silently down the long halls like buoys, looking out for one another.

I applied to college on the West Coast and when I was accepted to UC Berkeley on a full ride, my father took me out to dinner at our old place on Arthur Avenue, bought a bottle of Prosecco to have with our meatballs. His eyes teared up when he toasted me, and he wrapped an arm around the grizzled owner, pointing and weeping, That’s my girl. That’s my smart girl, you know.

I still live in Berkeley. I found that the West Coast suits me. The sun is gentle, August does not stink of garbage. There is a garden in the back of my house with a lemon tree. I fill baskets with yellow lemons and even put some out in front of my house for the neighbors. That’s something people here do.

I still mostly keep to myself. Mind my own business. I’ve not once set foot back in New York. I don’t have visitors. I don’t see many people. I have no idea what’s inside me. What’s been carved there.

I changed my name after college. I didn’t feel like Anna suited me anymore. Changed my last name too. I have a window seat now that looks out over the garden, where I can see the birds fly up to a feeder I hung, and I can watch them for hours, their feathers soft and smooth and sleek. The lemons smell sweet, their scent wafts in on breezes, frequent and generous.

Beneath the lemon tree is where I buried the hammer. You never know when you might need one. And I can take care of myself just fine.

As far as I know, my father is out there still. Down on his hands and knees, scouring the city clean, carving it down to its bones.