Fade Away

Chapter 27

Myron stopped at the traffic light that divided South Livingston Avenue and the JFK Parkway. This particular intersection had barely changed in the past thirty years. The familiar brick facade of Nero’s Restaurant was on his right. It had originally been Jimmy Johnson’s Steak House, but that had to be at least twenty-five years ago. The same Gulf station occupied another corner, a small firehouse another, undeveloped land on the last.

He turned onto Hobart Gap Road. The Bolitar family had first moved to Livingston when Myron was six weeks old. Little had changed in comparison to the rest of the world. The familiarity of seeing the same sights over so many years was less comforting now than numbing. You didn’t notice anything. You looked but you never saw.

As he turned up the same street where his dad had first taught him to ride that two-wheeler with a Batman reflector on the back, he tried to pay true heed to the homes that had surrounded him all of his life. There had been changes, of course, but in his mind it was still 1970. He and his parents still referred to the neighboring homes by their original owners, as though they were Southern plantations. The Rackins, for example, hadn’t lived in the Rackin House for over a decade. Myron didn’t know anymore who lived in the Kirschner Place or the Roth House or the Parkers’. Like the Bolitars, the Rackins and the Kirschners and the rest had moved in when the construction was new, when you could still see some remnants of the Schnectman farm, when Livingston was considered the boonies, as far away from New York City at twenty-five miles as western Pennsylvania. The Rackins and the Kirschners and the Roths had lived a big chunk of their lives here. They’d moved in with infant children, raised them, taught them how to ride bicycles on the same streets Myron had learned on, sent them to Burnet Hill elementary school, then Heritage Junior High, finally Livingston High School. The kids had gone off to college, visiting only on college breaks. Not long after, wedding invitations went out. A few started displaying photos of grandchildren, shaking their heads in disbelief at how time flew. Eventually the Rackins and the Kirschners and the Roths felt out of place. This town designed to raise kids held nothing for them anymore. Their familiar homes suddenly felt too big and too empty, so they put them on the market and sold them to new young families with infant children who would too soon go off to Burnet Hill elementary school, then Heritage Junior High, and finally Livingston High School.

Life, Myron decided, was not that different from one of those depressing life insurance commercials.

Some neighborhood old-timers had managed to hang on. You could usually tell which houses belonged to them because—in spite of the fact that the children were grown—they had built additions and nice porches and kept their lawns well groomed. The Brauns and the Goldsteins were two who had done just that. And of course, Al and Ellen Bolitar.

Myron pulled his Ford Taurus into the driveway, his headlights sweeping across the front yard like searchlights during a prison break. He parked up on the blacktop not far from the basketball hoop. He turned off the ignition. For a moment he just stared at the basket. An image of his father lifting him so he could reach the basket appeared before him. If the image had come from memory or imagination, he could not say. Nor did it matter.

As he moved toward the house, outside lights came on via a motion detector. Though the detectors had been installed three years ago, they were still a source of unbridled awe for his parents, who considered this technological advance on a par with the discovery of fire. When the motion detectors were first put up, Mom and Dad spent blissful hours in disbelief testing the mechanism, seeing if they could duck under its eye or walk superslowly so that the detector would not sense them. Sometimes in life, it’s the simple pleasures.

His parents were sitting in the kitchen. When he entered, they both quickly pretended they were doing something.

“Hi,” he said.

They looked at him with tilted heads and too-concerned eyes. “Hi, sweetheart,” Mom said.

“Hi, Myron,” Dad said.

“You’re back from Europe early,” Myron said.

Both heads nodded like they were guilty of a crime. Mom said, “We wanted to see you play.” She said it gently, like she was walking on thin ice with a blowtorch.

“So how was your trip?” Myron asked.

“Wonderful,” Dad said.

“Marvelous,” Mom added. “The food they served was just terrific.”

“Small portions though,” Dad said.

“What do you mean, small portions?” Mom snapped.

“I’m just commenting, Ellen. The food was good, but the portions were small.”

“What, did you measure it or something? What do you mean small?”

“I know a small portion when I see one. These were small.”

“Small. Like he needs larger portions. The man eats like a horse. It wouldn’t kill you to lose ten pounds, Al.”

“Me? I’m not getting heavy.”

“Oh no? Your pants are getting so tight you’d think you were starring in a dance movie.”

Dad winked at her. “You didn’t seem to have any problem taking them off on the trip.”

“Al!” she shrieked, but there was a smile there too. “In front of your own child! What’s wrong with you?”

Dad looked at Myron, arms spread. “We were in Venice,” he said by way of explanation. “Rome.”

“Say no more,” Myron said. “Please.”

They laughed. When it died out his mother spoke in a hushed tone.

“You okay, sweetheart?”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I thought you did some good things out there,” Dad said. “You hit TC for a couple of nice passes on the post. Real nice passes. You showed smarts.”

Count on Dad to find the silver lining. “I bit the big one,” Myron said.

Dad gave a staunch head shake and said, “You think I’m saying this just to make you feel good?”

“I know you’re saying this just to make me feel good.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dad said. “It never mattered. You know that.”

Myron nodded. He did know. He had witnessed pushy fathers all his life, men who tried to live hollow dreams through their offspring, forcing their sons to carry a burden they themselves could never carry. But not his father. Never his father. Al Bolitar had never needed to fill his son with grandiose stories of his athletic prowess. He never pushed him, possessing the wondrous ability to appear almost indifferent while making it clear he cared intensely. Yes, this was a direct contradiction—sort of a detached attachment—but somehow Dad pulled it off. Sadly, it was unusual for Myron’s generation to admit to such wonderment. His generation had remained undefined—shoehorned between the Beat Generation of Woodstock and the Generation X of MTV, too young when thirtysomething had ruled the airwaves, too old now for Beverly Hills, 90210, or Melrose Place. Mostly, it seemed to Myron, he was part of the Blame Generation, where life was a series of reactions and counterreactions. In the same way those pushy fathers put everything on their sons, the sons came right back and blamed their future failures on the fathers. His generation had been taught to look back and pinpoint exact moments when their parents had ruined their lives. Myron never did. If he looked back—if he studied his parents’ past feats—it was only to try to unravel their secret before he had children of his own.

“I know what it looked like tonight,” he said, “but I really don’t feel that bad.”

Mom sniffled. “We know.” Her eyes were red. She sniffled again.

“You’re not crying over—”

She shook her head. “You’ve grown up. I know that. But when you ran out on the court again like that, for the first time in so long…”

Her voice died out. Dad looked away. The three of them were all the same. They were drawn to nostalgia like starlets to paparazzi.

Myron waited until he was sure his voice would be clear. “Jessica wants me to move in with her,” he said.