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he’s been driving for a long time and he somehow has picked up the wrong hitchhiker.
    And I say,
Daddy, it’s me.
    For three weeks straight, I arrive at school at least three hours late, and every time it happens, Patti, the teacher, just laughs. My dad does his imitation of Donald Duck for me and the other kids, and then he is gone.
    Â 
    The first time I see any therapist—and there have been so many first times—there are certain routine questions we must go through. There is the usual medical trivia: Are you allergic to penicillin? Whom do we contact in an emergency? Are you on any drugs? And then there’s all the family stuff: not the anecdotal kind that is the bulk of therapy itself, but things like, Is there any history of depression in your family? At first, I always forget about everyone else, about my cousins who tried to kill themselves and about my great grandmother who died in an asylum and about my grandfather the alcoholic and about my grandmother with the terrible melancholia and about my father who was obviously very fucked up—I always forget about all these people and say,
I’m the only one.
It’s not an act. I just honestly don’t think of any of these people as really related to me because they’re all on my dad’s side, and I hardly feel like he’s in my family.
    Pamela, my first cousin, tried to end it all by slitting her wrists, or at least so the story goes. I remember hearing about all the blood and mess, but it was years later when my dad mentioned the suicide attempt to me, adding that her brother had also tried, but with drugs I think, and by then the indelible impression I had always had of my cousins as rather ordinary bland blond kids was too well developed for the information to register. Besides, almost nothing my father told me ever really stuck because I was convinced that he was nuts himself.
    I could just as easily dismiss the thing about my great grandmother dying in the asylum as insignificant. After all, back then they put women away for wanting to work for a living or for asking for a divorce. Or she could have had tuberculosis or typhoid, besides. And it was hard to know that there was anything particularly wrong with my grandfather beyond being old and sickly because that’s all he was by the time I came along. It wasn’t until he died and we didn’t go to the funeral that my dad told me what a mean drunk he was, that he beat my grandmother, and that one night my dad broke his father’s ribs trying to kill him (who knows if any of this is true). To me, Grandpa Saul was just a docile old man. And Grandma Dorothy, well, she surely must have had an awful life, but I knew her only as the old lady who made chicken soup for me on the rare occasions my father took me to visit (he, of course, would spend the time asleep in a lounge chair in front of the television set) her little apartment full of fake wood furniture, pile carpet, impressionistic wallpaper, with a view of the Cyclone roller coaster in Coney Island. My grandmother always seemed like any other oversolicitous, doting Jewish mother to me.
    And my dad—I just thought he was really tired.
    It never occurred to me that any of this was a problem.
    But now, years later, I must admit that unhappiness seems to run in the family, there have been so many generations of it on my dad’s side that I wonder why someone doesn’t just—I don’t know how—put a stop to it. I don’t know why someone doesn’t throw a big black umbrella over our heads and pull us all in out of the rain.
    So I mention the family history of depression to every new therapist when it finally occurs to me, and they always feel obligated to point out the genetic component of mental illness. But then I’ll tell them a little bit about my immediate family background, and sooner or later, as the narrative continues, they’re sure to say something like,
No wonder