Rough Draft: A Memoir

by Katy Tur

My father was a perpetual, irrepressible instructor. A certified know-it-all to some, but when I was a kid, an oracle to me.

Then he did what he’d seen done in his own home, what he’d do again over the next twenty-five years in ours, until the marriage was over and the business was broken and their lives were ruined. He hit her. A slap across the face, not a fist, not this time. He claimed it was to calm her down, reset her nerves like a bucket of cold water. He’d claim he’d seen it in

the movies. He’d claim it was a bad joke. To this day my mom will say she was angry with him about the slap, but that she also believed his explanation. He was kidding, she says.

Journalism is the world’s best career for avoiding your own problems.

Inside the theater, the air smelled like old New York, like afternoon newspapers, your wife cooking dinner, and cocktails on a tray. It also smelled like television, or the making of television, anyway, like decades of heavy wiring and dust and electricity.

felt like Harris had opened a door by calling me, but instead of walking through it, I banged my head against the frame. I was so flat, so lifeless. I was Morse code to her technicolor rainbow. She must have noticed it too because she begged off the call pretty quickly.

Instead, I did what I’ve done so many times in my life, and especially the past five years. I balled up the entire disgusting day and put it into a little compartment for later. I have a warehouse or two somewhere in my brain full of these balls of trauma delayed, feelings denied.