06.10.04: New design. Got rid of the art and tape trading sections since I don't really trade
anymore. Lots of new poetry.
|
|
 |
My mother taps her fingernail gently on the glossy surface of a photograph. I sit beside her on the living room couch with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands and peer into the leather bound photo album in her lap. The paper in the album is black and old. It frames the black and white photos just right and my mother touches the pages delicately and reverently.
“This one was taken when I was four and my cousins were all at the apartment in Flushing for Pesach,” she explains.
I nod silently. In the photograph, my mother has buck teeth and the same frizzy hair, only it is black in the photo, and now it is completely grey.
“Is Grandpa in this one?” I ask.
“No. He was taking the picture,” she says. She points to another one. “This is of Grandma when I was five or six.”
I look. My grandmother’s hair is rich and black and her eyes are bright. Her high cheekbones are smooth and prominent. She’s smiling. This is not how I remember her. This is not how my mother remembers her either.
I was seven. My grandmother sat with perfect posture on the center cushion of our couch with my mother to the right of her and my grandfather to the left. On the wall behind my grandmother’s head was a framed print of Matisse’s Harmony In Red. I sat on the carpet drinking cranberry juice silently, looking up in their direction. Tears streamed down my grandmother’s face, and caught in her wrinkles. Her eyes were rimmed with scarlet. She took her glasses off. Then she put them back on and sniffled. My mother and grandmother were arguing about my cousin Aaron’s fiancé, who was pregnant.
“She’s a goy!” my grandmother said contemptuously. I looked at her. The gold star of David she wore around her neck glared.
“So what, Ma?” my mother asked.
“So what? They’re going to raise my grandson with… with crosses on the wall.”
“Aaron isn’t even totally Jewish, Ma. His mother is Christian.”
“He has only known her six months! A shikse!”
“You only knew dad for six months.”
“It was different then.”
“Come on, Ma.”
“You were not there.”
My mother continued arguing. She had not, in fact, been there. My grandmother was right about that, at least. However, my mother had never found any argument futile. My grandmother began sobbing in anger again and my mother handed her tissue after tissue and continued to argue. My grandfather looked bored. I just sat there, gripping my cup of juice, my back tensed.
My mother is cutting oranges in the kitchen. She slices them into quarters with a paring knife. I listen to the rhythm of the knife hitting the wooden cutting board. Finally she transfers all the slices to a plastic orange plate.
“It’s so hot,” I say. I open the refrigerator door and stand in front of it.
“Yeah. I’m shvitzing. Close the refrigerator, though. It’s letting all the cold air out,” my mother says.
I close the refrigerator and sit down at the table. There is an old photograph lying next to yesterday’s newspaper. I turn the photograph around so that it’s facing me. It is a color picture of my grandparents. My grandmother’s hair is frosted and my grandfather’s is white. My grandmother is wearing makeup and a long coat.
“When is this picture from?” I ask.
My mother comes over to the table, her hands still sticky with juice from the oranges. She looks over my shoulder at the picture.
“That’s from when Grandma and Grandpa went to China for their 50th anniversary. You were four,” my mother replies and smiles.
“Grandma is wearing makeup. I don’t remember her ever wearing any.”
My mother sighs and walks over to the sink. She turns the water on and puts her index and middle fingers under the faucet every few seconds to test the water temperature. She glances over at me.
“Grandpa used to beat her for it.”
“Oh,” I say. I get up and take an orange slice.
My grandmother, my mother, and I were sitting in the kitchen of my grandparents’ apartment. All the necessary scents of a Rosh Hashanah dinner permeated the apartment; there was chicken soup and mushroom barley soup simmering on the stove and brisket and potato kugel cooking in the oven. They mixed with the smell of my grandmother’s Marlboros at first, then finally overpowered it. I was pouring honey into a dish, watching the honey fold in on itself as it settled. My mother was slicing apples, and my grandmother was rolling matzah balls, the yellowish mixture getting on her hands.
“How do you like fourth grade?” my grandmother asked.
“It’s all right,” I said and shrugged.
“Your mother used to yell at me for her not being big. She said it was my fault,” my grandmother said. I gave my mother a confused look.
“Ma!” my mother exclaimed and blushed. “She’s talking about my breasts.”
“Oh,” I said.
My grandmother laughed and dropped a matzah ball on the yellow tile of the floor. A cockroach skittered across the tiles in the opposite corner by the oven.
“Get up now,” my mother said, pulling my green, fuzzy blanket back from my body.
“I’m not going to Hebrew school,” I mumbled, and pulled the blanket back over myself.
“You have to go.”
“Why should I? I don’t even believe in God.”
“What?!” my mother screamed.
“I don’t believe in God. It doesn’t even make any sense. There isn’t even any proof.”
“You’re eleven years old! How do you know? Oy vey, an atheist.”
“I never felt any different when I thought I did. It doesn’t even matter. God might exist, for all I know. I don’t even care,” I said.
However, in the end, she was my parent. I rolled over from my bed onto the floor, making a loud thud, still wrapped in my blanket. I felt the scratchiness of my light green carpet against my face turned my head to look at my mother staring down at me.
“What’s your grandmother going to say?” She shook her head.
My grandmother didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. She had Alzheimer’s disease and emphysema and no longer talked. Twice a week, my mother would take me to my grandmother’s apartment to visit. My grandfather had been moved out to an assisted living residence after trying to stab my grandmother with a letter opener. My mother hired an aide to look after my grandmother most of the day because she could not.
We knocked on the door and the aide answered.
“Hello Jean,” my mother said.
“How you doing?” Jean asked and let us in.
My grandmother sat in her living room in a steel wheelchair that glared under the incandescent lights in the apartment. Her eyes were docile and wandered around the room. She made no indication that she recognized me or my mother. The apartment smelled like disinfectant and broken vacuum cleaner belts.
“Hi, Grandma,” I said and patted her arm. Her skin was dry and papery. I could feel the folds and wrinkles with my fingertips. Around the loose skin on her neck hung her gold star of David, clean and bright.
We stayed all evening. I sat on the carpet and played solitaire, laying out the blue and white backed cards on the darker blue carpet and listening to my mother talk about all of the family news to my grandmother in a low soothing voice. I occasionally glanced up to smile at both of them.
For dinner, I ate a sandwich. My mother fed my grandmother from a baby food jar with a spoon, then took a napkin and wiped my grandmother’s mouth off.
We took a limousine to the funeral. I sat between my mother and my cousin Aaron. I was twelve. I gazed at the purple ceiling lights. They were the same as they had been three months earlier for my grandfather’s funeral. I looked across at my relatives sitting opposite us. They were all staring at their feet, not talking to one another. The snow fell relentlessly outside.
Before the funeral service, the Rabbi talked to the whole family. I did not listen. I shuffled towards the coffin when the rest of my family did. My mother leaned over her and kissed my grandmother. My grandmother’s wrinkled cheeks were rouged and her lips reddened. The gold star of David glistened around her neck, picking up color from the purple in the collar of her dress.
“Let’s go out into the hall, Molly,” my mother said gently.
It is three A.M. on the anniversary of my grandmother’s death. I cannot sleep. I creep down the stairs in the blackness of the house, holding the banister, careful not to fall. My feet stick to the wood floor of the downstairs.
The kitchen light is on and I hear my mother’s voice. I stand in the hallway, peering around the corner and see my mother sitting at the kitchen table with the leather bound photo album. She is gently turning the black pages and fingering the black and white photographs. A Yartzheit candle flickers in its glass container by her right arm.
“I’m sorry,” she says to the photos. They just smile back.
“Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei rabah, b’alma dee-v’rah…” I whisper. Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer. I turn around and walk back up the dark stairs.
|
|
|
