Short Story: I Remember

I Remember is being published by the Victoria Cancer Coucil, and will be part of their Seize the Day multi-media exhibition in July/August, 2008.



I Remember

"Don't be angry at your father. He has a way, and maybe it's not the right way, but he loves you."

My grandfather, Dedushka Mikhail, takes my hand then, and we walk on in silence along St. Kilda beach. I am thinking about whether he is right, whether my father can love me and scream at me at the same time.

My grandfather, who knows my thoughts, squeezes my hand to say, “…of course.”

He gives me a nudge. He wants to see my eyes, if there are tears in them. He is my best friend. And at age 10, I believe that I am his, too.

~

It happened on a Tuesday morning. I don't remember breakfast. Only a feeling.

Everything is quiet. The way air gets sucked out of a room when a secret moves in.

My mother is pregnant, although I'd always wanted a dog. I am 12.

I go to school not knowing my grandfather is leaving me. I don't remember any classes. But when I come home, the air is still gone.

~

"You have to come pick me up, dad. Dad! Dad! You have to come pick me up!"

I must have called my grandfather’s house five, seven, ten times. I am calling again.

“Dad can't leave him now,” my mother keeps saying. "It's his father, sweetheart. It could be any moment."

By the time she’s told me, half a day has passed since they expected Dedushka’s last breath.

"But, I have to go there. I have to go there. I HAVE to go…”

~

When my father comes for me, his face isn’t moving. He doesn’t exactly look at me, but he opens the car door and I jump in and we drive.

In the living room, there are many people. I walk past them and I do not feel small, because my grandfather is waiting for me.

He is there in the bedroom, sleeping, but deeper. “You can say goodbye now,” my father says, and he leaves the room. I am alone with Dedushka.

~

I remember what happened. He is on the left side of the bed. His big hands are open to the sky, his right palm curled over like a cradle, shaped by the goodbyes of everyone in the next room.

I kneel down, I put my hand into that cradle, I bring my face close. “Dedushka…”

I don’t remember what I said.

Because he knows my thoughts, I cannot hide how much I want him to squeeze my hand. I thought we would.

I am looking at his face when he takes a deep breath.

I don’t remember how I told everyone that he was dead.

~

“How is Ilana dealing with it?”

I know I shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but no one is including me in conversations since Dedushka died.

“She’s so young. She doesn’t understand.”

“I DO understand!” I hear my own voice explode from the shadow of the stairs. “I’m NOT small anymore, he was M-Y-B-E-S-T-F-R-I-E-N-D…”

I run, like always.

~

“When Mikhail died, I waited and waited for him to exhale again,” my surviving grandfather tells me over thick pumpkin soup. I am 25 years old, and visiting Australia from my home in New York.

“When... wait, you were there?”

“Of course. Your father had gone out for a cigarette. I had to tell him…”

“But, where was I?”

“Your mother had already taken you home, in the morning. Really no place for a child…”

“Morning? But I came there after school…”

“What school? How could you go to school that day?”

~

“Can I sleep over at Dedushka Mikhail’s?”

My father’s parents lived on Ruskin Street. Their apartment used to smell like carpet, but then Dedushka got sick, and it started to smell like something that cannot be explained. “Chinese herbs,” my father said. My grandmother, Babushka, stirred a green-grey mixture over the stove.

“He’s very weak,” says my mother. “Let’s go there together.”

We sit in the living room and watch Gilligan’s Island. Dedushka teaches me the Hebrew alphabet with that puzzle, like always.

My mother reaches for her bag and looks at me. “Can I stay?” I almost whisper.

“Let her stay,” Babushka’s hand is on my hair.

She sleeps with me on the pull out couch. I don’t know why.

~

“Your mother was almost due,” my father is telling me. “We thought Dedushka would make it, but we found out just in case. It was a boy. We were going to tell him the next day, the day he never woke up...”

That same look comes over my father’s face. He doesn’t exactly look at me. His face doesn’t move.

“I told him we’d call his grandson Mikhail, but his eyes were closed.”

“He heard you, dad. He heard me, and he heard you.”

I realize how much I have always believed this. I am 32 years old.

“But dad, you don’t remember me being there at all? I called you, I begged you to come pick me up…”

“No, I don’t remember, and I don’t think you called, Ilana. I would have never left his side. Except for that cigarette… ”

~

I remember how my grandfather died. I know how he waited for me, how he wouldn't let go until I was there, holding his hand.

~

My father died while I smoked a cigarette. Three weeks later, I named my son after him. I missed my chance to tell him it was a boy.

~

My son-in-law’s father had cancer, and one morning he slipped away. I was with him when he died. I don’t think he knew I was there.

~

Dedushka, no one has forgotten. But what we remember tells a story of its own. The fingerprints of our longing, our pain, our guilt, are smudged over our memories.

We thought we had more time. But we were all there with you. And you heard us saying goodbye.

~

Didn’t you?

que sera sera

Clara pulls up a chair next to mine, and the circle is complete again. She is a very tall woman, and remains gracious despite her years. When she dances, she opens her arms wide as if to hug the entire room.

Seated now, her fingers work quickly to fix the crumples in her dress. Then they turn in onto themselves, chipping away at each other.

Suddenly, Clara turns to meet my eyes with a precise and concentrated gaze.

Is today Wednesday? she asks.
It’s Thursday.
So tomorrow is Friday?
Yes, tomorrow is Friday.
Well then, says Clara, throwing her head back and laughing wildly, GOOD SHABBES!!, GOOD SHABBES!!

Then she stops laughing, and seems lost in thought for a moment. She turns her wide shoulders back to the others in the circle. Some are asleep, or staring blankly at the air in front of them. Others are following the flying balloons with their eyes. The most able reach for them with their feet and hands.

HEY! Clara booms into the circle over the chorus of Toombalalaika. ARE WE GOING TO THE CASINO TODAY? CAN WE GO TO THE CASINO?

The balloons fall to the ground, and a long bright orange scarf comes out. We all hold on and push it through the air together. Clara loses interest and walks away down the hall.

Leila wakes up and finds an orange scarf in her hands. She searches for an explanation.

This is Tuesday morning Dance Therapy class in the Dementia Unit of Emmy Monash. I am doing some writing for them. This is research.

Every song that plays on the stereo is plucked from our youth, danced to at endless celebrations. Those who can sing along. The others sing too, you can tell, but they do not move.

Clara comes back and wants to dance with the man on my left. He can’t stand, so she holds his hands high and sways before him.

The music changes from Jewish folksongs to old classics. I am somewhat relieved. I did not want to cry.

A new song begins. All of a sudden, from the circle there rises a chorus of voices. First three of four, then six or seven, then, I can't believe it, they are all awake, and singing…

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother
What will I be?
Will I be pretty?
Will I be rich?
Here's what she said to me:

Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be, will be.
The future's not ours to see.
Que sera, sera.
What will be, will be...

When I grew up and fell in love
I asked my sweetheart
What lies ahead?
Will we have rainbows
Day after day?
Here's what my sweetheart said:

Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be, will be.
The future's not ours to see.
Que sera, sera.
What will be, will be.

My eyes burn. Clara opens her arms wide.

Short Story: A Yom Kippur Prayer

Written the morning of October 2, Yom Kippur, 2006.

A Yom Kippur Prayer

The bars on the synagogue windows are white. Ella wraps her hands around them making little fists, and brings her face close. She wants the light to fall on her face, so her husband, reciting prayers inside, can spot her if he lifts his eyes.

It is Yom Kippur in Herzilya, Israel, and the women are beginning to gather outside the small, almost make-shift synagogue in Gordon. They have walked here, each from their own home, flanked by a warm breeze and hundreds of ecstatic children on bicycles. This is the holiday all children in Israel wait for. With no cars on the streets, parents open their doors and the young pour out, roaming freely in pigtail gangs. Tonight, and until the shofar blows tomorrow at 6p.m., these children will rule the streets.

Secular, religious, confused or conflicted, no one drives their cars in Israel during Yom Kippur. Occasionally, but very occasionally, you’ll walk past an open window or Israel’s strange tilted shades, from which the heartless blue light of a television shines, accompanied by disembodied voices that have no place in this stretch of time in Israel. No place on this day.

But the streets are quiet. Not dead quiet. Alive quiet. You’d feel the need to talk in whispers if not for the streams of children, some not more than three-years old, some in their teens, speeding back and forth on their three-wheelers, two wheelers, roller blades, roller skates. The excitement of their liberation brings the night to life. And their entitlement to these streets, which they will carry with them their whole lives, can maybe, just maybe, be traced pack in part to the Yom Kippurs of their youth.

Pressed up against the white bars of the synagogue, Ella watches two solemn men slowly remove the holy scrolls of the torah from an old and lop-sided wooden cupboard. The chanting inside intensifies in volume and in depth. These scrolls are like a volume dial, she thinks, and as they move around the room the dial spins outwards, but also inwards, calling out words from the caves in men’s hearts which they have prepared for God, hoping He will enter, but that remain empty until then.

Ella searches her conscience, looking for her own prayer. It is Yom Kippur, and like all people she has much to ask forgiveness for. She searches, wanting to find the words that will bring meaning to her fast.

Etai, her husband, looks up. He sees her, he smiles, she makes a funny face, and he smiles more. She pretends she is trying to tear apart the bars with her little fists, and he laughs. The Torah passes him, and he lifts his talit from his shoulder, kisses it, and presses his kiss against the Torah. He looks at Ella again. She is proud of him. Proud of his little kiss of the Torah, of his knowledge and love of Jewish traditions, and for repeating the traditions of her grandfathers and their ancestors. He is carrying the flame in there, she thinks.

And me, she wonders. What am I doing?

Behind her the women are gathering. They come later than the men because they have no intention of praying. This synagogue is small, and there are only three rows of seats in the woman’s section, assembled in the back and separated from the men by a billowing white curtain.

The area reserved for women had been occupied hours earlier by the wives and daughters of the most religious men in the temple, who now huddle around the rabbi’s pulpit. There is a little standing room also, but how much more commitment it would be for the women outside to stand out the prayers; to watch the billowing cloth, and to read, or half-read, to feel interested, or half-interested, to experience a transformation, or only the dull sense of duty.

So the women gather outside. They have raised their families and loved their husbands. They have cooked every Pesach, Passover, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur meal for the last 30 years. They have knit their family together over bread and memories every Friday night for Shabbat (and the family has come because the food is good and the company is their blood). These women have listened to their sons’ and daughters’ stories from the military, and to their husband’s troubles at work, and the aches and pains of his body. They have tried to help their own brothers and sisters as they’ve struggle with money and the hardships of their own children. They’ve flown to New York and Australia to visit children who left home and made new ones, and they’ve fought back tears at airports as these children have promised they would come home, they would come home, they would come home soon.

And now it is Yom Kippur, and they have gathered outside the synagogue. Going inside to pray feels like too much. Maybe tomorrow night, before the blowing of the shofar. But tonight, they know exactly who they are, and the men inside are happy to know they wait for them in the courtyard.

The women gather outside. They collect into groups, and they gossip. They drag plastic chairs towards the most familiar faces, women whose children went to kindergarten with their own children, whose husbands work together, whose cousins work together. And with so much life in common, they gossip.

The children who have come with their mothers sit on the side and make fun of their parents. They youngest don’t see the fun in sitting at all, and collect into mini-gangs and chase each other around the courtyard, sometimes taunting each other, sometimes holding hands, releasing gleeful yelps and long drawn-out giggles.

These children know it is Yom Kippur, but they do not yet know the need to ask for forgiveness. They are forgiven each day for their wonderful, innocent little sins. And they are blessed also with the ability to forgive themselves.

Ella loosens her little fists, eases her grip on those white metal bars, and moves her head back into the shadows. The women have gathered behind her. The children run past her and around her feet. The men inside have stopped chanting and are praying quietly, rocking gently to and fro.

Ella turns to the women now filling the courtyard. Ruti, Etai’s mother is there. She smiles at Ella with easy kindness. She knows Ella loves her son.

Ella walks over to Ruti and takes a seat between her and a girl who passed through Ruti’s kindergarten 16-years ago. Ella’s Hebrew is improving, so here and there she can understand, here and there she can join in.

The women have gathered around her. She is one of them now. But what a long road it will be, she feels, before she has earned her sense of place among them; before she can share their peace of knowing that her family is grown and strong, that her marriage has survived because the right sacrifices were made, that the food of her kitchen was good, and that thousands of miles away her sons scold their own wives for not being enough like their mothers.

The women are gathering inside her now. Their voices all hushed like muffled heart beats, echoes against her ribs and stomach and throat, against the inside of her skin. Their fingers move inside her, like they have moved over endless bed sheets and washing lines, and dried perfect red tomatoes, and sliced cucumbers and onions, and poured vinegar over cabbage, and fried eggplant on the balcony. Their fingers move like they have moved over challa on Fridays, and though their children’s hair, and like they have moved when wiping away tears, and applying bandaids, and taking pain away by telling stories.

The women’s fingers move inside her, and turn their palms upwards with unspoken questions. Can you do what we have done? they ask. Can you make your heart so selfless as to be what we have been? Will you care for our sons as we have cared for our husbands? Will your sons love you as our sons love us?

The women have gathered inside her now. Ella’s eyes close, 30-years of moving fingers gathered in her heart. A prayer begins to form on her lips.

From the courtyard outside the synagogue in Herzilya, she turns her closed eyes to the sky, and asks forgiveness for all she knows she will never be.

Short Story: The Day That I Went Blind

Blindness always seemed to me a silent thing. The lights go out, and suddenly the world is quiet. Let me tell you, sometimes I wish it were true. So that I could drift off into oblivion, evaporate into perfect boredom and give as little as I receive in the minutes that do not matter, filling the days that mean nothing and feel like nothing and will be remembered as less than nothing because there is nothing whatsoever to remember them by.

But no. I hear socks slipping onto my feet and ask them to please, please try to whisper like they used to. Car engines outside my window rip through my darkness like elephants braying into my mind. My fork against my plate is like the wind chimes you have to put away for the winter. All music is unbearable because it makes my heart scream and that thing never shuts up once it gets started. And I live a block away from a fire station, and fire engines are like death, and many times I have wished for the crackling to come get me.

I do like memories though, and the sounds they make.

I like to remember casual glances. The casual glance down east 8th street at a silent sky turning purple and orange over spring’s greenest leaves (rustle, rustle). The casual glance across the bar revealing Saskia’s intense stare that says “please, get this guy away from me” (clink, clink). The casual glance over my shoulder that catches two beautiful brown eyes looking out at me over a math book (skin across a blanket).

The last person I could love with my eyes. This silence cannot be described.

I like to remember the color choices I used to make. Three years ago I spent 45 minutes in Pearl Paints squinting at 457 variations of white. I chose a creamy “Winter Wonderland” for my walls and liked how it contrasted with the nothin’ fancy white of my ceiling. I used to work a lot with Excel and liked to choose my background colors carefully. I would highlight a whole section and click a color square to make it pale blue, or bright yellow, or transitional gray. I often wish now that I could highlight the dark room around my head and click a button to make it fill with red (I’m in a hurry), fill with green (central park for lunch?), and fill with orange (don’t blow out the candles).

When I need a hit of color, apples are an easy thing to remember. The green of the granny smith I swear I can still see. Golden Delicious are a bit less yellow than a lemon, a bit more than lemon sorbet. But what kind of red were the apples from the farmer’s market? “Which are the sweetest in the world?” I asked him, and he said “There, those red ones.” That was last summer.

Other colors I want to forget as desperately as I want to remember. My hair was a rustic red tan and my skin an uncreamy white, my towel was pale blue for my body and ripe peach for my hair, and my CD player had a pale green LCD screen, my bed was terracotta red with a beige duvet and pillows like the 4 o’clock sky, and his body on those sheets was milk chocolate in the winter and coco gelato in the summer, and my toes were always painted in “Rummy,” and Sunday’s croissants were a welcoming tan, and homeless Patrick’s nails were gray and pink at the same time, and my brother’s eyes were bigger and bluer than anything I have ever seen.

Short Story: Secret Society

In one hour and forty minutes our lives had forked like a viper’s tongue.

Her fingers scraped across the floor as she hoisted books and bras into an oversized laundry bag meant for our stained sheets and intertwined underwear. On the bed, raped coat hangers and books bought arm in arm, now one ear-tag more mine than hers.

“Jesus Danny, your denial is unbearable,” she seethed, “You’re a human blackout.” Her muffled voice hissed inside the wardrobe: “You and your fucking secret society”

I am a member of the secret Tourette society. We are a motley crew of tapping, humming, rhyming, ticking, eye rolling individuals. We lick elevator doors and caress street lamps, and if you stand next to us on the subway with snow crystals glistening on your hair, we might lick your winter jacket and apologize desperately while tapping you three times on one shoulder, then three times on the other.

“Why are you giving up on me, Mel?” Hissss.

For one year she had been empathetic. But my ticks had become worse in the past months. I lost my job. I found Johnny Black.

You know what I miss? The freedom of a glance, corrected, controlled, diverted. I miss owning my thoughts like as children we owned our imaginations, exploratory but safe. I also miss having sex without mooing like that cow we saw in Costa Rica.

“Your true soul mate will find it endearing,” she said as she dragged her last suitcase to the elevator. Holy fucking shit, I thought. That bitch is right. “Intelligent, independent Journalist, 27, seeks open-minded 20-something for love and friendship. Only those who find mooing endearing need apply.”

I sit on the floor awaiting salvation. She would pause. She would apologize.

My ears and hands, prematurely nostalgic, tingled with the desire to relive every fixation of my infinitely perceptible imagination. To move her hair from my face in the morning. To hear the water falling off her in the shower.

It was time for me to say something. I looked up and saw an empty room, barren and without the seeds of tomorrow. For a moment her sighs were within earshot, but in the time it takes an elevator door to close, I was left alone with my Tourette.

I mooed involuntarily for three hours after those elevator doors closed. I finally went out to get a beer and when the new guy asked me for my ID I showed him my wrinkles and asked for a break. A fake. A rake. A cake. A steak. And fries. And beer. No, only the beer! Give me the goddamn beer! Mooooooo.

Every morning of every day sees the sun rise over another evolution in my tick-eroded personality. Tourette has a whore and that whore is change and change has bastardized my self-determination and left me strange. Two graduate degrees but change is all I got. The change in my ticks. The change in my wallet. And six empty beer bottles, and six empty nights since the elevator doors closed and left me alone.


Inspired by Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

===

i, memory

She wanted to hold me. All the time. She wanted to feed me. To dress me. To brush my hair and pet me. She wanted in some part of her she learned from movies and her own mother, to be a good influence in my life. To teach me about love and protection. But somehow, in a way neither her nor I understand, she became disgusted when I lay in a pool of blood and water between her legs, wrinkled and curled from my 9-month gestation, shrieking from the shock of passing through her dark body into a world of light. She became disgusted that day by the way she had been pinned down, her legs held apart, arms grounded, mouth stuffed, eyes left to gape.

Her memory had no choice but to reject with primal violence all reflections of that day of her life. But for all its trying, there I was, forcing her to remember. So she had no choice but to reject me, with all the primal violence of her fist and belt and cutting board. I felt that she loved me between welts. But in the end, I was the memory she couldn't kill.

=============================

(sorry to get a little dark kids. this is from a workshop on the short-short format. the method is that we look briefly at an image, and then write. no thinking. no pausing. just break through your inner-censor. just write. the image here was of a kid with no real expression on his face. don't know why this is where i took it. but then, that's the seduction of giving up control of your thoughts. you never know where you will end up.)

just thoughts, you know

bombs. bombs. bombs. so much terror now that it has touched all of us. it reaches right into our lives, and takes things.

feels like every week i am writing to someone somewhere to say... "hey, are you okay? i heard there was an explosion, i heard there might be more, are you okay? is everyone okay?" and i send off those emails now like any other, like a 'happy birthday', or 'loved your holiday pictures,' or 'i saw the funniest thing today...'

it's been there so long now that i can't remember when it was all new. when the terror first took hold. first on the outside, and then on the inside. before i started becoming numb.

staring into space today, i thought of a random piece i wrote in 2002 when i was just beginning to realize that i was affected. strange to read it now. i remember that day so clearly.

Just Thoughts, You Know

I got up just after you today, around 9.3O. I wanted to sleep but couldn’t help visualizing myself being strangled, you pinned down, forced to watch. In the end I crawled out of the blankets and stood in cold shower water and counted to 10 before making it hot.

Then I finished the coco pops, sorry. We’ll buy a bigger box next time.

Then I opened the curtains and read the paper, 180 dead in Bali, Saddam will use chemical weapons, sniper will kill again and watched people run from the rain.

I decided to join them. I needed a workout.

The gym was almost empty, which was perfect because the music seemed louder and I got the treadmill I like with a view onto Broadway and 38th street spontaneous scene creation in my mind: a man stops on Broadway, faces me, lobs a Molotov Cocktail straight at my window. I run, dodging rowing machines, rugby-dive forward propelled by apocalyptic boom, propelled by crumbling ceiling, flames licking my shoes, I don’t hear fire engines, people on the street yelling “jump! jump” jump and be paralyzed, wait and burn, “jump! jump!” inhuman screams from the inferno, spot flagpole intact perpendicular to gym wall, lunge for chain, chain is not tied, scream, falling fast, scream… and 40 minutes went by fast.

Then I went to Macy’s. God I hate that place. I came to get a Sheseido powder refill and left with 37 perfumed strips in my pocket. I also bought some deodorant because I know you hate it when I use yours. Well, you don’t hate it, it’s just that I always drop it and crack the lid. I did it again this morning to your new one, but don’t get angry because you’ve broken every mug I’ve ever bought. Anyway, now I have my own, it’s Eternity and you can use it whenever you want.

So it was 4 o’clock by then and I wanted to get home around the same time as you, so I ran through the rain and squeezed into the train doors. I looked around for a seat and saw one beside two middle-eastern guys a few feet to my right. One looked like you, just like you actually, but with a thick beard I had trouble persuading myself it was safe to sit down and, you would have laughed at me, I started imagining I had 30 seconds left to live, do you know I am afraid to shower when you aren’t home? I leave the door and curtain open, I watch the beads to see if they rattle and when the doors opened on 57th street I saw people talking to their dogs and buying gum and I felt like I’d been given another chance.

So I went to the supermarket… I thought I’d make lasagna for the first time. I’ll make it with eggplant, zucchini, but first I wanted coffee sleeping is hard, every night my dreams wait for me so they can crawl inside my head. Sometimes there’s murder, always there’s the possibility of it... and I’ll also use beef, we still have some in the freezer, lately my dreams don’t care if I’m asleep or awake and they take over my mind in the same way. No matter how many I shake off, there’s always another, there’s always more. And I thought I should try cooking with wine, like that Bourdeau you’re always drizzling over our chicken. So I went to the liquor store on 57th and got some red.

Anyway, I had a good day. And I know what you think… the subway thing was stupid. I know it’s stupid, I knew even then. But they were just thoughts, you know. Everyone has them.

Hey forget about it. Come here, give me a kiss. I died four times today.