nonfiction

Angela Palm

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AVERAGES

by Angela Palm

At The River I have a new job and a car payment I didn’t ask for. I am sixteen. I am forcibly learning “the value of a dollar” and missing out on Friday night boy-girl trips to Pizza Hut with kids who wear letterman jackets. It is 1997. I have my own checkbook with pink and blue checks and pastel flowers, checks for a baby, linked to a joint account with my mother’s name on it. On Saturday mornings I drive my car—a four-door Ford sedan fit for a family, with a sparkling champagne paint job—to the bank and deposit my paycheck, along with babysitting money, when I have some. At my new job, which is just down the road from where I live in a tiny town tucked along the bank of a dirty river, a woman named Toni is canned for giving blow jobs in the men’s bathroom. Another woman named Lonnie tells me while we’re rolling silverware that her new thing is screwing her boyfriend while he’s driving, straddling his lap and watching the road get smaller and faster behind the truck. “You have to try it. It’s a rush,” she tells me as she slips a buck from someone else’s tip into her apron. I assume she means with my own boyfriend—not hers.

At The River I bus tables, carry empty glasses, lug trash, churn the film on the salad dressings, answer the phone in a voice that sounds like my mother’s, manage the waiting list, watch the Kankakee River freeze over into big white plates of ice and snow while I wash the restaurant’s windows, keep waitresses from crying or fighting, inhale second-hand smoke, and smell like au jus. I eat whatever nobody ordered—steamed vegetables, fried cheese balls, popcorn shrimp, onion rings, and sometimes steak, if I’m lucky. I bring baskets of bread to the boyfriend who broke up with me without telling me why four months earlier when he comes in to eat with his family. They barely speak to me—only to say, Water please. More napkins. He won’t even glance at me, and I stare at him so that his cowardice doesn’t go unnoticed and so I don’t shatter from the feeling of being invisible. His family has two newly adopted Korean daughters in tow, which is alarming because there are already five children in the family, and no one introduces me. I’m also surprised because they don’t seem the adopting type; they have never exuded warmth. No one seems to remember, here in the restaurant, that I spent last Christmas with them or that they gave me an expensive porcelain doll with angel wings, which is still propped up on a metal stand on the table next to my bed. She has blonde hair as fake as mine and my same blue eyes. A doll. I am still astounded when I look at her, with her tailored, tiny golden dress, quietly mocking me. I believe this gift was chosen for me as something to aspire to. Should I want to continue dating their son, I ought to discard the resale bell bottoms and men’s polyester pants, the 1950s housedresses and the flowing gypsy skirts I’ve sewn myself, and become more like her: demure, mute, polished. She is a symbol of something I can’t yet name, but unnerving all the same. I re-tie my apron, wrapping its long black strings round and round my waist in the bathroom, and wash my hands, wash my hands, wash my hands, my mood ring a deep midnight blue, turning my middle finger green around the edges of its cheap band.

At The River I work harder and faster than anyone because it feels good to use my body and to make everything new and clean, to put everything in its proper place. I try to make a game of it by bettering my wait-time estimates and by doing so much of the work myself that I make the other bussers look lazy. And they are, mostly. In the dry storage room, which is really a narrow hallway lined with unstable metal shelves and boxes, a dishwasher named Josh catches me alone, pulling reams of white napkins from the top shelf, and puts his hand up my shirt and kisses me even though I think he’s disgusting and not at all attractive, and it doesn’t feel good. It takes me longer than it should to push him away with both hands. Still, I never say “no,” though I think it the whole time. Later, he follows me to my car when my shift ends and tries to get me to go to a party with him, and for once, I’m glad my parents are too strict for that to be a possibility.

At The River my father usually sits at the bar when I’m working, and other times, too. At home he barely speaks to me, and when he isn’t working in the yard or watching TV, he swings unpredictably between being a ghost of himself and a battle-ready brute with the vengeance of a wrecking ball. But when he’s in the bar he squeezes me close and tells everyone about my good grades and that I’ve received an honorable mention in a painting contest for the National Duck Stamp, which has something to do with hunting. We have the watercolor picture framed and hung in our hallway at home. In it, a sleek male wood duck floats in a pond, water rings spreading out from its richly colored plumage. It was easy enough to do. I copied it from a picture in a book, visually dismantling the duck into its core shapes and allowing myself to see that brown is actually comprised of grays, greens, yellows, blacks, blues, purples, and whites. Later, this painting will earn me an academic scholarship to a nearby college—the only one I ever consider in my listless search. You’re so smart, everyone insists. And it’s true enough; I have the grades to prove it, which have come with little effort. I tell them I just want to be average. In the fall, I’ll pack the duck painting in a flat cardboard box, and bring it with me to college and later to several apartments, evidence of my having crossed over from once place to another, but I’ll never hang it up and I’ll never paint again.

At The River I am seven and my babysitter walks me and my brother over to buy cigarettes with money she stole from the old water jug my parents save change in for vacation. By vacation, they mean drive to Maryland to see my father’s parents and siblings, who eat dumplings in gravy with a dozen eggs every day. They go to church and spend their days watching the dog pee because they think it’s funny. They talk and talk about church, but they never pray. They barely speak to me at all. Sometimes we get to go fishing or play cards, and that is the only time it is fun. The rest of the time I read Ramona or play Classic Football, punching all of the buttons in arbitrary patterns at arbitrary speeds until the little red lights move and beep and I score.

At The River I am sixteen, and a woman named Meg who is forty and pregnant asks me to babysit her 8-year-old son while she does drugs. She doesn’t say that’s why, but I can tell when she comes home, hours later than the time she promised, that it’s drugs. She’s gone away in the eyes and barely on her feet. She never mentions the little boy’s name, not before she leaves and not after she returns, but tells me on her way out the door that there is mac and cheese if I want. The boy is already in bed; his face twitches in the moonlight with sleep, and I’d like to hold him, name him, make him meatloaf with green beans and chocolate chip cookies for dessert. But all I do is dab my cheeks with Meg’s Cover Girl powder in the bathroom and wait, playing house in a broken home. The boy never even knows I was there, layering him with extra blankets, watching over him and thinking about how I could save him. The baby is born with Down’s syndrome, and everyone at The River loves him and touches his chubby hands when Meg brings him in, but all I can think is, What will I do with two babies? I never stop thinking about how I’ll save them, nor do I understand why I feel inclined to be held responsible.

At The River I am fifteen, and don’t yet have the car that I don’t want, but it is coming: a gift, I’m told, which is confusing because I am solely responsible for repaying the $12,000 loan it takes to get it. And so I work, which I don’t mind. I read on my work breaks, and everyone is mad because I take the full fifteen minutes. I tell them that because I don’t smoke and everyone else takes smoke breaks every hour that it’s only fair. I read books about witchcraft, the Louisiana bayous, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and the Apartheid, and books by V.C. Andrews and Stephen King and Thomas Hardy and Mary Higgins Clarke and anything by the Bronte sisters and anything Oprah says to read.

At The River I am fifteen and a boy with long hair whom I’ve never met sits down with me during my lunch break. He buys my meal at my discounted employee rate. He tells me I’m beautiful and that he’d like to sit there all day until I’m done working. “And then what?” I ask. He says take me to a real dinner. I think he might be crazy, but I also love his candor and it’s not every day that someone says I’m pretty, so I’m an easy sell. He talks me into meeting him in the parking lot on my break, where I find him sitting on the hood of a blue car with a guitar, waiting for me. He sings to me in broad daylight, puts my name into the refrain. I don’t know what to say, but I’m happy, if a little humiliated. He doesn’t tell me his name, doesn’t try to kiss or touch me. Just a smile and a goodbye. I never see him again. He is proof of something, but I’m not sure what.

At The River I am twelve and I order steak fries and Pepsi with my little brother in the bar. It is summertime, noon, and our parents are at work. A few men sit at the bar drinking amber liquid from small glasses. We use half a glass bottle of Heinz ketchup and I tell the bartender to put the bill on my dad’s tab, that he’ll be in later, I’m sure of it. And she does, and he is.

At The River I am sixteen, the youngest person on the floor staff, so people are inclined to teach me things. Betty is the head waitress, with fluffy white hair and tiny feet and red lipstick. She tells me about her sweet old husband and her sweet old Cadillac. She calls me honey and promotes me to Head Busser, a title for which there is no pay increase, just more work. She teaches me to put on lipstick the right way, which means outside the lines of my already plump lips, in order to attract a man. I note that it is not unlike the showy purple plume of the male wood duck’s crested head, that we are not far from our animal instincts, which no one but me finds to be an interesting point. One night while we’re loading empties into the glass washer, Betty tells me that AIDS exists because black women can’t keep their knees together. I tell her she’s ignorant and a bigot, and she is never kind to me again. She tries to have me fired, and nobody says I’m right. I go home in tears and in shock, and I’m too embarrassed to speak of it to anyone.

At The River my friend’s dad comes in drunk and orders prime rib. He eats the monstrous cut of meat with his bare hands and dirty nails, happily slopping it into the au jus like a puppy mauling a rawhide. He slaps the steak onto the table and tries to speak to me through his wide grin, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. His face is red and his eyes are red and he dumps the au jus all over the table and rests his face in the mess of food and falls asleep in it. I feel so sad, and nobody helps me clean it up after he’s carried out by his friends. I watch the Kankakee rushing by while I mop up the mess, wondering where all that murky water ends up, and then I call my mom and tell her what happened, crying, because it seems like the right thing to do. She calls the man’s wife, a friend of hers, to tell her where she can find her husband this time, and I hope I won’t be in trouble. This is the day that I learn there are different ways to be a drunk.

At The River I am seventeen and I stay late after my shift ends because it’s better than going home. I am no longer invited by people to go to the Pizza Hut, and anyway, I don’t want to because I feel as though I’m between worlds when I’m around them. I feel as though I’m between worlds nearly everywhere except in this bar. Instead, I sip virgin daiquiris at the employee table in the corner. “Strawberry Wine” plays on the juke box, and a man named Tim sits down across from me. He buys me French fries and smells like mouthwash. His voice is high-pitched, although he’s twenty-seven. When I was younger, I used to watch him fly by my house on a crotch rocket, tan arms with no sleeves, curly blond hair blown back by the speed. “You want to go for a drive when you’re done with that?” he asks. His truck is brand new, the spoils of his job as a carpenter. The bench seat is covered in a red and black plaid blanket made of wool. He tells me he’s separated, getting a divorce, that I’m pretty, that we could go to his house. Maybe just for a drive, I say, but we never make it out of the parking lot.

At The River I am sixteen and one day a man called Muddy, who has known me since I was ten and who comes into the bar every day, falls backward off his barstool. When I rush to help him up, he storms out in horror, the bells on the door jingling long after he’s gone. He never, ever comes back. Sometimes I wonder if he is dead on a couch somewhere, with a bottle of whiskey between his thumb and index finger, in front of a static television.

At The River a man named Dave, who has known my mother for more than twenty years, talks to me about planting and irrigation and harvest, about books, about nature, about the Presidential election, about taxes, about the Farm Bill, and about the college I’ll go to in the fall on a partial scholarship, where he used to party when he was my age. An avid reader of the Farmer’s Almanac and in possession of an MBA plus his father’s farm, he knows much about nearly everything. One day while we are talking about waterfowl that make their habitat along the marsh—blue heron, wood ducks—he tells me that only some wood ducks migrate south along the Atlantic Flyway, while some stay put through winter. And you can’t tell which are which, not by looking at them, which means that it’s in their DNA. They are programmed as one or the other—to stay or leave. Dave is very tan, year-round, from having worked outside all his life. He is always alone, always at the bar, elbows up and smiling wider as the liquor takes hold of him. Once, in the summer, I go to his house with my family for the Fourth of July and swim in his pool. I catch him looking at me a few times, and later we are alone, briefly, in his big, empty house. He has the face of boy and the mind of a wise elder. He tells me it would sure be nice if I were ten years older. And I feel like I already am. I go back to the pool and dive down to the bottom, lie on my back holding my breath, and look straight up to the sun.

At The River I am eighteen and I call divorce-in-progress Tim from the pay phone, but a woman answers and I hang up. I call Corey, my lifelong friend and one-time romantic crush, who is on trial for murdering two of our neighbors, just to prove to myself that I haven’t forgotten his number, even though I know I’ll never speak to him again. I call home to lie: they asked me to stay till close. I put more makeup on in the bathroom, and stay late at the employee table because I’m still too young to sit at the bar. The regulars, who are friends with my dad, friends with me, take turns sitting with me, and everyone tries to get the bartender to give me a drink, a real drink, but she doesn’t and I don’t want one anyway. I don’t learn until a year later how much I like to drink. Right now, I just like the company.

At The River my father celebrates his promotion to General Foreman, then later to Superintendent. He buys all the drinks for everyone, and he calls me Baby Girl when I walk in with a tray full of glasses. He orders prime rib for the two of us, and he dances with all of the women in the bar, spins them silly, and sings into their ears. He is still a stranger to me.

At The River I take dollar bills from men who are wearing guns in black holsters beneath their overshirts but over their undershirts, and I pick the music, and they smile. We listen to all the Hanks, The Stones, Stevie Nix, the Judds, Joni Mitchell, Aerosmith, Genesis, Bon Jovi, and The Eagles. I dance and sing while I’m working, with Katie and Dave and Lonnie and Tim and Harvey and by myself. The men tell stories about dogs and ex-wives and fishing and teenagers and motorcycles. The women talk about men who are farmers and steelworkers and carpenters and bricklayers and alcoholics and wife-beaters and no good and a little bit good. Between dancing, I do my work. I walk into the room-sized refrigerator to put away a tub of cottage cheese, and I linger there, watching a carton of milk go bad. It’s proof that time is change, that one thing can become another, and I can’t bear to throw it out.

At The River I’m five and nine and fifteen and eighteen and twenty and sixteen and seventeen. I talk to Kimmy, who’s now dating Dave, and she tells me all about how to ache with love. They are both alcoholics, one mostly quiet and smart, the other at the edge of unraveling, teetering between precipices of elation and melancholy. Dave talks to me less, and Kimmy never remembers what we talk about, relaying the same anecdotes of her life present and past, again and again; she gets lost in her own bubbling laughter, in the perfect harmony of a song only she can hear. And I hope that maybe I’ll grow up to be a little more fun like her, less serious, a little more disarming and open-armed and fragile, but I never do.

Kimmy comes to my high school graduation party, they all do, and they hug me and give me money and say, Good goin’, girl. They are the sum of me, divided into different kinds of pain, different kinds of happiness. Or perhaps I am the sum of them, our common denominator this river and a hard-earned history. Kimmy grips my cheeks with her long fingers and tells me that she loves me, she always has; it is her lasting memory, a compilation of many smaller, specific ones that have been lost inside a bottle, a feeling that is true. Still, she knows we have shared something important, if not the details of it. She says that she could be my aunt, she could be my sister. She tells me to stay blonde, blonde, blonde, and to marry a man with money and not to get pregnant in college.

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Angela Palm pictureAngela Palm is an editor and co-owner at the Renegade Writers’ Collective, an independent writing center in Vermont. Her work appears in Midwestern Gothic, Sundog Lit, Prick of the Spindle, ARDOR Literary Magazine, Little Fiction, Big Truths, and elsewhere. She is a nonfiction editor at The Fiddleback and the editor of the forthcoming collection, Please Do Not Remove. Her essay, “The Devolution of Cake,” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Susan Lynn Solomon

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KADDISH

by Susan Lynn Solomon

Pellets of snow stung my cheeks. I bent into the January wind and reached for my brother. He glanced at me from the corner of his eye. For a moment I thought he might brush my hand from his sleeve.

“It was nice,” I said.

Linda, his wife of three years, leaned across him. “What was?”

“What the Rabbi said about Mom.” My chest tingled as I recalled the eulogy. “The only time she made her family cry was when she died—that was nice, wasn’t it, Robby?”

“Robert,” my brother corrected me in a voice as stiff as his shoulders. He stroked his moustache, then flicked snowflakes from his black hair, so flecked with gray it belied his age. Next month he would be forty-three.

“It was nice,” Linda said. She pulled her knit hat so low over her ears she nearly knocked the glasses from her small nose.

“I suppose,” Robert said. “But he didn’t know her.” He pulled his coat tight around his broad frame. “For a few bucks, he probably says the same thing about everyone.”

“I wish Phil were here,” I said. “He knew Mom.” Rabbi Bentley and his wife, Deborah, were old friends.

Robert shrugged. Who officiated at our mother’s funeral made little difference to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Mom—he and Linda had cared for her, seen to her every need during the nine months cancer gnawed at her lungs. But for my brother, this rite—anything to do with religion—was merely to be endured.

“At least the guy kept it short.” He shook my hand from his arm and wound his scarf around his neck.

Linda frowned at him. “Did you remember to ask the rabbi to come over and lead the prayer tonight?”

“Did you?” I said.

Eyes straight ahead, Robert’s lips tightened. It was as though I’d accused him of a breach of etiquette.

We were walking along the narrow road cutting through the heart of the old cemetery. To the left and right, paths bent off, curled around a city of mausoleums, and ran through arches erected by burial societies named for the shtetls—the villages in Eastern Europe in which our grandparents had been born. Beyond the arches were tall headstones that in the spring would be adorned by neat flower beds.

At the end of the road we passed through an iron gate, and into the chapel’s parking lot. I waved goodbye to my two surviving aunts and the cousins who’d braved the snow, and dropped my eyes when I received half-hearted nods in return. This was the price of being the family outcast.

With a sigh, I pulled a set of keys from my purse. As I unlocked my car, I called to my brother, “Is there anything we need? I can stop at the market on the way.”

We would sit shiva at Robert’s house, and I suspected he might not have bought enough food and drink for the relatives and friends who would stop by in the next seven days to share memories of our mother. Hosting this ritual wasn’t my brother’s choice: our father had passed away two years ago, so the obligation for shiva and gathering with a minion of nine other men to say Kaddish—the Jewish prayer for the dead—was wrapped as tight as the scarf around his neck. He was the only son.

“We’ve got plenty,” Linda said.

“And people always bring food,” Robert added, then muttered, “As if I can’t afford to feed them.”

Linda smacked his arm.

“Okay, then,” I said, “I’ll just stop at home to get what I baked.”

They didn’t hear me. My brother’s car was already exiting the lot.

 

The large colonial house in Roslyn Heights was by no means a mansion. Still, it announced to passersby a successful man dwelt within. My brother had become what my parents wished for their children. I, on the other hand, had been unable to do something as simple as make a marriage work.

What might have been a full stadium parking lot greeted me when I turned onto Robert’s street. Even his circular drive was jammed. A quick glance informed me my eight-year-old Saturn wouldn’t fit into the only small space, so I parked around the corner. Balancing two trays of noodle pudding—when I was a child, Mom had taught me Grandma’s kugel recipe—and fighting a wind that tried to rip off my coat, I made my way down the block. When I opened the front door, it seemed as though I’d walked into a cocktail party.

I saw no torn lapels, no covered mirrors or crates to sit on, heard no soft-spoken remembrances of a woman’s life well-lived. Instead, laughter pealed from the large square living room, dining room, down the hall and up the stairs. Bottles clinked on glasses. Someone was playing the piano. My brother had made this an Irish wake.

Robert circled the corner from his den. He’d changed from his suit into a tan corduroy jacket, jeans, and oxblood penny loafers. His cheeks were red—they got that way after only two drinks. He glanced at the trays in my hand. He glanced at my old wool overcoat. Speaking to the glass of tequila in his hand, he said, “Glad you could make it, big sister.” He didn’t reach out to take the trays I held.

Had I the desire, or at that moment the strength, to point out his ill manners, he would have said he was being ironic. My brother had difficulty differentiating irony from sarcasm. He hadn’t always been this way. It’s just that he had little tolerance for failure, and a failure was how he had viewed me since my divorce.

Mom had also thought me a failure, with good reason, I suppose. “You and Ron can work it out,” she told me the day I showed up at her house, suitcase in hand. “Your father and I always worked things out,” she told me each time I visited her at Robert’s house during her illness. Tied to a marriage that had gone sour, I had an affair, moved out. The judge gave my ex custody of our daughter. Mom was terribly disappointed in me, embarrassed in front of her friends. It had never been different: I’d been a hippie in college, a rebel, a nomadic wild-child, disappearing who knew where, sleeping with who knew whom, getting arrested in Birmingham and in Chicago. “No wonder you can’t get along with your husband,” she told me.

I lost my temper then. “Guess people are right when they talk about the apple and the tree,” I’d snapped. “After all, you named me for Dad’s great-aunt, and she got burned by the Tsar’s army for causing trouble.”

Unlike my brother, I recognized sarcasm when it bounced out of my mouth. I heard Mom crying when I stormed out. Though he never said it, I’m sure Robert blamed me for our mother’s death—he believed I was the reason she refused treatment that might extend her life by maybe a year. Nights I sat alone in my apartment, I blamed me too.

 

Linda emerged from the kitchen. A green apron covered the black dress she’d worn to the funeral. Her neck-length hair, the color of autumn hay, was now tied back. She glared at Robert. “Let me take those, Susan,” she said to me.

My brother’s eyes now rested on a color photograph hung on the wall. It was taken outside a bed and breakfast on Martha’s Vineyard just after his wedding. My ex and I were in the picture. From the expression on Robert’s face and way he pulled at his mustache, he might have been telling our parents he only put up with me for their sake.

Linda took one of the trays and my arm. “Give me a hand in the kitchen, would you?” She turned her back on her husband.

In contrast to the heavy overcast outside, the kitchen was bright, white from cupboards to appliances. Beyond the windows and French doors, under an inch or two of snow, what appeared to be an acre of lawn was ready for the children my sister-in-law hoped to have one day. I couldn’t help but compare her life to the miniature one I led in the basement efficiency apartment I inhabited.

“I apologize for my husband, Sue,” she said.

“No need to.” I gave her a smile that wasn’t really one. “I’ve known him a long time.”

Robert’s voice barged through the kitchen door: “We need more food out here.”

Linda shook her head. “All those years you grew up together, and you didn’t kill him?”

I laughed. “Well, there was one time I tried to plug his finger into a socket.”

Brow furrowed, she stared at me as though she were uncertain whether I was serious.

“I might have done it if Mom hadn’t heard him crying.”

“Why’d you do that?”

I pointed to the bend where my nose had been broken. “He threw a block from his playpen. Hit me right here. Mom rushed to him, left me sitting with a bloody nose.”

Robert interrupted my resentment: “How about some food.”

“Better get the platters out there,” Linda said. “Drinking on an empty stomach, he’s liable to throw a block at me.”

I poked my head through the door, and peered around the living room, at the bodies on plush sofas and chairs, at the feet up on the glass tables. “I don’t see any of our relatives here. Where’s Aunt Florence, Aunt Millie?”

“They said they’ll stop by another time. Rob’s business people wanted to come today, pay their respects. They all have to work tomorrow.”

I heard a glass shatter.

“Nothing to worry about,” Robert called. “I’ll clean it up.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see their respects.”

Linda shrugged. “What can I say—car salesmen.”

For the next hour we carried food into the dining room and empty platters into the kitchen. It seemed only minutes before a garbage bag was filled with the empty bottles I hauled to the trash cans outside.

When I slammed the lid on one of the cans, the wind crept up, encircled me. As if the ghost of my past stood at my back, I felt a tingle at the nape of my neck. Or maybe my mother stood there. But that couldn’t be; it was Robert she would have gone to. So maybe it was Grandma. On Sabbath evenings at her kitchen table, it was she who patiently taught me what I knew of my heritage. Through the years, in all my wanderings, I’d felt her beside me.

I stopped, laughed at the idea. I’d grown too old for such foolish notions.

As I stepped aside to return to the house, the tingling in my neck spread downward. The wind touched my hand, almost a caress. With a shiver, I gazed at the sky. The fiery orange of a setting sun broke through the gray cloud cover. The sight pulled me back to my teenage Fridays in Brooklyn, to Grandma lifting the shade to peek through her window. I could almost hear her say, “Sun’s down. Shenah maideleh”—she called me that—“light the candles.”

I wrapped my arms around my chest. Though Grandma had left me her candlesticks, I hadn’t lit Sabbath candles in years. I’d forgotten how to pray. But now, held by the memory, I whispered, “Baruch atah adonai—”

The wind drifted away. I stood, as if frozen.

“Susan?” Linda leaned out the back door.

I didn’t move, didn’t even turn my head to look in her direction.

She came outside, touched my arm. “You okay?”

I nodded slowly.

“You’ll catch a cold,” she said. “Come inside. The Rabbi just got here—they’re gonna say Kaddish.”

 

Robert’s den was oak-paneled, and lined with bookshelves. He was a reader. History: his primary interest was the Civil War. He also had sections of books on Western Europe and the Orient. I found it interesting that nothing in his library told of Russian Poland—the place our family fled just before the First World War.

Instead of a quiet place to read, that evening the den was crowded. More than a dozen men leaned on the teakwood desk and against the walls, and lounged in the leather chairs. My brother was at the window, staring out.

Several women blocked the doorway, whispering to each other.

“I wonder what this is about,” one said.

“Do you think they’ll say the prayer in English?” her friend asked.

“I hope so. My mother told me to be careful—you never can tell what someone might make you say.”

“Might even be a sin.”

Clearly, these women weren’t Jewish. Neither, I suspected, were many of the men. Still, I appreciated the fact they’d risk their immortal souls by praying in Hebrew for my mother.
The Rabbi rested his briefcase on the floor, and pulled out a blue felt bag decorated with yellow stripes and a Star of David. From this bag, he took his tallis—his prayer shawl—kissed the hem, and draped it around his neck. Again he reached into his briefcase, and came out with a sheaf of pages he distributed to the men.

I took Linda’s arm. “Come on.”

She shook her head. In the orthodox tradition she’d been born to, this prayer was to be said by men.

I pushed past the women at the door and put my hand out to the Rabbi.

He tried to ignore me by looking at the pages he held. These had both the Hebrew version and a large-type transliteration of the Kaddish.

“She was my mother too,” I told him.

He glanced at my brother.

Robert shrugged.

At last the rabbi handed me a page, and again ignored me as he counted the men. Apparently he thought God wouldn’t hear us unless ten men chanted the words. Satisfied, he glanced around the den. “For those of you who aren’t familiar with our customs,” he said, “this is the prayer we say for our departed. It’s interesting to note that nowhere in this prayer do we speak of death. Instead we talk of the glory of God, whose wisdom and strength we can’t approach. Now, in memory of…” He looked to Robert.

Before my brother could answer, I said, “Jeanne—our mother’s name is Jeanne.”

“Yes, um,” the Rabbi said. “In memory or Jeanne, please read along with Robert.”

I glared at him. “And Susan.”

“Uh, yes, of course. Please read along with Robert…and Susan. Yisgadal v’yistkadash shmay rabbah—” (Glorified and sanctified is God’s name.)

Stumbling over the strange words, the men read the prayer.

I glanced at Robert. Still peering out the window as if he saw Mom standing in the snow, he repeated only every third word. And those he said were a beat behind the Rabbi. If he really saw Mom, perhaps he was apologizing to her for his discomfort with our customs. Nights I’d sat with Grandma learning who I am, he watched television with Dad.

“Oleybu v’al kol yisro-eyl,” the Rabbi said, “v’imru omeyn.”

“Amen,” I said.

In the brief silence that followed, one of the women at the den door clapped.

I glared at her.

She blushed and stepped back into the hall.

While the Rabbi gathered his pages, Robert went to his desk and wrote the man a check. I didn’t know why, but instead of returning my copy of the prayer, I folded it in eighths and shoved it in the pocket of my skirt.

When I rolled over in bed to turn off the alarm the next morning, my hand settled on the page I’d placed on the night table. Instead of my routine of reading a novel in bed until my eyes closed, I’d sat up reading the prayer over and over. As when I pocketed it in my brother’s den, I didn’t know why. Maybe it was because, while I’d recited it along with the rabbi last evening, Grandma reached out and touched my hand—stranger things have happened. For whatever reason, sometime around midnight, I reached a decision: I knew Robert wouldn’t go to the synagogue each morning and evening for the next year to recite Kaddish, so I’d say it. Then, remembering the rabbi’s disdain of my audacity for daring to be part of his minion, I reached another decision: I would recite it alone at home. I didn’t know if this would count for anything, but I’d do it just the same.

Why?

I had an answer to this question: guilt is part of my tradition.

 

Each morning before putting on my makeup, even before having my first cup of coffee, and every evening after sundown, I turned to the east. I turned east because Grandma had told me in the old-country shul where my forebears worshipped (a two-story wooden edifice not grand enough to be called a synagogue), a seat against the eastern wall was considered an honor. I’d never asked her why, yet thought it had to mean something. So, I turned east, and read aloud, “Yisgadal v’yistkadash shmay rabbah—”

I wish I could say it was easy to remain true to my intention. It wasn’t. Too much temptation.

In July, women I worked with came into my office near the end of the day. “We’re going down to Rosie O’Grady’s for drinks after work,” they said. “Wanna come?”

My mouth watered. At the mere suggestion, I tasted the creaminess of the Guinness Stout I usually ordered. More, I tasted a desire for the broad shouldered men around the horseshoe bar who would gladly buy me a pint or two, then suggest we find a quiet place for dinner. And maybe a night making love afterward.

I gulped back the almost uncontrollable urge, and forced my eyes down to the papers on my desk. “Sorry…can’t,” I said. “Gotta get this contract done by Thursday. I’ll be here for hours. Another time?”

Why couldn’t I tell them I had to get home to pray for my mother? They might have understood. Or they might have gone off to Rosie’s giggling, and told the crowded bar, “Susan’s gone religious on us.”

Five minutes after they left my office, I closed my file, turned off my computer, and rode the elevator down to the street. I turned my face as I passed Rosie’s windows so the women wouldn’t catch me in my lie.

After a month of “another times” they stopped asking me to join them.

That didn’t make it easier though. In September, my friend Janet’s brother moved back east. His divorce was final. He asked about me. Richard—Ricky—and I had dated all through high school. It seemed he wanted to reach out to his past.

“C’mon,” she said to me on the phone. “It’ll be fun. We can double-date like we used to.”
I remembered Ricky. Too well. He’d been the star pitcher on the school’s baseball team, a member of the honor society, and a hell of a lay. He’d been my first. Then he left for college in Los Angeles. Had I searched for that Elysian time with him though all these years and dozens of relationships that didn’t last?

“Sorry, Jan, can’t,” I told her. “There’s … um, something I’ve gotta do.”

“What’s so important you can’t put it off till tomorrow?” she asked.

I wouldn’t tell her either.

At my next session with my shrink (after my divorce I thought it was time I learned why I found it hard to settle down) I ask why I couldn’t tell anyone I was saying Kaddish morning and night.

She smiled as if she knew a secret. “Isn’t the more pertinent question why you’re doing it?”

I bristled. “Okay, tell me why.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Damn! Would I have asked if I knew the answer? After an hour of talking around the issue—and trying hard to change the subject—I went home, lit a joint. Maybe the answer would come to me if I got stoned.

After another session with my shrink in October, I opened my night table and reached for my stash. I stared though the plastic baggie, to the pot and rolling papers within. For the first time in months, years, I had no taste for it. I put the baggie back, closed the drawer.
It wasn’t until early December that the answer to why I said Kaddish every day came to me. And I literally mean it came to me.

The late autumn sun doesn’t begin to rise until past seven. It was a Saturday—I remember the day because, no need to catch an early train to the city, I was able to sleep in. Around six, I was awakened by a stirring in my room. Maybe it was a breeze rustling the documents I’d brought home from my office to work on over the weekend. I was about to roll toward the wall, punch my pillows, and fight to return to whatever I’d been dreaming, when my mind cleared enough that I realized there was no breeze in my room. It was near freezing outside; my windows were closed and locked. Then what caused the papers to flutter? Perhaps I had left a window open. I rolled onto my side, opened one eye.
In the center of my room I saw a flash of bright light—not yellow and orange like in a flame, this was all white, an absence of color. As if a flashbulb had gone off, the light blinded me.
I snapped my eyes shut, rubbed them. The light still flashed behind my lids. What was going on in my apartment? Was . . . I being robbed? My stomach began to churn.

Trembling, I again opened one eye, this time just a slit.

The light was still there, and now it fluttered as though it were a candle kissed by a gentle breeze.

“What the—” I muttered, my voice rasping with fear.

I tried to pull my quilt over my head, but I couldn’t move.

The fluttering became more pronounced. A figure walked into the light. It was a woman, her dark hair and her dress blown as if by a gale wind. She turned. I saw her face.

I blinked rapidly.

This…was my mother.

“Thank you,” she said, although I’m not sure if her voice was just in my mind. “I’m all right now. Tell Linda.” She waved, smiled, and walked away. The light flickered, went out. My room was bathed in darkness.

“Ma!” I cried, arms outstretched.

Silence answered me.

I peered into the darkness, craving another sight of her. Leaning on an elbow, I continued to search the shadows in the corners until my eyes grew heavy, blinked, then closed.

 

I woke to sunlight streaming through my windows. I brushed my teeth, put on coffee. I pulled from a drawer the wrinkled sheet on which the transliteration of Kaddish was typed. I turned to the east, and read, “Yisgadal v’yistkadash shmay rabbah— ”

Finished, I replaced the folded page in the drawer, and sat at the table with my coffee and the newspaper. Had this been a Sunday several years ago, I would have phoned my mother so we could do the crossword puzzle together. Remembering those days before I was an outcast, tears filled my eyes. Feeling sorry for myself, as I idly brushed my fingers across the newspaper, the dream I had returned. I recalled a light, blindingly bright, filling my room. The vision was as clear as this crisp December day. Mom was in the center of the light. She thanked me, waved goodbye. My chest fluttering as the light had, I broke into sobs. Never had I had a dream that was so achingly clear and well-remembered past my first cup of morning coffee.

But was it a dream? Had my mother returned, however briefly, to tell me something?
Nonsense! I knuckled away my tears. This was reality, not a restaging of a scene from Fiddler on the Roof.

Yet it had seemed so real… I glanced at the drawer that held the printed prayer.

Ridiculous! I told myself. I shoved the newspaper and the dream aside. Time to get on with the day, I thought.

Still, while I carried my clothes to the Laundromat, did my marketing in Walbaums, wandered through the Mid-Island Mall in search of a new blouse, the dream I tried to convince myself wasn’t one, returned again and again. Maybe that was it: I didn’t want it to have been just a dream. I’d wanted to see my mother one more time, wanted again to feel part of her—wanted her to stroke my hair as she’d done when I was a child, and utter words of comfort. She had told me something, though—I’m all right now, tell Linda.
For a message from beyond, what Mom said was just so…mundane! So it had to be a dream.

As I emerged from a store in the mall with a plastic bag in my hand, shoppers stared when I stopped, and roughly wiped away tears.

See, Susan? I thought. The answer becomes clear if you just reason it out.

My careful logic failed to make anything clear. Through dinner, what I had seen early that morning sat in the chair next to me. I couldn’t shake the feeling my mother had actually told me something I needed to know. Or do. Yes, she’d told me to tell Linda what I saw. Maybe Linda knew what Mom wanted me to understand.

At last, my single place setting cleared and the dishes washed, I called my sister-in-law.

“I don’t know what this is supposed to mean,” I said as soon as she answered the phone. “But…uh…” I felt as foolish as my brother and mother believed me to be. If I’d been staring in a mirror, I would have seen my face grow red from my neck to my forehead.

“Is something the matter?” she asked.

“No, no. It’s not that.”

“If something’s wrong, I can come right over.”

Someone cared I might be in pain—was that what Mom wanted me to know?

“No, Linda, nothing’s wrong.” I said. “It’s just that… Well, I had a…dream.” Stammering, I told her how I’d been awakened by a stirring, blinded by a glowing in the center of my room. Again my eyes were clouded by tears. “Anyhow, Mom asked me to tell you she’s all right now.” I tried to laugh, as if I knew how silly I sounded.

There was no laughter on the other end of the line. I heard Linda gasp and begin to cry. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you…Susan.” She hung up.

Okay, I thought as I put down the phone, it wasn’t just a dream. I did what Mom asked. I can put it behind me now. Except I couldn’t. Like a dramatized movie adaptation of a scene from someone’s biography, what I’d seen and heard now had a life of its own.
On Monday, work was a waste. Time and again my mind returned to my mother’s words. It had to mean more than telling Linda she’s okay, I thought. But it didn’t. Did it?
At three o’clock, pleading illness, I left the office. About the time the Long Island Railroad reached the Jamaica station, I decided to call my shrink. Maybe she could explain the dream. Between Jamaica and Syosset, I decided I had no patience for another question smashed back at me like a tennis ball. So, instead of my shrink I called my friend, Deborah, the rabbi’s wife. She was the one person I’d told what I was doing; the one person I knew wouldn’t laugh at me.

I spoke quickly, the way I do when I don’t want to be interrupted by someone asking if I were stoned. When I finally took a breath, Deborah remained silent.

“You still there?” I asked—a foolish question, since I heard her breathing.

After a minute, which felt far longer, she said, “This might not have been a dream.”

“It…it might not have been…”

“Uh-uh.” She inhaled, probably a drag from a cigarette. “When did your mother die?”

“January ninth,” I said. “Why?”

I heard another inhalation. “And today’s December eleventh. So, this happened on the morning of the ninth.”

“Yeah. So? What does that mean?”

She exhaled her cigarette smoke. “You’re finished saying Kaddish.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not a year yet.”

“Yes.”

“But the rule is—”

“Yes,” she said again.

I yanked back my hair. If my shrink had batted the question back at me, it might have been easier than this conversation with Deborah. I felt as though I were spinning. “I don’t understand.”

“There’s also tradition. And by tradition, we stop saying Kaddish after eleven months. It’s our way of telling God your mother was such a good person, she didn’t need a full year.”
I caught my breath. I hadn’t known of this. When Grandma died, I never counted the months my father went to his synagogue after dinner. When Dad died, Mom paid the rabbi to say Kaddish. Robert hadn’t spoken the prayers for Mom. So, that meant… Could what I’d seen have been real?

Deborah and I spoke for a few more minutes. To this day, I have no idea what we said. I was crying.

Now I understood why my mother had come to me—whether or not it was in a dream didn’t matter. And I also at last understood the true reason I’d prayed each night and evening. Laying my selfish desires aside for eleven months, every evening and morning I’d begged her forgiveness. I’d been a difficult child, a more difficult adult. I’d yanked at her heart more times than she ever allowed me to see. And even after she was gone, she returned—I desperately wanted what I’d seen to have been real—to say I was forgiven.
On my bed, with my knees pulled up to my chin, I cried until after sunset. I was alone in a basement efficiency apartment. There was no one to blame for this but me. Perhaps it was time for me to forgive myself.

 

Mom’s been gone sixteen years, yet the morning she came to me is still as present as my memory of her face and her voice. Was it a dream? Was it really her in the blinding light? I’ll never know. Does it matter?

Some things have changed for me through the years: these days I feel more settled, and don’t seek fast times in strange beds. I volunteer my time where I can—most recently lighting Grandma’s candles while I lead Sabbath services in an old age home. And I write. Quiet evenings at my computer, I record my memories of who I am and where I came from. Perhaps this is a sign that at last, like Robert, I’ve become the person Mom hoped I’d be.

But as I write this, I realize not all the hurts I’ve caused are healed. Typing the words my mother spoke early one December morning, I find a tacit message hidden in them. That message begs a question, so simple, yet after all these years, difficult to answer. Difficult, because I’m still alone. I wasn’t able to reconcile with my ex, and my daughter and I… I’ve torched too many bridges.

So, this unspoken question presses on my mind now that I’m nearing the age Mom was: who will say Kaddish for me?

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Susan Lynn Solomon lives and writes in Niagara Falls, NY. Her story, “Sabbath,” published in Prick of the Spindle, Vol. 6.4, was nominated for the Best of the Net 2013 anthology. Her story, “Abigail Bender,” was an honorable mention in a Writers’ Journal short romance competition (2007). Other work has been published in Imitation Fruit, Literary Juice, Sunstorm Fine Arts Magazine, and Our Echo. She wrote the text for a book containing the works of the artist, José Royo. Her essay, “Walking the Paper Trail,” has been quoted in court cases and cited in law journal articles. An art major in high school and college, she began her creative career as a songwriter and performer with the 1960’s band, Coconut Groove.

Cassie Hottenstein

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THE PARABLE OF THE MADMAN

by Cassie Hottenstein

Are you not the madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” There will be time, there will be time: We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence, and I will show you something different from your shadow at morning striding behind you. The term human anatomy comprises a consideration of the various structures which make up the human organism. In a restricted sense it deals merely with the parts which form the fully developed individual and which can be rendered evident to the naked eye by various methods of dissection.[1] I should premise that I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.

I have known the arms already, known them both, arms of the patient etherized upon a table.[2] The phalanges are fourteen in number, three for each finger, and two for the thumb. Each consists of a body and two extremities.[3] The dorsal digital veins pass along the sides of the fingers and are joined to one another by oblique communicating branches. Those from the adjacent sides of the fingers unite to form three dorsal metacarpal veins, which end in a dorsal venous network opposite the middle of the metacarpus.[4] Somewhere I have never travelled, beyond any experience, nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of the patient’s intense fragility.

I will show you, madman, fear in a handful of dust, and nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.[5]

~

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. There are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of the wallpaper as I did? The subject of the “uncanny” is a province of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread.[6] A hand cut off at the wrist: as we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its association with the castration-complex. There will be time to murder and create the etherized patient. We have killed him, you and I. Both of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? This is just to say, forgive me; they were delicious.[7]

Hurry up, please, it’s time. My nerves are bad tonight. A special variety of nerve-ending exists in the subcutaneous tissue of the human finger; they are principally situated at the junction of the corium with the subcutaneous tissue. They are oval in shape and consist of strong connective-tissue sheaths, inside which the nerve fibers divide into numerous branches, which show varicosities and end in small free knobs. Reflect how over a month ago he had cut his finger with a knife and only the day before yesterday this injury had still hurt him badly enough. He found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.[8] His fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four. But there had been a moment of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five.[9] Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become so sweet, and so cold?

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first madman who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human anatomy. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. They speak bitterly about guys who find release by shooting off their own toes or fingers. So easy: squeeze the trigger and blow away a finger. They imagine the quick, sweet pain, then a hospital with cold tables.  And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, you weep for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall of the true, wise patient.[10] He, too, decomposes. He is dead. He remains dead. And we have killed him.

 

Texts used, in order of appearance

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Parable of the Madman,” from The Gay Science.

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.

T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land.”

Henry Gray, Anatomy of the Human Body.

E.E. Cummings, “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny.’”

William Carlos Williams, “This is Just to Say.”

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis.”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.

Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried.”

William Golding, Lord of the Flies.

 

[1] “We need to look for pieces,” Mom explains. Saturday morning, I’m in my Poppop’s garage on my hands and knees. There are pieces missing. I don’t know how many yet.

[2] Poppop is meticulous, as always. The handsaw sways back and forth from its hook; a stained rag lays neatly folded, freshly wet; the sink tap still drips dry. Behind this careful organization, handprints trail from the once-white walls to the workbench, drying into the paint. I find desperate smears clotting in the sink: he’s washed his hands of any evidence, wiped away this mistake with the rag.

[3] There’s a fingertip wedged between the garage door and the wall. I imagine Poppop shaking the tension cord with his free hand, cursing under his breath, careful not to scream, “Let go, goddammit, let go.”

[4] There’s another fingertip on top of the bloody ladder – he must have misplaced it during his rush to the sink. Wash it away, it’ll be okay, no one has to know.

[5] It takes two extra minutes to find the third clinging by its flesh to the freshly cut tension cord. Unsalvageable.

[6] I slide on my back underneath his shiny silver Civic. At least he was careful not to smudge the car’s paint. Dad packs the cooler; I hear a ziploc baggie slosh with ice and ripped nerves.

[7] There’s the overwhelming stench of blood and WD-40. I taste metal from the back of my nose to the tip of my tongue, so I put my hands over my face to mask the scent. It grows stronger – my face is sticky. His blood was on my hands.

[8] He is perfect, perfect. In those trembling moments, when he bit his lip and tried not to scream, he took care to hang the handsaw just so on its hook: swing swing, nothing is wrong. One perfect hand and one with three missing fingertips folded a rag, shh, if I’m quiet it won’t stain. Soap will wash it away. Shh, if I’m quiet I’ll be okay.

[9] I’m counting my fingers over and over because I’m not too sure they’re still attached: one two three four five, one two three four five. Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they’re not. His fingertips fit perfectly into my palm.

[10] Mom is trying to discuss stubbornness and assisted living and Alzheimer’s and he’s lucky to be alive the cord could have hit his face after all. My throat is full of bile; all I can retch is a wet “no.” I want to say, “We haven’t found all the pieces.”

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Cassie HottensteinCassie Hottenstein was born in Pennsylvania and raised in South Carolina before finally settling in Florida. She is a teaching assistant, writing tutor, and full-time student at the University of North Florida. She hopes to graduate in Spring of 2013 with a major in English and a minor in creative writing. In her spare time, she writes poetry, rewatches episodes of Hannibal, and obsessively collects figurines of owls. “The Parable of a Madman” is her first publication.