re-emergence
about.
This isn't what I envisioned in the beginning.
world-building: the corner house on lake park
In a champagne brick house they drank bubbles out of plastic while the bath filled in the upstairs bathroom for when everyone trickled out the front door slowly, like the last drips of a lazy running faucet. Down the white-washed hall the kids slept beneath yellow baby blankets in a warm, dim-lit, square room, rocked dreaming by a scratched Neil Young CD and the hand of their mother slipped into theirs; then when the time was just right, lifted gently away with the caution of the tamer backing away from the dozing lion, precise with her steps, creeping backwards on the creaking floorboards, all the way down the stairs to the kitchen, where the others sat in the hazy contentment of human noise, and white wine.
It wasn’t much: the water stains where the ceiling met the wall, paint melted by the spring rain that always seeped through the shingles, always came too early or too late, washing winter off the rusty station wagons for good and and releasing a fresh harvest of forgotten purple perennials when the skies cleared. Dinner parties, the last remnant of life as it was once known, as old friends soak in the newness; new marriages, new mortgages, new doors to slam and mattresses to sleep beside one another on, tangled. Fresh paint. A six minute walk to the record store, a two-floor bookstore and a Blockbuster and the pharmacy.
Still, when she walked downstairs, under the flickering light bulb she’d replace in the morning, the sink full of dishes even though they’d eaten on paper, the liquor flat, now, the wall splashed with rain like the hail of a popped champagne bottle, the bed upstairs well-used, the door hinges creaking and closed quietly, or left open, the bath water lukewarm, the bills unpaid, the husband rolling out of bed to get the baby, the morning light loitering in the window sill like the fresh dirt on the first grave of the first parent they buried, the first vows broken late at night when the kids slept, the storms that seem endless and lull the kids to sleep, thundering between riffs of Heart of Gold and loud heartbeats, clinking, soundless paper cups, the garbage disposal, the aging dog barking down the tulips, cold pizza, yellow bricked, white shuttered potential, glimmering with graying hair and cable and carpool and the noise of it all, gathering, sneaking downstairs and back upstairs again.
reemergence
A wikipedia search for the 1918 flu pandemic, brown bananas for baking bread, high school yearbooks, closets full of old coats.
The freezer in the garage we use for “special occasions”, crayons I didn’t know we had, printer paper, garbage day, top shelves of pantries and underneath bathroom sinks.
purple perennials in the backyard and dead branches. a passover seder for five. deep one-sided conversations with the old blind dog. puzzles, purell, sunshine interrupted by patches of hail.the dusty piano in the room with a couch i’ve never really sat on before.
my mom crawls into my bed one morning in the way I used to climb into hers when I was a little kid. today we drive to my aunt’s house and wave from the window. tomorrow she’ll go work at the hospital. tomorrow my middle school basketball coach will die and i’ll watch harry potter and the goblet of fire. we teach my grandfather how to use facetime, over facetime. one morning we go into the basement and open a cardboard box full of old dolls. the only thing that can put me to sleep is jewish melodies, prayers in the tunes from my childhood, on spotify. News briefings: Michigan, bronze metal for devastation. I pray for new york city. I use the crayons to write “thank you essential workers” on a piece of paper and tape it to the front door. I wonder if I should have gone to school to be a nurse instead of a writer.
I’m grateful, I really am. I wonder what kind of world is waiting on the other side of this. I wonder how I can still be so vain as to hate my body when its keeping me alive, when down the street someone’s lungs are filled with a disease with no cure. what did I waste on those beaches in tel aviv, what did i waste flushing shabbat dinner down the toilet. on passover we drink wine, and i drink sparkling grape juice, and remember when I told my therapist I was a “sober queen”. My dad sneezes from the other room and says ahead of time that it’s just allergies. My mom did a “risk analysis” and decided my sister should be the one who goes to the grocery store, but she goes anyway, usually before anyone else wakes up. Adon olam, eternal master: the lord is with me, i will not fear.
A part of the passover seder is to wash your hands, twice.
“Before we get to work, especially on such a sensitive and cosmic task as the ritualistic handling of food to manipulate spiritual truths, our hands should be clean. Wash them clean of the impurities of a life in a materialistic world.”
Right hand, repeat, repeat again. Left hand, repeat, repeat again. Twenty seconds, scrub your nails and hum “dayenu” seventeen times, or “happy birthday” twice.
Dayenu- it would have been sufficient. It would have been enough.
Why is this night different than all other nights?
Last year in Venice; a tour of the Jewish ghetto. Italian yeshiva boys handed us a box of matzah and we ate pasta for dinner anyway.
Next year in Jerusalem.
Next year in person.
Re-emergence: banana bread rises in the oven, my fondness of ron weasley, a shabbat melody synced to my airpods. A family under one roof. A live-streamed funeral. Home made coffee, prayer. Fall back to poetry. Fall back to the bathroom scale. Fall back to gratitude, to inequality, to privilege and guilt and chores and facetime. Saturday Night Live reruns and prozac. Goodbye to Bill Withers, and Coach Tony. Inching toward prayer. Inching toward faith.
24 hours
we spent tuesday morning cleaning the bathroom. On our hands and knees, my mother and I scrub the gray tiles one-by-one, wipe fingerprints off the mirror, polish the corners of the sink. she takes out the trash, and I screw the top back onto the toothpaste and fold the towels. we don’t speak, we just use our hands to wipe down the door and scrub the tub.
From my bedroom I can almost hear everything. Some days I wake up to the clatter of dishes, the crack of an egg, a pan sizzling. The dryer bangs; steam pours out from under the bathroom door from a hot shower running. We’re a symphony, the five of us, opening and closing drawers, typing, picking up the phone, washing our hands.
Right outside the sliding door there’s a rusty bell cemented into the brick, a dinner bell left behind from some sort of past life, someone else's life in a neighborhood where children ran through backyards, barefoot, picking flowers, tossing baseballs, spotting beehives, climbing fences, waiting to be summoned home.
One afternoon I slip into the basement, brave the spider webs, switch on the lights and venture through a junkyard of old suitcases and garbage bags of clothes for goodwill, abandoned pieces of furniture, an old brown couch with mismatched pillows, one-eyed teddy bears, and baby clothes. I rifle through waterlogged boxes of dusty photo albums, old diaries, book reports, an old bowl for the dog, hand-painted at one of those birthday-party pottery places. An unfamiliar framed picture of a brown-eyed older woman, and a porcelain-skinned teenager, a dead-ringer for my aunt. I will trace my fingers around the mauve velvet frame and bring it upstairs, back to life, to my mom who will tell me that older woman is her grandmother, and the one with porcelain skin is mine.
Let’s take a trip to that wall of exposed brick, to the box under the sink filled with old pairs of glasses, to a page of my favorite book and a cabinet of mismatched mugs, and a record player, and ceramic set of friday night candlesticks, and a bible, and a lost chapstick wedged between the couch cushions, and to my favorite kitchen drawer, the one with muffin tins and a little bag of decorative cocktail umbrellas no one has ever used, the one with the homemade place mats.
A list of places to go tomorrow: the backyard, to pick up branches the wind keeps knocking down, to notice that pink flowers bloomed on the tree next to the dinner bell, to the hallway where my sister will gently water her plants, to the kitchen where my dad eats cereal out of a bowl I made myself out of clay, to my grandparents’ record collection that lives under the tv, to the top shelf of my closet where I keep a ninth place ribbon from a 2011 track meet, handwritten notes from a tall blonde named ben, a music box that plays hava nagila, a strip of photo booth images with the blue-eyed boy from prom, with the top square, the one where we were kissing, cut off. the shelf lined with cookbooks, the patch of sunlight in the yard, a bowl of flour in the kitchen, a pile of clean laundry, a hot shower, a dusty piano and a trip around the house with a broom.
