*
I get off the train at Sixth Avenue and stand on the corner. In the past year, the bookstore has closed down and the burger joint’s been turned into a juice bar. There’s a strung-out couple with a pit bull begging for change outside the health food store, but even they felt the need to specify that they’re vegan on their cardboard sign. I don’t mind. I have no nostalgia for old New York, with its hookers, heroin addicts, and constant threat of robbery or rape. I’m happy to sacrifice fast food and hardcover books for general personal safety, which I guess makes me about as uncool as they come.
*
I wander south toward the basketball courts near West Fourth. I have, I realize, nowhere to go and no one to see. I pass the underground karaoke bar on Cornelia I went to with a gang from the office a few months back. Myke revealed himself to have a beautiful baritone and performed a rendition of Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” that made Jacky and I just kill ourselves laughing. I half expect to find them there when I step inside, but the bar is quiet. What the hell, I think, and book myself a private room.
*
Drinking a margarita out of what looks like a fishbowl and singing three Stevie Nicks songs in a row. Just try to tell me I don’t know how to have a good time.
*
Back outside, a woman bums a light off a man and looks him up and down.
“Your shirt is telling me you live in Brooklyn,” she says.
*
I’m trying to decide if it’s late enough to satisfy my mother or if I should kill another hour getting a foot massage at one of the places on Eighth Street. I enjoy any form of massage that doesn’t require nudity.
I’m looking up to check what street I’m on when a taxi passes. Inside it is Frank. He’s in profile, leaning forward to say something to the driver. It is just a flash. The taxi slides past the green light, and he is gone. It takes everything in me not to drop to all fours and chase the cab across town like a dog let loose.
*
I sit on the PATH train and try not to think about Frank. This is impossible. I try to focus, instead, on listing all the different types of cheese I know off the top of my head. Camembert. Gouda. Swiss. Cheddar. Manchego … Could he really be pining for me? But if he was, why wouldn’t he tell me that Cleo had moved? Maybe he thinks I don’t care? How could he think I don’t care? Provolone. Feta. Stilton. Mozzarella … I didn’t even say goodbye to him the day I left the agency. But he knew how to contact me … Brie. Pecorino. Ricotta. American. He doesn’t think of me, or he would have reached out. This whole thing is in my head. Pepper jack.
*
Not satisfied with my romp into the city, my mother insists I accompany her to her bonsai class. The teacher is dressed like an ancient boy scout, with his socks pulled tight over his knees and shorts cinched at his belly button. His only teaching aid is a piece of paper covered in sketches of variously shaped bonsai held shakily in front of him. He has the tendency to say “This is what we call …” about the most obvious things—This is what we call a leaf—but terms like ramifications and apical bud, apparently, need no additional explanation.
*
“So what did you think?” asks my mother on the drive home. “Bet you’ll never look at a bonsai tree the same way again, eh?”
“This is what we call a waste of my time,” I say, gesturing to the car, this conversation, the state of New Jersey, the entire world.
“And this,” says my mother, gesturing to me, “is what we call an asshole.”
*
My brother Levi comes down from upstate.
“Man, I hate hospitals,” he says, scuffing his heels against the linoleum floors.
“This one’s not so bad,” I say. “The nurses are nice, and they have a TV room.”
“Ellie,” he says, “it’s a dump. Dad deserves better than this.”
I have the urge to punch him swiftly in the neck, but I restrain myself. It was typical Levi, artfully sidestepping any responsibility, then showing up last-minute to offer a thoughtful critique.
“That’s great feedback, Levi,” I say. “You want us to write a Yelp review or something?”
Levi gives me an outraged look.
“Did Mom tell you I got banned from Yelp?” he says. “I specifically told her not to.”
*
I’m reading to my father from one of his dog-eared volumes of collected poems when I stop at a page faintly marked with pencil. He has underlined two stanzas of a Derek Walcott poem very finely, almost tentatively, as though trying not to muss up the page.
Days I have held,
days I have lost,
days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harboring arms.
Next to them is a faded check mark. A restrained little check. My heart.
*
I can’t sleep, so I’m up late watching a documentary about Middle Americans and their battle with crippling methamphetamine addictions. The man currently being interviewed has dry red sores all over his face that he picks at absently, almost tenderly, as he speaks.
“I never had a real birthday,” he says. “No presents or nothing. My parents didn’t care. But on meth I can have a birthday whenever I want. I can have my birthday seven days a week.”
*
Levi is playing his new solo album Table for One, Not by the Window loudly over the speakers in the living room.
“Turn that racket off!” yells my mother.
He turns the volume dial down, not all the way, but enough that the house is no longer vibrating.
“My eardrums, good grief,” says my mother, collapsing onto the eating couch.
“It’s not racket,” says Levi.
“It is the definition of racket,” says my mother.
“Listen,” says Levi. “When the first radio programs came to India during British rule, people would gather from all over and sit together and listen to English radio shows. It was the first time a lot of them had heard Western music, basically ever. After the programs were over, there would be long periods of white noise, just static. And the Indians would all stay and listen to that as well.”
“Your point?” asks my mother.
“They’d never heard it before, so to them that was music too.”
“So?” says my mother.
“So, don’t you see that it’s all just perspective, Ma? Our white noise was their music. Your racket is my masterpiece.”
“That’s a cool fact, Levi,” I say diplomatically. “About the Indians.”
“You’re going to have to travel a lot farther than India to find someone who thinks that’s a masterpiece,” says my mother.
*
He died.
*
Outside the hospital I wait for my mother and Levi to arrive. Next to me, an elderly woman wrapped in a pink blanket despite the heat sucks on her cigarette between great hacking coughs.
“Can I bum one of those?” I ask.
“Trade you for a dollar,” she says.
“I don’t have a dollar,” I say. “My father just died.”
She looks at me from under her wiry eyebrows.
“In that case,” she says, “no.”