Back in the car she smoothed her dress, extracted a tissue from the glove box and spat, swabbed the scurf from her lashes. She got the AC blasting and peered through the windshield. Birds still blotted holes in the sky and whistled their old tunes. Beyond, in the smog-horizon, a rainbow smut. She lingered, admiring the view. High above where the sky appeared a clearest blue, tiny bright dots sparked and jiggled—her own white blood cells bounding through the narrows of her retina’s blood vessels. The blue-field optical phenomenon. It looked like a screen across her perceptual field. For a second the dots above her car gathered blizzard force and she felt herself lift and toggle as if among them.
She remembered true winter here. The cruel wind flurrying a relentless snow. The watcher who in accordance with ancient custom attended her mother’s casket atop the hill while she the dutiful daughter collected her father from the car and drew him up the path to the gravesite. All the while the shomer waited, guarding the body but watching her, she felt, judging, a feeling she couldn’t shake. And once there, Jesus! her father called out. The rabbi startled, then rolled—Baruch this, Adonai that, what a pro. Soon her father looked like he was boiling, curses bubbling into the December air. She surreptitiously looked around—the watcher had melted away—and twice she tried to take her father by the arm, get him to settle, maybe coax him along the shovelled path and put him in the car and lock the door on him. But no go. Each time she plucked the sleeve of his old duffel jacket he shook free, swore like a stevedore, some of which tribe he’d once known personally as general manager of a shipping company, contending with lay-offs, strikes, Ukrainian stowaways, the city in those days still a major port.
Jesus! all through Kaddish. She stiffened in her parka and occasionally flicked a drop or two from her face. Nearby a stick-thin distant cousin shivered in a tiny black wrap, ungloriously underdressed for a Hanukkah burial—Jesus. Hard to believe. Apparently the cousin’s only dress coat was red and apparently not even she had the nerve to pull that off. At least the freaking cold was working in favour of the parka, since beneath it was a pantsuit that used to fit but was now tighter than drying rope. Earlier that morning she’d dressed in her just-deceased-mother’s disorderly bathroom. Dizzied by thoughts of what to keep, what toss—useless for her final journey the dull manicure scissors, eye cream, four nearly finished jars of Vaseline, what the fuck?—she’d handled her belly fat then sucked it in and yanked the zipper, tortured in private places. But with the funeral underway she was thinking the cold could be even colder.
She imagined a rent-lung clarity. A vacuum-packed nothing. Freedom through freeze-drying. Rebirth as astronaut-drift in an unblinking beyond. Escape! Instead there was the snow—was it ever coming down, fogging the surrounding hills. Leaving not much to look at except the hole in the ground and the lilac-coloured coffin, dainty, impractical—pre-selected by Mom herself—and about to be wholly surrendered while the living blinked, unfathoming. They were fudged, smuzzy. Something they hadn’t seemed before. For one thing they were in a section of the cemetery reserved for the deceased of a local Labour Zionist congregation. Her father, who hadn’t attended a service since the cousin’s bat mitzvah and certainly counted himself as no member of any group, had purchased the double plot here because it was by far the cheapest available, in his books a moral victory of sorts. Making small talk with the rabbi pre-service, good old Dad had make-believed about so-and-sos there was no way he knew, holy days he’d last celebrated in the Antediluvian Era. When the rabbi asked how many years husband and wife had shared, the answer was a fantasy beast of fifty of the best creation had ever bestowed. A creature called Dummy, she immediately thought—what her father used to call her mother when, during their frequent fights, he broke a lot of furniture trying to break his spouse’s warrior silence. Hearing such lies, who wouldn’t want to call such a father out? Who wouldn’t re-tighten her thick scarf and fume instead? Of all times. Of all places.
But when the rabbi finished reciting, her father totally lost it. Jesus, he shouted, tears streaming his cheeks. Jesus.
She steadied her gaze on the shovels spiked like spears in the hard dirt heaped around the grave’s perimeter. There was scaffolding too and wide straps, some kind of gizmo for lowering the box and conducting the business at hand. She kept her back turned on pretty much everything else—she’d already seen her cousin managing, despite her shaking and quaking, to leaf her hands through her thick hair. No friends. No people her mother had never cared much for. She’d been embarrassed to have lung cancer. Years of smoking, what she’d openly referred to as her filthy habit, had finally caught up to her. When she’d received her diagnosis, how hard it had been to convince her not to say she had breast cancer instead—she thought it might gain her greater sympathy, pink ribbons, stuffed toys, balloons. Some prize. How much she must have lived confused in her head. Whose own head wouldn’t swim just thinking? Whose legs wouldn’t wobble?