So when her father began racing the wooden plank alongside the grave, backing and forthing over the now-descending casket, its cargo of emaciated body wrapped in a white sheet, she let him be.
The purity of that sheet had been important, evidently. Keeping it that way had caused some consternation. She’d driven in the middle of the night from her south-city-district apartment to arrive at her parents’ bungalow crammed with a riot of meds and a ripe cat-litter box, her father exhausted and possibly incorrectly, dangerously drugged into brief acquiescence accepting coffee, a buttered roll—the bread not too far past its use-by date. By mid-morning came the phone call. This from some clown at the funeral home. There was a problem. In accordance with custom they’d wrapped her mother in a white sheet. But as sometimes happened with the dead, the guy explained, she was a cauldron inside, stomach acids and bile emitting a staining fluid at the mouth. Took a moment to comprehend. The only way to keep the sheet pure was to sew the lips shut. Permission was being sought. The old man, too out of it to deal, passed on the matter.
She clutched the phone to her ear. Why hesitate?
All those times she’d begged. Eat, please. Anything, especially toward the end. Mushy pasta with bottled, over-salted sauce. Simulac by the teaspoonful. In those last months, she’d desperately tried to ark as many calories as she could into her mother. Get her to pack some on. Get her to live. But her mother hadn’t wanted any of it.
Yes, go right ahead, she told the funeral-home guy. Do what you need to do. Do it!
He seemed taken aback, stammering a few words before cutting short the call. But she hadn’t cared. Here was some news. All along her mother had been full. On her surface, mute suffering, blankety-blank. Inside, a delicacy of churning eels. Lobster claws click-clacking—tref, impure, an unbridled unclean with which in death she was well-provisioned, leaving just some foam breach-burping her lips.
Please, the rabbi was saying. I’m afraid. Your father could fall.
Here was her teetering, imprecating father. Here the snow curling like the crests of waves over the leagues of the dead. So much for her magic carpet ride into the past. The rabbi shrugged apologetically and peered at his shoes. They were hefty numbers, scuffed, salt-soured. Clearly they’d seen better days. Like his face, the flesh listing, skin pouchy and pocked. Tell the distant cousin that, though. She’d sailed closer to the rabbi and cocked her hip, and was maneuvering her trembling bits and pieces in his direction. Now he looked really scared.
Jesus, Jesus.
She walked. She’d done it before, a lot. The second she’d turned eighteen—out of her parents’ cramped house and into one squamous low-rent apartment after another. Whole emotional territories shipped and skipped, good riddance. Bullshit jobs tallying columns of numbers for questionable profits. Thieves for bosses. A degree then degrees then better jobs. Places to go, people to see. Including new young guys—the young dudes getting younger while she got on. So she went. But this time, toward what was left of her family—her riotous and undignified father—though the wooden board nearly bestride the grave was soaked and slippery. She inched toward him as he chuffed and capered and raged bareheaded—moments before, a flapping gust had disappeared his yarmulke. When she got to him she gripped his arm. Jesus. How many times he’d gripped hers. She remembered it all, all of it, while Dad rocked on the plank and the rent-a-rabbi rolled and Mom’s remains remained. Around them the tall pines waved their arms hello, goodbye—maybe in their language these were the same word. If she squinted, might the wet snow slip to apple blossoms? At the rabbi’s signal she opened her mouth. Baruch Adonai. Flakes lit her tongue. Flecks of cold-kissed stars, she thought, though she tried not to think. Hold on, she thought anyway—unsure of what she meant while amidst the bare trees, across the snow-swept swales, the winter sparrows dervished like dreidels. Like there was so much to cease to know.
Three days later, it was as if her father did topple in—as if in slow motion, his blown bits carefully collected by an organization she hired to place in a casket. So another watcher waited and watched until she stood before another rabbi and observed the casket lowering into the ground. The sky spun more snow, the flakes not much smaller than the small whirling birds. Who or what were any of them? The living, the dead. What was she to them? To anything? Hello, goodbye. Baruch Adonai. The stars were dead suns. Hold on.