There was so much she wanted to tell Joe, so many days to describe—all the amazing things the kids had done, all the struggles big and small she’d had to overcome, how sometimes she couldn’t sleep at all.
But the words wouldn’t form. And now he was walking away. Grief rushed at her like a hurricane.
“Where are you going?”
“Gotta get my bags. Be right back.”
“Okay,” she said, letting out a sigh. He wasn’t going back to the ship just yet.
But something wasn’t right. Hazel felt exhausted, like she’d been running up a mountain. She wanted to wait for Joe but also wanted nothing more than to be home in her bed with the kids tucked in and Nonna drinking her nighttime tumbler of Chianti.
“Joe,” she crooned in a voice like old floorboards. “Joe, Joe, Joe.”
She could hear the ocean roaring behind her and the buzzing of lights on the boardwalk. She couldn’t walk much farther or stand much longer. Maybe it was time to be done. She was curious though: Which country was this? What shore? Why couldn’t she tell?
As Hazel frowned and started to shiver, a sharp brightness swept the sand. She covered her eyes. Someone was coming—a pack of them in dark clothes, maybe with guns. They were going to kill her. “Hazel!” they called. “Hazel Sasso!”
Hazel turned and tried to run. The sand kept pulling at her heels, making her sink. The wind ripped at her face. She wasn’t ready to be captured, jailed, penned up. They were going to put her in a straitjacket and bolt every door. She’d read about this.
“Mama,” said a voice. Someone ran toward her.
“Joe, help me!” she yelled. “Help!”
As she tried to run, she felt the earth tilt. Then they reached her, and a man started wrapping something big and soft around her. Too many people. They were rushing, trying to bring her down—policemen and policewomen with shiny badges and flashlights.
“Mama,” the man said, touching her hair. “It’s me—Henry. Your son. Thank God, we found you!”
She looked at his face. A little familiar but no, she didn’t know this person. “You’re not my son.”
He wrapped the blanket tighter around her then took her face in his hands. “Mama, we were so worried. You’re safe now. We’ve been looking for you for hours.”
She shook her head, wrung her hands. “No, no, no, no.”
The man who said he was Henry looked into her eyes. He had a kind face framed by wild brown hair, graying at the temples. His blue eyes were red and tired-looking. “Your name is Hazel Sasso. You have two children: me and a daughter named Sonia. She lives in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. You live in Rehoboth Beach with me. We’re in Rehoboth Beach now. You have three grandchildren—Franny, Sarah, and Joe.”
Hazel shook her head back and forth, back and forth.
“Mama, it’s okay.” He stroked her shoulder. “You’re safe now. These nice people are helping us, and we need to get you dry. Do you understand? Should I sing Dad’s favorite song?”
The young man covered Hazel’s frigid hands with his warmer ones and started to hum. She couldn’t help but listen. The tune was bouncy and bright. Something scratched at the outside of her mind like a cat at the basement door, desperate to get in. Henry had a long-haired Persian cat. He loved that cat. This man beside her had the most determined look on his face as he hummed, just like her son when he went looking for that cat.
“Henry?” she said, her gaze fully focused on him for the first time since the group had approached.
“Yes, yes. It’s me.” Henry smiled and exhaled, then nodded to the policeman and woman. “Let’s get her to the car. She’s soaking wet. Thank you so much for your help.”
“Toast,” she said. “With jam. I want toast. Do you have toast?”
“Of course. I’ll make you toast—don’t worry. Do you know where you are now?”
She nodded, calmer, steadier. She was Hazel Sasso, and this was her son, Henry. She had only wanted to go for a walk. He was a good boy, but he had grown up so quickly.
“Where are we, Mama?”
She swiveled her head weakly, gazing at the water, sky, and sand as if she’d never seen them before. “The beach, at night, in the rain.”
“That’s right. Which one, Mama? Which beach?”
She squeezed his hand and tried to remember. She wanted to tell him, but the name wouldn’t come. What did it matter? Henry had found her and she’d seen Joe and Sarah, even though they left this world long ago. Sometimes she could remember events forty years in the past like they just happened but could not remember her own name.
Her brokenness made her furious, but there was nothing she could do. She stepped in the direction of the surf.
“Where are you going, Mama?” Henry said.
“Joe’s coming back soon. I want to meet him.”
Henry turned to the officers beside him. “I’m sorry. Just one minute.”
He stepped toward the sea with his mother, his arms around her like she might melt away in the rain. “Mama, I’m here for you, but Dad is gone. He loved you very much. We all do.”
Hazel kept her gaze on the mysterious black water until she felt it, that odd sensation, a feeling of something infinite, going on and on and on. Though it was wider and stronger than her, it was also inside of her, no matter how confused she became. She could not explain it with words because it held everything and everyone she’d ever loved.
“Mama,” Henry said softly. “Are you okay?”
Hazel nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving the wild waves. “Yes, yes, yes,” she half-sang to herself. “We’re at the beach.”
NEW WORLD
JULIE LANGSDORF
A new Cadillac every year from the rock-and-roll star son, the one who sends her three dozen roses on Valentine’s Day, addressed “to my best girl.”
Another son whose hands shake, who taps in the wrong number in his cell phone over and over, his face red enough to burst. “Monday we’re putting you in a home, Ma. We’re taking everything out of here and putting you in a home.”
She answers with a laugh that makes her teeter on her high heels, makes her sugar-strand hair shiver on her bony head. Everything is white and breakable here, porcelain figurines, tea cups, narrow-stemmed lamps. There are wires and blinking lights everywhere, like a booby trap. If she falls, she’ll shatter.
“Ma? Why you got so much crap in here?”
The third son calls her every day to tell her he’s going to buy, then to sell, to buy and sell and buy and sell and buy and sell. “How are the kids?” she asks.
“Fine,” he says. “They’re a bunch of shitheads. They’re fine.”
She can’t tell her sons apart any more. Not on the phone. Not in person. There are too many grandkids to count. Great-grandkids. Half grands and half greats. Step grandkids. Adopted kids. Ex-wives and second wives. Third-fourth-fifth wives. Mexican gardeners. Mexican cooks. Mexican nannies. She never learned Spanish. She never even learned English good.
She has a needlepoint framed on the wall of her kitchen. “Cooking sucks.” A gift.
She’s sitting in the little synagogue, her father praying out of tune, her little sister, the one who died, on her lap. She’s walking on Rodeo Drive past dogs in shiny booties and cashmere coats. Chandeliers dangle from the lampposts. The leather jackets are velvet soft here, with no memory of where they came from. Her father was a cattle dealer. They used to keep the cows out back. Her sons don’t want to know.
He drives like a nut, up and down the palm tree–studded hills, past the house with the statues where Rock Hudson lived, past Hugh Hefner’s mansion. They had some good times there, by God. “Beautiful broads.”
“What, Ma?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re out of your head, you old bat.”
She laughs. Is she? Is she out of her head?
Barbara Streisand lives there. Larry King lives there. Frau Mueller lives on the corner. Herr Kunstler, the butcher, down the road. His so
n said he’d drown her if he caught her near the river. Martin told her to leave her window open at night. He threw in loaves of bread, without which we would have starved.
Dinner at a restaurant that’s so dark you can’t see the food. The waiter glides over with the bill like a man on ice skates.
“Let me see it.”
“I’m paying, Ma.”
She grabs it when he looks away. $3,465 for six people. Six bottles of wine at $400 each. “It tasted like cheap wine to me.”
“That’s because you’re a peasant. You got peasant tastes.”
“You’re right!”
She dreamt she went back last night and knocked on doors to see who was still there. Martin answered. He was still twenty. “Du lebst noch?” he asked her. You’re still alive?
The daughter-in-law sends her roasted chickens from a fancy shop. Every week, another chicken knocking at her door. “Why she spend all that money? I don’t even like chicken.” Should she freeze the stuffed peppers? She can’t eat all this. She calls a son to see if he wants it. He tells her to shove it up her ass. “See you later, you bullshitter,” she says, laughing.
“Hi, you old bag.” It’s the rock star son, inviting her for Christmas, thirty people, four turkeys, catered on the beach. “I’ll send a car for you.”
She started going to temple again recently. It feels good. She doesn’t eat pork. On Fridays.
Her sister is visiting from Palm Beach. They go to the Grove, to sit in the sunshine and watch people shop. They drink Caffé Americano, the cheapest thing on the menu. They’re meshuga, charging four dollars for a coffee, am I right? Nights, they eat white fish salad and chopped liver and bagels and watch videos of the rock star son in concert. She doesn’t like the music. You call that music?
“Ma, videos are shit.” One of the sons says. “Throw out your videos, okay? And your records, too, while you’re at it. And all that other crap you got in there. You got so much crap.”
And yet they keep buying her more crap.
“Oh, my God, get a towel,” she tells her sister. She’s just had diarrhea on the couch. It was the sausage at lunch. Too spicy. “Don’t use soap, only water,” she says, the shit dripping down her leg. But her sister is gone, back in Palm Beach.
They say they’re going to put her away. Do they mean it? She’s afraid to ask.
She was a wild one. She loved the boys. Her father used to beat her every day. “And I deserved it.” She was quite a dancer.
“You’re out of your head, Ma.”
“I used to dance all the time, and then one night at Zum Lamm, nobody would dance with me. Dirty Jew, they said. It broke my heart.” She had an aunt in America. They got nearly everyone in the family out. Not the father. Not three of the sisters.
Her sons don’t want to know.
“Why you got so much crap in here, Ma?”
If it were up to her, she’d keep three things. A button from her father’s nightshirt. The pincushion her friend Idl gave her before the ship left for America. Idl had tears in her eyes. Now we have no one. The photo of her family on her fifteenth birthday, in the meadow by the river, where they used to lay out their bedclothes to dry. They kept the smell of the outdoors on them when they brought them back inside. She used to smell hay and sunshine all night long, in her bed.
That’s the thing, the one thing she’d keep. Just that. The smell of a sunny day in Gundelsheim, a sunny day before the world shattered.
CHARLEMAGNE
JOE A. OPPENHEIMER
Since forever, Dad was the first one up. Long before he had to show up at Rossetti’s Auto Body, he’d brew himself the day’s first espresso. Then he’d grab the paper from the yard, sit on the old plaid sofa, and watch the sunrise. Of course, he’d also be petting Charlie. After that ritual was completed and before the sun would be full up over the neighbor’s roof, he’d stand, stretch, and put Charlie on a leash. By then other early risers would be up, walking their dogs.
Charlie would do his business and get his first social hour of the day. He was always more ready to socialize than Dad was. Dad never knew the names of our neighbors—even Mrs. Polakoff, who lived just two doors down and walked a fancy bichon frise that she was always having to clean. Charlie, on the other hand, knew all his neighbors, maybe not by name, but he sure was up close and personal with them. He’d tug at the leash furiously when he’d see the McDaniels’s dachshund who, if I remember right, was called Schnitzel.
Charlie was a handsome and tall golden. His coat’s sheen and his proud, youthful posture was a contrast to his master’s slouch and demeanor. The picture caused many a passerby to steal a second glance of my father’s stocky, dark, Central-European frame. Some say goldens are the friendliest (and dumbest) of all the breeds. Charlie sure was friendly. I don’t think he ever had an enemy in the world. But I never thought he was dumb.
Most days they’d be gone pretty much a full hour. You couldn’t miss their return. What with Charlie’s happy barking, and my father’s loud “Good fella, there, good boy!” he could have woken up Grandfather, who was lying two miles away and six feet under. We’d all be up, and Mom would have breakfast started.
Dad was a welder at Rossetti’s. They gave him a steady income and his addiction to espresso. If he’d been more sociable, he might have used the bragging rights he earned by working only a few miles from home in a town full of commuters. He could leave at a respectable hour and come home pretty early most evenings. Of course, when home, he’d grab the leash and walk Charlie.
No doubt about it, Charlie was Dad’s dog. I mean, Charlie certainly tolerated Cal and me as we grew up. He was obedient whenever we took him on his afternoon walks. But inside, he’d move into another room away from us. Sure, he’d wag his tail at Mom as she’d put down his bowl of water. And Friday evenings, when she’d served a chicken for the Sabbath, Charlie would be far more expressive as she gave him the extra schmaltz. But it never lasted. When Dad was at work, Charlie would wait patiently on a scatter rug and ignore all of us. He never barked at the mailman, and left most of the other humans alone as they entered the door. But when he’d hear Dad close the garage, Charlie would jump up, move to the front door and bark wildly. When younger, Charlie would get up on his back legs, put his front paws on Dad’s shoulders and lick Dad’s face. In return, Dad would always be greeting Charlie first, then he’d nod to the rest of us. As Charlie would get down, Dad would kiss and then scratch Charlie’s big blond head.
When Charlie died, sometime after I followed Cal to college, Dad fell into a deep funk. But after some months, he got another—this time a mutt—a Lab terrier mongrel. He called it Chuckles—in honor of Charlie, I guess. Chuckles was also good-natured, and, unlike Charlie, he was rotund, a bit swaybacked, and lower energy. Dad still took those morning walks. I suppose the two of them looked more fitting together—Dad no longer being shown up by a lean blond athletic type.
Without Cal and me at home, while Dad still worked, Mom walked Chuckles in the early afternoon. But Dad would take him out in the evenings and nights. All the dogs were always really Dad’s. He loved his pets.
And once he retired, Dad was the one who walked Chuckles, almost always. He had his routes. Most mornings he’d go around a few blocks, so Chuckles could say good morning to everyone. He thought that, like Charlie, Chuckles needed a strong social life. This was in sharp contrast to himself. Dad never seemed to need more companionship than he got out of his dogs. He’d sit at the table with us, eating our meals. But aside from taking scraps and giving them to Charlie, I can’t recall him having any sustained social communication with a living member of the household at the table.
Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, ’cause if we weren’t respecting Mom, we’d know Dad wasn’t going to tolerate it. But not much more. I know that sounds pretty extreme. Maybe I’ve forgotten a time or two. I’d have to check with Cal.
Even apart from mealtimes, I can’t remember him talking to Mom about anything. I mean, you
could hear a “yes” or a “no.” Or some short answer to a question. And of course, there’d be the standard questions:
“Did you see Chuckles’ leash?” or “Have you seen the car keys?” or “What’cha cooking, Rachel?”
Not that they weren’t happy. He’d smile; they’d hug. Sometimes if the radio played just the right music they’d get up, laugh, and dance. But talk? Really talk? I doubt it. I think they never had a conversation. Not in front of us boys anyhow. Can you imagine my surprise hearing him talk to her after she passed? I’d come home for a holiday or something, and I’d hear him say things like, “Rachel, don’t you concern yourself none anymore. All your boys, David, Cal, and me, we’re truckin’ just fine. They got themselves good jobs now. Just like you always wanted.”
Another time it was about the garden: “Don’t you be too worried about me anymore. I got the bulbs in just like you like, and the garden is going to be real pretty this year. You’ll love it—we’ll be able to look out the window and see all the flowers. Just you and me.”
Well, I was so surprised that I called Cal first chance I had, and he could hardly believe it. He made me tell him the story two times before he accepted it as “real” information.
Big dogs may be fun, but they don’t live long, most times. And sure enough, not long after Mom died, so did Chuckles. Chuckles’s death just highlighted how alone Dad was. It marked the beginning of Dad’s downturn.
He was inconsolable. ’Course, unlike when Mom died and Cal and I came home, neither of us thought about going home for Chuckles. Probably should have. Maybe Cal was too far away—I’m not exactly sure where he was that day we each got the call from Dad. As a journalist, he could have been sent anywhere. Maybe Cal was already in Libya, maybe he was just getting set to go. But I was in Chicago working for Sears. It took me a few weeks to realize how depressed Dad was. I mean, I’d call home in the morning and he wouldn’t pick up. Even at noon he’d just say he had been sleeping—was just now getting up. It seemed like he’d never go out except to get food.
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