by Margo Rabb
Omi and Opa still lived in Washington Heights, but they didn’t get a chance to see my mother before she died. It had happened so surprisingly quickly—my father hadn’t arranged their visit in time. At the funeral I’d stared at Omi beside me on the pew in her heaping wig, and Opa steadying himself with his cane; I’d wanted to extract my mother from them, whatever part of her that they held. They spoke little except for a few exchanges in German to each other.
My father called them nightly now. His own Polish-born parents were long dead, his aunts and uncles relocated to Yonkers; only my sister, father, and I remained in Queens, half a block down from where my father had grown up.
“I’ll wake you up at six-fifteen,” he said, and shut the door. I groaned. I’d been sleeping until noon every day, waking in a coma-like state. I dreaded getting up when it was still dark, to wait on the icy 7 train platform for the hour-and-fifteen-minute subway ride to school. I hated being smushed in the train car with dozens of commuters sweating in their winter coats, grumbling in ten different languages, reaching desperately for the silver poles as the train squealed and tilted like it was about to topple off the tracks.
“I’m glad I’m going back,” Alex said during our nightly attack of the post-funeral food supply. She dug into a half-destroyed strudel; I ate the frosting off a cupcake. “It’s better than moping here.”
“I like moping.” I didn’t want to face the level buzz of the lunchroom and the day packaged neatly into its eight periods, and I shuddered at the thought of seeing Jay Kasper; I hoped he hadn’t told people about our pity date. But I wrapped up a cupcake and a piece of strudel to take to lunch the next day. My father made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
That night I dreamed I was back at school, telling everyone that my mom had died. In the dream they all said, “So what?”
The Bronx High School of Science is a sprawling 1950s architectural monstrosity of glass and red brick, several long, cold blocks from the Bedford Park Boulevard stop on the D train. It was early February; the wind whipped down the wide, deserted streets. I walked past the railway yard and Harris Field, which looked less like a field and more like an abandoned lot.
My first-period class was history. I settled into my assigned seat between Nagma Pawa and Joe Randazzo. We sat in welded-down rows, beside the barred windows. (Were they afraid we’d steal the desks, or jump out?) No one paid attention to me being back after the long absence. No one mentioned my mother. I felt partly relieved but partly disappointed. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but I had expected something. Alex would probably say, Did you think you deserved a parade?
“Pearlman. Long time no see,” Joe said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Melody clicked over in her patent leather Mary Janes. She wore tiny silver cross earrings and a corduroy jumper. Her fashion taste lingered in the era of OshKosh and Underoos. “How are you?” she asked, gazing at me like she wanted to shrink-wrap me and take me home as her own grief specimen.
“Fine.” I took out my notebook, turned away from her, and started to doodle.
Mr. Flag took attendance. He looked like a businessman who’d wandered into the classroom on his way to the office. He wore suits with creased pants, pristine white shirts, and tasteful ties, unlike our other teachers. Their shirts seemed permanently untucked, the soles were peeling off their ratty sneakers, and their ties, on the rare occasions they wore them, featured smiling squirrels or dancing pencils. Mr. Flag revered the meticulous Delaney attendance-taking system—little pink and white cards, which he marked up with the four-colored pen he kept clipped to his inside pocket. I could see my card on his desk, scarred in red.
Mr. Flag was additionally unique in that he swore by the Study Skills Acquisition Program, color-coded packets that corresponded to our textbook, which required writing long, dull answers to longer, duller questions. In his thirty years of teaching in the New York City public school system, he told us, he’d found this system incomparably effective. They made SSA cards for nearly every subject, and he didn’t understand why more teachers didn’t use them. If they’d made them for lunch and gym, he would’ve recommended those too.
Mr. Flag had Melody pass out the SSA cards and the school-owned History of the World textbook. I stared out the window, past the schoolyard, toward the subway. I wished I was back in bed reading Anne of the Island. Melody paused at my desk and told me we were still on Unit Five. I’d missed the second half of World War I, and now we were on World War II. She said I hadn’t missed much.
As the class set to work on the current SSA card, Mr. Flag called me to his desk and handed me the stack of cards I’d missed. On the subway that morning, I’d worried that some teacher might single me out and make an embarrassing show of sympathy. Mr. Flag’s distant, pained smile and his lack of mentioning anything about my mother’s death, as if I’d been out with a cold, seemed worse. I sank back into my seat and stared blankly at the SSA cards in front of me.
I watched Melody return to her desk and dutifully scrawl out the answers to every dry question, like the rest of the class. I stared back out the window. Suddenly I heard Mr. Flag’s voice. “Are you having a problem with the assignment, Miss Pearlman?”
I shook my head.
“Then you should be writing.”
I opened the book. History of the World was color-coded to go with the SSA cards. World War I was canary yellow, World War II a sky blue. I glanced over the long, thick, dry passages on governments, battle sites, statistics of lives lost. I turned the pages to look at the pictures. Red and yellow maps of countries’ borders before and after the war. FDR in his wheelchair. A military army plane over the Pacific. Hitler at a podium, his moustache like a mistaken flick of a Magic Marker, a German banner waving behind him. Then, in the bottom right corner of the next page, the last photograph of the section: a concentration camp. Bodies, bone-thin, huddled, half alive, limbs strewn about so that you could not tell which belonged to whom. Then the chapter ended. The following page was electric orange, the beginning of Unit Six.
Everyone scribbled the assignment.
I stared at the page with its sky-blue border, the black-and-white photograph. I’d seen dozens of pictures and movies about the Holocaust and the camps before, of course. I’d read The Diary of Anne Frank and watched Holocaust movies-of-the-week on TV despite my mother’s disdain. She never watched them. I was curious, and guilty for being curious. The books and movies never satisfied the curiosity; they never seemed real. Did Anne Frank mean it when she wrote that people were good at heart? Did she feel that after her family had been found, after she’d been taken to Bergen-Belsen?
My mother had met Anne’s father, Otto Frank. He’d been friends with the Gluckmans, Fanny’s parents, and my mother had been invited to dinner several times when Otto Frank was there. My mother was about ten years old. What was he like? I asked her, proud and envious. She shrugged. She said he seemed nice. It was before the diary had been published. She said he was thin and quiet, like everybody else.
I kept staring at the photograph. The silence of my mother’s life became even greater right then, as I looked at the picture. She’d rarely spoken of what happened to her family during the war; she’d tried to shelter us from it. She’d wanted being Jewish just to be the songs for us, the food, but it couldn’t be—those couldn’t be separated from everything else. Her sheltering, her silence, had told us something darker just the same. My back prickled, my face grew hot. I stopped seeing the picture in the book and instead saw my family: my grandparents’ eyes when they gazed at my sister and me playing, as if they’d never seen children do that before. My mother, digging her fingernails into my shoulder when she heard German spoken on the bus. Jamming her tote bag full of food and supplies, to be prepared “for anything.” Calling the police after hearing fireworks one August night, waking my sister and me, thinking New York was being bombed.
This tiny photograph in the book, with no names, no explanations, no descriptions o
f who the bodies were, how they got there, if their families survived—this one chapter with its color-coded sections and corresponding questions—wasn’t what my family had experienced. This book was about a one-event history, the kind of disaster that begins and ends, with no aftereffects, no reverberations. Not the kind of history that seeps in slowly and colors everything, like a quiet, daily kind of war, the war that my mother and my family lived through, which lived through them, which never ended.
I thought about my mother in the hospital, telling me that she’d always known this would happen, that she would die like this, that all her life she’d been waiting. Even that night of the diagnosis, behind the surprised smile had been something else: a knowing, an expecting.
And the shock was that hints of this had been dropped all my life—hadn’t I read Anne of Green Gables and Oliver Twist for the first time, long before the diagnosis, with the same hunger with which I read them now? We’d only known my mom had cancer for twelve days, but the doctors said it could’ve been growing in her, undetected, for over twenty years. I wondered if that was the cause behind her years of vaguely identified allergies, asthma, colds; her days in bed; the darkness of her room, of every room in our house; her face buried in her hands; the crook of her elbow shielding her eyes. She had kept piles and piles of lists, reminding herself to do everything in a frantic, uneven script. We had repeated “I love you” to each other daily, incessantly, because my worst fear had always been that I would come home one day and find out she’d died, and she wouldn’t know how much I loved her. We said it so often, I used to be afraid that someone outside of my family would catch my mother and me in a desperate “I love you”—or that I might accidentally say one to someone else. I’d even considered it superstitious—but it wasn’t, I could see now. It was that I sensed, even then, how fragile and uncertain my mother’s life was. That the hole her death left had begun forming a long, long time ago.
I stared out the barred windows to the cement schoolyard. I hadn’t answered one question, not only on this card but on any in the stack. I hadn’t even faked it, writing notes to friends like others did. My stark white notebook lay wide open, my pencil across the blank page.
The classroom was quiet. Mr. Flag watched me with a starched smile. “Miss Pearlman, if you’re having problems with the blue section, you can go back and work on the yellow.”
I couldn’t turn the page. I sat frozen in my seat, transfixed by the picture; I couldn’t look forward or backward or do anything but stay there, staring at the bodies, unknown, intertwined, tossing, their bodies, my mother’s body, me.
A bell rang, the end of the period. Books slapped shut, assignments passed forward, notebook paper tore. I didn’t move. I kept looking at the picture, and it seemed to me that the worst thing that could happen in the world right then would be to send my book forward like everyone else and pretend that it was just a photo in a book, in World History, Unit Five, and nothing else. As if the war was the kind of thing you could print in a color-coded textbook, shut at the end of the lesson, and give back.
Melody stood at the front of each row to collect the assignments and textbooks. I heard them flapping around me, moving forward.
Mr. Flag stared at me, impatient. “Miss Pearlman, are you going to pass your book in?”
The books lay in a neat stack on the first desk of our row, and Melody moved them into a pile on the windowsill. I couldn’t move.
“Miss Pearlman, pass your book in, please.”
He whispered something to Melody, and her patent leather Mary Janes clicked on the floor. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I picked the book up. It felt surprisingly light in my hands. As Melody walked toward me, with Mr. Flag’s stark face behind her, his fingers bent stiffly over his pink and white Delaney card system, each card filed into its neat compartment without a thought as to who existed in each one, his face with its expression of perpetual annoyance, like we were an incurable breed of disorder, disruption, and lost causes, the last thing I could do was place that book in Melody’s hand. She was smiling, the same smile she’d had when she handed me the grief book, the five distinct stages I hadn’t entered or passed and, it seemed now, never would.
She was still smiling when I threw the book at the window. The window was open, and it hit the metal bars with a loud clang, then clapped on top of the sill as the pages flurried open. The class flinched all at once. Mr. Flag did too, and though his features reassumed their rigid position and his face admitted hardly a change, the sound continued to ring in the silent classroom afterward.
HOSPITAL FOOD
It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.
—M. F. K. Fisher
The Gastronomical Me
When my midterm grades arrived, I considered various ways to shield them from my father: Oh, there are no grades this year, I could say, or U does not mean unsatisfactory, it means ultraperfect. Or else I could spill ketchup on strategic spots. I’d stopped going to history class altogether in favor of sleeping late, and I often slept through my second-period English class as well. But it turned out that the report card didn’t matter after all—that night, my father had a heart attack.
“It’s probably nothing, just too many baked beans at dinner,” was how he’d initially described his chest pains as our taxi careened over the 59th Street Bridge and on to New York University Medical Center. It was April, three months after my mother died; a freak snowstorm had hit the city a few days before, and its slushy gray remains still lurked on the corners. Within hours we learned he would have to stay in the hospital for monitoring and tests, and in a week would undergo triple bypass. It was his second heart attack; his first had been when he was thirty-five, before I was even born.
During those days before the bypass surgery, I lived off ice cream. It was the only appealing thing in the hospital cafeteria. I wasn’t the only one who ate it—I recognized the other visitors from the fifteenth floor, all of us standing beside the soft-serve machine, Styrofoam bowls extended, globbing on fudge, sprinkles, and whipped cream in some speechless camaraderie. Nobody cried openly in the hospital; we just stuffed our misery behind magazines, rumpled newspapers, and meals of dessert. I buried myself behind Cardiovascular Surgery and Your Family, the blue pamphlet the doctors had given us, and tried to convince myself that my father would be all right.
Doctors, relatives, and friends assured Alex and me that he’d be fine—bypass surgery was so common now that it was practically routine, they said—but each night I’d watch my sundae dissolve, not wanting to return to his room, to the tubes flowing from his body like plastic vines, the heart monitor exposing every wobbly beat, the electric clamps poised against the wall like a pair of praying hands. A common procedure, I’d repeat to myself, and then wallow in a melted pool of cookies ’n’ cream.
I was sitting in a far corner of the cafeteria three days before the surgery when one of my father’s doctors, an intern, approached me. “Can I join you?” he asked.
I nodded. I’d seen him dozens of times in the past week, whenever the team of doctors came into my father’s room on their three-minute rounds, all of them inspecting my father’s body and rattling off medical terms like a secret code. We’d never spoken. None of the doctors ever spoke to Alex and me; they glanced in our direction and smiled warily, as if we were the unfortunate audience of an unrehearsed show.
He introduced himself and we shook hands. I stared at his ID tag, like the kind factory workers wore: Richard E. Bridgewald. His face looked small and young in the little photo, overwhelmed by the white plastic around it. I searched his white coat for some sign of personality, some clue as to who he was—a monogrammed pen in his shirt pocket, a distinctive watch, a ring—but there was nothing.
Richard unloaded a salad, sandwich, and a glass of orange juice from his tray. “Where’s your family?” he asked.
&nbs
p; Family seemed an overly optimistic term for Alex, my father, and me. Most recently, Alex and I’d argued over which subway stop was closest to our house; that morning we’d huffed off to the 46th Street and 52nd Street stations separately.
“My sister’s upstairs with our father,” I said. I didn’t know if I should mention that our mother was dead. I still wasn’t used to saying the word dead out loud. I felt half disgusted and half fascinated by the word, as if it was a new, forbidden curse: dead, the real and unreal sound of it, absorbing and repelling, like a horror movie. Night of the Living Dead. The Dead Return. My father used the euphemisms—she’s gone, she passed away—which, my sister pointed out with her usual delicacy, sounded like his Excuse me, I just passed wind. “Say fart, Dad,” she’d demand.
“My mother died here—in this hospital—in January.”
Richard rearranged his lettuce leaves. “I know—it’s on your father’s record. I’m sorry.”
I nodded, surprised. What else did he know about me? I pictured the doctors whispering about us in the back halls, the staff elevator: The Pearlman daughters, they’re regulars here. I often stared at the doctors, settled in their roped-off section like a flock of tired geese; I imagined mini-plots secretly unfolding among them, like on hospital TV shows. Sometimes I even peeked into staff lounges and restricted rooms, hoping to see doctors and nurses getting it on, orderlies in a fistfight, or patients screaming bloody murder. But nobody kissed, and no one fought. Even the emergency room, where my father had been that first night, had seemed surprisingly sedate: a kid with a button stuck up his nose, and lots of sleeping old people.