Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened

by Hal Niedzviecki

  Dad?

  Yeah —

  — Is everything —

  Ah, I’m fine, everything is . . . it’s just . . .

  You sure?

  Hey I gotta — listen, busy man. You go back to your stories.

  Okay, say hi to Mom.

  Your mother. Yeah, okay.

  Shlomo holds the phone in his soft hand. The sun sets and the day ends and he sits.

  The not-my-mother pushed me out the back door.

  The air was hot and dry. The sky was fire, burning and melting.

  I stepped forward, teetered on the edge of a cliff, griffins and lions, centaurs and peacocks prowling restlessly below. And there, shining like the moon, was the unicorn, a present, I heard her say, a present. But for whom?

  I looked back. An old woman with rotting teeth waved at me, good-bye, hello. The sky pressed low. Not knowing what else to do, I stepped forward.

  Falling.

  My gut split open on a single horn of lunar light.

  III.

  In the bright grocery store Shlomo has a moment. He stops, gasping for air, puts his hands to his chest.

  He plans to do a halibut on the barbecue, a certain special glaze he knows.

  He walks by the dairy section, glance averted.

  By the time he reaches fish, he’s feeling fine again.

  When he has a bit too much Crown Royal, that’s when it all comes out: Harvey and his band of shysters, the nerve of them, spineless, they way they — early retirement buyout bull crap, you call it whatever you want. Shlomo knows what it is. And after everything, after he struggled and risked everything.

  Thicker, he tells the fish boy. He shows him with three fingers how thick. He is still somebody. He still commands respect. They took everything. They abused his trust, his good name, his good sense. But it’s his, no matter what, they took it away from him but he’s still the innovator, the inventor, the man behind Shlomo’s Original Flavored Cream Cheese. The rest were little: lawyers, stockbrokers; hangers-on, thieves.

  Shlomo takes his fish, $14.65, the price for fish, he puts the package in the cart. This time he’s going to do it. He wheels the cart purposely back through the milk, past the butter, past the margarine, past the yogurt; it’s like his wife says, he has nothing to be ashamed of. He should be proud.

  But the flavors these days. The horrors they commit in his name. It was the beginning of the end, chocolate, if only he had known. Yes, true, the Christians loved it. Still, Shlomo cringed every time he was confronted with the smooth brown spread — I never should have — it’s unnatural, he told Harvey, but Harvey just laughed.

  And then butterscotch and mocha. The Goying of Cream Cheese! screeched the headline in the food section of Jewish Life.

  The Christians loved it.

  Shlomo tried to draw the line at fudge ripple.

  It’s not ice cream, he had yelled, brandishing his protruding belly, feeling the red on his face spread like an overflowing river.

  Harvey just laughed.

  Shlomo quickens his pace. If he can’t look, he doesn’t have to look.

  He looks.

  There he is. His face garish and smiling. Rows and piles and stacks of the stuff. Bricks and tubs and vats. Diet and Calcium Enriched and Extra Creamy. It’s a circus, Shlomo thinks. On the containers, his eyes are wide in amazement and invitation, his arms flailing like an overenthusiastic grandparent about to lock a toddler into a hug. It’s a circus. And I look like a — like a — clown.

  Shlomo coughs, his heart working, his throat closing, then, mercifully, opening.

  At night, the men had nightmares — no no please. You could hear their moans through the canvas flaps of the tents. The women slept peacefully, snoring, clutching their babies to their breasts.

  I slipped out of my mother’s grasp. Outside, the moon was bright, despite the incessant drizzle. My boots splattered through ruts of wet mud. The night was warm and empty, ghettos and ghosts, coincidence and survival. I thought of the future: next month, the month after that.

  The gates were shut. I felt my heart rattle against the bars. The Americans had locked us in and left. Sure, why wouldn’t they? — we disgusted them. We disgusted ourselves, empty vessels holding nothing more than blank stares and dry coughs. My hair had grown back bone white, not strand by strand, but all at once. Nobody noticed. I was angry, near tears. Let me out, I said, in what I hoped would be my confident voice. Open the gate. What language was I speaking? Who I was talking to? Open the gate. I tramped at the puddles around my feet. It’s not fair, I yelled. I kicked at the gate with everything I had. I fell down. The gate swung open. In the guard post, the American slept with his feet up, machine gun in his arms.

  Shlomo develops an interest in televised sports — golf and women’s tennis in particular. His wife leaves for work in the morning, refusing to ask what he does every day, what he’s done every day for the past five years.

  Shlomo watches television. He flips through pages of the newspaper, never stopping to read the articles. He shops for groceries, buys too much, spends too much, eats too much. His wife doesn’t trust him, she pays all the bills, keeps watch over the accounts. He feels lost in his own body, in his own house. He goes out to the backyard and considers the shrubs, the empty flower beds, the slumping back fence.

  A letter comes for him from the Jewish Congress, inviting him to the Displaced Persons Memorial Conference and Gathering in Washington, DC.

  His wife shows it to him.

  How do they know? he says.

  They know, she says.

  He sighs, returns to his easy chair, to the girls in short skirts grunting after the dizzying green ball.

  You should go, his wife says, fluttering the letter in front of the TV.

  It has nothing to do with me, Shlomo says, craning his neck to see behind her.

  You’re going, his wife says.

  The conference is in a downtown warren of many rooms. There are plenaries and seminars, testimonials and break-out groups.

  They give him a name tag. The tag is light green, everyone who came from a certain area wears the light green tag.

  Shlomo feels like people recognize him from the commercials they used to run. He feels like people are looking at him with a certain degree of hostility.

  What, he thinks, I’m not allowed to be here?

  A historian from Hebrew University recounts the story they all know. Then the great Jewish writer/survivor does a talk. Shlomo glances around him. Everyone is old. The lady next to him cries. Shlomo stares at the podium. There, there, he whispers. He feels himself perspiring though it’s not warm. There, there, he says again, quietly, so that no one can hear him.

  At lunch, the waiters bring chicken. Shlomo sits next to a couple from Ohio. So, the man, Tim, says. Let me just ask you one thing . . . french vanilla? What were you thinking?

  Shlomo rolls a parisienne potato from one side of his plate to the other.

  It was, he mutters, I couldn’t really . . . I mean —

  Genius, Tim gushes, really, really great stuff. Eve can’t get enough of it. You can’t get enough of it, can you, honey?

  It’s wonderful on a muffin, Eve says politely.

  Thank you, Shlomo says. Their name tags are white. The couple beam and Shlomo notices how young they are.

  Are you . . . he says, not quite sure how to put it.

  No, Eve laughs, we’re not Jewish.

  We’re just here to learn, Tim says. We’re history buffs.

  Tim puts a big boneless chunk of chicken in his mouth.

  I followed the rivulets of water as they ran in ministreams and tiny rivers through the aortas and veins of the village. Soon, I was through the town, as far away from the camp as I had ever been. The camp was just a smell in the grooves of my skin. I kept my head down, watched my speckled boots take their tentative steps. I was six. I was eight. I was ten years old. It was raining. I opened my mouth to speak. I did not speak. I tasted the rain.

 
I loved it when my mother slapped me. I loved the sour smell of her skin. When I was talking too much, she pushed my head down almost into my soup. The rain became a downpour. The last part of the night. I hid under a tree with no leaves, only branches. It was spring, and the lightning lit up the wretched land, thick forest graveyards and pockmarked fields where nothing grew, the entire world crumbled into a wet hole, dirty knuckles and torn nails scraping gray wet earth.

  They slept, their bones leaking through their thin nightshirts.

  What kept us safe? The Americans? The war was over. There had been a terrible, terrible war.

  No one spoke of it.

  The dead tree turned into an old dead man. I stole his cap and ran down the road. The old rules, the old ways of doing things, the old ways of following a path to a destination — what did they mean to me now? Now we were just names on a list. I was six or eight or ten or twelve, with an old man’s cap swallowing the top of my head. I ran because I could. I ran under the sky as it spit at me with fire. I ran because if I had stopped to look I would have seen purple and ocher in charcoal smudges where the soaked night met the smoldering glow of the first dawn. It was spring. They searched everywhere for me. They followed my boot prints past bloody pastures and murderous thickets, past landmarks they refused to recognize. All of sudden, the life of a single boy was so important? My mother stayed in the camp. She ate her soup, then she ate my soup. They commandeered a jeep. They cursed and prayed in their nothing language. They squinted their eyes through the muddy roads. If I had looked up, I would have seen men creeping from graves, their naked privates swinging and swollen, their bone heads glistening wet in the moonlight. But, of course, I did not look up.

  After lunch, they split into break-out groups. They divide by camp and by period of internment. There are ten people in Shlomo’s group. They are all older than Shlomo by at least fifteen years. They wear loose gray pants pulled up over lumpy parts. They walk slowly in tan shoes with thick white soles. Following the advice in the Displaced Persons Conference Welcome Kit they go around the room, introduce themselves.

  Shlomo waits anxiously for it to be his turn. He thinks of his mother. He tries to put words in his dry mouth. He closes his eyes, sees a supermarket shelf, those brightly colored cream cheese bricks, each one stamped with his caricature likeness. When they get to him, he turns red and coughs in his fist. They expect him to go on, but he doesn’t.

  With the introductions over, the group becomes animated; everyone talks at once:

  — We lined up for soup! a woman yells.

  — Remember!

  — The Americans couldn’t understand!

  — Why would we line up for the soup? Pushing and shoving! There’s plenty, that’s what they always said.

  Shlomo watches as they dab at their rheumy eyes.

  — I thought there’d be more of us, intones an old man in a yellow sweatshirt.

  Nobody looks familiar. Nobody mentions the time before the displaced persons camp.

  — I was pregnant with Marsha, didn’t give birth till we got to New York, thank god.

  — Lots of girls were getting pregnant!

  — And all those marriages!

  — The Americans!

  — Couldn’t understand —

  — The colonel, remember the colonel?

  — We kept coughing, everyone had that same cough!

  — And remember Reb Singer, who led the first Yom Kippur prayers?

  — What a beautiful voice.

  — I thought there’d be more of us.

  — What ever happened to — ?

  — He was old, even then —

  — He’s dead, of course.

  — Does anyone — ?

  — Did anyone — ?

  — I thought there’d be —

  — But what a voice!

  — Remember? Even the Americans were crying.

  — Wait wait wait, cries a woman, mascara smudging down her cheeks. Does anyone remember? She looks over at Shlomo. That little boy! Remember? Weren’t you the one, the little boy who ran away?

  Sometime Next Sunrise

  Disaster is imminent. Mom is driving. The Dad’s blood pressure rising. We can all feel it. Veins in our temples. Pulsing.

  Turn there! The Dad stabs at the green highway sign announcing the next exit.

  We’re not going that way, I say.

  Turn! There! The Dad ignores me like I’ve wet myself and he’s too disgusted to even acknowledge it.

  I’m thirty-three years old.

  Mom resolutely forging forward.

  Get in the right lane, The Dad orders. This is the exit. Nancy! Do you hear me? THIS. IS. THE. EXIT.

  We’re going the regular way, I say.

  THERE! The Dad’s eyes bulging out of his head as we shoot past his turnoff.

  You’re passing it!

  We were never going that way, I point out.

  Rainy puts her hand on my leg. Squeezes. Shut up? or Be strong? or Your family is crazy?

  That was the exit, The Dad mutters. Goddammit.

  We just want to get there, I say.

  Fuck! The Dad pronounces.

  Simon, Mom says.

  Fuck all of you!

  The Dad shrouds his face in a map.

  Rainy unpacks. She understands these holidays with my parents as something we have to do; keep up appearances, be good people, we — and they — are all good people. But really it isn’t about good or bad, requirement or respectability. It’s a symbiosis, ingrown truth we spend all our time avoiding. Their life is my life. They haunt me because they are me, my memory, my self, a living ghost smothering me in its ample ever-present bosom.

  Rainy is done unpacking.

  You could be nicer, she says. To your dad.

  He’s crazy, I say. He practically went psychotic when we didn’t stop at that chicken place. And he told us to fuck off. Remember?

  We could have stopped there.

  Did you see his face when I told him you didn’t like chicken? I thought he was gonna have a frigging heart attack!

  I laugh. Rainy turns away. Her father died of a heart attack.

  From our balcony on the twelfth floor I scan the beach with Dad’s binoculars. Beach is a swathe of beige sand packed between high-rise condos and the gray green Atlantic. People shroud the silt, splayed out like retired centerfold models — used to displaying themselves and their accoutrements. Science experiment cellulite creeps across the sand, overwhelms bathing suit bottoms, threatens to encompass even the spreading scope of the sky. Everywhere I look, white fleshy skin bloats toward the waning sun.

  I scan for teenage girls in string bikinis. But instead I find the parents in my bifocal scope. They’re negotiating with the umbrella boy. I freeze, unable to pull away. Mom gesticulates, The Dad talks loudly. I can see his lips flapping. Armed with meticulous instructions and an ample tip, the umbrella boy will no doubt be eagerly staking out our prime territory sometime next sunrise. The parents complete their transaction. Satisfied, they stand with their backs to the ocean, comparing high-rise condos for placement, value, amenities, pool size. I see her poke The Dad and they both turn toward our building, pointing and waving.

  What are they waving at?

  Me, I realize.

  Suddenly, I’m sweating in the seashore air. I can actually see The Dad’s lips forming words — Hi Son! Over here, Son! The entire mass of beach-bound sun worshippers stirring from their slumber to see what that crazy old guy is going on about. The Dad’s yelling drowned out by the recurring waves. My parents gesticulate frantically, their hands over their heads. An eternity passes. I pretend not to notice. I pretend to linger on the tight buns of a sun-kissed adolescent whose flesh has not yet turned corporeal and corrupted by a steady diet of lite beer and reality TV. Where is she? Splaying her charms to the last of the late day’s heat.

  Rainy says I’m ungrateful. Rainy says I’m an asshole. Rainy says I’m lucky to have parents who care about me.


  The Dad wants ribs but I insist on all-you-can-eat crabs.

  But the rib place is the best! The Dad halfheartedly protests.

  Simon, Mom says, the kids want seee-food.

  Mom decides we’ll walk the six blocks to Joe’s all-you-can-dismember crab hut. Mom is always trying to get The Dad to walk places. The Dad and I both hate walking.

  Two blocks in, I realize why nobody walks in Ocean Town. It’s like going for a pleasant evening stroll on the shoulder of a highway during a rush hour traffic jam. Three lanes each way, the main drag separates the premium beachfront high-rises from the restaurants and less premium motels. In order to stave off the ocean’s looming uncertain surety every other possible surface has been paved over, made solid and irrefutable.

  Why are we walking?

  It’s good for you, Mom says.

  C’mon, wimp. The Dad punches me hard in the shoulder. Get some exercise. For a change.

  Rainy keeps trying to escape my grip on her arm. The air is thick with exhaust and the smell of deep-frying. Cars pull in and out of giant-sized family-style restaurants. The vehicles are oblivious to us, the lone pedestrians gingerly stepping past yawning maws of parking lots. In order to show everyone what I whiner I am, The Dad is making a big display of enjoying this promenade. He doesn’t seem to notice that we are the only people walking. That the sky is pollution-gray. That he is perpetually on the verge of veering off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic.

  The Dad runs enthusiastic commentary on the local flora.

  Look, Nancy, a bathing suit place!

  Mmm. . . . Rainy, Ice Cream Castle!

  Hey, Son, Tequila Mockingbird! It’s a bar. Should we try it? Whaddya think? Wanna try it?

  Sure, I mutter. Rainy catches me in this moment of distraction. Pulls out of my suddenly flaccid grasp, surges ahead to join the aggressively normal; my power-striding mother on a permanent ladies walkathon. Rainy has escaped. Left alone, I feel like a set of dangling legs, the view from the shark’s perspective. The Dad as Jaws. He huffs to catch up. Immobilizes his prey by hooking a weighty, hairy, moist arm around my shoulders.

  How are things going, Son?

  Good.

  Yeah? How’s work?

  Good. Fine. You know.