Guilty Prayers

I get self-conscious in my parents' house. What Jewish woman doesn't? Even my mom moves a bit uncertainly in my grandmother's apartment. Though my baby sister, Jude, seems to make herself at home wherever she is--some combination of incredible social ease and supreme self-assurance. Jude can walk into a party of strangers and sit plop on the floor so naturally that within half an hour every couch is bare. Even those swanky standing in credit-card finery will crouch down on the balls of their feet to speak with her, greet and pass drinks. It is as though my sister is impervious of faux pas. I've seen her skills, hosted parties she's co-opted graciously. Whatever my sister happens to be doing is exactly the right thing to do. Maybe she's like her Aunt Elaine that way, or a more vivacious Elissa. Sometimes it seems like she was born with a double share of social ability--hers and mine. Sometimes I'm a little in awe of her social abilities, her bravery with people and effortless and semi-self-righteous composure. Being siblings though, I'm more impressed by these qualities themselves than the way she uses them. Is it a dreadful sin to be jealous of one's sister? Am I jealous of mine? Of the person she is or talents I'd like to have, the accolades I'd like to receive -- or at least deserve. I don't really know Jude that well, a statement my mother would find objectionable, and sad. I don't know how well Jude really knows me. And maybe we'll be closer as we age. To be honest I'm not sure it's important, one way or the other, to anyone but my mom. I don't write about Jude that often, actually. Sometimes, uncertainly, I pray for her; it's easier to do when she's unhappy, isn't that awful. Sometimes I pray to like her more, to be a better sister to her. Don't think I've ever wished to be like her. Tonight I try to pray we could be friends.

Burning Cigarettes

My father exists to memorialize the bite of his mother’s voice, her bitter mentholated exhales, too stern for sighs. My father may love her; he flew back for the funeral, and later, I think maybe, the memorial. Or maybe not; he doesn’t like his sisters plurally. Jews don’t put down the tombstone the capstone the grave marker granite what have you at funerals, no, the body is shroud-wrapped and buried, pine coffin in naked ground and nameless earth. Hebrew prayers muttered from transliterations and the ritual handful of earth; Jews don’t throw flowers, nothing else covers the newly anonymous dead. Only after a year is the memorial marker pulled into place, the final service held. Jews take a long time to say good-bye to the dead we rush to bury. Plant trees, burn candles, and leave pebbles on their grave at every visit. Not knowing the date of her death I forget why the yartzeit candle is waiting for me. I am waiting for the year my father forgets to light it, forgets to remember the end of my grandmother’s reign. If I don’t know the date I can’t forget her. Jews don’t believe in heaven, I mostly don’t believe in heaven, but if she’s there it’s full of ashtrays.

Three Hospitals

Missed my Grandma Molly’s funeral. Hospital. I picture her last weeks; a hospital bed with the name printed in blue on coarse white sheets, Beth-something-or-other, a sallow woman swaddled in colorless hospital blankets, a nest of tubes. Eyes closed, shrilling when anyone tries to remove her brown-frame glasses. I was 2 weeks from my fifteenth birthday, of course I don’t know her age. My father’s mother, Grandpa Abraham’s wife, his second wife. My Aunt Elaine’s stepmother, did she call her that? I never heard. They married while Elaine’s mother, the nameless wife, beat herself to pieces against the walls. Huntington’s Chorea; an institution. Was there divorce, annulment, some brief symbolic period of widowerhood? Did they sit Shiva while the frantic woman danced in iron shoes, turn her picture to the wall and shroud the mirrors; was she buried alive? Abraham, the unknown grandpa, choose poorly in love, or matrimony, Mildred his second wife was mad. Starkers, raving, Sylvia Plathological with a car full of kids. Or so her only son, my father claims.

Ice and Dirt

My grandparents are dead; both sets, both sides. Safely tucked in Jewish cemeteries in Michigan somewhere, somewhere near Detroit. Are they all four buried in the same one? We’ve been to only one of their funerals, my sister and I. The one for my mother’s mom, Granny Annie, whom she always called Ma. Always Ma, like Little House on the Prairies with a faintly Ashkenazic accent. Ma is a word that always sounds annoyed. It snowed, at her funeral, an unremarkable Sunday sort of snow, an I-can-wait-all-day-if-I-have-to British snow-globe kind of snow, a matronly grey-wool snow, the useless kind that falls in dryly brittle snow-god dandruff flakes, no good for powder nor packing, and crumbles when you try to snow ball it. The tombstones were grey and cold letter-molded concrete, they might have been the same color as the snow but no one scraped the ice back to find out.

Aleveh Shalom

We all hate Maine, my mother and I, where I was born. My stolid Jewish father had a breakdown there, losing his mind and his father’s life in the living room of an Auburn house heaped in snow. Do you remember, my mother asks? My father was such a different person then, even-tempered and more active than obsessive. I only know my father by hands and voice, fleshy tension smells and little notes signed with sardonic smiley faces. What is there to write about my father, I do not know him, and my mother’s hearsay makes shoddy evidence. I have a sister who hugs him in family pictures. A self-imposed/enforced restraining order. An audio-tape to listen to after he dies. It’s 13 years old, the tape, he made it when I was 12 or 13—the tape’s not dated, just sealed neatly into an envelope labeled “From Papa” with a note telling me to listen to it after he dies. That’s how he handed it to me. A little package in a white business envelope, note attached. It came with a tear-smudged papa-story and frequent reminders to listen to it as soon as possible. He wasn’t dying. I can’t remember if I showered afterwards. After hearing my name on this spoken-word death-letter pseudo-suicide-note, addressed specifically to me from a man who was supposed to be resting in peace. Aleveh shalom.