That Said (25 page)

born the year the
Titanic
sank.

 

But before she'll let me kidnap her,

she hijacks me, steering her spiffy

high-tech walker across the street

into rush-hour traffic to the bank.

 

Breathless, I plead for her to stop.

Bypassing the flashing ATM,

waving her cane, she makes a scene,

repeating yesterday's, before I came,

 

when she demanded that the teller

withdraw $5,000 in fives and tens,

and make it snappy,
from her account.

The bank called the cops, the cops

 

called her doctor, her doctor

called me to please come ASAP,

extract her from her apartment house

and move her into assisted living.

 

She calls her walker her “wagon.”

She calls me by my mother's name.

Now that both my parents are gone,

I am the responsible party.

 

I'm responsible and it's no party.

After accusing her optometrist

of losing her bifocals, my aunt

pocketed his ballpoint pen,

 

the same pen she uses to sign for

the five grand in soft bundled bills

we stuff into tote bags like robbers.

She's the brains. I'm her accomplice.

 

They can't arrest us. There's no law

against withdrawing money that is

rightfully yours. Back from the bank,

she's too busy dumping her loot

 

into a drawer to catch me slipping

her car keys into my purse.

She insists on cooking us dinner.

My mouth waters for her brisket,

 

the only dish she's famous for.

Instead, she fills a pot with milk,

stirs in a spoon of instant oatmeal,

turns on the gas, opens the fridge,

 

and stares inside as if she's opened a book

and lost her place. Is she hungry?

Where's her appetite? Come to think of it,

where's her full-length sable coat?

 

Not in the closet where I saw it last.

Did she throw it down the incinerator

chute along with the garbage bags

she ghost-walks past the corridor's

 

numbered doors twenty times a day?

Is that fur warming a neighbor's back?

Lost, her husband's star-sapphire ring,

her strand of graduated cultured pearls,

 

her Chanel handbag, not a knockoff.

Lost, her lovely, sophisticated things.

Where did they go? Misplaced? Stolen?

She won't let strangers inside her door,

 

no social worker, not even the super.

She points to snapshots of my daughter

among the rogue's gallery on her desk:

“She's very pretty, what's her name?”

 

She says it again two minutes later.

And says it again five times more.

Though I'm afraid to leave her alone,

I lock the bathroom against her.

 

I don't want Auntie to see me cry.

I sit down on the closed toilet lid,

turn on the faucet, flush the toilet,

in case she's listening at the door.

 

But she isn't. She's where I left her,

humming happily, perfectly in tune,

“Unforgettable.”

Unforgettable, that's what you are.

One night, Chen Chu dreamt that he was a butterfly. In his dream, he had never been anything but a butterfly. When he woke up he didn't know if he was Chen Chu dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was Chen Chu.

—Zen koan

 

I was sleeping in a round room made of stone.

A voice called out, “This is your room. This is your bed.”

For months thereafter, I crossed a river

on thoroughfares to a city that seemed familiar.

Most nights I'd return there.

Its turn-of-the-century architecture,

wrought-iron and stone apartment houses,

looked like the buildings on Park Avenue, and Fifth.

Sometimes I dreamed hybrids of buildings

over and over: a library–hotel, a train station–school;

and a department store with a rickety elevator that took me

to the fourth floor, where the dresses were.

 

In one dream, I caught myself telling someone,

“These are the clothes I wear in my dreams,”

as I opened a closet. Inside were

shoes, jumpers, coats, a green hat with a feather—

my taste, my size, they even
smelled
like me.

 

And, once, I brought someone along with me from
here
.

Here, where I am when I'm wide awake.

I said, “This is the place I always dream about.”

 

As I fall asleep, my dream picks up in the place

where it left off the night before—

the street, the house, the room.

The next day, I might catch a glimpse of it

superimposed on what I'm
really
seeing—

a shard of light bleeding onto a negative.

 

In time, I began to see my city,

the basso continuo playing behind the melody

of my everyday life, as a kind of everyday life, too:

its industry, the bustle of its people,

its traffic, its history, its parallel
ongoingness
—

 

But not long ago, I was traveling

along the Jersey side of the Hudson

where I grew up. I hadn't been back in years:

the woods were gone—

the collapsing docks and broken pilings

replaced with high-rent condos, supermarkets, malls,

anthills in the shadow of the Palisades.

 

The bridge and tunnel traffic was awful.

Instead of taking a bus, I crossed

to Manhattan by commuter ferry.

In the middle of the river, I looked up

at the skyline, the buildings

bronzed by late-afternoon light—

my dream city's light—

the city I'd dreamed since I was twelve—

 

but I wasn't dreaming.

My husband and daughter were sitting on the bench

on either side of me.

Rows of strangers, too.

Some gazed at the skyline, as I did.

Others read their newspapers, or dozed.

The soul remains attached to the physical body after death for the first seven days, when it flits from its home to the cemetery and back. This explains why the initial mourning period is one week. For twelve months after death the soul ascends and descends, until the body disintegrates and the soul is freed.

—Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend

 

Which must be the reason why,

lying awake in my mother's bed

the night after her funeral, I caught her

rummaging in the underwear drawer.

 

What a relief to know

the dead are
expected
to come back—

so seeing them up and about so soon

is no big deal.

 

If you die, say, in July,

I'd like to think that in the next few weeks,

your soul clings like the bar code

to the book of your body.

Little by little, the label

starts to peel, curling and lifting

until the sticky underside loses its grip.

 

By Labor Day, your body

can walk your soul on a leash,

yanking it back when it lifts a hind leg

over the perfect green of a neighbor's lawn.

 

Around Halloween, the soul begins to rise.

 

Thanksgiving,

it's a kind of beach ball clearing the net.

On New Year's Day, it flips on the trampoline

of the body, bouncing higher and higher

until it shoots through the roof.

 

As Pesach approaches,

the soul—tied by the ankles—

bungee-jumps from the body,

which, meanwhile, has been attending to

its own messy business in the ground.

 

How else to explain why

Judah ha-Nasi would suddenly appear

to his family on Friday nights,

dressed in his Shabbat finery,

recite Kiddush over the wine, and vanish.

 

Or why my mother, just last week,

stood behind me by the stove,

telling me my kugel needs more salt.

 

A retired dentist from Great Neck

swears he's photographed a soul leaving its body.

And a deposed countess from Romania

topped
that,

claiming she's measured its weight in ounces.

 

On my mother's Yahrzeit,

when our family gathers at the cemetery

to unveil her headstone,

and we're crying, why be sad?

Think of it as a bon voyage party—

a soul at last at liberty

to make its own plans.

If God can be said to breathe the soul

into each living thing, as he did into Adam,

then the magician we hired

for our daughter's birthday party was like God.

 

Before performing the rabbit-in-the-hat trick,

before pulling shiny nickels

from Emma's ears,

he got a long skinny green balloon

and stretched it like saltwater taffy,

then put his lips to its lip and blew.