Authors: Rebecca Dinerstein
I sat down on the floor when my father started clinking his glass. There wasn’t enough time to find a chair, and I wanted to be low to the ground. His smile and even the butter knife he used to clink his glass seemed unspeakably dangerous. He stood in the middle of the dance floor. My mother stood at the far right of the tent, near the band. Scott and Sarah sat at the bridal table, having just begun their dinners. My father threw his hands in the air.
“We’re so picky!” he began. “Picky picky picky.” He began to sing. “‘Pick-a-little-talk-a-little-pick-a-little-talk-a-little-cheep-cheep-cheep-talk-a-lot-pick-a-little-more.’”
It was the housewives’ song from
The Music Man.
It was Sarah’s old favorite. There was an unused trumpet on the floor of the band stage, and my mother rested her hand on it, as if to keep herself from falling down. Had she too wound up on the floor, I could have crawled over and joined her. She stayed upright, clutching the trumpet.
“My name is Saul,” he said, “I’m Sarah’s father.” He pointed at Sarah with his knife. “My daughter is making a
decision
,” my father said, spreading his arms out on the last word. He turned around in a slow circle, to see who all was listening, and everyone was listening. When he faced the bride and groom again he said, “Would I pick what she is picking? I would not! No, sir, I would not!” A friend of Scott’s who didn’t know my father, and who was in a great mood, cheered, “Me neither!” Someone put a hand over his mouth. “You pick the love you want,” my father went on seamlessly. “You pick. The love. You want. Okay. I picked—”
This was where I thought it would break down. Again, the familiar sensation of my father’s hair growing while we watched, away from his head in every direction—he was marvelous, and even holding the glass of rosé I knew was his tenth, he was precise.
“I. Picked. Wrong. Didn’t I?” Both my mother and my sister were crying. I was enthralled.
“I am the angriest person I know. Also the most entertaining. Wouldn’t you say?” The young man whose mouth was still covered clapped his hands in appreciation. “Thank you,” my father said. “Now. In case you don’t know my work—and believe me, you don’t know my work—I spend my days drawing swollen submaxillary glands so that tenth-grade biology students can learn the diff—” This was the one word he slurred.
Difference
. “The diffrenz between mucus and saliva.” He looked hard into the eyes of the guy who had cheered for him and said, “You have never seen wrists like the wrists I drew for the pamphlet on carpal tunnel syndrome.” This quieted even that guy. “Do I love this work? Actually, yes. At least I
did
, in the beginning. I knew what I loved and I picked it, for better or worse.”
There was a pause, and a few people drank from their glasses.
He said, “Sarah is picking her love. Aren’t you?” Sarah was still holding the fork she had raised to her mouth just before my father started speaking. Her eyes and his eyes said Blue Blue Blue Blue to each other. “And I congratulate her. For the picking itself. Because that is hard to do. Few people ever do it. The most of us,” he said, “something picks us. Or we pick nothing. Take what we get. My Sarah said, ‘Daddy’—no, she never calls me Daddy—she said, ‘Dad, I pick him.’ And we said no. And she picked him anyway. And she got him.” When I think of this speech, it’s this line that most makes me wish that Sarah and Scott had kept each other. This part about Sarah wanting him, and getting him.
“The next job, Sarah,” my father said, “is to remember down the line that nobody picked this but you.” For the first time since clinking the glass, he lowered his knife. “What you’ll have, what you’ll lack—all your fault. Your misery? Your fault. Your happiness? Up to you. The only thing that ever made me less scared of my misery was my wife. There she is, by the band.” My father gestured. My mother did not wave to the crowd now looking at her; she held on to the trumpet. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’ve lost track of things.”
And that was it. He left the dance floor and took a seat at an empty table, where nobody came to comfort him, and the trumpet player eventually lifted the trumpet out from under my mother’s hand, and the band started to play, relatively quietly, until the party was in swing again.
To Scott’s credit, he comforted my sister through her hysteria for the better part of two hours. My mother composed herself—even took a seat at my father’s table. They didn’t speak, but they sat together. I kissed my sister’s head and left the tent for a short walk.
• • •
Stretched out along the house’s corridor wall, the gifts looked like fish in an aquarium. Most of the wrapping was silver, gold, or light blue. The ribbons were voluminous—they looked like foam. One of the gifts was perfectly spherical. They were so intensely silent, these objects, I half expected they would release a burst of song when opened, following my father’s example. The spherical gift was silver. The cube was gold. A set of three white-wrapped gifts was tied up with a turquoise ribbon. Beside it lay a padded envelope. I looked at the envelope because by comparison it was so unattractive.
The envelope hadn’t been wrapped and the shipment label was peeling off. Written into the recipient box was my name and the address of the Glenny house. Written into the return address box was
480 Leonard Street, New York, NY 10013
. The postage stamp was fifty-six kroner.
Seeing as the package was addressed to me, I opened it. When I try to remember what I was thinking as I opened it, I can only recall feeling surrounded by silver and gold fish, and the sound of my father singing
Cheep cheep cheep
. The envelope contained a key ring. On the ring hung three Mul-T-Lock keys and a silver medallion. The medallion was embossed with
IS
.
IS
.
Is, I thought. Is. It is. Is what?
It is it.
There are photographs from the rest of the party in which I am dancing. In all the photographs, I am holding the envelope. You can see the corner of it behind my sister’s arm in the picture where we have our arms around each other. You can see it in my left hand in the picture where my father and I are drinking glasses of water. As far as I remember, nobody asked me about it. Everyone had, by that point, lost track of things.
When I got back to New York and moved into the apartment at 480 Leonard Street, my parents didn’t give it much thought. They had gotten used to my being out of the house, and my graduate program had started, and for all they knew I was living in a dorm. They hadn’t yet vacated their apartment. It was completely empty, and they were living in it that way, with some thrill, it seemed, as if they were squatting.
The apartment above the Gregoriov Bakery needed to be emptied. The phone at Ian’s apartment rang one day with a Mr. Dobson, who had gotten the number from a Yasha Gregoriov, who wanted to know if I could please pack up his and his father’s belongings.
When I arrived at Brighton Beach that morning at the end of September, Mr. Dobson greeted me at the bakery door. He had two things to tell me. Bad news first, he said: Yasha’s cat had been run over. It was the first time the cat had left the bakery in two weeks, and he hadn’t eaten in as long—he walked through the cat door onto Oriental Boulevard, and stood weakly in the center of the road. “All my fault,” Mr. Dobson said. He hadn’t closed the cat door as Yasha asked. The good news was that as of January, the Gregoriov Bakery would reopen as the Ladisov Bakery, and that the Ladisov family would keep all the old ovens. I walked upstairs and saw the two rooms in which Yasha had grown into himself. A sweet, dusty place. At the center of everything I’d come to learn about Yasha, these two rooms would remain empty, a blueprint of what I’d missed: his first life, watching bread rise, with his father. I packed their things into two thick garbage bags I found in the lower level. The bags sat on either side of me as I rode the B train over the Manhattan Bridge.
In October, Sarah and Scott had their first big fight. Sarah was so startled, she took a red-eye one Thursday night and spent a few days on Leonard Street with me. We talked through it—I was of the opinion that the relationship was salvageable at that point—and when silence fell and we both reached for our phones, I thought of my father’s thumb assignment. He’d turned it down. He told me he was now working on something else. He wouldn’t say what. I wrote a letter to the Viking Museum, addressed to Yasha, saying his cat had died. I painted Sarah in the nude. That painting has since gotten Sarah a few dates, but we’ll see where they lead. I heard that Robert was still in Japan. I heard that he was reporting directly to the Secretary of State.
I didn’t hear back from Yasha until the end of November. His father’s grave had withstood its second major storm, and Yasha was half confident that it would remain stable. This, alongside Septimos’s death, he wrote, marked the end of an era. The era was his life so far. He hadn’t heard a peep from his mother, and that was fine. Haldor had left on his Baltic cruise, and Yasha was living with Sigbjørn and Sigbjørn’s grandmother. He had starting eating and liking fish for the first time, the way Sigbjørn’s grandmother prepared it, with butter. The bread Sigbjørn’s grandmother baked was as fresh when it came out of the oven as his father’s had been. It is bread’s nature to be warm, he wrote. I got his letter a few days before Thanksgiving, and when I called my mother to pass along Yasha’s regards, she was shredding apples for applesauce. I asked her what the applesauce was for. She said Thanksgiving. She shared the applesauce with my father, my father put ketchup on it, and that was all they ate. My mother had begun to decorate the apartment again from scratch. I visited them for the holidays and found three sketches of my mother’s face tacked to the bathroom wall.
When the sun stopped rising in Eggum, Yasha said he was ready to leave. He said the sky turned purple at eleven in the morning, pink at noon, purple at one, then black for twenty-one hours. He said the mountains turned the same colors as the sky. He said the fjords never froze. He said the Icelandic ponies stayed out all winter and their manes grew over their eyes. He said the storm winds were so strong, they made the trees shake so humanly, he’d had a long dream, filling the dark hours, in which all trees walked away. He said the blue that settled over the fields before the black was the most erotic color he’d ever seen. He said he’d been drinking goat milk. He said that one morning when the sky was purple he’d seen a bit of grass through the snow, that some of the snow had melted, that he wanted to get out before the next storm, that it all depended on the boats—when they ran, how rough the fjord was on any particular night. He said he was leaving everything where it was and coming back to everything. He said he was taking nothing with him. It would be eighteen hours down from the Arctic, he said, then due west.
Yasha hears an excerpt from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of
The Brothers Karamazov
(New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2002).
Haldor reads from I. A. Blackwells’s 1906 translation of
The Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson
and from Jean I. Young’s 1954 translation of
The Prose Edda.
Olyana reads aloud Jesse L. Byock’s description of the Yggdrasil tree, as found in
The Prose Edda
(New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), page xxvii.
Nils and Frances listen to Oliver Stallybrass’s translation of Knut Hamsun’s
Victoria
(Toronto: Hushion House, 1994).
The Viking Museum, as portrayed in this book, is a fictitious institution and is not meant to resemble the LOFOTR Viking Museum of Lofoten. I extend deep thanks to LOFOTR for its inspiring example, and to Lofoten Golf Links for teaching me how to build a lavvo.
I am joyfully indebted to Jenni Ferrari-Adler; Lea Beresford, George Gibson, Nancy Miller, Cristina Gilbert, Marie Coolman, Theresa Collier, Lily Yengle, Gleni Bartels, Laura Keefe, Derek Stordahl, Patti Ratchford, Alona Fryman, Megan Ernst, Alexandra Pringle, Alexa von Hirschberg, Kathleen Farrar, Lynsey Sutherland, Madeleine Feeny, and all of Bloomsbury; Sally Wofford-Girand, Sam Fox, and all of Union Literary; the extraordinary writers, faculty, staff, and director of the NYU M.F.A. program; the Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellowship; the Yale English department; the New York State Summer Writers Institute; the National Library of Norway;
Kunstkvarteret Lofoten
; Reidar Nedrebø and Anne Grete Honerød of
Baroniet Rosendal
; Christian Kjelstrup and all of
Aschehoug Forlag
; Jon Gray; Louise Glück; Jessica Strand; Alice Quinn; Mark Strand; Graham Duncan; Lill-Anita and Bjørn-Erik Svendsen; Eric Bulson and Mika Efros; Julie Buntin and Julia Pierpont; Aaron Parks; Noah Warren; Laura Bennett; Rachel Brotman; Lizzie Fulton; Liz Fusco; Annie Galvin; Meggie Green; Halley Gross; Ingrid Schibsted Jacobsen; Signe Kårstad; Diana Mellon; Cassie Mitchell; Annette Orre; Rachel Rose; Alexandra Schwartz; Ingeborg Sommerfeldt; Alex Trow; Zach Bjork; my loving family: Lia and Jim, Jon and Becky, Max, Michael, Bob and Marti, Lea and Bruce, Shmuel and Lee, Eitan, Goldie, and my heroic late grandparents.
REBECCA DINERSTEIN
is the author of
Lofoten
(Aschehoug, 2012), a bilingual English–Norwegian collection of poems. She received her B.A. from Yale and her M.F.A. in fiction from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn.