THE SECOND DAY (OR THE FIRST DAY OF PASSOVER)

FIND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOOD AND MEMORY

EMILY, 2003

The sun was just starting to rise, blazing over the horizon, and Mackie was razing a path from across the street. She might know about how the families had met. Emily leaned her head against the lodge’s front door and hoped, fervently, that the story that she dug up would be a good one. Because otherwise she was going to be fired. Nobody was allowed to up and leave their job like this. She’d brought the papers she had to mark, but hadn’t even unpacked them. They had to be due some time. Someone was bound to complain. And of course, she only had seven days left to hand in a completed thesis draft to her committee.

Suddenly, Mackie was at the door, pushing her way inside, and Emily was stumbling backward. “Thanks for coming over,” she said. “I wanted to ask if you remember the first time you met the family. Do you remember who introduced you?”

Mackie thrust a letter toward her. “I found something for you.”

“Do you remember any guests?”

“The lodge has lots of guests, dear.”

“I mean, from when you were very little.”

But then Aunt Sonja appeared beside Emily. Obviously, she’d appear. Why had Emily thought that she could get up before the old people?

“Jonah seems to think she’s working on a family tree,” Mackie told Sonja.

“Jonah told you that?” said Emily.

“Anyhow,” said Mackie. “Blima was looking for letters, like the old game, so I looked in my place too, and wouldn’t you know it, I found one.”

“Why is Bubbie Blima looking for a letter?”

Mackie held out the letter, but Sonja grabbed it. “Emily, this is from your great-grandma Ayala. She wrote letters to my mother, every time they went away travelling.”

“What else did Jonah say about me?”

“People sent letters in their day. That’s what was done, darling.”

Darling. As her Aunt Sonja frowned at the envelope, Emily tried to determine, from Mackie’s expressive face, what Jonah might have said to her. It was Mackie who, at some Hanukkah years before, third glass of Manischewitz in hand, had waved Emily over and whispered with sweet breath, “Darling, my Jonah loves you.” But maybe she’d said it out of pity. Maybe Jonah didn’t like her anymore at all, and Mackie was trying to make her feel better. That tended to happen in this family. People tended to say exactly the opposite of what they were thinking.

“We were just talking about the old times,” said Sonja. “The old times and the old letters too, I think. Didn’t we talk about old letters last night?”

“I don’t think so,” said Emily.

“Isn’t it funny how everything happens all at once,” said Sonja. “These things are never coincidences, these moments of confluence. It’s not nothing.”

“Well, ladies.” Mackie kissed Emily’s cheek. “I have to get back. I’m making a strudel with matzo. I don’t know. We’ll see.”

Emily watched her toddle back out again, then turned to her aunt. “Can I see the letter?”

“Soon.” Sonja didn’t look up as she pulled a crinkling paper out of the envelope. “Later.”

“Do we still have things left from when the family was in Russia?”

“Sure,” and Sonja waved vaguely. “There are boxes in the cellar.”

“The basement?” Emily crept around the door frame and smelled the garlic spread from earlier that morning. “Are there papers anywhere else?”

“The final ones are in the office.”

“Final?” First, she’d go to the office. She’d search for those files, to find out what final meant. Plus, she could use the computer to send an email. She’d tell her advisor that she’d just come by his office and hadn’t found him, and that would buy her at least a bit more time. It would work too. Russell was always late.

Some time later, minutes, hours, Emily opened her eyes and Jonah’s head was on the dining-room table, looming beside her like a plate. He slid a mug of coffee in front of her, and it clanked against the other mug, and Emily willed him not to speak, not to move, not to do anything. But not to leave.

She held her breath. There was a new smell in the room now, a smell like licorice. She closed her eyes and tried to follow from image to image like before.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Emily put her head in her arms. “My family has a secret.” But she was fine. She was great. She was right on the verge of remembering something, and, whatever it was, it would blow the day right open, would crack the secret open like a coconut and fix her thesis too, she could feel it. She’d come in here to work, and that’s when she’d been accosted—by the smell first, and then by the memories.

“Did you sleep at all?”

Emily shifted to answer, but she smelled her matzo instead, and it happened again, her head buzzed with images, memories of things and caffeine. Jonah would love the connection between food and memory, but how could she explain it?

“I thought I heard you get up last night,” he said. “What have you been doing?”

“I’ve resorted to unconventional research methods.”

“What?”

“Hard copies.” Emily sat up, and revealed the mess of papers on the dining-room table: obits, death certificates, cemetery papers and funeral programs. But now the images she’d been remembering were gone. The feelings too. Her mind was filled with white and grey like a Kingston sky.

“Yeah, right,” said Jonah. “Everything must be on computers for you.” He picked up her matzo and sniffed, just like she’d done, and Emily felt herself nodding and nodding. Jonah must understand. The tangy smell, that’s what had done it, that’s what had made her remember. There was something else now too, something on the periphery, her great-grandmother holding long strips of Scotch tape. Suddenly, Emily could feel the tacky things stuck to her fingertips, little jolts as they were pulled off again, the feeling of thrilling complicity. She couldn’t have been more than six.

“Are you still working on that family tree?” asked Jonah. “I’ve been thinking about that. We could look up your family on the Mormon website.”

“We’re not Mormons.”

“The Mormons help with genealogy. It’s a thing they do.”

She should have looked this up before coming. She’d just noticed incongruities in her genealogy, vertices that didn’t connect and orphans on the peripheries, and had come right here. “How do you know so much?”

There was a silence. Then, “You know, Blima’s got a registration outside.”

“What?” Emily stood, and the morning changed again. She held the back of the chair to steady herself. There was sunlight streaming in from outside, like a flood, like a torrent. “I promised I’d help her with those. I said I’d be more helpful. I forgot.” She’d promised herself she’d have a new thesis draft finished by noon. When she’d come here, the light had been going the other way, from inside to out. And the sky had been a dusty purple. What time was it?

Emily picked up her cup of coffee. Which would be more serious? Girl with mug, girl with arms crossed, girl with hands on hips. “Blima was supposed to get me. Show me how we do things in this family and all that.”

“They get this way. They get into their pranks and they forget.”

“I should have been listening.” Leave the coffee. Take a pen. That would look good. “I want to help. I want to work.”

“You shouldn’t work here,” said Jonah.

Emily bristled. “Why not?” He didn’t want her here, that’s what he meant.

“This place isn’t what it was.”

“Maybe it can be.” Maybe it had to be. What if she got busted for her disappearing act, and got fired? Where else would she go?

Emily hurried to the desk where Aunt Blima stood facing a young man and woman in Queen’s University jackets. She edged away from the desk, closer to the back cubbies. She’d always wanted to be the one behind the counter, but now felt unaccountably shy.

“You kept separate last names then?” Blima was saying.

“We’re not married,” said the young man.

“Oh. So then you want two rooms?”

The young man hesitated, and the young woman said, “Just the one.”

Emily grabbed a room key and the registration book. When she straightened, Jonah was weaving his way behind her. His shoulders were shaking. Was he laughing? This didn’t make sense. Blima and Sonja had always been too open about sex. They’ve been around a while, that’s what they always said. They made condom balloons sometimes when they filled the guest room dressers.

“What about meals?” said Blima.

“We’re just going to sleep here.” The young man handed Emily a Visa. His name was Ryan. “I mean, we’re just going to sleep,” he said. “We’ll be in the city. We’re just graduating.”

“We’re having a special dinner tonight,” said Blima. “It’s a Seder. That’s a special evening in the Jewish culture. And it’s become our family’s tradition to make sure that everyone has a place at a special meal, even if they’re not Jewish. It’s not everyone who does this. You’ll find most Jews don’t even worry about whether their Gentile friends eat a good gefilte fish.”

“Wait,” said Emily. “Other Jews don’t do this?”

“We already have plans,” said the pretty girl.

“We appreciate the offer,” said Ryan, “ but we’ve got plans in the city every night.”

Then Emily took the boxy machine from her grandmother’s outstretched hand.

“You have a nice night,” said Blima.

Emily turned to face the office, then the students. She felt her blush like a fever. “I’ll show you to your room.” She could be scalded by shame like that.

When Emily came to the lodge as a little girl, she and Blima used to swim together, and Blima would always carefully wet her armpits before traipsing into the water. That’s what Emily told the students, Ryan and Amy, as she stood in front of their door.

“Seriously,” said Ryan, lingering after Amy had already disappeared inside. “You don’t have to apologize.”

“Blima’s not actually offended that you’re not married,” said Emily.

“You really don’t have to worry,” said Ryan. “This is a nice place.”

Emily followed his gaze down the hallway, at the unevenly faded wallpaper, the worn carpets, the light that seemed to hover in slanted columns of dust.

“It feels like history here,” he said.

“Great.”

“I was in this other inn, in Pennsylvania, this one time. It had old pictures on all the walls. Oh and it showed the family trees of all the famous people who had stayed there. I like things that are old.”

Emily balanced on the top step so she could see the window, the tops of the trees and the sky. Things just kept coming up. How many people had talked about family trees since she got here? Two. No. Three. Jonah and Mackie. And now this Ryan. Grandma Ayala would have said that it’s besheret, meant to be. It should be in her thesis after all. This was proof.

She hopped down a step.

This could be her unifying vision, her thought experiment somehow, and she felt closer than ever to figuring out why she’d been so obsessed with genealogy, because this would do more than give background and history for her thesis. She could make the claim that the family tree was the first instance of a social network, graphed, and she could graph them as social networks. She could show the community of Treasure Island as a concrete example, a graph whose vertices could be tracked and analyzed. They’d show more than the obvious connections too, much more than only birth and marriage. What if she could use the family tree to do stuff? She could use the graphs to map the passage of oddities, like Blima’s story about Elijah in cheap motels. Emily had heard that one before, from Great-grandma Ayala. So she could track it down the generations, all the way from Russia to Kingston. No. Farther than that. All the way to Brooklyn or Boston or wherever Doran was from. Maybe she could show how the stories changed. What if she could show how these pathologically strange people had affected each other all these years and use the family tree to map traits, like biologists did, and determine the origins of quirks, senses of humour and things. She could make lists of personality flaws and treat them like genes. This island was isolated like the Galapagos.

At the bottom of the stairwell, she heard voices, so Emily stopped at the entrance to the room of windows and hid behind the door frame.

“What’s a nine-letter word for lie?” asked Sonja.

“Obfuscation,” Blima said absently.

“‘To lie,’” said Sonja, “‘a verb.’”

“Disseminate,” said Blima. “No. The other one.”

“Dissemble.”

“That’s it.”

“We could go on Jeopardy!, you know,” said Sonja. “If they ever allow two halfwits to make up one whole person.”

Emily sat down on the step. Dissemble. Disassemble. She opened her notebook because whenever you’re starting something new, you should always go back to first principles, and what did she really know? She had two graphs, no, three. She had her family, Jonah’s and Doran’s, and they were all connected somehow, by influence if not by blood. She made a list of all the names she knew, then organized them by line, first her family, then Jonah’s. Then she moved on to Doran’s family. She wrote in Doran’s name, and that was all, a little orphaned vertex in the corner of the page. Where was everyone else?

“I found the letters, you know,” Sonja said suddenly.

Blima gasped. Emily could hear her all the way in the other room. She looked up from her diagrams, scooted forward on the stair.

“Oh,” said Blima, “the love letters. Our collection. I’d forgotten all about those.”

“So now do you feel better?”

“That’s not the package that I’ve been looking for.”

So Blima was looking for a package. Well, Emily would find it, and she’d find it first. She’d look through the place methodically. It really just came down to science.

Jonah appeared in the hallway. “Hey,” he whispered, nudging her with his toe. “I just thought of something. Have you checked the guest files?”

“I’m more interested in family information now,” said Emily. “I’m giving up on old guests.”

“They might keep family information in there.” He shrugged. “Technically, all family members were also guests. Trust me—their filing system is that bizarre.”

“But anyway,” said Emily, “they’re in a filing cabinet. It’s locked”

“I have a key.” He gestured for her to follow.

Everything came down to science, if you thought about it. She was having trouble reconnecting with Jonah. She could use science to solve that too. There had been old psych experiments on friendship formation, how to force people to fall in love with you, she’d read them as an undergrad. She’d just have to look those up again, she realized as she hurried after him.