Ointment rubbed over the skin—
3 drops Frankincense,
2 drops Peppermint,
1 drop Clove, 1 drop Pine—
could not bring on the exorcism.
All hands blunt clumsy.
Too much food had been eaten.
Egg and chop and leg of duck
were placed on the breast
of the dead one,
then passed to my lone figure
in the corner—the sin-eater
of the family chewing, chewing
so the beloved’s soul could be free,
made light to have
an easy journey.
IN THE YEAR BEFORE Great Aunt Eva died she cared less and less to understand, fix, or tell anything to anyone about her own troubles—and if she got angry she no longer yelled, just suffered silently. She also did not care to hold anyone close or captive. This is one way some people prepare for their above-the-ground exit—quite the opposite of Uncle Manny’s fury to grab anyone near and try to take them with him into his wretchedness.
Eva believed she had been a kind, generous person and to people who did not get too near to her, there was no one finer. She gave Mario the handyman large tips—even though money was terribly short—and on his holiday, Christmas, a present and she still, “at her age,” made a hot lunch for Odette and served it to her, when Odette came twice a month to help Eva clean her apartment and move the heavy furniture. And when the young, handsome, Catholic president was shot, how Eva grieved, and lit a Yarzheit candle for him on the first Yom Kippur after his death—the rabbi at the temple telling her this was a mitzvah. True, she had not voted for him, since she never realized her good intention to learn to read English and consequently never became a citizen of her “new country”—but she was dazzled by his Hollywood image, his star-like family, and was stunned for a long time by what had happened to him, similar to when her son-in-law Benjamin’s sister, the “perfect Rose,” as Eva called her in a sour way, had lost a daughter—meaning me.
Mostly alone, she took long walks on her avenue no matter what the weather. Always with her huge, worn, black leatherette purse and orange nylon net bag to carry a few groceries—an apple, a pear, whatever—both hooked on to her left arm. The net bag matched the color of her hair. Once she was a true redhead.
Often her daughter Esther came down from the suburbs to walk with her. Celie sometimes came too, but then Celie began to visit less and less and that was okay with Eva. So different from years past, when she would clutch Celie so tightly, Celie thought she might break.
In truth, it sort of made Celie sick to be with her grandmother, because she felt her grandmother was walking with Death and Celie is petrified of Death—goes to a psychiatrist because of this and other terrors. He gives her pills that open her up to the day and others that close her down at night. The pills help too with the rituals—obsessions, compulsions are what the doctor calls them—the repetitive checkings and numbered spinnings that she does for safekeeping before she leaves her apartment. She has tailor-made them for herself to keep Death away.
Celie remembered when her grandmother, at seventy-five, whispered to her, while riding past a cemetery, that she no longer feared Death. That she was tired—just so tired. In her earlier years Eva feared it with such ferociousness that she would squeeze Celie so hard with her large hands that they would leave red marks on Celie’s body—sometimes a discoloration that could last for a couple of weeks. From the age of one onward, Eva made Celie stand next to her at the living room window and, whenever anyone was more than five minutes late, Eva would start to shake and hold on to Celie muttering, “Celie, your father (mother—whoever it was) is late, yes, late—too late.” Then, Eva would slip into Yiddish and chant the word. Niftorim. Niftorim. Way before Celie was three, she clearly understood that meant dead person.
Eva did not mean to scare her granddaughter; she just needed to share her anxiety and it was the small Celie who was the most available. Anyone would have done as well—her daughters Esther or Adele, her husband Levi, or her son-in-law, the most unavailable of all. Benjamin left Esther and Celie, and some years later Joshua and Jeremy, in that tiny apartment a lot. He was busy working in the shipping department of a downtown department store during the day and going to school at night, studying to become a CPA and then a lawyer. He was saving his money so that someday “they”—meaning his own family—could move away, out of that crowded apartment to the suburb where we lived and where his other brothers had already migrated—something that caused him no small irritation.
Benjamin was determined to follow my mother’s and his brothers’ paths as soon as he had saved enough. Then, he and Esther and their children would escape. Not just because of how physically closed in it was in the apartment, but because of the crowd of words that crashed into each other every night—the fights, which he could not tolerate.
Esther’s begging him to just move to another apartment was not enough, nor was how she eventually developed patches of eczema on her arms and legs from the stress of that place. He needed to be in that suburb, in a house, and he wanted a better house than what his brothers had settled for, something resembling his sister’s, even if it were in miniature. It took twelve years for that to happen and it was then, in the weeks before the move, that Eva completely lost control—alternating between screams of betrayal and tears of grief that her beloved Esther was leaving, leaving her. Moving away—twenty miles dead north of her. How would she survive? Celie wasn’t sure if her grandmother meant herself, her mother—or maybe even Celie. Then, in the final week before the move Eva went mute—spoke absolutely no words. Niftorim.
On the last day, in mid-February—as bleak and cold and dead a day as she could remember—Celie cried uncontrollably, not wanting to leave the apartment, not wanting her own room. She needed the familiarity of the cot laid out each night in the dining room, which her father carried her to when the grown-ups were done with their after-dinner fights. In the earlier evening she would sleep in Adele’s bed in the back room. Under Adele’s scratchy sheets, permeated by a strange fish smell and human sweat, Celie would curl herself into as tight a fetal ball as she could and pretend she was Cinderella waiting for the prince. No matter how distasteful, she was used to this. To this day Celie fears change, even if it is for the better.
Mostly the adults fought over Adele—what to do with her, her rebellious ways. She often came home late at night, or sometimes not at all. The fights were about putting her in the hospital. They would lower their voices when they said hospital, but Celie could still hear them. It was a secret place that eventually she figured out was for people sick in the mind, not the body. “A place like where Grandmother Idyth was,” she would think, “maybe the same place.”
If Adele happened to come in, they still fought about her. The problem. The failure. Eva wanted to put her away and Esther and Levi wanted to give her another chance—even after the police brought her home one night, showed them the pin and the ring that they found on her that were reported stolen by the neighborhood jeweler. Benjamin avoided all discussions about Adele, just as he refused to discuss his mother, Idyth, with any of them.
When Celie would hear the loud adult talk, she would twist further into her small self and in a strange way be glad—glad none of this shouting was about her. But there was a sadness, too, for sometimes she really liked Adele—the freedoms she gave herself. She especially liked her on the Saturdays when Adele would sneak home a paper bag with two non-kosher hot dogs, one for herself and one for Celie, and they would escape down the paint-chipped, creaky, wooden back stairs of the apartment, sit in the outside air on the first floor landing and eat the “forbidden fruit,” as Adele called it. Celie loved this.
Later in life, when Celie saw the title of one of Cecilia’s poems, “The Sin-Eater of the Family”—although Celie was pretty sure Cecilia did not have Adele in mind when she wrote it, more her own self—Celie thought of Adele in that old apartment, forced to wear a jagged, tilted, tarnished crown—all the precious jewels fallen out of it, leaving just rusted, empty holes. I also know Celie, Cecily, and even Celine—had she chosen to focus on it, which she did not—would think the title more than applied to themselves. Here beneath the ground, I, too, identified with it, which surprised me for I thought I had worked far past the victim concept.
Overweight, out of control, unable to keep a job, unengaged with no man in sight, Adele grew into her mother’s worst nightmare. Adele was not filled with beautiful music, only mood swings—out-of-sync, out-of-pitch, high-to-low, low-to-high—never to become the concert pianist Eva had dreamed for this daughter. The baby grand piano in the living room was never to be touched again, after “Adele failed it”—that is how Eva phrased it. “It” became the monument—the Monument to Failure.
Once, Celie bolted from her chair in the kitchen during dinner and ran into the living room, lifted the highly-polished, wooden cover over the keys and banged on them wildly. She was five. It was a loud, manic moment, similar to one when she was seven and she leapt from the dining room table when Aunt Bertha, Eva’s cousin, came for her monthly Saturday night dinner, her crutches always positioned in the same place against the doorway that led to the coat closet. Celie fixated on them when Bertha was there—could hardly look elsewhere. Polio had crippled Bertha’s legs, but with braces and the crutches she could get around if adults were always on either side of her. Celie thought it a sad parade, but it did not stop her from focusing on how much she wanted to swing from them. She imagined herself an acrobat, flying away from the table—the room, the people. On the day it became too much to restrain herself, she caused an even larger chaos than the piano incident—almost equal to any of Adele’s. And it was not fun. Their curved tops, even with their heavy padding, dug into her armpits and caused a sharp pain. As for flying—she fell.
After Eva realized Adele would never be a joy, a pride, she focused her complete attention on her younger daughter and for a while Celie’s mother made Eva quite proud. But when she met Benjamin—“wild, tanned, handsome Ben,” as Esther rhapsodized to anyone who would listen—Ben, who told her stories about how he and his brothers would run naked through the woods in Michigan, howling like wolves, Esther imagined such a freedom. She thought Ben, with his movie star looks, would be her savior, would free her from the stage, from her mother, from her trapped life—the too many words, the too many directions to be remembered, to be memorized. So when he proposed, she said a quick, ecstatic, “Yes!”
When Esther would speak of him this way and her cheeks would flame with life, all Eva felt was her own world shifting again and growing cold—almost to frozen. With Eva’s awful memories of her first neighbor, Idyth Slaughter, still very much alive, she could not help but believe a dybbuk inhabited that family and one day it would again spring to life and cause great damage to someone—anyone—named Slaughter. So when her treasured Esther fell in love with one of Idyth’s sons, this became an addition to Eva’s list of nightmares.
However, when Ben showed up the first time for dinner, dressed in a white linen suit and straw hat, and handed Eva—not Esther—violets, it was the beginning of Ben winning—winning over Eva—especially after he talked so politely with Eva and Levi about all his plans for the future—all his great ambitions. And a few months later, when Eva tested the water by suggesting perhaps they live with them after the marriage—that it would cost them “almost nothing”—and Ben, without even looking at Esther, eagerly agreed (thinking about all the money he could save and knowing this was even a better deal than what his brothers Emmanuel and Abraham had made with my father—Samuel eventually moving into their building once he married Lettie) Eva was even more reassured, thinking, “Even though he is a Slaughter, I’ll be able to keep an eye on him and make this work.”
She and Levi threw them the best wedding—one they really could not afford—and, regularly and often, she would pull out the pictures from the top drawer of her bureau, spread them carefully across the oilcloth on the kitchen table like a deck of cards and make everyone sit down, so she could talk about how it all was “so perfect.”
Celie often wondered where that other Benjamin went. The Ben who ran naked through the summer nights, making wild and wonderful animal sounds—the one her mother had told her about, described to her with such delight. To Celie, because her grandmother approved of her father so much, he must have died. And she missed him, although she never knew him. Niftorim.
When he finally took his family twenty miles away, something died in Eva—again. And in Celie, too. She did not like the suburbs. They were filled with preadolescent girls who looked like the carefully manicured shrubs that lined the streets. Plus, they talked so much about their clothes. About their cashmeres. Celie had never heard the word cashmere before the move. When they asked her almost in unison, “How many do you own?” she did not know what to say and ran home to ask her mother. Esther laughed and answered, “None. Your sweaters are made of Orlon,” which Celie felt she should keep to herself.
Now, Celie is legendary. She knows her fabrics better than the ultrathin women who wrap themselves in them and give no care to what anything costs. However, while covering the living with the expensive silks and satins and sequins that make their lives a’glitter, she spends her time waiting for Death, shrouding this fear with too much food, a fixed smile, and a too-jolly laugh. It is only in her dark eyes that her panic is etched, but her clients are too busy—busy looking at themselves in the gilded triple mirrors—to give it much, if any, notice. For this Celie is grateful.
Someday she hopes to open her own shop, not for clothes, but for linens. Linens with the highest thread count—the softest, finest bedding one can dream on. This is her one, perfect fantasy. This is her one great wish.
Eva did not understand how her granddaughter could settle on just selling clothes. It made her sad and uncomfortable. Actually, embarrassed. Benjamin’s brother, Samuel, had a daughter who was a published poet. To her this was so much better. But she loved her granddaughter and on the surface accepted Celie’s choice. Told her friends, “Celie is the best saleswoman in the Midwest—actually famous.”
Eva had left her family at fourteen. Left them in Russia—five thousand miles away. She waved good-bye for the promise—the promise of the promised land. Her family had chosen her to be their messenger, their memory, their legacy. She carried that luggage with her always—their troubled waves goodbye and her own escape from the pogroms and the looming threat of the camps. And with this grew the need to be ambitious for her children—have a daughter who would be a great pianist or a celebrated actress and maybe someday even a granddaughter who would become a famous poet. Like Anna Akhmatova or Marina Tsvetayeva—well, maybe not exactly like Tsvetayeva, who she later learned had in the end hanged herself. “But, still, how wonderful,” she thought, “it would be to bring such an inheritance across the ocean and be able to report on these accomplishments to my family back in Europe.”
She would sit next to Esther by the radio, and listen to the news about the war—about the men named Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler—while Esther wrote letter after letter to the American Red Cross asking for their help. “Could they find her mother’s family—her parents, her brothers, her sister?” Finally, in 1950 the answer arrived. A stamp over their names, DISAPPEARED. Niftorim.
So six years later, when Eva took the small Celie’s hand and they stood at the living room window—the sounds from the baby grand piano long silenced, a heavily fringed, thick black wool shawl smothering the top of it—she needed, even more, everyone close by, on one street, in one place and never late. And it all became Niftorim.
Same as when Esther disappeared into the suburbs, even though she and Levi visited there every weekend. Benjamin would drive down to the city, pick them up and bring them back. Two hours in the car on Sundays. And when Levi was gone, he came just for Eva, although on the ride to take her back into the city he would bribe either Joshua or Jeremy to come along and sit in the front seat. Alone in the back, the only noise coming from Eva was that of an old woman checking and rechecking for her apartment keys in her huge, worn, leatherette purse.
As she walked her avenue, sometimes three times a day, snow or wind or rain never stopping her, she watched Manzelman the grocer, Satvitsky the butcher, and Ruben the tailor slowly disappear, and other stores rise up with owners whose names she could not pronounce, nor did she try.
And when Esther started to wear scarves—the most beautiful Celie could find to cover her mother’s baldness, a side effect from the treatments—Eva never asked “Why?” Nor did she ever speak of Adele when she and Esther walked together.
Though one day, over the phone, she did talk of Adele to Esther. Said she saw her coming toward her—“a ghost in the night” was how she put it. But, before Adele saw her, Eva said, “I crossed over. Over to the other side.”
She told that to Esther and then they were cut off—it sounded as if the receiver just dropped into its cradle. Eva took a too-difficult breath, pushed a chair as close as she could to the window that overlooked the avenue. Sat down and stared.
Esther called and called her mother back, but she did not answer. With Ben elsewhere and herself too weak to drive, Esther called Celie, begged her to please run down there, which she quickly agreed to do.
It was when Esther hung up the phone that she felt a deep pang of upset about her daughter and wished Celie would be more aggressive—more assertive in life—instead of always absorbing the pain of everyone else, never lashing out—so like Esther herself.
Unbeknownst to Esther, through the years Celie picked up on her mother’s seething and the few times it burst open. One instance being Esther’s thrilling smile when she so finally crashed the phone into her sister’s ear. Another, when pregnant again, she hollered full strength at Benjamin, “If this child is a boy he will not be named after Cecil Slaughter! No son of mine will ever be named after him. Enough! If it’s a boy he will be named after my dear Lettie’s deceased father, Joseph. I’ve had enough of all this! Do you hear me?”
Frightened by the force of her wrath—the insanity he heard in her voice, reminding him, however momentarily, of the piercing screams which emanated from his mother Idyth—he acquiesced, thereby appalling my mother and father and for which he begged and begged huge forgiveness. Which, ultimately and nobly, they gave him.
Celie carried those sharp moments of her mother’s ire into her future, believing someday it would come quickly to her as to how to use her own ever-burgeoning anger.
Celie found her grandmother in the chair next to the window. She stood next to her. They were in position.
Niftorim.