Cleopatra and Frankenstein(117)

*

“So what did you think?” asks my mother on the drive home. “Bet you’ll never look at a bonsai tree the same way again, eh?”

“This is what we call a waste of my time,” I say, gesturing to the car, this conversation, the state of New Jersey, the entire world.

“And this,” says my mother, gesturing to me, “is what we call an asshole.”

*

My brother Levi comes down from upstate.

“Man, I hate hospitals,” he says, scuffing his heels against the linoleum floors.

“This one’s not so bad,” I say. “The nurses are nice, and they have a TV room.”

“Ellie,” he says, “it’s a dump. Dad deserves better than this.”

I have the urge to punch him swiftly in the neck, but I restrain myself. It was typical Levi, artfully sidestepping any responsibility, then showing up last-minute to offer a thoughtful critique.

“That’s great feedback, Levi,” I say. “You want us to write a Yelp review or something?”

Levi gives me an outraged look.

“Did Mom tell you I got banned from Yelp?” he says. “I specifically told her not to.”

*

I’m reading to my father from one of his dog-eared volumes of collected poems when I stop at a page faintly marked with pencil. He has underlined two stanzas of a Derek Walcott poem very finely, almost tentatively, as though trying not to muss up the page.

Days I have held,

days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,

my harboring arms.



Next to them is a faded check mark. A restrained little check. My heart.

*

I can’t sleep, so I’m up late watching a documentary about Middle Americans and their battle with crippling methamphetamine addictions. The man currently being interviewed has dry red sores all over his face that he picks at absently, almost tenderly, as he speaks.

“I never had a real birthday,” he says. “No presents or nothing. My parents didn’t care. But on meth I can have a birthday whenever I want. I can have my birthday seven days a week.”

*

Levi is playing his new solo album Table for One, Not by the Window loudly over the speakers in the living room.

“Turn that racket off!” yells my mother.

He turns the volume dial down, not all the way, but enough that the house is no longer vibrating.

“My eardrums, good grief,” says my mother, collapsing onto the eating couch.

“It’s not racket,” says Levi.

“It is the definition of racket,” says my mother.

“Listen,” says Levi. “When the first radio programs came to India during British rule, people would gather from all over and sit together and listen to English radio shows. It was the first time a lot of them had heard Western music, basically ever. After the programs were over, there would be long periods of white noise, just static. And the Indians would all stay and listen to that as well.”

“Your point?” asks my mother.

“They’d never heard it before, so to them that was music too.”

“So?” says my mother.

“So, don’t you see that it’s all just perspective, Ma? Our white noise was their music. Your racket is my masterpiece.”

“That’s a cool fact, Levi,” I say diplomatically. “About the Indians.”

“You’re going to have to travel a lot farther than India to find someone who thinks that’s a masterpiece,” says my mother.

*

He died.

*

Outside the hospital I wait for my mother and Levi to arrive. Next to me, an elderly woman wrapped in a pink blanket despite the heat sucks on her cigarette between great hacking coughs.

“Can I bum one of those?” I ask.

“Trade you for a dollar,” she says.

“I don’t have a dollar,” I say. “My father just died.”

She looks at me from under her wiry eyebrows.

“In that case,” she says, “no.”

*

My mother has driven over to speak to my father’s brother. Levi is upstairs on the phone with his girlfriend. I sit in the garden and watch the birds dart around the feeder. Today is almost done. The sky is apricot with golden clouds. A chorus of grasshoppers surrounds me. The earth is alive. I am alive. I wait to feel whatever I’m meant to feel, but nothing comes.

*

I practice ways of telling people the news. He is no longer with us. He has departed. He’s six feet under. He’s deceased. He passed away. He croaked. He rests in peace. He is no longer of this world. He went to meet his maker. He bought the farm. He’s with the big guy in the sky. He’s pushing up daisies. He expired. He’s dead as a doornail. He kicked the bucket. He’s no more. He’s been reincarnated, we don’t know as what, but we’re hoping anything but a Jets fan.

*

“The rabbi called,” Levi says. “He wants to know why we’re not sitting a week of shiva.”

“What business is it of his?” I say.

“I’ll deal with it,” says my mother.

“What are you going to say?” asks Levi.

“I’m going to say, ‘Who has the energy for all that sitting?’” she says.