Filial

by Anthony Santulli

        My father knew how to put himself together de rigueur. His smart casual wardrobe consisted of 3-button bespoke jackets, pleated chalk stripe pants, notched lapel blazers, mid-calf Argyle socks, Italian leather belts and Half-Windsor knots. There were, of course, times where a sale too good to pass up could lead to any number of strange purchases: tacky baseball caps, neon colored neckties, the occasional blouse left in the men's department. Poor judgment aside, he always presented himself well; to this day I have never seen him in a pair of jeans. At eight years old, I associated my father’s clean-shaven appearance with a precocious notion of what it meant to be an adult and the many luxuries that awaited me in the business world.
        He sold his first house at 28. His days as a real estate broker consisted of sporadic commissions, useless partnerships, futile attempts to sell upscale apartments on the waterfront, and paper. Always paper. His filing cabinets overflowed with numbers and letters and useless symbols. When his business went online in 2002, he still asked customers to fax their contracts, mortgage commitments, advertisements, and other information. Anything abstract confused him; he liked the idea of something tangible.
        My father had often taken me to see this work when I was a child. His office was just one of many small businesses on Jersey City’s Central Avenue: Holey Moley Tattoos & Body Piercings, Central Gold & Diamond, Rumba’s Café, $.99 Gallery, and more. Still, it was all his; the fax machine, some tangled telephone wires, the furniture inherited from his father. "One day," he used to say, "this will all be yours." A piece of him, I'm sure, was damaged when he realized that I didn’t want to sell houses or inherit my grandfather's furniture.
        Maybe it was the basement. Forty years ago, the building served as a retail store that specialized in military apparel, and several shipments of camouflaged inventory as well as a shoebox full of baseball cards from the 1960s had been left behind for my family to collect. After he started his own business there, my father used the same space for his own storage. One of my earliest memories is apocryphal; I remember wandering around that damp, dark room, trapped in a world of sealed Rubbermaids that contained everything from Christmas decorations to vintage Matchbox cars and moldy posters of Muhammad Ali. On the far wall, the boiler room's heavy steel door was barricaded by chains and locks. Its edges glowed red with chthonic intensity as they whistled and moaned to a demonic rhythm. White heat emanated from the radiators, a contrast to the obsidian and impossible chill of that infernal hall. This, I thought, was what the Catholic boys meant when they spoke of Hell.

        My father has switched buildings twice since then, both of them with only one story, yet the vastness of that place remains fresh; it floats idly like a balloon losing air. But it’s no longer the basement that I fear—I know now that Hell has moved somewhere else.
        When the Take Our Daughters to Work program was expanded to include boys in 2003, most parents were indifferent, perhaps embarrassed by their own jobs. In my class, there were no sons of astronauts or paleontologists, no daughters of doctors or superheroes. "Take Your Child to Work Day", as the elementary teachers called it, soberly reminded most parents of their status as typical middle-class suburbanites holding a 9-to-5 job. The program gave my father a chance to show me around a calculator and explain the stock market; I just looked forward to the day off.
        We got to work around eleven. To most people this is late, but my father wanted the entire morning to himself. On most days, he wakes at 5:30 and meanders around the neighborhood, showers and shaves in slow, quiet song, watches the local news, and takes in the cold air and coffee of dawn.

        I looked at my assignment sheet, full of prepackaged interview questions, and wrote my name at the top in sloppy script. This year’s theme for the program was A New Generation at Work.

        “What do you do?” I asked, mechanical pencil in hand. The phone rang with the digital tone of business. In a manner almost rehearsed, he replied,
        “I help people buy and sell houses.” He picked up the phone as I jotted down his words. “AFS—Yeah, I got the listing right here—Stop by my office tomorrow—Alright, bye.” Click. It was funny to think that half of his life had been spent like this. I stared at the certificates hung on the wall. My father dropped out of college before he could earn his associate’s degree, and my mother always joked that his epitaph would read “Died with 32 credits.”
        My mind wandered, so I began to search through the endless supply of records stored in the stainless steel file cabinets. I recited the names of different buyers and sellers under my breath as I sucked the salt off a pretzel stick. The files went all the way back to 1985; ten years before my father passed his name onto me. Ten years before all the crying and babbling slowly became words. My words. He walked towards the door.
        “Come on, we have to go to the car.” The housing market was better this year, and an older man had contacted my father a few days earlier to estimate his property’s market value.

        “What are we doing?” I asked.

        “An appraisal.” I misspelled the word in the margin of my homework for later: Aprasal Aprasal Aprasal.

        Outside, the industrial sounds of the city flooded my ears. The warm, urban air smelled of soft pretzels and gasoline. I read everything: license plates, graffiti, 1-800 numbers and street names. Even the cardboard signs of homeless men breathed a drunk, poetic life. At home, these things meant nothing; here they took on a life of their own.

        My father’s new crystal red Impala, which would one day be mine, was cluttered with Poland Spring bottles and manila folders full of papers that on any other day would have been useless, but now their language fueled my sensory addiction. I indulged in the leathery new car smell, fogged up the back window with my breath, and listened closely to the hymn of klaxons and talk radio as I mused over this new world.
        When we arrived at the apartment, my father parked along the curb of the crowded street. He pulled a ring of keys off of his belt loop and scanned the collection of silver and brass for the right fit. He paused for a moment so he could slowly run his fingers along the teeth of the blade that were shaped like shattered piano keys. As the lock turned, the door let out a death rattle as though it hadn’t been opened for years.
        Our arrival was greeted with filth. The dregs of the earth seemed to collect in puddles around the living room. There was an old Western on the television but the volume was muted. Newspapers assembled in vertical stacks along the couch cushions created a soft gradient of gray to faded yellow. Clothes embalmed the carpet along with scattered pieces of cereal, urine and milk stains, patina pennies, and hairballs. My senses rescinded and eventually succumbed to the house’s infinite, endless dissonance: the shrill mewing of cats from the bedroom, the fusillade of a leaky faucet, the drone of centralized air conditioning, the crunch of broken glass beneath my feet.
        And the smell. A horrible, animate thing. Not like fresh manure in springtime; or the decomposing body of a deer beneath August heat; or a stagnant, polluted pond. Worse.
        “Is anybody here?” My father's usually resonant voice dropped to a whisper. All words lost their music, the airy bounce and rhythm of language reduced to harsh noise. “Hello?”
        The walls of the room absorbed all sound, keeping it a secret, while the hallway stretched into an illusory labyrinth. A dizzying blur. I carefully slid my hand along the glass of the picture frames that lined the walls, some of them empty, some of them stuffed with the stock images of anonymous interracial couples kissing on their wedding day in perfect lighting, friends sharing a toast after some untold celebration at a cheap Italian restaurant, and families posing in multiple uncomfortable positions before a bright ocean backdrop. A gaunt, almost skeletal cat brushed against my father’s leg and stared at me with innocent eyes.
        I looked from the pet to my father. The thick black Mediterranean hair of his youth—identical to my own—that I only knew of in pictures was now gray and receded; his bald, dappled scalp was liver spotted from wistful days at the beach and ultraviolet rays. His clothes, which I had once held in such high regard, suddenly seemed ridiculous. Without warning, I noticed the wear in his cheap penny loafers, the black wool sports coat and matching flat front pants that did nothing to conceal his increased weight, and his white cotton shirt, ruined by tomato stains and bleach. Even his moschate cologne only seemed to add to the intolerable smell.
        With a final “Hello?” we left that place. I held my breath to escape the paralyzing odor as I exited and watched my father lock the door of the apartment and proceed to graze his thumb along the key’s bitting.
        After we left, my father took me out to lunch. We ate cheeseburgers, and my father wore a napkin around the collar of his shirt. Later, he took me to see another apartment, this time on foot. I was still in a disgusted, languid stupor from the day’s events, and I kept my gaze fixated on the sidewalk, careful not to step on any cracks or fossilized gum. Before I knew it, I had been placed on this customer’s doorstep.
        My father rang the doorbell and its buzzing swirled in my ears. A tall young man answered the door.
        “Come in,” he said. He gestured towards the foyer while his daughter, a girl of about my age, clung to his leg like a vice. I saw in her something innocent and familiar. Was there a word for that?

        The two men shook hands, their grips brimming with insincerity. My elementary mind took stock of the building’s contents. Senses and images had faded into numbers and facts. The guest room was full of bicycles—there must have been at least a dozen—old and new for both children and adults. The living room walls were covered with posters of Beavis and Butt-Head and AC/DC.
        “You want me to turn on the TV?” the owner asked me. I nodded and he put on a cartoon. The characters and faces looked familiar, but I was too numb to pay attention. My father’s trained and familiar rhetoric was at work in the other room but I could not escape the day’s earlier memory and its arresting mayhem of cat piss and rotted meat. It must have been toxic to breathe, the song of a thousand deaths. I didn’t speak of it at school the next day and my assignment was left incomplete with no explanation.
        The smell, as would later be identified by police, was the scent of a decayed body in another room. Exactly how long the lone resident had been dead I didn’t know, but an implacable sense of mortality and oblivion consumed me. My first true death. What happened to his cats? Where were his family and friends? Years later, extensive Internet searches and hours spent studying obituary records have yielded no answers. I never got to see the face of this man, and the images I created of the ugliness and heartache in his mind, an attempt to forge in him sort of new life, only cast a muddied reflection of the foulness in his own home. Recently, I asked my father if he remembered the apartment or its owner.

        “I sold the building to someone else, I think,” he told me. “Yeah, I must have.” More questions produced the same doubtful responses. I was shocked. When it came to the apartment, he couldn’t recall a single thing. No rusted faucets giving birth to brown water or ants colonizing an open container of moldy bread. I tried as well to ask him about the basement, but he didn’t remember any satanic boiler rooms or guttural whistles. Everything seemed business as usual. All the memories had been locked away in his mind’s filing cabinet, the data lost with the amnesia of aging. Within my own mind, the images encoded themselves as though they had been written down; he catalogued them away, separate from the numbers and dollar signs of his working life. The fact that my father had to handle these situations often enough to be considered normal was sickening and only served to drive me away from the calculated, almost suspicious practices of AFS Hudson Realty Corporation in the years to come.

        Several months after the incident, my father contracted a severe case of meningitis that nearly took his life. One morning, he woke with a sudden fever and refused to get out of bed. All that time, the bacteria had been metastasizing inside of him, corroding his mind by the millions. When he tried to shift his body, he couldn’t even move his neck. On the drive to the emergency room, he began to hallucinate that he was somewhere else: the northern red oaks and dirty pond water of New Jersey became the lush palm trees and ambrosial beaches of California.

        During his stay at the hospital, he didn’t even know who I was.  For a week, his body lay supine and stiff. The doctors told my family that another day without treatment would have killed him.

        The thought of my father hooked up to IV needles and hoses was hard to swallow. At his most vulnerable, I saw in him my own weaknesses, desires, and fears; I, too, wanted to escape to that other world, my California. The delusions went away after a few days and my father soon returned to the pace of work like nothing had ever happened. His days judging homes—the one place where a human is free to sleep, self-loathe, eat, love, and die—were as busy as ever.
        It was hard to believe that this was the life that awaited him every morning. Day after day, I felt myself slip away from that banal world void of all sensory pleasure and joy, the only world I had ever known. But the one thing I will never escape, the strangest of them all, was seeing my father stand amidst the chaos of that ruined apartment like a homeowner after a hurricane, dignified in knowing that he was better than the dead, and realizing that this was the place where he had always belonged.

Anthony Santulli is a New Jersey born writer currently attending Susquehanna University. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Extract(s), The Review Review, the delinquent, The Postscript Journal, Bartleby Snopes, Literary Orphans, and decomP.

When She Sleeps

by Shirley Russak Wachtel

            I like it best when she sleeps. When she sleeps, I don’t have to look at her eyes. Her eyes are remarkable, you see. They are matchless, neither a subtle cornflower, nor the color of a dusky, rolling sea, nor even a silky lazy sky which settles comfortably over apartment buildings as children sit down to their suppers. Nor are they fantastic for the incomprehensible fact that neither of her children managed to inherit the particular shade of blue. No, they are unique because of one irrefutable fact—they speak. Through the years, they have spoken of many things, most predominantly, love. But now, now that they are the only voice she has left, I can’t bear to hear them. Yes, definitely sleep is best.

Today the sun is pouring, pushing its way through the closed damask shades, which with little prodding, open. Sunlight, an unabashed intruder, falls upon her face, but her breaths come soft and steady, and her hands are motionless clenched upon her chest. I stare at the face, as I have the last four months, and I realize again how beautiful she is. Not the standard notion of beauty, but the kind accomplished by a mask of quiet serenity achieved only in age. I marvel at its smooth contours, and hope briefly that the powers of heredity bless me with the same fine skin one day. In fact, even with her chin sunken in like that, one can barely believe that she is 83 years old (give or take a year depending on the source). 

I walk into the bathroom she never uses and wet a paper towel, which I then gently place over her forehead. She makes a few “puh” sounds pursing her lips, nothing more, as the towel caresses the furrows of her sweaty brow. I move the cloth down the willful nose, and as I take note of the bump in its center, I am surprised that I no longer feel the twang of guilt upon its discovery. The thin lips are expressionless and covered by pathetic little patches of crust. I make a mental reminder to coat them later with Vaseline.

She wouldn’t like people seeing her this way, without her dentures, mouth swallowing up the thin lips. Once, she accidentally broke the false teeth, and she cried for a whole day. But they wouldn’t allow even the teeth in this place. So I put the dentures away, or maybe I threw them out altogether. At the base of her neck are sprinkled the freckles of childhood along with a couple of moles, to which she is prone, and I lightly cover these too with the cooling wetness. Finally, I squeeze the last of the tap water onto the top of her head, and with my fingers I comb back the remaining hairs, straight and thin, like my own. She is almost totally gray now. There were times, as recent as a few months ago, when I would squeeze the Clairol Herbal Golden Brown onto her head, as she simultaneously pinched her eyes tightly shut. I can still smell the stinging odor of peroxide in the air. I watch as a single droplet of water, not hair dye, escapes onto her left eyelid which flutters as a petal would when brushed by a spring breeze. Standing back, I watch the rhythmic movements of her breathing, her chest barely rising beneath the sleeveless yellow flowered sundress with buttons (they all have to have buttons) down the back. The dress isn’t even hers, having somehow made its way into her closet, not an unusual occurrence. She is too tightly swaddled today beneath the beige flannel blanket, and someone has casually thrown an afghan over all, a patchwork of dancing pinks and grays. In the bed, buoyed by round sacks of air, she is at once a presence and an unimposing picture of fragility. No longer able to look at her, I turn away.

Photographs line the window sill, the TV stand devoid of TV, the dresser, the large bulletin board in the corner. Reminders of a life lived, the pictures are present in almost every one of the rooms. They are all the same, yet each is different. In this room, there is one of my wedding, twenty-five years ago, another, more recent, of her and two brothers, a black and white posed one of me and Jack, he with a striped rubber ball in his hands, I with a gray ribbon, then a scarlet red, wound around a ponytail. Jack’s face is round like my mother’s, mine long like that of my father. I am missing a tooth.  Most of the photographs, though, are of the grandchildren, five in all, and all boys. 

“No princesses,” she would often say, “only kings.” Every so often I hold the largest photo of all five directly in front of her face, and I point to each one.

“See, there’s Howie. He’s at Georgetown now...” and finally, “little Sammy, remember?” I say, calling him by a Yiddish endearment meaning “lightning bug.”  As I point to each one, sometimes I think that I see one of the blue eyes begin to willfully tear. But each time, I dismiss the notion, reasoning this is a natural physical reaction to the dryness in the air. And I convince myself, I pray, that she is no longer capable of crying.

Today, there is silence. The creak of the double doors perpendicular to her room is less frequent than usual, and the lighthearted bantering of aides more distant, muted; even the screams, which rattle periodically through the corridors, are quieted now. All silent save for the steady cranking of the cogs rhythmically churning the liquid, which resembles a kind of noxious chocolate milk, into the plastic tube. Down beneath the crocheted dancing afghan, sneaking further, further underneath the too tightly wound beige flannel and sundress into the soft yellow putty which was once her stomach.  Nourishment.  Life—no, I correct myself—existence. She exists with every whir of those cranky cogs. To camouflage the sound, I place a cassette into the radio by her bed. Written across the edge it says: Favorite Jewish Melodies. Immediately, the sturdy voices sing out; I visualize young strong Israelis dancing with banners through fruit-laden orchards. “Shane vidila voona, lichtic vee der shtaren...Sweet little one, light as the stars...  Fin Gott a mitunah, ost der mer tsi gui brangt...From God a blessing you have brought to me.” It is her favorite song, a tune which has always brought tears to her eyes. Now, her eyes are shut.

Yesterday was different. I found myself walking down the hall with its too pristine white tiles, shining golden oak chair rail, sedate salmon-colored wallpaper with the look of suede on which were placed at regular intervals, pictures—a Jewish woman praying over candles, a couple dancing under the chuppah, an abstract of a hillside in Israel. It was all too sanitary, too ordered, and I hated it. My high heels clicked against the tiles as, like radar, I followed the high-pitched whining sound which had reached my ears just as I stepped out of the elevator. My pace quickened as I walked past her room with its neatly made bed. Finally, I saw it. The back of the special narrow wheelchair with the inclined seat, the pole adjacent to it, and one skinny white arm with clenched fingers stretching into the empty air. The whines bore no resemblance to the strong, round tones I knew so well—those comforting tones which even in anger could wrap themselves around you and make you feel that nothing was ever or could ever be bad again. Nothing like this mutant cry which was an unnatural pitch, a hybrid borne of fear, of pain? When I faced her, she looked up at me, straight into me, and then altogether through me. She screamed again.

I stood up straight in front of her, my eyes going to my own skirt, a cotton blend of black and white Swiss dots. Somewhere inside my brain, a small egotistic voice murmured an unspoken question. “Do you like my outfit?” Of course, she had always loved polka dots, and so she would smile appraisingly, check the hem, and have me spin like a teenage ballerina.

“Zaya shein...Very nice,” she would say with a smile, and then she’d ask, “Viful?...How much?” She’d have to see the shoes, too. Bright black pumps with very high heels. She certainly would have approved.

Indeed, the voice in my brain is a child’s voice—still demanding to be noticed, appreciated—now drowned by an insistent whine. She knows only herself, reasons an older voice, submerging the child.

I approached the nurse’s station where I was greeted like an old friend. My tone, lighter than usual, inquired about her last dosage of morphine. I was told that the last supplemental dose was given 45 minutes ago. Her tolerance was building. 

The sacral wound, which is delicately often referred to as a “bedsore,” rests precariously close to the anus, and is much smaller, I am informed, than when she first came here. Big enough to put a fist through, they had said, yet packed with bullets of pain. The morphine reduces the pain, which is often agonizing, but as her tolerance rises with each day, so does the dosage. It is a horrifying but unavoidable cycle. 

Often, walking down the hallways (those further away from where she is stationed), I overhear the familiar banter between mothers and daughters.

“I picked up my new dentures today, ma...See?...How about some more water?” or “Lucille, you should really go to a doctor for that constipation problem.”  “I’m eating roughage, mom.  I’ll be all right.”

Sometimes, hearing it all brings a momentary smile to my face. I am definitely the youngest offspring here, as far as I can tell. Senior citizens with back pains and canes often drop by to visit their elderly parents. As I walk past, feigning oblivion, I wonder who will care about my dentures, my eating habits, my polka dotted skirts when I get older.

But, even here, you have to laugh.  Indeed, emotions always hit highs or lows. There is no moderation, the subtle niceties of time having long fled this place where gentlemen wear diapers which emerge from tweed pant waists, and women go denture-less.

You have to laugh. Once, a woman in a wheelchair took her shirt completely off. And although there was nothing about the old lady’s body that could be recognized as womanly, one nurse running toward her joked, “Save it for when you can get paid for that, Sadie.” On another occasion, one of the patients was sitting in the TV room, where none but the attendants pay attention to the flickering screen. She was screaming, “I need something...I need something!” ignored by the overworked staff. “I’ll tell you what you need!” screeched a hag with the profile of a baba yagar, the mythical witch which so often scared me in childhood. With raised fist, she ominously wheeled herself, rubber baby doll in hand (many of the patients have these) toward the woman. “You need to be quiet!” she screeched, approaching until a tall aide with mounds of curly black hair promptly wheeled her away.

There are times, though, when the conversation is less dramatic, as when I overheard one patient, sporting a trim white bun, an alligator pocketbook resting on her lap, insist to her friend, “But I do love my husband...It’s just that I can’t remember his name...”  As I said, you have to laugh if you’re going to return to the world outside, if you’re going to have any kind of normalcy.

            When I came back to her, she was calmer; the morphine was beginning to work. I could tell that she was partially awake despite her closed lids, because the tremor in her hand, more distinct of late, was again present. I tried feeding her some applesauce, which she sucked slowly, every so often smacking her lips.

            “Remember how you loved to eat apples?” I prodded, recalling the way she would carefully peel away one long circle of skin with the edge of a knife, then slice the white fruit into thin wedges, making sure to core the brown spots and save one thick wedge for the dog. 

            “I can tell you love this,” I said, trying to catch the sauce which had begun to drip down her cheek and onto her bib.

            But, that was yesterday. Today is better. And so I wait until the Jewish song ends, and another begins. This one is about someone dear being more precious than all the money in the world. And then, for no reason, I begin to cry.

            I place my cool cheek next to her warm one, thinking again how this time with her has become both the worst and best part of my day. My tears cover her cheek, which I kiss, murmuring, “I love you” over and over again, as

if the force of the words could infuse her with some power. A lifetime of unsaid “I love you’s” sail up into the air and burst like so many bubbles. But she doesn't wake, and her eyes remain shut, speechless. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll have the heart to leave her, the strength to return. But, of course, I do—I must.

            As I look through the window past the front yard into the parking lot where cars are neatly lined in rows, I suddenly remember that I have to get back home. Charlie will be home soon, and he will need a ride to Hebrew school, Brad will be calling for a ride from basketball practice, about thirty student essays needed grading, and a stop has to be made at the butcher shop if there is to be any supper tonight.

            I begin to button my coat, and as I bend down to place one last kiss on the forehead of the sleeping woman, suddenly my body is gripped by an old fear. When I leave, no one will know her. No one will know my mother.

Shirley Russak Wachtel is a college English professor living in New Jersey.  She holds a Doctor of Letters Degree from Drew University. She is the author of a book of poetry, In the Mellow Light, several books for children, and a series, Spotlight on Reading, a college-level text. Her personal essays have been published in The New York Times OpEd section. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Middlesex, Haiku Journal, emerge, Leaves of Ink, Whisper, and other literary journals. Her memoir, My Mother’s Shoes, follows her mother’s journey during the Holocaust and as a new citizen in America. “When She Sleeps” is the introduction to My Mother’s Shoes.

Sky

by Richard Ballon   

It is that delicate time, when bones are stretching and knees go knobby, the body all elbows and a boy’s heart is suddenly nesting in a body trying to be a man. This is fifteen, when the willow of my body leans toward other boys and men who smell of salt that summer on Hampton Beach.

Oh, I chisel out words with my foot on the beach, and Peace signs. I read graffiti of other boys, spray painted on the inside curl of the sea wall, and we all think we are as deep as the curl of our letters that match our running legs, when the waves lap, lap, lap, as the tongue of the tide lashes our legs.

I sneak one night, away from the trailer of women, where my Mom, sisters and cousins giggle and squawk over the fanleaf of fan magazines. I pause to watch the white lip of the surf. Colin is sitting on the sea wall, cross-legged, his goatee shadowing his chin. His long curls blow soft and fringed with the streetlight.

The sea acts more itself at night, he says and the meeting of our eyes is the handshake that seals our friendship and ushers me a summer later to a lake in Maine.

One night, his Aunt Liz and her boyfriend are beyond silly drunk in their trailer and we slip out, barefoot. My soles are pinched by tree roots, and we wear haloes of mosquitoes until the pfffssst of bug spray.  

We launch the boat, Colin and I, onto the dark lake, and tumbling in I see the shadow of Colin’s arms like tree roots, snaking their stroke as he rows us out into the valley of water that looms beneath us. That stillness cracks with the creak of oar lock and the plip plop plip of the oars, easing the boat along until we drill a hole in the center with the drop plunge of anchor, waiting for the surface to mirror back the sky.

There, he murmurs, is Cassiopeia, and he points at the stars in the water, and I repeat the word like a litany. Cassiopeia. And here is Orion. The Pleiades. The names coat my tongue with the milk of their meaning, and after I learn them, he bids me look up, up, up at the darker lake in which the stars are really nesting.

The Big Dipper, The Drinking Gourd, the Shopping Cart, pour the night over me these, many years, many summers later, and shimmer with what I did not do that night, which was kiss the man whose eyes reflected my longing back at me.

Richard Ballon’s work has been performed in New York City at Manhattan Theater Source’s Sola Voces / Estrogenius Festival, Stage Left’s Women at Work, MamaDrama and Left Out Festivals, Emerging Artist Theater’s One Man Talking and One Woman Standing, and NativeAlien’s Short Stories 5. Other work has been performed at The Shea Theater, Turners Falls, Universal Theater, Provincetown, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Out of the Blue Gallery, Cambridge, Devanaughan Theater, Boston, Last Frontier Theater Conference, Valdez, Dylan Thomas Festival, Chicago, Walking the Wire Festival, Iowa City, Fells Point Corner Theater, Baltimore, The Inspirato Festival, Alumnae Theater New Ideas Festivals, Toronto,Asphalt Shorts, Kitchener and ArtHotel, Montreal. Richard is a member of the Dramatist’s Guild. 

Ninety-Six Hours of Catholic TV

by Rachel Dovey

The Hail Mary was coming from my grandmother’s television, and I tried to pay attention.

“Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” a priest with a crew cut repeated, in the tone of studied concern often used by weathermen.

My 87-year-old grandmother had just suffered a stroke so severe she couldn’t talk or roll over, but every time my mom or I picked up the remote to navigate away from her beloved Catholic TV, she would do the one thing she still could—open her milky green eyes and glare at us.

Catholic TV is exactly what it sounds like. There are programs where church leaders interview conservative pundits about their pro-life stance and adolescent boys explain “Treasures of the Church,” like the Eucharist through silver braces, their monotonous voices raising only when they break. There’s a Merv Griffin-style variety show where 70-year-old clergymen sing old-timey pop standards backed by the Catholic TV Orchestra, and at 10am and 6:30pm, a priest or cardinal prays the rosary, inviting viewers to join in at home.

My grandmother is very Catholic. My mom, a long-out lesbian who’d left this Irish neighborhood in Buffalo, New York for Northern California 30 years ago, is not. I’m not either, but the scent of religion still clings to me, thick and lingering as incense. Raised in a Russian Orthodox Church by my dad and an apartment full of Buddha statues and Georgia O’Keeffe prints by my mom, I had struck an uneasy compromise between their conflicting worldviews by 23. I no longer went to church, but I did still pray, and as the clean-shaven priest repeated his ancient invocation—flat, staged and artificially lit as it was—I focused on his words, hoping at best for some kind of transcendence, and at least for a little distraction.

It didn’t work.

From the hospital bed that had been set up in her living room, my grandmother let out a loud groan. It could have been a word, or a sentence, but her voice was so garbled after the stroke that each utterance sounded like it was filtered through gravel. The smell of shit filled the room.

My mom jumped up from the plastic-covered couch where we’d been sitting and ran over to my grandmother, across a TV-lit living room that had started to lose the immaculate shine it wore when its owner swept and polished several times a day. Houseplants were beginning to wither, crucifixes and yellowed photos collected a thin layer of dust and unopened mail was strewn around the coffee and end tables, displacing the lacy doilies my grandmother had endlessly rearranged. 

My mom bent down over her and quickly straightened up.

“We need to change her,” she said, her voice dipping as she tried not cry.

I got up and walked reluctantly over to the bed to stand opposite my mother, over this 90-lb woman who was responsible for both of us, but whom neither of us really liked. She looked up at me through a face unusually bare of lipstick and bright pink rouge, her hair white, her jaw and cheek muscles so relaxed I would have thought she looked peaceful if I didn’t know her better, didn’t know that this newly acquired softness was just paralysis from the stroke.

Together, my mom and I lifted and rolled my grandmother out of her diaper and I held her brittle hip and shoulder, trying not to watch. But as my mom ran a wet washcloth up and down her withered thighs and placed a clean diaper underneath her, I accidently looked down, noticing that her naked crotch now sprouted nothing but a few wispy ghosts of hair.

I looked away quickly, embarrassed for her and ashamed of myself. I was ashamed of so many things that day—of being here for the first time in nearly six years, of planning to stay only four days, of being glad that our visit would be so short. And I was ashamed because, though I didn’t like to admit it, I’d thought this deathbed visit would be something with more meaning or profundity, something that might just bring about those great Catholic terms like “epiphany” or “forgiveness,” or even just bind my grandmother, mom and myself a little closer together. A recent college grad with little experience of loss, I wanted something more than this—more than disposable diapers and the jumbled noise coming from my grandmother’s throat, sounding like a distant cousin of “sorry.”

Across the doily-strewn room, under a dying plant, the TV still broadcast the rosary. When the camera wasn’t focusing on the priest, it would pan up the marble-and-gold walls of the tall cathedral where he stood. I remembered something I’d learned in my junior-year art history class, that the narrow basilica and tall, pointed spires of a traditional Catholic church are constructed to draw your attention skyward, up and away from this suffering world. I watched the lens ascend to a dome full of weightless clouds and floating angels and wished my mind could follow them, to hover peacefully above this mess.

~

“Can you grab me a towel?”

My mom was trying to spoon feed her mother broth, but the clear liquid kept pouring back out of her drooping mouth—a process I’d been trying not to watch. Instead, because it was 10am the next day, I listened to the same clean-shaven priest sermonize on TV, now in the middle of a comparison between the glory of God and extra-strength laundry detergent. 

I went to the hall linen closet, finding rigid stacks of towels that had been color coded and cross-referenced according to type—hand, bath, wash cloth—by my grandmother, once a librarian, before the stroke. I wasn’t surprised; this was, after all, a woman who’d dreaded leaving her home for an apartment not for sentimental reasons, but because she couldn’t stand the thought of a communal laundry room.

“And then he was transfigured. His clothes became whiter than any bleach could make them,” I heard from the TV. 

I brought the towel reluctantly over to my mom and then hurried back to the couch, wary of catching my grandmother’s half-shut eye. Once safely back on the plastic surface, I began rifling through a box of old photos that was stowed nearby, picking memories out of their faded depths. There was the vacation cottage on Lake Ontario where my grandmother had always insisted that I sleep downstairs, in case the house caught fire. There I was in a pink two-piece during the first months of my 14-year-old anorexia, when she’d surveyed my gaunt physique approvingly, but still told me that she weighed less at my age. There, in a dim snapshot from the distant past, she stood on her wedding day beside my grandfather, years before the five children, the drinking and the unspeakable things to come.

My mom interrupted me. 

“Your cousin isn’t coming,” she said in the same tone she always uses to talk about her brother’s family, who live in South Carolina and namedrop Jesus like he’s everyone’s friend.

“She says she doesn’t want to see her like this. She wants to remember her like she was.”

I continued sorting photos, pretending to be surprised. My mom’s implication was what it usually is—that I was the better cousin—and letting her paint me as the family’s model child never failed to comfort both of us when we were around her relatives. They might see her as the rebellious San Francisco ex-pat, but I was different. Instead of getting slapped by Sister Mary Edith and smoking pot in school, I’d gotten college scholarships and straight A’s. Instead of a string of failed romances (with women!), I’d been in a nice, traditional relationship with a penis-owner for nearly six years. With our blonde hair and green eyes, my mom and I might look nearly identical, but we both knew very well that, here, I functioned as an atonement for her many sins. 

But while I would never admit it, I envied my cousin, who was at least honest. Sure, I’d made the big grand gesture, bought the plane ticket, flown to this dreary corner of upstate New York, but now that I was here, what was I actually doing? My mom busied herself with a thousand things—sponge baths, feedings, coordinating Hospice care—the anxiety lodged deep in her DNA spurring something nearly identical to love. But I tried my best to stay back, “out of the way,” I told myself, but really just as far across this small dark room from my dying grandmother as I could get. Something about her twisted body and croaking voice was too glaringly real, blinding as newly bleached whites, and in that age-old gesture Fr. Crew Cut had just been talking about on TV, I hid my face.  

~

On our third day in Buffalo, I sat on my grandmother’s cement driveway and pulled a hidden box of Camels out of a tear in the cloth lining of my purse. My mom knew I smoked, just as I knew she’d been trying to kick the habit since I was ten, but it was one of the things, like her early childhood, that we didn’t talk about.

I blew a white cloud out into the muggy morning. Through the thin walls of the 1940s cottage behind me, I could still hear my grandmother moaning—her guttural cries escaping with the frequent intensity of crashing waves. The Hospice nurse had assured us that this new development wasn’t serious, that she was just sore from being unable to roll or stretch, but coming from a woman who likely had kept resolutely silent while birthing twins, the sounds were alarming. My mom had responded by frantically fluffing pillows and crushing Tylenol when I finally left the house, doing anything, and ultimately nothing, to calm her.

I looked around. This was a neighborhood my grandfather had hated because of its confluence of first-generation Italian and Irish immigrants. With his German pride and taste for expensive martinis, he’d never been happy about raising his family on Buffalo’s industrial border, but he’d have suffered a second heart attack if he saw the neighborhood where his widow eventually moved. The green, tan and white cottages with plastic window awnings and carports lined this pothole-dented street with none of the usual signifiers of suburban wealth—no white picket fences, no sprawling lawns. Though I couldn’t see it from the driveway, I knew that the Catholic school and church my mom had attended were only blocks away, as were the homes of her cousins on my grandmother’s side, raising their second-and-third generation Irish families in the Sunday schools and pleated uniforms my mom had long since left.

This fading rust belt city, with its abandoned railroad terminals and crumbling factories, was the backdrop of things that happened to my mom in her early childhood that she’d only told me about once. I was six, just beginning to retain memories myself, and had walked in on her picking each of the blue-and-white plates her parents had given her out of our kitchen cupboard and hurling them against the wall. She told me then, as she crumpled into a heap of broken china, about the thin strands of half-formed memory that were starting to come back to her, about the things that sometimes happened to children, and about the fact that her own mother had quietly, politely, resolutely looked the other way. She told me, in detail far too great for a six-year-old to comprehend, about the whimpers that had been hushed half a century before, creating a silence that would roll and drift through our family like heavy smoke for years to come. 

I inhaled again, starting to feel the nicotine’s calming buzz. My grandmother was dying 30 feet from where I sat, and there was nothing spiritual about it—no meaningful glances, no warming embraces, and, on my part at least, no forgiveness for what she’d never done. I knew my mom shouldn’t have told me what she did, but at least I understood why she’d done it, her words “You can always talk to me” a desperate attempt to clear the muteness that had echoed through her life. I looked over my shoulder at the living room window, which flickered like a votive with the light of Catholic TV.

I remembered, then, a novella by Tolstoy I’d read in High School, “The Death of Ivan Iyllch,” an experience which, I realized, that was the closest I’d come to death until today. Like most things written by Russians, it doesn’t shy away from the gory details—we see the protagonist’s naked, skeletal thighs, feel his exhaustion after shitting, smell the odd, rotten odor that follows him everywhere he goes. It’s a story, like most things written by Russians, that only tiptoes cautiously around the edge of redemption—there’s half a page of lines in twelve chapters that hint at anything beyond what seems like painful, meaningless death. And when they come, those lines don’t call on the usual image of floating bodiless, free, up toward the light. The image Tolstoy uses is a strange one—instead of going up, Ivan has to follow the light down, through a soft, dark, earthy sack.

I realized that it was one of a host of images I’d encountered on my Russian dad’s side that was overtly sensual—round and womb-like as that country’s low-domed churches, and so very different from the ascetic angles and needle-thin towers of my grandmother’s self-abnegating faith. For me, this image conjured something like reality, something like acknowledging that we’re here for a while and may as well do what we can to cope. And I had just spent the last three days doing the opposite, like my grandmother—a woman who wouldn’t look down at the life falling to pieces around her, but always stood like the statue of the Virgin I’d seen on TV that morning, frozen white and silent in the hope of deliverance, looking up at the sky.

I rubbed my cigarette against the cement, feeling the springy give of its fleshy softness as the sparks went black. We still had one day in Buffalo, so I did the only thing I could—I went to inside to see my grandmother and help my mom.

Rachel Dovey is a reporter and nonfiction writer living in Santa Rosa, California. Her work has appeared in Bust, Paste, Thought Catalog, Wired and SF Weekly, and in 2012, she received a fellowship through USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism. She is a staff writer for The Bohemian, a Northern California alt-weekly, and when she isn’t struggling to meet a deadline—hell, even when she is—she can be found in that baffling and wonderful alternate universe known as Parenting a Seven Month Old.