First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Breaststroke

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I know you don’t know me. I know I don’t look like you. I suppose, every once in a while, amidst the black hats and long coats and sheitel-wearing-women, there is someone who doesn’t look like you.

My sleeves are rolled up, on purpose. My skirt is too short, on purpose. My grandma would be proud. You’re sorry, today you don’t have a map of the graves. It’s alright, I remember.

I walk off on my own, a left at the end of the narrow white road. An oasis in the middle of congested New York. It’s hot today. Strange, my father always said that graveyards were peaceful, but I’d never understood what he meant until this moment. Until I built a life of getting dressed while driving with a sandwich is my pocket, late before I’d left, one moment, too much. Time doesn’t matter here. The emails I forgot to send or the errands I have yet to run, they all stand still in the sunlight. I’d been here before as a little girl (I’d cried and left a letter on my grandma’s headstone, the way children do), but I was an adult this time with a grown-up’s purse and sharp cashmere sweater - the same one I wore to a different funeral a few weeks earlier, when I’d tracked graveside dirt across my car and my apartment. I recognize so many names across so many stones, because they are all Jewish names. An odd kind of comfort.

Did you find your family? a woman calls across the row. Platform shoes and a Brooklyn accent, the kind always edged with a bit of annoyance. I’d thought I was alone.

Just there.

You’re lucky. The graves are all so overgrown I don’t know where mine are.

She was wearing pants. The regulars don’t wear pants here.

Who are you looking for?

My grandmother, she answers. I haven’t been back here in twenty years now.

I haven’t been back in three years. Since before the pandemic.

Why today, I wonder.

--

I text my housekeeper, it’s a mess and my life is falling apart.

My housekeeper is usually the first one to know when my life is falling apart. I tell her in tears that everything is everywhere and she, gently and meticulously, puts the corporeal things back in their place. She’s been with me three years and I don’t know her last name; it was only a week ago that she asked what I do for a living. But she could tell you the kind of cereal that I eat for breakfast. The color of my underwear. And she knows when my life is falling apart.

How is this Saturday?

Not Saturday. For religious reasons, not Saturday. Is that alright?

Don’t worry. I’ll be there before you leave for work this afternoon.

--

I flew back to Texas. Because I had a dream just after the world ended, and the man I spoke to in that dream had a Dallas accent.

I sat among my father’s olive trees. Paced barefoot when the ground was too hot to stand on. I showed up at your doorstep, like I do now and then.

You’re still fighting, aren’t you? You’ve been fighting all this time. It’s who you are.

Is it?

Yes. It’s like waves. You get knocked down, again and again. And you rise, again. That’s why you’re burnt out. But you’ll be alright if you stop fighting it, you know. Just let those waves take you where you need to be. You know how to swim.

What does swimming look like? Practically. When everything changed around me and I’m redefining all of it. What does swimming look like?

Well. A pause. Clear and certain. There’s the breaststroke…

--

I am sitting on the floor of my friend’s apartment, sharing batter from the bowl.

As long as you come to my wedding, she tells me. Nobody dances like you.

--

The taxi driver shakes my hand, and holds it longer than he should have.

I really like you.

I laugh lightly. You’re sweet.

Next time you’re back in Texas. Call me.

It was a twenty-minute drive to the airport. You don’t even know my name.

--

So. I knelt down in the dirt beside the graves. My grandma, fierce and rebellious and wild. My grandpa, who was stable and stoic and understood everything.

I stayed there a long time. I told them a lot of things.

Because when the world fell apart, I found comfort at the graves.

Because I have my grandma’s eyes. And where you come from doesn’t change.

 

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