“What happened to you?” she asks. “You’re all banged up.”
“Car accident,” I say. I can’t bring myself to tell her about the stroke; it makes me feel old. “Beautiful flowers,” I say, nodding towards the vase on the table.
“I’ve had them for years,” she says. “They’re plastic; I wash them once a week with Ivory. This you should keep.” She hands me back a container of kasha. “I won’t eat it. This too,” she says. “Can’t have poppy seeds, no seeds, nuts, or small kernels — that means no popcorn at the movies, no pistachios. I’ve got trouble with my gut.”
The way she says it, I’m tempted to make some crack about “hardly makes life worth living,” but, given my recent experiences with how precarious life is, it’s starting to seem like something I shouldn’t joke about.
“Your brother should be ashamed,” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
“Is he?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
We sit at her dining-room table. She makes me a cup of tea, Lipton, strong and incredibly good. “Do you take sugar or do you want Splender?”
“Sugar is fine,” I say. It’s sugar that’s been in the bowl so long it’s lumpy, sugar that many generations of wet spoons have touched, celebratory sugar, infected sugar — old sugar. Lillian comes out of the kitchen carrying an artifact, the blue metal tin marked Danish Butter Cookies that if I didn’t know better I would swear had been in the family for generations — when the Jews left Egypt, they took with them the tins of Danish Butter Cookies. And tins, which as best I could tell never included Danish Butter Cookies, traveled from house to house, but always, always, found their way back to Lillian. In every family or tribe there is a keeper of the tin, whose job it is to intone annoyingly, “Don’t forget my tin,” or “How could you forget my tin? No more for you. I don’t bake without the tin. What’s the point, the cookies will rot.”
Aunt Lillian’s long, thin gnarled fingers twist and turn the thin metal top; the contents knock around inside — trapped. Lillian’s hands are leopard-spotted with age; her fine-gauge hair, dyed a deep unnatural red, is fixed highon her head like rusted steel wool.
She finally gets the tin open; there are only about ten cookies left. “I don’t bake as much as I used to,” she says.
I take one, bite into it: hard as a rock, like Jewish biscotti. “Good,” I say, with my mouth full.
“The last time I saw you was at your father’s funeral,” she says.
I dip the cookie into my tea; the second bite is better. I finish the cookie, and when I move to take another, Lillian yanks the tin away from me and puts the top back on. “I have to ration them,” she says. “I don’t bake often; in fact, this may be the last batch ever.”
“Tell me about my father,” I ask, and it’s as though, after exhaling the word “father,” on the next breath I inhale the look and smell of him, five suits hanging in the closet after he died, his hair tonic some kind of oily, spicy-scented stuff that he splashed on his hands, ran through his hair, and combed back. It left stains my mother called “fat” on the pillowcases, the sofa, the living-room chairs, anywhere he rested his head.
“Middle management,” Aunt Lillian blurts, “that’s all he ever was. There was always someone above him who he hated, and someone below that he took it out on. He sold insurance. He worked the congregation temple. Then, later, he went into investments. If you ever questioned something your father did he’d explode — he managed to do things his way by making everyone afraid.”
I nod. What she’s saying fits with my own, dimmer recollection.
She goes on: “Now, my husband, he didn’t like the family, felt they were too judgmental and undereducated. And he was right. Your father would argue with Morty and wouldn’t give up until Morty crumbled — didn’t matter if he was right or wrong.”
I shake my head.
“And then Morty was gone. I never said it, but to a large degree I blame your father for that,” she says with a sound of disgust, a kind of sputtering spit, as though she’s revealed a deeply held secret. “Your father was like that, always needed all of the attention and acted like a child if he didn’t get it. That’s why he and your brother never got along — they were the same. And you,” she says, wagging a gnarled finger at me, “you stood there like a little retard.”
I say nothing — as far as I can remember, no one’s ever referred to me as a “little retard.”
“Was there something specific that happened, a reason that we stopped seeing your family?” I ask, jotting down the comment about my being a retard in the margin of the legal pad I’m using to write notes on.
“I had a falling out with your mother.”
“My mother?”
“I know what you’re thinking — she was the one who was easy to get along with — but she picked up a trick or two from your father.”
“What was the falling out about?”
“Matzoh balls.”
I glance up to see if she’s kidding. Lillian looks at me as if to say, Isn’t it obvious?
“A matzoh-ball war,” she says. “Do you make them in the soup or separately? What is the ideal consistency, fluffy or chewy?”
I look at her, waiting for more, waiting for the answer. “Your mother seemed to think whatever her answer was had to be the right answer and also meant she was a better Jew. And, frankly, between that and your father, I couldn’t be bothered to stay in touch. Just because we don’t talk to you doesn’t mean we don’t talk amongst ourselves.”
I’m about to ask who from the family is still alive when she abruptly cuts me off.
“And then there was the incident with you kids in the recreation room.” Again she gives me the look. “Are you playing dumb or are you actually dumb?”
Not knowing what she’s talking about, I decline to answer.
“Your brother performed surgery on my son,” she says, as though offering me a clue, a little something to jog my memory.
“What kind of surgery?”
“He recircumcised him, using a compass and a protractor and Elmer’s glue.”
I vaguely remember something. It was one of the Jewish holidays, and all of the children were downstairs playing. I have a thirty-watt memory of being down on the floor, on the rug with the cousins, and there being an intense Monopoly game going on with some off-site buying and selling of property and hotels, and while we were playing, my brother and my cousin Jason were doing something at my father’s desk that seemed strange. I remember thinking how like George it was, getting someone to do something they shouldn’t for his pleasure. The recreation room was part playroom, part office, with the office area blocked off by file cabinets and white shag carpeting, so it wasn’t like I could actually see what he was doing, but I knew it was weird.
“Was Jason all right?”
“Yes, there was very little physical damage — a small cut, a lot of blood, and a visit to a plastic surgeon — but now he’s gay.”
“Are you saying that George made Jason gay?”
“Something did — I don’t think you’re born gay, do you? Something happens, a trauma that turns you that way.”
“Aunt Lillian, there are lots of gay people who would say that’s the way they came, and in fact some theories about intrauterine hormonal levels …” I go on, wondering how I even know this; must have been an article I read. Whatever I’m saying is clearly irrelevant to what Lillian believes. “What did my parents say about the incident?”
“I never told them. Jason swore me to secrecy; he was so humiliated,” she says. “George only stopped because someone went downstairs to check on you kids.”