Lili Glauber

1.

Not being able to land.  A friend accused me of that last Monday.   I was late to our phone call and she said something like I wonder why you resist landing.  Ridiculous, but I defended myself a little: sorry-- it was just a few minutes and it happens, so many people are late, late is even a synonym for dead. As in I would rather be Harry Truman late than the late Harry Truman. So says my dad.  Along with make like a rug and lie lie lie.  Except she’s right, my friend. No landing.  Not quite.  No remembering everything, no hesitation mid turn, no turning at all, no circles, no trans atlantic cigarettes, no nostalgia for the day moon, for being in between places, for all muses, no choosing, no unchoosing, no burying, no landing. 

This house is full of sugar ants falling into traps of lemon water. I didn’t set the traps but I also didn’t object to the trap setting. Look, a baby deer! I tell O in the morning. We are sitting on the porch at first light and the deer is on the lawn. But why she asks? I’m not sure, I tell her.  And see, it’s covered in spots, all the babies are.  But why? She says again.  I don’t know. Life’s preciousness maybe.  And I kiss the top of her head which smells like dirt and pine and new words and maple syrup and ocean. The news is filled with horrors. Other peoples’ daughters blown to pieces, swallowed by a flood, and mine safe in my arms. But why. Do you believe each individual ant has a soul or just the collective colony? Do you believe in a soul at all? Do you prefer the homonyms fluke and fluke or soul and sole?  If so, does the soul commence upon conception and linger long past dementia? Remember all those memory floors where patients could just wait for the bus to come take them home forever.  And the debate around this: Was it cruel and enabling to simulate a long-lost commute home on a dementia floor or sweet and ingenious?  My father’s mother Rae was on the memory floor at sunrise assisted living for the last few years of her life. I would go with my dad to see her most Sundays, and we would sing her songs together.  Her favorite was a stray line: On a bicycle built for two, boop boop, whatever that meant, we would sing it over and over for hours and then hug her and go home. No landing. 

On the two hour drive to sunrise my dad liked to warm up by singing the entire Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack to me. The rides were jolly and a little psychotic, the two of us eating pretzels and red licorice and singing Matchmaker Matchmaker loud and off key.  Thanks for keeping me company kid. Sure thing.  And then years later how I learned that eyes could actually shrink from sadness, his eyes small and sunken that winter he wanted to throw himself onto the 6 train, or maybe it was the whole year, while I drove him around to doctors and synagogues and churches and ice skating rinks.  You look good, Dad. I said, lying a little like he taught me. I look like shit warmed over kid.  

*
Do you believe an ant even has its own eyes, there are hundreds of ants in this house following each other, all seeing or not seeing I’m not sure, my sister-in-law loves to kill them, she squishes them under her thumb or her forefinger and then she smells her finger. I hate this, all the squishing and smelling. But I also hate them on my counters on the walls in the sink in the dog food on our plates, the beautiful lines of them, walking toward whatever sweet crumb.   My sister-in-law says I must call pest control.  But I feel for any pests and any animals and also stuffed animals and inanimate objects. All of this feeling used to be a strength deep inside me but now I know it is a weakness, wanting muscles where there are no muscles, unable to land, an endless soft middle, my mom middle and my dad middle, what they knew and didn't know, don’t you ever go into the basement my dad told me when I lived in the apartment where he grew up, their secrets that I will spill and that I will take to the grave—

Take time to care and not to care take time to sit still, I keep returning to that line. What is it called. That sickness when your heart fills with worms. It’s a thing I think. I knew some people who might have had it. A few beautiful women. One in particular. She’s somewhere in northern Hungary on a lake maybe, smoking a Davidoff cigarette.  Oh well. Davidoff cigarettes, lakes in northern Hungary, other lives and other lives.  

*

Storm and I took O to a carnival in the town of North Sea a few nights ago. She rode the mini train and the mechanical swings and she was thrilled. I was happy too, to see her so happy and to be there with Storm who loves a carnival. We ate fried bread with sugar and fried oreos and fried pickles and some of O’s ice cream and we felt disgusting, but content. There was a dunking booth and a game to win goldfish and a game to win giant stuffed bananas and there was a dizzy dinosaur ride and a giant slide that we didn’t go on because while we were in line a friend told us that her friend’s kid lost an arm on one. Instead, we went on a rickety carousel and O sat on a bright purple horse that seemed a little alive still.  The man who took our tickets was very old and he had shoulder length greyish yellowish hair and a long pinky nail that was painted glittery gold. He smiled at us mysteriously and said. Careful. She goes faster than you think. Storm held my hand and it was nice, to feel close and disembodied together, a happy carni family for a night, like the other lives were near but we didn’t need them at all.  

And as we were driving home, O pointed out the back window from her car seat.  The moon. She said.  It’s floating away.  No babe, I told her. It's not. It looks like it is but it's not.  It's just us who are floating away.

2.

My mother loved extreme weather.  She talked about it so much that three people mentioned it at her funeral.  One friend told the story of her at a wedding in Italy that was interrupted by a tornado of sorts-- my mom’s hair and pant suit were blowing about wildly in the winds and she was starting to lift up off the ground a little, the sky darkening and turning silver, and in the middle of that she pointed up, where the lightning was, where she was heading and laughed. I love extreme weather, she said, and off she went.   It snowed the day of my mom’s funeral and I quoted Heschel in her eulogy: We must build cathedrals out of time.

What is it called again: that burst of brightness right before dying. Terminal lucidity.  Something about an increase in oxygen flow in the brain when death is near that causes words and clarity and faces to return for a few hours, sometimes even a day before they vanish.  What did you take in today. The light at 5 am. How some people believe the mind can truly cure the body.  Coffee, honey, salt. The ordinary difficulties I longed for, a life and a lover. The heat that comes off Storm while she sleeps. Knowing her. There is a woodpecker outside my window in Brooklyn, hammering its beak into the wall behind my head.

*

Go west, young man says my dad in my dream. I can tell it’s my dad but it’s my young dad-- he’s in a maroon shirt, and well-fitting jeans, handsome and smiling with a full head of hair-- whose woods these are I think I know/his house is in the village though.  My dad recited that poem to us every night, I knew it before I could talk, my first word was: my little horse must think it queer. “I’m in the dog house again” my dad would tell me. Meaning with my mother. And he would shrug and smile, charming and sheepish, a sheep dog at the edge of my bed, lucky for me.

*

The thing about a truck, Storm said yesterday, is you just never know what’s inside it.  Could be anything. Refrigerator parts. Horses.  Girls.  I am always interested in the differences that draw people. What they imagine inside a truck.  The darkness.  But also just options, preferences, names, the words for deer in three languages—

I try not to but this time of year of course I remember the does.  Their bushy tails. How beautiful they looked running away from us. Beautiful is maybe the wrong word. How we sat in my car and watched them for as long as we could.  Their tails mostly-- high and pert and fluffy and sexy and vanishing.

How shall I live, mom? I asked that night, in the restaurant we went to after the doctor looked down at her scans and back at us and shook his head, said devastating, devastating. We shared a bottle of wine. You already know how to live, my mom said, her green eyes shining.  I dreamed the woods in the morning, branches covered in gold leaves, the gold ground.

3.

Once I was in a canoe with my dad on the upper part of the Delaware, just the two of us, before my mom got sick and before she died. We were paddling for a while, watching the water ripple out in front of us and the fly fishermen in their crazy boots and the wayward cows on the banks.  We packed lunch, cheese sandwiches that my dad made, plain as hell but delicious after a few hours on the river, and after we ate them he said something like, if the relationship is at least 40 percent good, just commit.  And this was like a reveal of sorts.  The secrets. The double shirts he always wore. A button down over a collared short sleeve, his trademark for a time.

*

It was weird, this week I fell completely asleep on the couch at 9 pm before I could load the dishwasher or walk the dogs and when I woke up 30 minutes later, confused and disoriented, Storm said I said: I don’t know which part of my life I’m in.  

Lately I have been trying to remember my mom’s hands. Her nails and her nail beds, her ring and her silver watch on her thin wrist, her hand holding a cup of coffee, holding a grey goose martini, her hand holding my hand, holding a pen holding a salem light holding a spatula, dancing around with it for some reason to paradise by the dashboard light, me dancing with her, stop right there, will you love me forever, her hands yelling at me for coming home late, for procrastinating, for getting the car towed, passing me a little notebook so that I can organize my thoughts: try to live each day as a prayer. 

*

My head is so itchy. I hope it's just from sea and sand and it’s not more serious but when it itches like this, I am reminded of the possibility of knowing myself.  Specifically, this time when I was 10 and convinced I had lice. Some other kids in my class had it and I was itchy too and imagining little eggs hatching on my scalp and I asked my mom to check my head and she did, carefully and with love, she combed through all my hair and found nothing. She assured me, said something like I promise you don’t have it and I knew she was wrong but I felt relieved anyway, protected and combed through like a baby monkey.  Later that afternoon I was still itchy so we went to the doctor just to be sure and within two seconds a nurse reached over and grabbed a fully grown adult louse from the side of my head and put it into a plastic bag. After, I was repulsed and scared but relieved again.  And a little voice inside me said: remember that louse. And I did and I didn’t.  It’s hard to know by heart. What a construction, know by heart. The dictionary defines it simply: from memory.  

To be young and free and bereft and untethered in the most beautiful place in the world, to walk up behind someone and put your hands in their pockets.  I can know it by heart, the dry heat of that place, bougainvillea at the edges of the cove, the desert trees and the little huts on the beach, the twinkling lights of Gumuslick, and Z’s beautiful mouth that I never need to think about again or remember, almost unpronounceable Gumuslick.

*

And then tonight I misplaced my work phone, my seltzer, Storm’s charger, two of our dogs, my tie dye sweatshirt, and my daily planner all in like ten minutes and Storm said: What the hell? Do you have fucking Alzheimer’s? And I love her but I couldn’t remember what to say so I went to sit by myself on the porch. It’s so hard to keep track of any objects, these hours, loves, actual grains of sand. Sand castles and sand castle contests and dates and recollections and rock collections and brain cells and bread, French bread and Italian bread, bread for a queen, so hard to keep track of sleeping and trying and standing and standing at a standing desk while time is passing, of time passing, of getting lice while getting old, of gorgeous beach towns on the edge of some other world, their shores, their fishes, glimmering and gone, the ghost shapes of their mouths, the mouths of women, of women putting things into their mouths, broccoli stems and sardines and sungold tomatoes and salt, what was it again that happened to us.

A rain pours down. And I am lucky. To hear it. A deluge. I love how that word sounds and I love how the rain sounds, and I loved sitting on this porch with my mother while it rained. My mother who knew everything.  Except maybe one thing.