Where do these things happen? The street. Bars. Coffee shops. On buses, in transit. The middle ground between some place and no place. Maybe it’s the rushing motion, the time-travel, that propels two bodies towards each other, or maybe it is the stillness in the midst of the rushing, the stops that jolt you out of your seat, your reverie, your inner monologue. You stop, you look up, or you look back, or to your side, and there he is, someone you’ve never seen before. A stranger.

Strangers: two people at a coffee shop, standing in line, waiting to order. I had passed him on the street, noticing him only because I saw that he noticed me. It’s a subtle burning sensation you get when someone’s eyes are on you—you turn your head and there they are, green or blue but most often brown eyes looking into yours. He didn’t worry me the way a stranger’s eyes sometimes do when you’re walking on a busy city street and you see them see you and you feel like maybe they want something from you. Money. Sex. Tattoos on his arm, a shaven head, a mustache from the seventies, hard eyes—maybe I should have been uneasy but I wasn’t.

We stood in line, and after I had ordered my hibiscus mint tea, when I turned around to grab some sugar from the counter, he stopped and said to me, “You have really beautiful hair.” I smiled with lips tight because I hate my teeth and said, “Thanks,” in that reticent way that somebody who has heard something said many times over can’t help but offer.

A lot of my encounters with strangers occur in this way. They use some remark about the red hair as an in, or the red hair draws them in, like some sort of magic, and they try another remark. “What are you reading?” “May I share your table?” “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a lollipop?” Strangers with candy is something you’re told to avoid. You can tell someone is a stranger if you will take candy from them, without a pause to think, unhesitatingly sure of the safety of the exchange. If not, they are probably a stranger. And yet when Halloween rolls around, this is exactly what we do—we take candy from strangers. Witches and goblins, they offer up their treats, their fat meats, their golden fruit, and all they want is a lock of your golden hair.

I was five years old, walking home from school by the usual route. Just as I was leaving campus, I stepped on a plastic grocery bag and an idea came to me: I will pick up all the trash I see on my walk back home. Back then, I wanted to be an environmentalist and back then I believed being an environmentalist involved getting large groups of people together with pick-up trucks and giant black garbage bags and sticks with stabby-things on them, traveling the countryside, picking up every single item of trash one could find. I didn’t realize, back then, that what I was envisioning was more like being a prisoner. I continued on my walk, stopping at every bus stop and corner where bits of refuse had gathered. I plucked up every cigarette butt and gum wrapper I could find, slushy cups, paper bits, Dorito bags, all of it, and I stashed them in the plastic bag I had found. There was so much waste on the road and time was something that always passed over my head when I wasn’t watching the clock. With all the stops and the toil, it was taking me much longer than usual to get home. Just as soon as I was rounding the corner of my street, my dad pulled up in his brown Nissan and vroomed next to me in a huff. He opened the door and barked, “Get in.” I saw anger in his eyes and I was sorry I had made him mad. I was about to open my mouth and say so but my dad was not worried about that. He pressed his foot on the gas and rushed to follow a long yellow Lincoln that had apparently been following behind me very slowly as I stopped to collect all the trash. As soon as my dad pulled up, the car had turned around in a hurry and sped off but my dad was right on its tail. He chased the car around the city for almost an hour before losing them, cursing the whole time and I just sat there not understanding. He told me later what had happened and said, “Chelsey, you can’t walk home from school anymore.”

As a child, I didn’t feel very fragile. I didn’t know that I could be snatched up, taken away, that I could die. I’d read fairy tales, of course, and I remember all the times my mom told me never to go inside a house with a stranger, but the actual idea that such things could happen to me had never crossed my mind. Even then, right when it did, right when I was threatened in a very real way, it didn’t hit me. I didn’t understand why what happened that day was scary until I was older and now I can’t get this funny feeling out of my gut. I think, maybe I should dye my hair.

My red hair reels in strangers like a flame that never burns. I am harmless.

Witness: Waiting to meet a friend at the train station, an old man in homeless garb, fat in blue flannel and old and Asian, comes up to me. I’m perched on some concrete, reading short stories and he comes forward slowly, slow enough that I don’t notice him until he is about a foot away from me. I look at him and first, I smile in the nice way that a nice person might smile at a stranger, acknowledging their existence but not necessarily inviting conversation. The man does not back down but continues his forward advance. I think maybe he is asking me for money, though he doesn’t say a word. I say, “I’m sorry, I have nothing,” but he continues coming even closer, leaning in towards me. It is then that I see his lips pucker ever so slightly and I realize he is going to kiss me. I lean back and shake my head and say, “No.” I say it-I don’t yell it because I don’t think this man means me any harm. I like to think that I can tell when someone means me harm. The moment I lean back away from him and shake my head and say, “No” softly, the man floats away, a ghost.

What was that ghost thinking? Did he think I might be a ghost too, that my body would melt away with his, that my lips would be soft and pliable or smoky and free, like a drug you can breathe in deep and smooth? I was taught to be friendly, to be polite, to smile at everyone because who doesn’t deserve a smile? The issue, though, is that no one knows what’s behind a smile until they ask, until they step forward and lean into you and learn, without a doubt, that your smile was not an overture or an invitation. It was a kindness turned bitter with misunderstanding.

And yet, there he was, one soul reaching out for another. To bridge that gap takes courage or craziness but either way, it’s a leap and it’s exciting and it’s good. Mutual understanding is what the soul longs for and sometimes a stranger is the only person who can give us that.  Maybe my attitude on strangers is shaped in part by that homespun humor of Will Rogers, the man known as Oklahoma’s favorite son, with his charmingly naïve saying, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet.” I certainly heard these words growing up from parents who themselves were indoctrinated with this theory as young Oklahomans and were once strangers to one another who met thirty-six years ago in a bar.

Many young lovers start off as strangers. Scene: I’m studying abroad in Florence working with a theatre group and a strange young man, a Florentine, walks up onstage after the show. “I’m Tom,” he says in perfect English, and extends his hand, giving me no choice but to take it. This moment marks the beginning of a brief romance. Later, he will tell me that he was drawn to me by a flash of my red hair and the words of his friend that asked, Is that your red? Not yet. Always the red. I wonder, was it my dad’s red hair that drew my mother to him?

Maybe I was given this hair like my daddy because I was meant to be open to this world.  I was meant for strange encounters, for the experience of mutual understanding, the recognition that there is something inside some foreign you that identifies with something inside me. This doesn’t happen with every stranger, not at all, but when it does, it can make the world and all the bad things that happen in it, seem a little less. Because mutual understanding and the simple care that comes from this understanding rather than from some sort of wanting, is possible. And it’s the beginning of friendship, of love, even if only for a moment.

A muggy day in the city coupled with much walking and my bones ache. My foot hurts. I walk into a coffee shop, Mojo’s Daily Grind, a three-floor place with a smoking deck, bright colored walls and cellophane-wrapped pastries stacked up the side bar. Barrels of coffee beans spill out onto the floor, the best smell there is, and big stuffed couches are everywhere, the way they should be, just waiting for you to curl up with a book and a cup of joe amongst your fellow caffeine junkies.

I choose a couch in the center of the first floor room-I don’t want to walk any further. I take off my shoe and begin to nurse my foot, mewling ever so slightly, trying not to be too public about my pain but not really minding if someone notices. My inclinations are dramatic and I tend toward the stage.

He has a bushy brown beard. He wears a tattered cap, a t-shirt, some chacos. He’s talking on the phone in the stuffy couch across from mine, leaning over occasionally to grab his mug and gulp up his coffee, black. I try to forget my pain and pick up a yellow book, brushing the top of my foot absentmindedly as I read. The man, still on the phone, stands up and walks around the table that separates us, switches his cell from his right to his left hand, he sits down next to me and places his right hand on the top of my foot. He holds it there for a little while and I do not move. I do not feel afraid, just alive, connected, understood. He doesn’t rub or stroke the foot which I hesitate to think of as mine, but he squeezes it a little, pulsating his fingers, sending human care signals into the foot. And it helps.

I’ve done some terrible things in my life. I’ve dropped confused lobsters into pots of boiling water, watched without remorse as they flailed around in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to escape a searing death, and eaten their sweet, chewy flesh with melted butter. I’ve watched with fascination as a live octopus was hacked to pieces with a cleaver, dumped into a spicy red broth, and eaten with sesame oil as each individual limb wrapped around chopsticks reflexively, as if in disbelief of its own death. I’ve smashed crabs open with a wooden mallet, dug through the broken shells for the slightest sliver of meat, and tossed the rest without any remorse onto an growing mountain of bodies. And no, I don’t regret committing these crimes against seamanity.

I love seafood. Some of my favorite eating experiences have revolved around devouring critters of the sea in ways that would upset children who have just watched Finding Nemo or the Little Mermaid. Come to think of it, the scene where Sebastian nearly gets cooked alive by the outrageously French chef in the Little Mermaid always struck me as funny rather than horrifying.

Lunch, May 15^th, 2010. My cousin Clara decided to treat me to a meal, as it had been my birthday a few days prior. Clara had made it her mission to show me the best that Washington, D.C. had to offer, so I found myself at Hank’s Oyster Bar, one of the better seafood restaurants in our nation’s capital. Perhaps it was inevitable that, as two former New Englanders, we gravitated towards an orgy of gastronomical violence against shellfish.

We started off with a round of oysters on the half-shell. Everyone should have the opportunity to taste a few raw, slippery, briny, oysters served on a bed of crushed ice. Sprinkle a little lemon juice, a dab of cocktail, then slide it down the hatch, and enjoy the sweet taste of the ocean without all the saltiness that comes with drinking seawater. And then have another, or a dozen. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the 18^th century author of The Physiology of Taste, wrote of French revolutionaries who would eat a gross (that is, a dozen dozens) of oysters in one sitting before starting their meals. Even though it was the food of royalty, it was a lot more affordable back in those times, before years of overharvesting and several diseases depleted the oyster beds, sending oyster prices through the roof to the altitude we’re familiar yet uncomfortable with today

Oysters are bivalves—two-shelled mollusks, whose ranks also include clams and mussels. Because they have extraordinarily strong muscles that allow them to stay safely shut in case some predator wants to eat them, we don’t show the mercy of killing these shellfish before cooking them. Instead, we leave them to die somewhere in the cooking process, coaxing them out of their shells by boiling them alive or smoking them out. You can immediately tell which bivalves were alive and thus unlikely to give you food poisoning when you drop them in boiling water, because they react visibly to the sudden and deadly change in environment. So it’s often necessary to cook these animals while they’re alive and happy inside their shells, even if you want to smash each individual one open with a rock à la sea otter. You just can’t take chances.

Growing up as a New England-Korean, I enjoyed my fair share of clam-based dishes. Clams in spicy seafood stews, clam in plain seafood stews, creamy clam chowder, clambakes, deep-fried clams, I could go on and on. Every single time we cooked clams, my dad would explain why we prepared the clams a certain way. He’d explain that the clams sat in a pot of water before we cooked them because “that’s how we get the sand out of the guts.” When the only thing you’re digesting for hours is water, whatever else was in your system is naturally purged, helping those who are about to eat you avoid an unpleasantly gritty experience.

After we dumped the sand-free clams into the boiling water, he’d watch as they cooked, pointing out, “Look, you know that they’re ready because they’re waiting, and then the heat is just too much for them, and suddenly they open up as if to say, ‘Ouch it’s hot!’”

He’d chuckle as the clams open up one by one, suddenly and at the same time slowly. It always gave him so much amusement for some reason, but all I see is their shells gaping wistfully as if to say, “But so much was left unfinished…” I never understood the expression ‘happy as a clam.’

In Japan, there is a rich tradition of ikizukuri, sashimi that is prepared alive. The sashimi is the freshest that it can possibly be because technically, the flesh isn’t dead yet. I saw on TV how the chef nets a fish out of the tank and stuns it, usually with an acupuncture needle applied to a strategic pressure point, before filleting the still-living fish. The sashimi is then presented on the platter, sometimes arranged on the body of the fish in a macabre mockery of its former self, the fish’s heart still beating as it flaps weakly (it doesn’t have the muscles to move any more than that) to the delight or disgust of the customer. In some cases, the chef puts the skeletal fish back in the tank to let it swim around while the customer finishes the first course, in order to keep it fresh for the next course, a soup. Either way, I can’t imagine waking up to find that all my muscles have been surgically removed. It’s a great way to remind yourself that what you eat comes from a living creature (in this case, still-living as you eat it), but I don’t know, it sounds expensive.

On the menu that day, there also happened to be a soft-shell crab sandwich served with homemade coleslaw. The crab is at its most vulnerable when it has just molted, like someone who has just taken off their clothes to change into a new outfit. No one wants to be discovered when he or she is exposed like that, but crabs are delicious when you catch them that way and deep-fry them in oil. I wonder who first discovered that freshly molted crabs could be eaten shell and all without severe gastric repercussions. It didn’t seem completely intuitive or safe to me.

I decided to get it since I had never had a soft-shelled crab before, and they happened to be in season. As I looked at the crab legs sticking out from between the lightly toasted buns suggesting that the sandwich contained one whole crab, I wondered whether the crab had somehow willed its new shell to grow harder before someone snipped the soft area between the two eyestalks to kill it instantly, which would make my digestive system extremely unhappy. But I shouldn’t have worried, the crab was rich and crunchy and entirely edible but ultimately too fleeting an experience.

For my transient pleasure that day, several oysters who had been chilled into a stupor were violently opened with a knife and severed from the shell that protected them, a couple who might have still been alive asphyxiated in shot glasses of sake. A crab’s worst fears were confirmed when it was caught at its most vulnerable and deep-fried. It could have been a different meal, but the end would have been the same, empty shells left on beds of ice like broken bodies and puddles of bluish-black hemolymph pool in the middle of plates like blood at the scene of a crime, mixing with drops of butter or tartar sauce. Even if it isn’t so obviously violent, like a lobster roll with its warm, rich chunks of lobster slathered in mayonnaise and placed lovingly in a soft bun, if you think about it, that’s pretty messed up.

Some people consider eating a luxury item like lobster as sandwich filling to be a bit extravagant. Then again, lobster wasn’t always a food for the rich. Back when lobsters washed on the shores of Maine and people could pick them up from the beach by the bushel, lobsters were a food of the poor. In fact, back in the 18^th century some lucky servants had agreements so they weren’t forced to eat lobster more than twice a week. When the wealthy started to notice that lobsters tasted delicious, the lobster was overharvested to the point that now the cost of lobsters at restaurants is always the dissuasive two words ‘market price.’

But lobster was relatively affordable in the New England of my childhood. My family would often go to the outlet stores in Kittery, Maine, and we would always have lobsters for dinner at a nearby lobster shack. We’d order platters of shiny red lobsters with steam still rising from their bodies, smelling like warm seashells. As a kid I loved cracking the bright red claws and legs with a nutcracker and picking out the meat with my fingers and dipping it in melted butter. It was so much fun, I always insisted on having the claws and legs, leaving the less interesting tail and body portions to my parents. I always thought I was getting the better deal, but only now do I belatedly realize that my parents weren’t particularly upset about being forced to eat lobster tail since it’s the tastiest part.

Although cracking lobsters open and seeing the clear juices flow out can be a lot of fun, it can get tedious by the second or third set of lobster legs. I always wondered how lobster shacks prepared so much fresh lobster meat for their rolls. The simple guess would be that they shuck them all by hand, spilling bluish hemolymph and green organs all over their hands and clothes as they coaxed lobster meat out of the shell. Seems like a lot of messy manual labor. But a few months ago, I read an article in Wired Magazine about a machine affectionately known as the Big Mother Shucker to the employees of Shucks Maine Lobster. It’s a water compression chamber that pumps the water up to 40,000 pounds of pressure per inch, or twice the force felt at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. At such pressures, the lobsters are instantly killed as cellular activity ceases and the flesh disconnects from the exoskeleton, allowing the meat to slip off like a crustacean glove. There was no mention of how quickly the water pressure rose, but I’m guessing the lobsters would feel it a bit as they were stripped alive and their organs exposed to very painful amounts of water pressure. It sounded like one of the freak accidents in sci-fi horror films where someone accidentally gets trapped in a pressurized chamber, though the movies have messier results. There was a picture of the shucked lobster in the article, and it looked surprisingly like an intact lobster, only its body was a fleshy pinkish color. The naked lobster would have blushed with shame if the Big Mother Shucker hadn’t already blasted it into oblivion.

On occasion I have gone beyond idle curiosity and felt what some may call a “pang of conscience.” I was at a seafood buffet in Thailand, picking up some rock lobsters off the grill. Rock lobsters are the grey, flat, ugly but perfectly acceptable cousin of the regular lobster. I flipped one over and noticed a clutch of shriveled white eggs attached to its belly. It was a mother. To be precise, she would have been a mother. She had been carrying around her eggs, protecting them until they matured and hatched, at which point she would be released from her maternal duties.

But it was not to be. She was caught by a Thai fisherman who sold her to the hotel restaurant along with other rock lobsters. Imagine her fear as she fought for space in cramped quarters with other rock lobsters who were no doubt eyeing her eggs to see if they would be a tasty meal. She thought the worst was over when she was taken out of the bin, until a chef tossed her onto a red-hot iron grill. She curled up and died in the flames, trying her best to make sure her children avoided the same fate she was about to face. Even though I had no direct hand in her death, my first thought was, “what have I done?” My second thought? “I seriously hope those eggs don’t ruin the taste.”

The undisputed king of roe is obviously caviar, the black pearls of the sea extracted from sturgeons. Served with champagne or vodka, fine caviar is so expensive that even the smallest tins are priced at exorbitant numbers, and those that come from Beluga, Ossetra, or Sevruga sturgeons seem more like abstract concepts than actual food. There has been no time in recent history where caviar has enjoyed anything close to the peasant food reputation of lobsters or oysters. After all, was it not Shakespeare’s Hamlet who, regarding a play unappreciated by the masses, quipped “twas caviar before the general?”

My opportunity to actually try caviar wouldn’t come till much later. My family was having dinner at the Walker Hill Hotel in Seoul, and my dad noticed almost immediately that on one of the serving tables was a small container of black caviar, complete with bone spoon. I tried a little and found it to be salty but otherwise unworthy of a revisit, but my dad had other ideas. Per usual dad buffet logic, eating as much of with the expensive dishes would result in a profit so naturally, eating a lot of caviar should be the perfect solution. And that is precisely what he did. While the rest of my family was trying out different dishes, there my dad was, piling on as much caviar and crackers on his plate as was socially acceptable, perpetuating a meal that never reached its main course. By the end of the night, to my mother’s great embarrassment his tongue was stained blue with the juice of who knows how much caviar. If the caviar was indeed genuine sturgeon caviar, he must have cost the hotel hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of caviar. He kept on reminding us on the drive home and many days after that how much caviar he had eaten in monetary terms, although I don’t know if he was telling us or himself.

A while later, my dad returned from a business trip to some Eastern European country and brought home a small tin of caviar. We spread a little dab on some crackers and tasted it. The caviar was oily and salty, but I didn’t know what else it was. My father made a face, and said, “You know, I don’t think the caviar at the Walker Hill buffet was the real thing.”

The “real thing” is harvested from sturgeons in the Black and Caspian Seas. Historically, caviar was produced by clubbing a female sturgeon and extracting the ovaries while the fish was stunned, making the sturgeon somewhat of a nonconsensual egg donor. This usually meant that the female sturgeons were no longer of much use to the fishermen, so they were killed if the clubbing hadn’t done its job already. Nowadays most caviar farmers surgically remove some of the roe from the females in a procedure similar to a caesarean section, allowing the sturgeons to live to produce more caviar to be surgically extracted. Apparently we can’t harvest the eggs that the sturgeons have already laid like we do for bird eggs, I’m assuming because that would ruin the taste.

I have a theory that we do such terrible things to seafood because they are in many ways mysterious and incomprehensible to us. Human beings have had a history of acting rather unkindly to that which they don’t know or understand, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we managed to make a culinary tradition out of doing awful things to the unknown. After all, we know more about the moon than we do about our oceans, which are filled with fantastical and terrifying creatures. Some of the ones that have been discovered look and act in absolutely horrifying ways, like the giant squid, the giant clam, and the giant jellyfish. There are a lot of giant things in the watery depths, things that wouldn’t think twice about taking a bite out of a small human child or push around a researcher trapped in a tiny, tiny submersible miles below sea level. Underwater, no one can hear you scream.

But scary things don’t always come in large packages, and they’ve been discovered far before we invented deep-sea expedition vessels. You may not have seen a lamprey, but you’ve definitely seen creatures inspired by its funnel-like mouth filled with endless rows of sharp teeth in countless science fiction/fantasy horror movies, like the sarlacc in the Return of the Jedi. Eating a lamprey wouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind if I found it caught in my net (more likely I would be screaming and sobbing hysterically while bashing it with an oversized object before flinging it as far as I could back into the water), as it seems more like a creature that you would put into a pool in large quantities for the purpose of torturing a dashing British MI6 agent and his buxom companion. Vedius Pollio of ancient Rome had a similar idea, but his plans to execute a clumsy slave by tossing him into a pond filled with lampreys was thwarted by the emperor Augustus.

But people do eat lampreys. Supposedly lampreys have a meaty flavor that many noblemen in the Middle Ages enjoyed while refraining from eating meat during fasting periods. Queen Elizabeth II was served lamprey pie for her coronation in 1953, and to this day lamprey is a highly prized delicacy in southwestern Europe. But if you are the type who would enjoy lamprey stewed with rice and Portuguese spices, don’t overindulge. King Henry I of England died after eating too many lampreys.

When I was in Bangkok with my family, we took a tour by boat through the canals, a day or two before the rock lobster incident. We paused briefly by a Buddhist temple and saw a local guide from a nearby boat toss a loaf of bread overboard into the water. The water immediately exploded in a roiling mass of arm-length fish flipping and twisting over each other as they tried to grab a bite of the loaf. The guide told us that these were temple fish, because they could be found near temples where people would throw offerings into the water, and a popular fish to eat in Thailand. Sounded harmless enough. I learned later that they were actually snakeheads, ferocious aquatic predators that ate a variety of smaller fishes, rodents, and birds, and most disconcertingly, could breathe and move out of water. Supposedly they’ve attacked humans (albeit underwater and only when protecting their young), leading to some hysteria in the US about killer fish that could crawl on land to attack our dogs and our children.

It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying. Good thing that they’re eaten with impunity in Southeast Asia. Snakehead grilled on a skewer sounds delicious.

Here’s another heart-shriveling fun fact: scallops can swim. If you thought their piercing blue eyes and rows of teeth-like feelers gave you the creeps, try watching a video of a scallop flapping madly as it propels through the ocean, no doubt prowling for a human toe to bite off. I feel like eating a plateful of seared scallops and enjoying every salty sweet bite just thinking about it. Every scallop I eat will be one less trying to kill me. “But scallops are plankton eaters,” one might argue, “there’s no reason why they would try to eat you or any of us.” This is true. They don’t try to eat us, because they know that we eat them. As long as they fear us, we won’t be overtaken by them.

Because I am convinced that one day the sea people will emerge from the ocean to enslave mankind. They’ll go after the Japanese, the Scandinavians, all of those seafaring people to exact bittersweet revenge on those who have decimated untold generations of undeserving fish families. And of course, they’ll come after me. I won’t-no, I can’t make any excuses for the horrible things that I’ve done to their brethren. They’ll sentence me to a swift death for the inexcusable atrocities I’ve taken part in. They probably won’t honor my last meal request of clam chowder in a sourdough bowl, thinking it monstrously cheeky. If I had any last words to say before a burly crustacean executes me, they would be to that expecting mother rock lobster I ate in Pattaya: I am sorry, I will always be sorry because I know you didn’t deserve what happened to you, but you were delicious with hot sauce.

by Kendra Peterson

Our teacher leads us up to the autopsy room on the first day of class and leaves us there with instructions to “poke around” and “try to identify things.” The organs are spread out for examination on top of a surgical steel table and reek of formaldehyde. The liver and lungs are cut into clean slices. A thin layer of light brown liquid leaks from the organs to a drain in the center of the table. The spleen continues to bleed.

I am struck immediately by the thought that it does not exactly resemble a deli platter, which is not to say that I had ever expected it would.

Chris Bentham is the first to touch. Flipping two halves back together with the back of his fingers, blue in latex, he points out the kidney by its resemblance, reassembled, to a kidney bean. Some of us laugh.  I point out that I’m an English Major and shrug as though this explains away my complete ignorance of basic anatomy.

We go around. The heart is easy to identify, even for me. After a few minutes we are sticking our fingers into the ventricles. I think, today I held a man’s heart in my hands.

I want to remember, or perhaps just to be the type of person who remembers, that this is a man’s heart – this pumped blood, this beat faster during horror movies, this – this, in my hands – has felt. I try the word alive in my mind, this was alive, but it’s work, keeping the word steady.

“The man was obese”, Karen Lee, a striking thin girl in pink converses, guesses, forming the heart out of blue gloves in the air above her chest.

I move to the brain. I think, today I picked a man’s brain from a bucket a fluid and held it in my hands, its casing hanging down between my fingers.

To my left, Jennifer Conley tells no one in particular to stroke the liver. The liver, too, is huge – as large, I think, as my whole head. “It’s soothing”, she says, running her fingers along the neat cuts. No one disagrees. A few people giggle. Watching her stroking it, I can easily see her in an armchair with a cat on her lap.

I want my eyes to water. I want to be light headed and need to step away from the table. I would like to be one of those people who are too sensitive for this, to be abhorred by the casual conversation two of my classmates are having about mutual acquaintances on the polo team while idly stretching out the intestine – but I am not.

The smiling, the joking, even the pink of Karen’s shoes beneath the table, feels somehow necessary. Perhaps not right, but I cannot, thinking about it, imagine the scene any other way. Chris Bentham readjusts his goggles with his bicep, raising his arm in the air like a child miming an elephant’s trunk. I go to stand next to him and he points my attention to the clean slits down the testicles, cringing sympathetically.

When our teacher returns he asks us to identify the organs for him. We are largely successful, but I am not the one volunteering the information. He tells us to stick our fingers through the liver to see if we can. If we can’t – “well,” he says, “that’s a problem.” I think, today I stuck my right index finger through a man’s liver. I try to come up with a comparison that is not just naming another raw meat.

When we’re done we remove our gloves carefully, flipping the one into the other, and throw them in a nearby bin along with our aprons. Class gets out at half past five, which is the same time dinner opens in the dormitory dining halls. I am hungry.

–

DISCLAIMER: The names in this piece have been changed.

Or,
What to Do When the Speed of Sound Exceeds the Speed of Light

by Rachel Kolb

Lesson One: Introductions

Look your companion in the eye and lay out the ground rules. Slow down. Look at me. Speak clearly. Stop covering your mouth with your hands. Say these things while trying not to feel embarrassed that your mode of communication is so different. Realize how often you have neglected saying them at all. Silently, wish you could establish more rules within the parameters of politeness. Shave your facial hair. Make your lips less like sphincters or sausages. Stop lisping. Stop rambling. Be expressive! Make yourself totally, unmistakably clear.

Realize that, if your companion is unaccustomed to talking with a deaf person, he (or she) will be likely to do one of two things: nod assent and then proceed to forget these guidelines completely, or take them a bit too seriously. Symptoms of the latter include wide buggy eyes, a stilted air, and overenunciation. Resist the temptation to snort and remark that, if your companion says “Ooookaayy, eeeezz theeiiss eh-nyy beh-tehrr?” it does not help, it only makes him look like a clown.

Remember, in seventh grade, a teacher who did not understand these things, who patted you on the back and pointed and looked anxious and stretched his lips almost to bursting, all in efforts to make you understand. Recall how this teacher’s antics made you uncomfortable before finally they made you laugh. One day surfaces in your memory, a class field trip to the river to collect bugs, when he sloshed up and warned you not to driiiiink the wahhh-tehrrr, despite the fact that you were thirteen years old and intelligent and this wasn’t water, it was mud. You stared after him in astonishment for a moment, suspended in doubt before your inner self spoke up and saw the absurdity of it and you and your best friend tumbled into giggles.

Watch your companion as he begins to speak. Evaluate how much you like his face, decide how challenging this is going to be. Often such judgments take only a moment, but define how comfortable you feel. If more than a dozen words wisp by like smoke, save that you can sense their particular rhythm like a train clacking over metal rails, take a deep breath and refocus your eyes. Estimate how essential it is for you to understand. Think about your surroundings.

*

Lesson Two: Logistics

Let’s start with the cocktail party effect. First described by Colin Cherry in 1953, this selective hearing skill allows people to converse in noisy places by focusing their auditory attention on a single speaker or sound within an excessive amount of background noise.

You do not have this skill, since your cochlear implant magnifies all environmental sounds, sometimes to the brink of physical nausea. But stop thinking about that. Try to get your companion somewhere quiet, since you find the white noise of overlapping conversations horribly distracting. Resist the temptation to fingerspell your name or sign certain things if your companion doesn’t understand you. You’re trying to have a normal conversation, remember.

Inevitably, you will think about how much easier this would be in sign. But recall the instances where you’ve gone out with other deaf people who did not lipread as well as you do, even for minor things like ordering food at a restaurant, and how you’ve felt astonished at your ability to shift between two languages and two worlds simply because you could scrutinize a hearing person’s face. The first time you realized this, you were twelve years old in an ice cream shop at a summer camp for the deaf. Now, as you did then, recall the immense power that you possess to bridge gaps with your eyes.

Speaking of eyes, be sure to take care of them. They are your most valuable tools. Give them a rest from time to time, recognize when the muscles wear out and the edge dulls from the ocular nerves, ceaselessly firing action potentials to your brain. Pay attention to the lighting in your environment. Good lighting is essential; without it your eyes flounder and you feel swept out to sea. Glaring indoor fluorescents are bright enough, but leave you staggering in near-blindness. Romantic dinner restaurants with low light may have good food and ambiance, but the conversation often takes a nosedive. Spotlights or lamps are helpful, but shroud the far side of a person’s face in shadow. You hate it when the sun dips and glares into your face, reducing everything to silhouette. But soft or muted outdoor light, on the contrary, is perfect.

Start settling into your companion’s distinctive spoken nuances. Hope in advance that she (or he) doesn’t have a foreign accent, or it’s all over. People from other countries, or even other parts of the United States, don’t just sound different; they move their mouths differently. Your brain will do headstands if you find yourself conversing with someone from, say, Singapore. You never felt completely comfortable conversing with the international students in your college freshman dorm, except for that one perceptive guy who typed to you on his smartphone. You remember despairing over the accents while studying abroad in the UK, where even asking for eggs at the store could be an ordeal. If faced with an accent, prepare to assess, reassess, adjust, second-guess, and finally run with what you think you saw. Even if that resembles a cryptoquip cipher puzzle.

Try to avoid certain situations like driving, when you wish you could tear one eye out to watch the road while the other strains to blink at the passenger seat, all while visualizing a crash with an oncoming semitruck. Recall how afraid you were to start driving for this reason, how frustrated you got when your passenger tried to give you directions. But, for conversational purposes, even worse is sitting in the back seat, when you can just feel the dialogue floating to the front of the car, away from you, as if you’ve been shut in a box. Even after years, this kind of isolation is something you cannot stand.

*

Lesson Three: Strategy

Smile courteously at the questions your companion asks about lipreading, once he realizes that’s what you’re doing. You learned through practice, because you had to.

More vocabulary: the McGurk effect, a 1970s experiment in which participants viewed a video of human lips pronouncing the sound “g,” at the same time as they heard the sound “b” – yet reported not hearing either “g” or “b,” but the intermediate sound “d.” To you, this example of multimodal processing is evidence that hearing people do lipread, even if they do not realize it. Thank your companion when he tells you that your lipreading is impressive, even while privately thinking that hearing people could do it too.

Rub your eyes when they start to blur, look away for a moment. When you get too tired of asking your companion to repeat a question, resort to your usual cop-out response of “Oh, I don’t know.” Recall one moment in first grade when you answered a classmate’s question this way after she had asked what your name was. Remember how mortified you felt afterwards, and think of how frightening incomprehension is for a child without a grounded sense of self. Pretended ignorance has its dangers, but ignorance is a line that you must toe. If your companion tells a joke and you miss the punch line – as you inevitably will, because it’ll snap by too fast for you to see – paste on a smile and chuckle appreciatively.

Try to keep the conversation constrained. Steer your companion toward a closed set in which you will be more able to anticipate his or her responses. Even if you despise small talk, rest knowing that this predetermined category will help the conversation flow better, will help keep you from second-guessing yourself. An open set, in which anything is possible, frightens as well as fascinates you with the unpredictability of other people’s minds.

If there is something you must do at all costs, it is this: keep the conversation one-on-one. Avoid interactions with a larger group, because that’s where your ability to converse breaks down. Anticipate how it will be: at first like watching a ball volley across a net, but more and more like attempting to grasp every detail of a world championship ping-pong match involving ten people and a dozen balls, in which you stagger away feeling nauseous and obliged to acknowledge that, in this case, the speed of sound does exceed the speed of light. In such situations, you gape and detach and end up walking away. You hate this, but it is not a matter of being fickle, shy, or snobbish. It is a matter of knowing yourself, and it has taken you years to realize this.

One last thing. When your internal batteries start to wear down, when your companion seems more and more unintelligible, resort to guesswork. In the end, that’s what lipreading is. You’ve read a statistic that says even the most skilled lipreaders, across a range of people and situations, only understand thirty percent of what is being said. You believe this figure to be accurate, as you piece together the array of minute facial motions, never quite catching everything, puzzling over routine dilemmas like identical-looking consonants, “b” and “p,” “t” and “d.” Which is it? Fill in a missing word, or a missing phrase, based on context. Gauge, calculate, follow your instincts, make split-second decisions and backtrack when they come out wrong. Plow your way through. Engage in the quickstep, take a gamble, and inhale in exhilaration when you succeed. Attempt to relax, even when you know that you’re clinging to communication while flirting with meaninglessness. Marvel at what a delicate thing human understanding is.

Sigh in relief when a familiar face appears before you. Recognize the way its planes move, the shapes its lips make. Stop strategizing. Talk. Smile and let the words flow over you.

Chickens are always dying. I realized this after a neighborhood dog ate our family’s third batch of pet poultry, and my parents decided to start buying chicks, in bulk by the dozen like grocery store eggs. These birds seem to die of everything, in the most grotesquely creative ways. I’ve rarely seen a chicken die of old age; never witnessed one curl up comfortably in the corner of the coop after a full life of eating cracked corn and kitchen scraps and succumb, finally, to a peaceful, lasting sleep. A sudden loss of feathers—now that’s more typical: a dragging wing, a growing lump, a blocked intestine or crop.

In the hours I spent playing with the chickens, I always saw the early signs of illness, and watched as the sickly worsened into states of decrepitude. The slightest indication of a missing feather or lopsided lope would send me running inside to tell my father, the Guardian of the Birds, the Keeper of the Coop, the one who knew about these sorts of things. We always spoke of the chickens as being “mine”—I chose the most fancily feathered breeds from the catalogue when we ordered them at the feed store, christened them with names like “Rowdy” and “Ritz,” baked them little plum-stuffed cakes out of oat and alfalfa pellets. But Dad was the one who silently kept things running, the one with enough strength to haul 50-pound bags of poultry feed down the hill, who scooped putrid, muddy shovelfuls of manure out of the coop when it began to reek, and who consistently remembered to refill the water – all while I was off playing with the pet rabbits, combing their fur coats and dressing them in doll’s clothes. And so, of course, he was also the one who dealt with their deaths.

Upon hearing my frantic entry to the house and cries of suspected sickness, Dad would calmly rouse himself from the table. He would swing on his thick, plaid jacket, and listen to me spill forth the symptoms and preliminary diagnosis as we walked together back down to the coop. Peering through the chicken wire walls of the backyard observation ward, he’d silently watch the patient stumble and peck about, nodding occasionally at my running commentary. He’d decide when to extricate the ones who seemed exceptionally contagious, and place them in the small wooden cage we had built together for the specific purpose of solitary confinement. And, when it was silently understood that the sickness was terminal, he’d give me a day or two to play Nurse Natalie, to suckle the sickly with a bottle of warm porridge and weep empathetically for those nearing life’s end.

Eventually, though, Dad would sternly approach me about “putting them out of their misery.” A passionate argument would commence until the creature either passed on independently, or we reached the uneasy truce of euthanasia. The veterinarian must have puzzled at the stream of ailing Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orphingtons that came through his door, but I couldn’t stand the thought of an execution on our property, especially at my father’s hands. I’d cry inconsolably as he gathered the infirm for their final journey to Dr. Bohn’s, yelling ardent, accusatory words down the driveway as he took them away, alone, in our big black van. Yet despite his mutterings in those final moments (“This is ridiculous, it’s a chicken! I should do this myself.”), I knew he never could.

Eventually a graveyard emerged in the one undeveloped corner of our garden, a place my alliteration-prone self deemed “Pet Purgatory” because it sounded catchy and I remember thinking “purgatory” was synonymous with heaven anyhow. We buried the ones that had died of natural causes there, the ones found fallen with scrawny wings splayed, or the ones that came home stiff and cloudy-eyed from the vet’s office, neatly contained in a plastic-bag coffin. Sometimes I’d try to grab the shovel from Dad and dig the hole myself, but in my hands the tool simply bounced off the layers of clay soil and redwood roots with a sharp metallic ting. So instead I’d stand back, silently entranced by the carcass that lay in waiting beside its growing hole. It was amazing how quickly the mounds of fresh dirt blended in with the natural contours of the yard, how soon my makeshift headstones (names written in Sharpie on shards of flat patio tile) were accidentally kicked or washed away. I lost track of whom or what was buried where, and eventually, one fall during high school, Mom turned the sacred grounds into a pumpkin patch, each scoop of dirt flung to the side christening it with crumbles of amber. I wondered why Dad had never let me see a murdered chicken. I had watched countless birds die of sickness, seen their lifeless bodies laid to rest, but there was something different about the slaughtered—perhaps it was the blood, the violence, the terror—things the Keeper didn’t want a child to see. My father was always the first to happen upon the scene of the crime, early in the morning as he watered the garden before work. He would always clean the whole mess up (fresh hay, birds flung, holes patched) before coming in my bedroom to wake me up and gently tell me: “Nat, I’m sorry hon, I think some mean animal got into the chicken coop last night.” After he left I’d lie horrified, thoughts swirling, in bed, inventing in my mind’s eye an image of their unseen nocturnal murderer: a dark, hybrid vermin—part fox, part weasel, part raccoon—who killed for entertainment, not out of a true need for food.

Dad never buried the chickens that had been massacred; they just got thrown over the fence, quickly, before I could ever see them. The same shovel that dug graves became a catapult, and it hurled the victim’s torn bodies deep into the woods and brush below our backyard. I would sneak down to the yard’s border later in the day, and perched on the top of a fence post I would scan every inch of the forest with morbid curiosity, hoping to glimpse at least a bloody feather. I suppose I wasn’t quite sure what to look for, since, despite my probing questions, Dad wouldn’t describe the carcasses or injuries he had witnessed. Instead he left me with a police report: a body count, the names of those who had died, a few factual details about the time and place. I remember the first time a chicken died. I was six, and some predator, perhaps a raccoon, maybe a badger, had discovered a hole in the wire coop. The victims were my first three chickens, my first three pets—a trio of rust-colored hens that I constantly traipsed about with, one tucked under my arm or teetering on my shoulder. Dad was frantic that day. He spent the morning outside fortifying the coop, erecting a concrete barricade around its base, wrapping the walls in extra layers of barbed wire, and adding double, triple layers of locks and latches to every door. That afternoon he disappeared for four hours and finally returned with a cardboard box holding five new baby chicks. But while their sweet peeps and chirps calmed me momentarily, my face stayed solemn and tear-stained for days, my steps repeatedly returning me to the newly buttressed coop outside. We learned that with death there came a sadness, one not even Dad could entirely patch.

The chicken fortress still stands in our backyard. A few straggling birds, those lucky enough to escape illness or the jaws of some cruel creature, continue to peck and scratch about in the dirt. I’m no longer there to bake them strange delicacies, or carry them through the garden paths, but every day, my father still hauls their bags of grain, changes the hay, and keeps the water clean. And every once in a while I get a phone call from the Keeper of the Coop—Dad calling to tell me, gently, that a chicken has died.

I’ve driven up to the front gate several times in the last two and a half weeks, but the guard on duty isn’t one I recognize: a man—not much older than I am but a lot larger—who looks cramped in the small booth. There’s California summer sweat on the guard’s forehead, and I can’t blame him for being laconic.

“Winger.” I try to look polite.

“I.D.?”

Getting to my driver’s license is a bit of a hassle since I haven’t taken my seatbelt off, but I’m pretty sure this guy has a taser and he looks like he has to take shit from geriatrics all day, so I don’t argue.  The guard holds an arm out of his sliding window and I drop my license into his palm.  The arm retracts slowly, coiling into the booth, and I can feel my face being scrutinized.  The license picture was taken at fifteen and a half, and I don’t look anything like it any more.

A car—a big, gold Oldsmobile like the kind I thought only retired Mafiosi in Florida owned—pulls up beside me.  The bottom corner of the windshield is emblazoned with a yellow “Leisure Village” sticker, and the guard waves the eighty-year-old woman hunched over the steering wheel through the gate. The bar rises, seems to stretch to accommodate the Oldsmobile, and the grandmother in the gold car is gone.

“I have a Marc Winger on file.”

“What?”  I look back over, and the guard is scrolling through something on his computer.

“Marc Winger.  You related?”

“Yeah, that’s my dad.  Am I not in there?”

“Doesn’t look like it.  And I can’t let anyone through that gate”—the guard gestures with my license to the bar blocking my path—“if their name’s not on this list.”  He points my license at the computer.

“I should be on the list.  Everyone should be on the list.  They told us anyone could visit this month.”

“Unrestricted bereavement visiting ends after two weeks.”  I can hear the cover of the employee handbook slamming shut.

“Look, I’m just trying to visit my grandpa.  Can’t you just call him or something?”

With a sigh, the guard slowly hands me back my license and then reaches for the phone in his booth.  He punches the buttons methodically as he reads them off the computer screen.  The phone rings, and the guard comes to life with saccharine alacrity.

“Hi, Mr. Mann?  This is the front gate.  The front gate.  Yes, the gate, sir.  I have a Seth Winger here to see you; is it all right if I let him in?  Yes, Seth.  Great.  You have a nice day now.  Well thank you, I will.”

Any trace of his previous personality vanishes with the faint click of the receiver, and the guard sizes me up one more time before silently raising the gate.  I thank him and accelerate slowly, trying at once to steer, roll the window up, and escape.

The drive through Leisure Village, the senior community my grandfather lives in, is slow and methodical. I’m careful to keep my speed under twenty-five miles an hour, the speed limit on every road weaving like strands in an asphalt web through the gated community. I’d ignore the signs, but my dad told me this morning that he already got a ticket from a twenty-hour patrol car for hitting thirty-five with no one else around. I haven’t ever gotten a speeding ticket, and I’d rather not start with a low-speed pursuit in the middle of a giant senior resort.

The Santa Rosa Valley, where Leisure Village sprawls over 440 acres, is really just like any one of the hundreds of other little valleys in California, but it does have a nice view of the Santa Monica mountains. The sky is dazzlingly azure today, like every other day, and the perfectly manicured and perfectly green lawns that line the perfectly tarred, abundantly wide, jet black stretch of road glisten in the sunlight. Smiling senior couples stroll down the sidewalks. Bluebirds may or may not break into a charming rendition of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as they flit around my car.

There are two named streets in Leisure Village. I’m on the imaginatively named “Leisure Village Drive,” but somewhere in the labyrinth of homes is supposedly a “Mountain View Drive” as well, though I’ve admittedly never looked and so have never found it. All of the other streets are named with numbers—“Village 12” or “Village 41” or “Village 23”—and every home on the street has as its address a number like 12006 or 41011. It would make sense in a grid, but Leisure Village is about the farthest thing from a grid possible: a weird, vaguely triangular blob sandwiched and squeezed between one of Camarillo’s main roads to the northwest and agricultural fields to the southeast. The village-roads snake away from Leisure Village Drive like ivy tendrils, curling in on themselves and filling every available inch of land that’s not already taken up by the eighteen-hole golf course, the swimming pool, the recreation center, the spa, the tennis courts, the paddle tennis courts, the extra-wide sidewalks, the gym, the giant chessboard, the main office, the park, the shuffleboard courts, the horseshoe pits, the RV parking, or the bocce courts.

I pass Village 44 first. It branches off to the left, and might be a little shadier than some of the other villages, but it’s hard to tell.  The addresses are about the only way to differentiate between houses—every village has the same suburban look, and even if they have different floor plans, all the houses are painted the same identical shade of beige. Some residents go so far as to hang potted plants or wind chimes from their porch eaves, though I assume the homeowners’ association has approved this practice. My grandmother used to hang bird feeders from the roofs of her houses—she loved the hummingbirds they attracted—but the feeders were swallowed up by cardboard boxes during some move and have yet to reemerge. I think the iridescent birds with ruby bellies and emerald wings may be gone forever.

My grandfather lives in Village 35, in the left half of an “El Dorado” model duplex. At twenty-five miles an hour, it takes a couple minutes to get from the gate to his driveway.

“We don’t want a duplex,” I can remember my grandfather saying as he sat in the green armchair he’d sat in for as long as I paid any attention to these things, the one that had followed him from home to home. We were in his living room in an apartment in Simi Hills, late afternoon, and the sun was just beginning to set. There was sunlight flooding into the room’s big windows and reflecting off the cream-colored carpet, so that the entire room looked blindingly white. My grandmother was standing at the miniature kitchen counter, sorting pills into compartmentalized plastic containers for the week ahead.

“But there’re only a few openings now,” she said. “We have to take what we can get.”

“Why not just wait until something bigger opens up?” I asked. Naiveté.

“People don’t just move out of Leisure Village.” My grandfather said the last two words with a sort of reverence. “And we’re not going to wait for someone to die.”

The earth that Leisure Village sits on—the land that all of Camarillo sits on, actually—used to be Rancho Calleguas, an 1837 land grant by the Mexican government.  I’ve thought a lot about how different the land was then, how different California was then. About how Adolfo Camarillo, sixteen when he inherited the ranch upon his father’s death, would sit in the fields on horseback for hours watching his cattle graze in the mountainous bassinet of the Santa Rosa Valley; about how Rancho Calleguas, rechristened Rancho Camarillo, became one of the nation’s leading lima bean ranches; about how Adolfo would have had to watch wildfires descend from the mountains every summer to threaten his crops; about how, eventually, Adolfo’s adobe home was devoured by the ravenous tongues of those same flames, collapsing with the terrifying crash of dreams rent asunder; about how, ultimately, the land was segmented, divided, and sold off to the California government.

California was quick to incorporate the rancho into the small communities already blossoming quietly in the valley. What became the city of Camarillo, isolated by its geography, saw little growth between its inception and the Second World War. But when a newly prosperous America emerged from the dusty rubble of Berlin and the acrid smoke of Hiroshima, when my grandfather returned from the ruins of Europe at the age of twenty—my age—to forget what he had seen and to learn how to be a college student again, when Eisenhower’s highway system began to steamroll its way across the nation in post-war affluence, Camarillo’s population exploded. Orchards were razed, houses were built, and people followed the path blazed so many years ago by wildfire over the mountains and into the city.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to explain why, exactly, I’m going to my grandfather’s house alone. Two and a half months ago I got a call from my mom while I was at work, saying that my grandmother’s cancer, long in remission, had resurfaced. It was multiplying rapidly. The prognosis was grim. She was made comfortable.

I flew home to visit that weekend, spent hours sitting by the hospital bed that had been wheeled into my grandparents’ bedroom, talking to my grandmother over the crooning notes of a Joan Baez CD, the constant drone of C-SPAN, and the hum of some sort of machine busy invading her body with tubes. My grandmother—who had had no symptoms the last time I saw her, who walked and cooked and danced until just days before I got the call from my mom, who I secretly thought would outlive us all—looked small and fairly well drugged, but brave. We hit the same topics we always covered: how’s school, how’s work, are you enjoying yourself, I’m so proud of you, have you met a nice Jewish girl yet, are you eating well? But then my grandmother asked me what I wanted to do with my life. Tell me your plans, she said. Show me the future. Show me your future. I’m so proud of you.

The second phone call—the one I was expecting but not, of course, prepared for—came two months later. I left my summer job four days early, flew home again, and the next day stepped out of my dad’s car and into the gravel parking lot of Eden Memorial Park.

I was greeted by family members I knew from across California, family friends I hadn’t seen in years, a stooped man of almost ninety—one of my grandfather’s friends from the days when he played handball—who stood barely five feet tall, walked in inch-long, shuffling steps, and shook my hand firmly while apologizing for his “handballer’s strut.”

I gave the eulogy for my grandmother. I don’t remember what I said. I do remember calling her the Energizer Bubbe. She would have liked that line.

And then I carried my grandmother’s plain pine casket up the hill, to the gravesite next to the plot where my grandparents buried their youngest daughter decades ago. The six pallbearers paused every ten feet while the rabbi leading the procession said a prayer. We hauled the coffin past dozens of graves, each marked by a tombstone flush with the ground—no fields of upright crosses in a Jewish cemetery—doing our best to dance around the names, to step on the lattice of grass that framed the plaques and not on the memories interred by them. My grandmother was a small woman, but our arms burned under the weight of the heavy coffin, and the two or three minutes we carried my grandmother in the hot southern California sun lasted into eternity.

The rabbi pinned a strip of black cloth to my mother, aunt, and grandfather’s chests at the gravesite. They tore in unison. The coffin was lowered into the grave by six Hispanic men dressed in grimy work clothes, their calloused hands sliding expertly over the leather belts that supported the coffin. My family took turns pouring dirt onto the grave with an upside-down shovel, each pile of dirt stippling the pale pine until the earth had swallowed my grandmother. Unto dust thou shalt return, I believe the saying goes.

I’m at about Village 39 when my phone rings. It’s illegal in California to drive and talk on the phone—and I know the Leisure Village police will nail me if I do—but it’s not technically illegal to check who’s calling.

Gram.

That makes me pause. It always does. My grandfather’s phone died two days after my grandmother, and he’s been using her phone since. I haven’t gotten around to changing the address book entry from Gram to Pops.

I realize I’m about to sideswipe a golf cart driving on the side of the road and swerve around it. The old man behind the wheel of the cart is oblivious. If there’s a cop around, he’s going to get me for that, but since I don’t hear sirens I figure it’s probably safe to pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Heeeeeyyy, kid. It’s Pops. Where are you?”

“I’m on my way—I’m in Leisure Village. Almost to your house,” I say as I turn into Village 35. I don’t mention his conversation with the guard. “I’ll be there in one sec.”

“Oh, that’s great. Just great. See you soon.”

He hangs up, and I park my car alongside the curb outside his house. I guess I could park in the driveway now that my grandmother’s copper-colored Lexus is gone— my grandfather sold it three days after the funeral, saying he didn’t want it around the house anymore—but I don’t. Old habits—well, you know.

Tradition in Judaism—the oldest of habits—dictates that the immediate family of the deceased actively mourns for seven days, a period of time known as shiva. The first night we sat shiva was a Friday, and so my family spent the first night with my grandfather, mom, and aunt, accompanied only by a few close friends, each other, and our memories. On the shiva’s second night, the two local Chabad chapter rabbis, who had apparently visited my grandparents often since their move to Leisure Village, came to my grandfather’s house with six other orthodox Jews in tow. From the window I watched them drive up to the house, careen wildly around Village 35’s cul-de-sac, and climb out of their van: first the thickly bearded Israeli driver, then the two rabbis, and finally two fathers and three sons, tumbling out onto the pavement like well-dressed clowns, faces set in the forced somber expression of people going to mourn for a stranger’s death.

Rabbi Yitzhak was the first through the front door of the house, bowing slightly to make it under the threshold in his large black hat. My mom was the first to greet him, but Yitzhak remained silent.

“Eileen!” Rabbi Zev burst through the screen door, pausing only to place a hand quickly on the mezuzah nailed at an angle to the frame. He asked how my mother was coping, made small talk, but volunteered no hand to her in greeting.

Rabbis Zev and Yitzhak were complete opposites save for their identical black suits, black hats, and black drawstring belts—Zev short and slight, with the scraggly five-inch beard of a man who had just had his first child; Yitzhak well over six feet tall and easily 250 pounds, with a dark brown tangle of a beard that draped over the corners of his mouth and hung down to his solar plexus. Both were New York Hasidim, dressed for eighteenth-century Polish winter and then uprooted, whisked off for miles and decades to the California summer, to my grandfather’s doorstep.

My family stood frozen, staring at the mourning task force. Zev talked nonstop, chattering about deli or babies or my grandmother or maybe all three while the rest of the group filtered into the house; Yitzhak just stood in the corner like Zev’s golem. Finally, Zev announced how sorry he was for our loss but how happy he was to be able to share in the great mitzvah of honoring Doris’ memory. My family defrosted, the buzz of conversation drowning out whatever Zev was saying. My grandfather stood near Zev, leaning heavily on his cane, nodding.

I watched as Zev banked away from my grandfather and wheeled through the crowd, searching for a new target to talk at. We locked eyes, and I turned away an instant too late.

“You know, Seth,” Zev said as he walked up to me, “I’m the head of Chabad at Cal State Channel Islands. You’ve heard of this school?”

I nodded.

“Good. Beautiful school. Your grandfather tells me you go to Stanford. Also a beautiful school. You’ve been to Chabad services? Do you know Rabbi Dov?”

“Uh, no, I haven’t been. I haven’t met him.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. He’s a good man, Rabbi Dov. You go to Hillel?”

“No, actually, I don’t really—”

“Well, you would like Chabad. Give it a chance. You should introduce yourself to Rabbi Dov. Tell him Rabbi Zev says hello.”

“I will.”  I haven’t.

“Good. You’re a good grandson, Seth. Your grandfather is very lucky.”

I thanked him and excused myself to get a glass of water. My aunt was on the phone in the kitchen—my grandfather’s landline, an oversized handset with bold print for tired eyes, large buttons for arthritic fingers, and prodigious speaker output for deaf ears. She was talking in the hushed, rushed tones of someone clearly upset but not wanting to disturb the guests in the other room. “Guests” is a strange term for mourners, I suppose, but such is a shiva with catered food.

“We were told the deli spread would be here by five,” my aunt hissed, “and it’s almost six.” She turned, saw me and smiled, and I smiled back before turning around and leaving the kitchen, faint sibilant sounds echoing off the tile behind me.

Back in the living room, Zev was shaking a tin can about a third full with coins and extolling the virtues of tzedakah—charity—as a way of commemorating the deceased. The can had his Chabad chapter’s logo on the side.

I enter my grandfather’s house through the screen door, too, but much more quietly than Zev did. The Chabad visits lasted two more nights before my grandfather shut down the shiva, both because he was thinking about my grandmother all of the time anyway and because he was tired of having his house invaded by orthodox Jews he didn’t know every night. I can’t even imagine how the phone call to Rabbi Zev went—how do you tell someone his solace is more aggravation than consolation?—but my grandfather carried through, and Zev and Yitzhak haven’t been back to the house.

The house itself is back to normal. Zev’s tzedakah can sits, half-full, on a coffee table. The dining room table has been pulled back away from the wall, where it previously served diligently as a buffet line. The mirror in the entrance hall, hidden by a draped white sheet during the shiva, is uncovered, and my reflection in it catches me off guard.

“Pops?”

“Heeeeeyyy kid!” My grandfather walks out of his study, limping heavily on his cane. He doesn’t have the handballer’s strut yet, but arthritis and an artificial hip are conspiring to get him there. As per the rules of bereavement, he’s letting his gray hair grow—or at least not getting it cut—but other than that he looks the same as always: large-framed bifocals, thick silver mustache, plaid shirt with three pens and his weekly schedule in the breast pocket, blue jeans, white Nikes. He holds out his hand to shake mine, a stilted action he’s fallen into since I left for college. I give him a hug.

We sit in his kitchen to eat leftover deli sandwiches and talk about my summer job. I worked in an engineering lab, and my grandfather, and ex-electrical engineer, is fascinated.  At three p.m., my grandfather stops the conversation. It’s time for “Judge Judy,” a post-retirement afternoon ritual for him, so we relocate to the living room and turn on the television. Today’s case is as absurd as any other—someone lent a car to someone else and someone else returned it with the spare tire missing, or someone tried to make off with the contractor’s money from someone else’s half-dug pool, or someone’s dad bought someone’s girlfriend breast implants—and my grandfather insists repeatedly that he watches this show only out of sheer amazement over the litigants.

“Who are these people?” my grandfather asks. We both chuckle.

After “Judge Judy,” Pops has had a full day, and he says he’s going to take a nap before dinner. My aunt is coming to visit when she gets off work, so I tell him I’ll stay until she gets here. We both know this is the last time I’ll see him until I come home again for Thanksgiving.

“When do you get back?” he asks. “November twentieth?”

“I don’t know. Something like that.”

“Well, I’m going to see you when you get back, right?”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to come visit.”

“That’s great. Let’s get the video chat working, okay?”

“Sure thing. Sundays are still good?”

“Absolutely.” There’s a pause as he looks up at me. “How tall are you now? Six one? Six two?”

I laugh. “Pops, I’m almost five ten.”

“Really? Jesus. You know, I used to be five ten and three-quarters. That was a while ago now, I guess.” He moves next to me and stands up straighter, trying to compare our heights. “Yeah, a while ago. Sure you’re just five ten?”

He’s at least two inches shorter than me. “Pretty sure,” I say.

“You get back here November twentieth?”

“Something like that.”

“Come visit, okay?”

“I will.”

“Okay then. I’m going to lie down. Have Wendi wake me up when she gets here?”

“Can do. Bye, Pops.”

“Bye, kid.”

I watch him shuffle into the master bedroom. I don’t have a book with me, and I’m not as much of an avid daytime television watcher as he is, so I head to the study, towards the internet connection.

I always used to think of my grandfather as extremely technologically literate—almost dangerously so for a man of his age. Before his move into assisted living, he taught computer classes in senior centers and elementary schools, and he had three working Apple computers and a laptop in his study. He gave me my first computer—a big, gray Macintosh manufactured around the year I was born, complete with an auxiliary external floppy drive for 5¼ inch diskettes. Now, his study has one working Mac and one broken laptop, and he struggles to check his voicemail. I get emails in all capital letters.

The blinds are closed and the lights are off in the study, but I’m too lazy to let in light. I turn on the working Mac’s monitor—a big, glossy, twenty-seven inch iMac—and am greeted by a blown up picture of my grandmother smiling back at me from inside the screen.  She’s wearing the purple sunglasses and red lipstick she always wore, her bangs curled as she would do meticulously every morning.  I think it’s a picture from the last time I went to lunch with my grandparents at the assisted living apartment they lived in before Leisure Village—I can hear my grandfather asking for a hot dog with sauerkraut and my grandmother rolling her eyes behind those sunglasses and saying, “Marty, the salt!” Files are strewn around her face in no conceivable order: detritus that seems to stem from not fully understanding how to find anything on the computer that’s not placed on the desktop. The Mac’s screen illuminates my grandfather’s desk, covered in piles of receipts and forms: detritus that seems to stem from the legal and fiscal consequences of losing a loved one.

I open up Safari thinking I’ll check my email or browse Facebook for a while, but I never make it that far. Safari paints a tableau of frequently visited pages on the blank canvas of a new tab, and between some YouTube video of a skateboard trick that I’m sure my cousin is responsible for and my grandfather’s Gmail account, there’s something jarringly out of place:

SingleSeniorsMeet.com.

I minimize the window quickly, and meet my grandmother’s stare again. The house is still hers in so many ways—the walls are covered in pictures of her and pictures she took; her desk sits as she left it in the sunroom; her hair curler is still in the medicine cabinet above the master bathroom’s sink. But her car is gone, and her smell is gone, and it’s close to four and she’s not in the kitchen starting to cook the lamb chops. And I realize what I think my grandfather must have realized: he’s alone in paradise, which makes it rather indistinguishable from hell.

I’m happy to leave when my aunt shows up—mostly because it’s almost five, and five o’clock anywhere near Los Angeles means it’s going to take me two hours to get home, half of which will be spent on one ten-mile stretch of the 405. I say my hellos and goodbyes at the same time and hurry out the door, leaving my aunt to the leftover deli food and the not insignificant task of waking my grandfather for dinner.

In my car, I slump into the polyester seats, turn the key in the ignition, and listen to the radio roar to life with the engine before swinging around the cul-de-sac to head back to the main road. The sprinklers are on and it strikes me that this seems like an incredibly stupid time to be watering the grass but then again something has to keep it green, I guess. The water droplets sparkle in the late afternoon sun. I flip down my sunshade.

The freshly mown lawns remind me of Death with a capital D, probably because people tend to talk about Death’s icy scythe that doth reap the cornstalks of our lives. That’s a ridiculous metaphor. It’s quick, clinical, precise, when obviously death is none of these things. The Talmud instead describes the Angel of Death as being “full of eyes.” I think I like this image better. We watched my grandmother for two months—watched, observed, studied—but now we see her. We see her around the corners of the empty house, by the unruffled half of the king-size bed, in the faraway sheen of my grandfathers eyes when he tries to talk about her and simply says, “She was a good kid.” I hope I can live up to the same epitaph.

There’s no security to leave the community, just a California roll of a stop as I wait for the guard booth’s automatic arm to open fully. A different security guard is stuffed into the stall this time, and he nods slightly at me as I drive through. Is the gate staffed for twenty-four hours a day? How long’s this guy’s shift? And who gets shafted with the ten p.m. to six a.m. shift in that little booth at the front of Leisure Village? But then I’m through the gate and it lowers behind me, shutting in my grandfather, shutting in the impressions my grandmother’s hospital bed has left in the carpet, shutting in the deli food and the rabbis and the patrol cars and the lawns and the golf carts and wrapping it all up with the sign hanging along the wall that separates Leisure Village from the rest of the world.

“Leisure Village: Safe. Quiet. Affordable.”

My daily walk to and from school is impressed in my head like the memory of any process repeated so often it required no presence of mind. Thermos and lunchbox in hand, book-bag on my back, I walk past the neighborhoods guards and say bonjour—a must around here—I listen to the pentatonic birds singing the same six notes in thirty second intervals. I take a left onto a walkway paved with cheap blue chalk that leads to the Route de Ouakam, which links downtown, to my left, with the airport to my right, and divides Mermoz, into two neighborhoods, Sotrac (named after the buses) and fenetre, meaning “window,” where the light enters onto the Dark Continent from the West. As I cross, with the help of a gendarme, whistle in mouth, his hands gesticulating in every direction, I can taste the tang of exhaust fumes from the Sotrac bus company on my left. On the other side lies a fou- foot wall with no perceivable purpose. I walk through the car entrance and stick to the side, occasionally waving at my friends and their parents as they drive past me. All Along the short path between the low wall and the school gate, unkempt reeds grow from under trash heaps and soundless ecosystems emerge centered on decaying rodents. Behind the last landfill on the right is a long colonial building, supposedly an abandoned hospital, where entire families—whose children I have often played soccer with stones as goalposts and torn sandals as cleats—live huddled underground rather than come out into the light. On the left stands my school: the International School of Dakar, run and operated by the American embassy. It shares a wall with the Americans-only “American Club,” a beautiful spot by the ocean with outdoor tennis, volleyball, pool, a basketball court and an Americans-only commissary replete with Jiffy Peanut Butter and Blockbuster Video. If I had kept walking for another minute, rather than turn into the school, I would find the cliffs at the very edge of the continent, bordering on the Atlantic and the dim morning sky stretching out to the West. I wouldn’t dare though—that’s where the bandits roam, along with the fiends, the lepers and who knows what kinds of unseemly people. Instead, I spend the day at the International School oblivious to my surroundings, where students from eighty countries and nine grade levels gather to learn. In eight years at ISD, I didn’t have a single Senegalese classmate. Not one.

I flipped through the pages to catch a glimpse of this Cheikh Kane’s world, which seemed so strangely detached from the ones I was used to perceiving on screens and pages. Here was a book by a living African, with a short dédicace to my mother from the author, on our shelf, littered with dense philosophical ideas summarized on the back cover—including the angoisse (anxiety) of our age and the Meaning of Life. It told the story of a young writer named Samba Diallo, a muslim trained at the traditional Coranic schools of the Diallobé people, who left for France to study and came back a torn shadow of himself.
That was about all I could grasp at that age and limited fluency in the language. It occurred to me then that I would have to improve my French, not my Wolof (which was nonexistant, since I am Ethiopian and not Senegalese) in order to understand what this book meant and why it was on my shelf in the first place. I would have to use a mediating colonial language to bridge the gap between the so-called Darkness of the West and that of the East, between where I was and where I was from. This book was nothing like any of the others around it: subtle, it seemed the sole representative of the world in which we lived and ate, bought peanuts from the peanut woman on the corner, played soccer with the squatters’ children on the semi-paved streets and watched the neighborhood guards ritualistically sip sweet Mauritanian tea at the villa gates.

Cheikh Kane only ever wrote one novel of any note. But since then, every generation of African writers writing in French, anyone who employs the former master’s craft and code must feel ashamed in front of the griots, the story-singers who memorize and recite hours worth of lyrics on their impassioned journey from town to town, taking each place with them into the past. They must feel ashamed in front of the oral historians of St. Louis—the present ghost of a once-prominent colonial capital, where migratory birds and old jazz legends annually converge—who nourish their visitors with local spices and anecdotes. Every generation of écrivains noirs (Ba, Barry, Diome, Mabanckou, Tchack) quotes, reflects on, imitates or somehow acknowledges this work, which appeared, like a miracle brought by the beaks of southbound warblers, one dry afternoon in Dakar.

I had a very pleasant, peaceful childhood in Dakar in the 1990s. It was the last term of Abdou Diouf’s presidency, and even though everyone in Dakar hated him, and everyone everywhere knew he had stolen the election of 1993, and would not get away with it again in 2000, calm reigned in the urban center of Senegal, out on a peninsula, perfect topography for a port-city, centuries apart from the villages inland. Nevertheless, I often had nightmares of the beach at sunset. I was a poor swimmer, so the water often summoned fear of death. I still taste the traces of salt-foam waves at the tip of my tongue, ten years on. I build little sand-castles in the simple angular shapes of mosques and village huts. A sudden burst forward by the ocean—which, in waking life, would erode half the beaches I used for my sand castles by the time we left Senegal, that is within eight years—washed the little structures away, but the giant overhanging tourist lodgings beyond the beach were immovable. They knew how to tie wood to wood.

The reverence afforded to Kane’s masterwork is the reverberating effect of a psychic nerve struck at the core of the African’s perception of his world and himself. It evokes the shock of awaking to an age that will be defined by someone else’s tools, someone else’s images and sounds. The character of the Fool–le Fou, the madman, the sound translates better, in this case, than the actual meaning—as the Diallobé villagers take to calling him, embodies this shock with his hunched posture and the “histrionic art” he performs for those who have yet to notice the sky falling. A former rifleman in the French campaign in Southeast Asia, like so many real-life traumatized young “French West African” men in the era of so-called de-colonization, the Fool babbles incoherently and beautifully throughout the novel, recalling visions of sensory failure and the ground crumbling beneath his feet.
At his side, by novel’s end is the religious schoolmaster of Samba Diallo’s home village, whose practice of prayer and self-flagellation becomes an active means of non-resistance as history gradually escapes his once firm-as-baobab-bark grasp. As the novel opens, the Schoolmaster hovers over Samba Diallo and his classmates forcing an entirely oral mastery of the Qu’ran in Arabic—yet another mediating language, revealing nothing of meaning in the midst of a deluge of sound. He brutalizes his students, especially Samba, the disciple he loved most, for every error and hesitation, shouting his furious faith and love at each pupil. “The teacher thought that man had no reason to exalt himself,” Kane’s narrator explains, “save definitely in the adoration of God. Now it was true—though he fought against the feeling—that he loved Samba Diallo as he had never loved any disciple. His harshness toward the boy was in ratio to his impatience to rid him of all his moral weaknesses, and to make him the masterpiece of his own long career” (23). And yet real pain, for Samba and thus Kane, comes in the absence of lashes and furious admonishments, now replaced by quiet reflection on Diderot and Montesquieu. The Schoolmaster’s  texts are no longer lone wonders in a world  of stories told aloud, as his pupils are sent to new colonial schools, so that they may learn to “tie wood to wood.” But as Samba learns in France, from a traditional point-of-view, wood, like the woodworker, was made to rot in the Earth, while faith in the infinite wisdom and coherence of the universe is paramount. Geometry, like medicine, can make or save life, but death is of equal if not greater concern, while new scientific practices pose an immediate threat to the infallible teaching of God.

A hundred yards from where I lay my head, I can hear the waves of the Atlantic crash against the cliffs. They appear, spatial images of feeling, in dreams about nuclear war with savages from islands visible from our cliffs. One of those islands, l’ile aux serpents served as a backdrop for the imagination of all the city-dwellers, raised on spoken stories, on the parole of elders—which denotes both truth and speech, because, even in French, the two are meant to be inseparable. On the other side from the Island-of-many-snakes is the island of many restaurants, French cannons, and slave houses—Gorée. You took a ferry to get there. Only sometimes the ferry sank. Countless ill-fated rides to the Island sink together into one disaster constantly laying siege to my sleep. I imagine washing ashore—one of hundreds now each scrambling for themselves against the cold current. I twist my half submerged face up to the Island’s crest, my eyes barely avoiding the salty sting of the water, and see one of the slave houses where they sometimes crammed sixty people into a one cubic meter cell and mercilessly threw some of them out the window into the sea right there in front of me, where the sharks did the rest with them and now they’re liable to come for you. In waking life, I wander around Fenetre Mermoz at sundown, saluting the guards as they sip tea and sweep the streets free of leaves. I glance over at the calm, stirring sea, feeling both afraid and at home.

In addition to Samba, the teacher, and the mad returnee, Kane’s book offers a series of archetypal characters, each of whom represents a way of understanding and reacting to the colonial encounter. Samba’s “father,” the dark chevalier, is a mythic and wishful apparition at a climactic point in the novel when the African imagination must seek connections to the past for guidance and pride. Like any other culture, these foundation myths, in the Light of science-history, reveal themselves as mere story. Still, Cheikh Anta Diop and Leopold Sedar Senghor, the two most celebrated public intellectuals of post-colonial Senegal, built their intellectual endeavors on establishing lineages to the relative light of the East—the Ancient Egyptians, the Coptic Ethiopians, the lost Nubians of the Sudan. Diop and Senghor were significant people, powerful even—Senghor presided over the Republic of Senegal in its first twenty years—but like the Knight, they wielded there consoling might and intellect with a generous realism. There was once again a home, a father-figure, a guiding light—but its scope was narrow, and its shining path beset by flickering contradictions.
Senghor wrote a famous book of poems entitled Les Ethiopiques, which as an Ethiopian, I read with curious interest and complete lack of recognition: I saw neither my ancestral homeland, nor my adopted hometown. Then again, the afro-pessimists, the late great Ousmane Sembéne prime among them, disparaged the poet-president as un assimilé, a man who invented a national pantheon by borrowing from the Egyptians, and the Frnech, advocating a “universal humanism,” while vaguely posturing at some proud state-of-mind called négritude. A liberal and a Francophile, he crushed the popular ideology of African socialism and lived out his last years in a mansion in France with his very French wife. The Village Chief—poet and president—gutless wonder–how could you not blame him? Then again, Senegal has never had to suffer the fate of Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire and countless other neighbors who, throughout the 1990s and well after my family and I left Senegal for good, suffered coups, revolutions, civil wars—all forms of chaos. The Village Chief—poet and president—realist and savior—how could you not honor him?

The day Abdoulaye Wade won the presidency in the Spring of 2000, a month before I left my hometown forever, I remember walking back from school, crossing the route de Ouakam—the longest single commuter road in town—and noticing, to my amazement, the pure pristine silence. For that day alone, the funny papers contained no cynical cartoons, only simple matter of fact headlines like “Wade Président,” one way to make the past still living in the present. There were no riots; nor were there celebrations. The people I spoke to, the guards from the quartier and the woman who sold us peanuts at the street corner, normally loud and opinionated when it came to politics and the need for le changement, all seemed suddenly quiet, pensive. I remember sitting down to tea with two neighborhood regulars and talking almost exclusively about football and going to the beach—anything but politics. This was unprecedented. As was the event itself. It was the first peaceful power transition from one party to another in Senegal’s history, and one of only a handful in the region as a whole. Looking back, I’m reminded of the spirit behind Kane’s characterization of that first rupture, “those who had no history were encountering those who carried the world on their shoulders.” The RFI announced the election results and lack of mayhem matter-of-factly. CNN, which reported anxiety in the capital leading up to the election, said nothing after the storm had passed over us and Dakar was left, once again, dry and silent. Apparently it wasn’t worth reporting.

Whatever one might say about the Chief, the same goes for the Most Royal Lady, la Grande Royale, a grand, beautiful, Mama Africa in her flowing gown who, alongside the village Chief, the meekest authority figure in the novel (the local kingdoms were the first to be sacrificed to the irrepressible foreign spirits of progress), eases the transition to a new world order. They choose to send their sons (nothing here on the daughters) to French schools, leaving the Schoolmaster, like the Fool, dispossessed and crazed. Something about that initial journey to the colonial center leaves the African intellect irretrievably shaken. He spends the rest of his days praying–his body contorted, his joints creaking, his soul soaring. He and the Fool hold each other in the empty schoolroom, laughing and crying.
Some of us discovered the book in Paris, where an entirely different audience greeted the novel with a slightly different, though equally enthusiastic, reception. We understood the disillusionment of being away from home, but knew relatively little about distance from one’s past. Emigration is certainly a form of rupture, but its psychological effect pales compared to being lifted up from the ground right where you stand, were born, raised and will die, to find that the earth which the ancestors inhabit is suddenly unrecognizable. Worse yet, you realize, even at birth, the place you knew was probably nothing like what came before it, just a generation or two ago—and the rule of seven generations no longer applies. Worse than forgetting itself is forgetting that one has forgotten, which is why the Fool’s forgetfulness is a virtue, the blissful state of being aware of one’s amnesia, wide awake at every new moment.
But for the émigré, those “lucky ones” who made it, often after suffering the humiliating rite of passage of sleeping in airports and shelters that stink of urine and sweat, a more direct contrast presents itself. The center, the middle, the power crux, blasts its bright lights and noises full of information and entertainment right at you, buries the malleable mind in mounds of texts relaying everything it knows. The wide-eyed African watches increasingly mixed peoples teeming through giant iron mazes. For those of us who weren’t making the occasional giant leap anymore, who moved back and forth and back and forth between the continents, mobility becomes a source of comfort, a source of smugness that aggravates the mental divide between normal people living the life of instinct and the cosmopolitan creature enduring the life of intellect.

I have never been lonelier or more frightened than I was during those three months spent in Paris. That’s where I first read L’Aventure Ambigue and its successors, the “afro-pessimists,” as the academy, somewhat awkwardly, calls them. That same year a young Senegalese woman living in France wrote a beautiful little book called Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, about a Senegalese girl who moves to France and becomes disillusioned with the life of intellect. Isolated from her own community at home as well as abroad, she returns to Senegal to find a host of sad stories of misguided ambition and wasted talent. Thematically, we haven’t come very far. But why change, when the storyline is so apt, and the experience of disillusionment carries over so easily from generation to generation. Afro-pessimism: the literature of those afraid of having to visit museums someday in order to experience exhibits of their former selves on display—spear in one hand, modern machete in the other, faces beckoning forth, large and colorful. Imagine having to learn from such a thing.

Compared to the Chief, the Knight, and the Most Royal Lady, the dispossessed Schoolmaster and Fool react with an appropriately endless reservoir of indignation and chagrin. And yet they come from opposite ends of the social spectrum for Senegalese men in the midcentury. One is a traditional beacon of rectitude and strength, the other a modern symbol of trauma and internal conflict. The former confesses to the latter, “we have turned ourselves into hybrids, and there we are left….filled with shame” (113). As if to perform the Schoolmaster’s narration on the village stage, the Fool would go into a frenzy recounting the moment an Indochinese piece of lead tore through the cheap fabric of his French uniform and pierced his abdomen, leaving a gaping hole at the center of his being. Alone with Samba Diallo, he relates the haunting experience of a nervous breakdown, several months after the war, on the hard concrete of a crowded city sidewalk. His histrionic art at once recalls and reaffirms the lost power of spoken history. Unaware of just how diffuse the Fool’s post-traumatic stress truly is, the villagers conceal themselves from the modern world and go on living in silence.

We are all always seeking the silence of the schoolmaster’s corner in the midst of the senseless violence we remember. What I remember—what images the television burned into my mind–weave together with the sounds of baritones booming facts from Radio France International in the mornings, and the cynical cartoons of Afro-pessimists embedded in Dakar newspapers, inciting disillusionment. We were there, but we weren’t there for the American soldier dragged around the streets of Mogadisho (and the countless, photo-less Somalis he took with him). We were there but we weren’t there for Kabila posing for Jeune Afrique in khaki shirt besides his smiling troops, two months before the takeover. The ominous shadow of two mass murders, one pre and one post this particular photo-op (which like some things slipped into the long-term register from the short-term habitat of curiosities dwelling and fading at the surface of the mind) and his own assassination loom over the sunny poses of his conquest. We were there but not there to see—on the eight o’clock news—the last boat leaving Guinea-Bissau after their coup. Our whole city welcomed and befriended the refugees, most of whom had one or two people who stayed behind. Senegal was an exception to this continental maxim of chaos—it saw itself kneeling, immobile in the Schoolmaster’s safe enclave–except for the Casamance, where one of our house-workers lost a brother, ambushed, mutilated by insurgents, and served up as a tragic story in the Dakar papers for our living-room consumption the next morning. Later that same year, Ethiopia, no exception either, descended into war with Eritrea. We listened to the news of mutual airstrikes and press conferences with presidential sound bites. Virtual war—the kind that creates the illusion of proximity when things are being kept far away from each other—had come to our little corner, where we could no longer hide like the Schoolmaster, but suddenly felt compelled to pray.

Today, the vast oceans separating the continents no longer represent the gap between past and present—instead the few miles of savannah between the city African and the quiet villager (often his distant cousin) enact the turbulent history of several centuries. Since the book’s publication, the initial rupture between past and present, faith and science, has become more remote. Its full impact has worn off in the African collective memory. According to many “indigenous” traditions, it takes about seven generations to cross that fine line between history and myth, fact and fiction, that which is transferred over dutifully and that which is invented on the spot. With new tools at hand to sever the old constriction of seven generations, Kane and his disciples have had to remind us of a lost world. Otherwise, not only are Africans forgetting who we once were, we are forgetting how we came to change in the first place.

In Senegalese epistemology, the living and the dead are bound together, indistinguishable, throwing into question the very translatability of being in African notions of the cosmos. Water is the origin of both life and death. Water ebbs and flows everywhere alongside the cliffs of Mermoz and the homes of several, now intermixed, descendants: Peuls, Touaregs, Wolofs. The true origins of these (like any other) people, are mysterious, well beyond seven generations of fathoming. They came from somewhere between the sea and the desert, between water and scorched earth—this is as much as we know. To mediate between the two, just as rivers flow through the savannah plains naming the kingdoms they nourish—Senegal, Congo, Niger—so poetry and metaphor flow between the wealthy sea and the barren land, the living and the dead.

Those who have died are never gone/They are in the water that flows/They are the water that sleeps/The dead have not died/Listen more often/To things than to beings/Hear the voice of water.
–Birago Diop, Les Contes D’Amadou Koumba
The ebb and flow of the Atlantic current takes fragments of our memory and brings new myths, often from distant lands where wide-eyed children settle and become riflemen and writers. In Birago Diop’s Les Comtes D’Amadou Koumba, another classic from the first generation of indigenous writing, the animals join the wind, the water, and the earth in speaking and interacting. Bouky the hyena, a clever and enterprising protagonist and a whole cast drawn from the local animal kingdom, animates an amusing, lyrical world of play—a welcome relief of lighthearted entertainment compared to the dense and dreary ruminations of Schoolmaster and Fool. The whole of Diop’s oeuvre was supposedly chanted to him by a griot named Amadou Koumba, whom he heard as a child. The oral frame of these tales is, not surprisingly, also the theme of the book. You’d be more likely to believe me, Diop seems to be saying, even when I told you about trickster hyenas and idle lions, if you had heard it from him rather than read it from me. If you still had faith—in the larger sense, the sense, which Schoolmaster and Fool preserve and mourn—if you were young and receptive, you would be able to learn about human nature from the inanimate realm as well as the animated creatures around you. Our fate is so tied to the things that precede and surround us that we (not necessarily Africans, but pre-modern people everywhere) use their experiences to guide our own, and more importantly, those of our children. We gather round, tell stories in which animals play people, and reflect on ourselves.
In the years since the emergence of Birago Diop, Ousmane Sembène, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Mariama Ba, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, an entire industry, beyond the stuffy boundaries of bookishness, has sprung up around the arts of re-memberance–an industry of recovery. The stories behind old Mouride ornaments and pre-colonial artifacts, the narratives of guided tours of St. Louis and Gorée, anthropological societies and linguistic projects aimed at recovering lost dialects all emerge and dissolve, shape and re-shape the past, ebb and flow.

Remembering requires making matter of the immaterial. Nebulous pictures of fleeting light immerse the mind in tidess that like the Atlantic rise up at night under the mysterious guidance of the moon. Screen-less projections of darkness play out in the non-space of dreams. I recall the dusky afternoon in ’93 when we first drove around our new quartier, one third villas, one third tenement homes, one third makeshift squatter homes with corrugated iron haphazardly tacked to the fences. The villa part of Mermoz was inhabited by foreigners mostly—Americans Lebanese, Africans—inhabiting art-deco and middle-eastern style homes–many designed with the exact same blueprint, so that you could walk into a stranger’s house and approximate your way around the place. Old men with wooden toothbrushes and ragged shirts swept the sidewalks along quiet streets in the daytime. Blue plastic bags caught up by weeds in the dirt roads shook and leapt in the humid wind. I haven’t been back in years—eight, to be precise—but I am often told I would not recognize it. Four-lane highways and sky-rises have replaced the unassuming paths we used to take. The earth is covered in newness, and soon people will forget what it was like to taste the dust clustered underfoot and lowly clouds. Somewhere the Fool is performing his histrionics along the amateur theatres that spring up by the cliffs of the corniche as the tides rise and the sun recedes.  The Schoolmaster is in the back-row of the audience, reciting his prayer, oblivious to the show, having already internalized the plot.
Then as now, I have a recurring dream of standing on the side of the beach, overwhelmed by wave after wave, my head constantly crashing against the black rocks.

As the girl grows older, her grandmother sends her to do the shopping and she pumps her knobby knees to the local butcher and the outdoor vegetable market down the street. She returns home slowly, arms spilling with peppers, with eggplants, with nuts, with bright red meat wrapped in clean, white paper.
No longer needing a step-stool, she hovers by her grandmother every day until she leaves to boarding school, absorbing the motions and learning the ingredients that will soon form the recipes of her future.

What is the recipe for love?
My mother encounters my father in the summer of 1985. At the age of thirty-five, she has decided to make the permanent move from the Middle East to the Bay Area to study education. When she walks up to a dusty Toyota dealership on El Camino Real in search of a new car, she finds a curly-haired salesman welcoming her at the door. After they exchange hellos, she recognizes something familiar in him.
“Where are you from?” she asks in Arabic, assuming he will understand.
“Lebanon,” he replies back, trading his learned English for his native tongue.
“You don’t look Lebanese. You’re Iraqi,” she blurts back immediately.
“How…did you know that?” A blush pushes through his dark, craggy skin. He has been living in America since his freshman year of college and has grown used to people not having any conception of his birthplace. At 42 years old, he has long since decided that it is easier to offer an answer that people might understand.
“You can’t fool a fellow Arab,” she responds, her sharp black eyes smiling as she slowly scans his face.
Although she doesn’t end up buying the car from the charming car salesman, she remembers him a few weeks later when she needs the signature of an Arab in order to renew her old passport. He agrees and she invites him over to her apartment for a simple meal to thank him for the favor.
Hummus blended to garlicky perfection. Warm pita bread. Tangy bean salad. Rice that is slightly burned at the bottom of the pan. In Iraq, they call the burnt bits hokoka but my father just calls it love. Her “simple” meal tastes better than anything he has eaten in years. Looking around her tidy kitchen, he notices that there are no cookbooks to be seen, no recipes strewn across the counter. This is a woman who cooks by heart.
When he goes home later that night to the girlfriend he has been living with for five years, he can only think about the meal he just had and the woman who made it. He remembers the way her tight, pale cheeks folded into a bright smile each time she slid a new dish onto the table.
“I have a life to live with this woman I just met,” he finds himself admitting to his soon to be ex-girlfriend.
My parents get married four months later on January 29, 1986.

A leafy lunch
Soon after their marriage, my mother, pregnant, rises early in the morning and makes my father’s lunch. She presses her swelling stomach against the kitchen counter as she leans over the cutting board to slice a tomato for his sandwich. She slips the food into a brown paper bag and writes, “Have a nice day” punctuated with a smiley face on the outside. In this way, she goes to work with him.
Summer fades into fall. As the leaves parachute to the ground, I am growing inside of my mother’s womb. I like to kick her hello in the morning as she bends over to pick up fallen leaves from the driveway. She writes short love poems along their veins and places them in my father’s lunchbox.
She thinks it’s important to feed his soul. He has been lost for a long time.

Colostrum and Cuisinarts
My mom breastfeeds me for eleven months. She is very proud of this fact and likes to use it as scientific justification for pretty much anything.
“Your daughter is so healthy,” my doctors say.
“Well, I breastfed her for eleven months, you know.”
“Your daughter is so intelligent,” my teachers marvel.
“Well, I breastfed her for eleven months, you know.”
“You and your daughter are so close,” her friends chime.
“Well….
The first real word that gurgles out of my tiny mouth is not “mom,” but haleeb, the Arabic word for milk. I speak the soft syllables to summon my mom to me when I need her the most. When she tries to gives me a bottle of formula, I screw up my face and refuse the tainted goods. When she offers me a bottle of her own milk, I accept it. Even as a baby, I know that my mother’s food will always be better.
After my mom finds a sliver of glass in a jar of Gerber’s mashed peas, she calls them to complain because she considers herself “a consumer advocate.” The company sends her coupons but that cooing baby-face label will never be seen on the pantry shelves again. I will not be a Gerber Baby. Instead, she invests in a mini Cuisinart and blends her own brand of baby cuisine for me. At one-year-old, I have already experienced more vegetables than some will taste in a lifetime.

The ties that bind
The three of us sit down to breakfast every morning before my dad goes off to work at the car dealership which he now owns. When he returns from work, we always sit down at the table for a homemade dinner. In between bites, my mom asks us about our days. She starts with me, and I ramble out the tiny details of my day as she continues eating. She tries to ask my father questions, but he would much rather chew than answer, so she turns back to me after he says a few words. I am more than willing to talk with my mouth half-full.
At the end of meals, my father and I traditionally chime an Iraqi saying he has taught me.
“Ashe-ayadiki,” we say to my mother as she swoops down on the table to clear the plates. Bless your hands.
“Shukran,” she smiles back. Thank you.
Even after she starts up an educational toy company and works as many hours as my father, if not more, she still manages to feed us every morning and every night. This sounds a lot like a ’50s sitcom, except it’s not. I am allowed to leave the table before my father finishes eating and my mother never wears an apron and still never, ever cracks open a cookbook.

Sunny Solstices
Everything tastes better in the summertime when my mother brings the life of our garden to our mouths. Onion bread laced with rosemary from the herb patch. Tart apples boiled with brown sugar and cinnamon and drizzled over French vanilla ice cream. Fleshy figs, little loquats, and sweet strawberries swirled into compote. Baby zucchinis stuffed with rice and ground lamb meat. Bowls of bing cherries that we eat until our lips are stained dark red.
On bright afternoons, I play outside while my mom works her magic in the kitchen. Sometimes my dad pushes me on the garden swing, pressing his palms against my bony back so that I can ascend higher than my knees can take me. He leaves me and goes to pick an orange from our tree, unpeeling it on his way back while I try to pump higher without him. As I feel myself losing momentum, he begins pushing me again with one, distracted hand. He eats the orange with the other hand, occasionally placing a slice into my laughing mouth as I descend from the sky. Even though he is pushing me away from him, this is the closest we will ever be.

Weekend mornings
On Saturdays, my dad makes breakfast. He wakes me up early to embark on our exciting expedition, scooping me out of bed and carrying me towards the garage. I float through the house in his arms, weightless until we reach the car. When he lowers me, I climb into the passenger seat, curling up in my cotton pajamas and closing my eyes again as he starts the engine.
At La Boulangerie, I pick out a dozen donuts dotted with fluorescent sprinkles and several pastries, pregnant with chocolate or fruits. When we return home, my mother removes the pastries from their baby pink bakery box and cuts each one into three parts.
“We have to be fair,” she likes to say as she places the pieces onto our plates.
After breakfast, my dad either dozes off or disappears somewhere. He has done his duty for the day. My mom then takes me to the Farmer’s Market, where she weaves through the stands with purpose as I follow her sandaled feet. She lets go of my hand to gently squeeze some peaches or rub a cantaloupe before holding it up to her nose. I hold my breath as she laughs and lingers with the fish vendors, trying to find the freshest pick of the day.
On the drive home, the leathery scent of my mom’s sedan is masked by a curious blend of citrus, salmon and fresh flowers.
I love the smell of Saturday mornings.
The moment we arrive home, she pours the produce onto the gray granite of the kitchen counter and begins to wash each fruit and vegetable, one by one. Every so often, she summons me from a nearby couch, where I am absorbed in a book.
“Come look at this eggplant, Natalie,” she gasps. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“…Sure, mom,” I reply. I never quite understand what she’s talking about, but I want so badly to see what she does.

I carry your heart with me
No matter how busy she gets with work, my mom prepares my lunchbox every morning. While my little comrades stand in the cafeteria line or peel the sweaty plastic from their Lunchables, I stare into my lovingly packed mini-Igloo, trying to decide what to eat first. It is different every day. Hummus stuffed into triangles of pita. Homemade fruit cups. Pesto pasta salad. Sugary rings of dried pineapple. Celery stick logs lined with chunky peanut butter and raisins. A savory sample of mixed nuts. Cream cheese and raspberry jelly pressed between two pieces of whole wheat bread. She has somehow mastered the art of making healthy food delicious.
She sharpies “Be Good” onto my white paper napkins and draws two smilie faces underneath the inky letters. In this way, she comes to school with me every day for most of my life.

A missing ingredient
When the car business proves less than lucrative, my father abandons it and becomes a different sort of businessman, a “financial consultant,” he tells me. I don’t really know what that means except that he’s not around as much anymore. He leaves to Geneva, Switzerland to embark on a business venture when I am seven-years-old, and I sob under my covers for hours after we drop him off at the airport.
Although he no longer sits at the breakfast table, I hear his voice through the telephone line every morning after I read the comics. I ask him when he is coming home and he always says, “soon.” It takes me a year to realize he is lying to me, and it takes him two years to come back.
When my father is gone, I go through a series of stages. For a few weeks, I want to eat nothing but raisin bread. I was never a picky eater before.
In the morning, my mom eats the Sun-maid toast with me as we sit alongside each other at the kitchen table. I always nibble alongside the crusty border first, wanting to savor the small square of butter-saturated swirls for the last moments of breakfast.
The raisin bread is harder to come by at dinnertime. Sometimes I catch my mom eyeing me as I mash my barely-eaten bean salad into the corner of my bowl with a fork. She and I both know it will not disappear the way I want it to.
“Natalie, you’re eating like a bird,” she sighs.
“I don’t feel like eating this now,” I reply. “Can I have some raisin bread, please?”
She stares at me for a moment and my throat constricts until she silently gets up from the table to get a box of Saran Wrap from the counter. She tightens a layer of plastic over my abandoned meal, slides it away from me, and walks towards the toaster. A few minutes later, she sits back down again with the bread in hand, and I begin my path around the crust as she resumes eating the now-lukewarm meal she cooked us for dinner.
My raisin bread stage eventually subsides as I approach my seventh year. For my birthday dinner, my mom crafts a three-tiered black forest chocolate cake, each dark layer lined with a different fruit: raspberry, pear, peach. When I squeeze my eyes shut to blow out the candles, all I can wish is for my daddy to come back.
“It’s just you and me, Natalie,” my mom says sometimes after she hangs up the phone in the morning. I can’t see her eyes because her glasses have clouded over from the steam of her Earl Gray tea, but she sounds sad.
We learn to turn that lonely declaration into a mantra.
“It’s just you…,” she starts as she tucks me in at night, gesturing towards me with her index finger.
“And me,” I reply as I smile and point at myself with my thumb.
Sometimes we reverse it and though we know this makes no grammatical sense, it gives us a strange sort of comfort. We are in this together.
By the time I am blowing out the candles on the chocolate cake my mother makes for my eighth birthday, I no longer am wishing for my father’s return. His absence has become more familiar than his presence.
Only months after my father’s return in 1995, my mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. She puts her business on hold, but she keeps on cooking and taking care of the household while he spends the entire day on international business conference calls. It is like he never came back. Although she is back in good health after a few small surgeries, her relationship with my father has taken a less-than-benign turn.

Dough
At least once a month, my mother devotes an entire day to baking. She wakes up early with a certain look in her eyes and soon, the kitchen counter is coated in chalky flour. When my mother bakes, my mother bakes. Chocolate-chip cookies with walnuts. Oatmeal raisin bars. Anise biscuits. Banana bread. Foccaccia Bread. And my favorite: a Swiss Bread reminiscent of challah. I stand beside her at the counter, watching as she kneads the dough briskly with her pale knuckles. She lets me braid the elasticy strands before we slide them into the oven.
Hours and dozens of trays later, we sit down to enjoy the labors of our day. Before she raises anything to her mouth, she will hold it gently for a moment, her eyeglasses slipping down her nose as she rotates it in front of her. When I laugh at her, she tells me she has the right to admire her creations.
Sometimes I catch her looking at me with the same thoughtful tenderness.
When I am in middle school, my mom confirms that I am, in fact, a baked good.
“Children are like bread,” she explains to me one night as we talk about the kind of person I am and the kind of person I will become. “You can choose which ingredients you will add to the mix when they are babies and there is still time to shape them after the dough has risen. But once you put them in the oven, it’s hard to do much else.”
“You’re already in the oven,” she tells me. “It’s all you now.”
“But don’t worry,” she goes on. “There’s always time to add a little egg wash or some jam once you’re out of the oven.”
She had a point. I am not that much different from my 11-year-old self, except for a garnish or two.

Letting Go
A few weeks into my world history class the summer before ninth grade, we are learning about ancient Babylon and Hammurabi’s code. That same week, I learn that my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer again.
After a few minor tissue removals, her doctors tell her that there is a chance that the dense cells within her breast can become invasive. Because my mom hates taking chances almost as much as she hates the possibility of prolonged suffering, she rejects a lifetime of medicinal cocktails and radiation treatment and opts for the most extreme solution.
“Just take them both off!” she shouts at her doctors, even though the cancerous cells are only ravaging the right side. She labels her breasts the “the bad and the balanced.” She’s always been a fan of symmetry.
She spends the days before her mastectomy in the kitchen, preparing meal after meal and freezing them in Tupperware containers. My father spends the days in his room, shouting on his phone to business people who are somewhere far away, somewhere that isn’t here. He reemerges at dinner time with a guilty look on his face.
In the anesthetized moments before she rolls into the operating room, I cannot even hold her un-needled hand because it is painfully swollen with stress and sadness. I sleep in the hospital next to her bed for the next two nights.
Only one day after my mother’s surgery, my father departs on another business trip, leaving me alone to take care of my mother, even though it is she who always ends up taking care of me. I bring juice boxes to her in bed, and she insists on getting up to reheat the food she had so carefully prepared the week before. The only other time she gets up is to clean the drainage pumps that are connected to the flesh where her breasts once hung. I sit on the bathroom counter as she cries out from both the physical pain of her lost flesh and my father’s final, stinging abandonment. Every time she screams, I hate him more.

A Broken Table, a Battlefield
The kitchen table used to hold my family together and it is at the kitchen table that I realize my family has fallen apart. At breakfast, I hide behind the newspaper so I don’t have to confront my father’s empty stare or my mother’s sad eyes. Dinner is either thirty minutes of silence or an endless verbal joust:
You’re never around. I’m working! You never tell us anything. In due time. Why can’t you just tell us the truth? It’s more difficult than that. We’ve been at your mercy for years. Why do you have to bring up the past like that? We’re financially instable because of you, we never know what tomorrow brings. Why don’t you go back to work   again. I’m trying to hold this family together.
Their words incessantly swirl into the same, sad story every time.
It is at the kitchen table that I also begin to wonder why my parents didn’t separate years ago and what kind of joke it is that we are trying to sit down together for a civilized meal.
My mother now hates preparing food for him. “My brother always told me that you shouldn’t even fry an egg if you aren’t doing it with love,” she tells me.
But she keeps cooking anyways. “The two of us have to eat, too. What’s one more plate?” she mutters as she removes three forks from a kitchen drawer.
The acid dripping from my parents’ daily arguments begins to burns my esophagus, and I develop heartburn at the age of fifteen. When I start to acquire gastrointestinal problems, my mother takes me to my pediatrician, who chides me for my “Type A” personality. I never seek her medical advice again. She doesn’t understand that my body is grieving.

Reconciliation and Rotisserie Chicken
During the summer before my junior year of high-school, my mother takes back her maiden name and accepts a job to direct a Montessori school in Kuwait for a year. She leaves in November because she can no longer handle my father, but also because she wants me to learn to love him again.
An hour after the Super Shuttle takes my mom away, it is dinner time and my father and I move towards the kitchen. I walk to the fridge, where a final meal has been left for us with careful instructions about rearranging and reheating.
“I can help,” my father tries as he leans against the kitchen counter, swirling a glass of Merlot in his hand.
I shake my head no. Only one interloper in her world at a time.
He retreats to the table and leaves me to bumble about. The kitchen never seemed this big before. Was the microwave always so loud? When I open the spice cabinet to get salt, fifty clear Tupperware containers filled with crushed powders stare back at me. Her magic ingredients. I can barely stand to look at them.
I scoop the warmed meal onto two plates and bring everything to the table, now littered with my dad’s business papers. He pushes them aside and starts tucking into the food while I settle in my chair across from him.
When I try to raise the first bite to my mouth, I break. My fork falls from my hand as I bend my head down and start to quietly cry.
“Natoolie,” my dad murmurs, invoking the nickname he called me when I was a little girl. He has stopped eating.
I shake my head no once more without lifting my eyes. When I hear his fork clinking against his plate again, I steal a quick glance across the table. His big, watery brown eyes look cloudier tonight. Maybe, in some way, he misses her, too.
“It isn’t too late for him to learn how to be a father.” My mom’s voice echoes in my head as I blink at the empty seat on my right, remembering the conversation she and I had only hours before she left.
Maybe she’s right, but I’m just not ready for it to happen yet.
**
As the weeks pass, my father and I slowly negotiate our relationship in the kitchen while we stretch the potential uses of rotisserie chicken in every meal. I find myself regretting that I hadn’t always paid close enough attention to my mother when she urged me to watch her kitchen techniques, but there’s something fun about the ignorance that my father and I share.
On good days, my dad and I work together to make a meal and only argue about how much olive oil should go in the pasta sauce and whether or not rotisserie chicken really jives with ravioli. We laugh about the moody oven when I make brownies out of a Betty Crocker’s box, an event my mother would have considered blasphemy.
On bad days, we butt our stubborn heads and our arguments are bigger than the space of the kitchen. I am trying not to see him through my mother’s angry eyes, and I know that every time he looks at me, he sees her. In my inability to forgive him. In my acerbic rejoinders. In my laugh, in my smile, in my silent tears.
“I can’t take it anymore! Can’t you do anything right?!” I shout at him when something explodes in the microwave.
“I’m sorry, Natalie.” He looks hurt. “I wasn’t paying attention. Let me clean it up, at least.”
On most days, we exist sort of like tolerable roommates, acknowledging one another’s presence pleasantly while mostly staying out of each other’s way. We prepare breakfast separately each morning, but we eat together. Occasionally we will exchange a quiet smile or even a word as our newspaper pages overlap in the middle of the table, a picture from my features section resting on his business article.
I do all the food shopping, not only because my dad has a tendency to come back with everything but what’s on the grocery list, but because I find solace in the shelves of the supermarket. I remember my mother as I now linger in the produce section, sniffing the cantaloupes as nearby shoppers stare at me, bewildered.

Meals for One
My mom returns home just before my eighteenth birthday and my last year of high-school. For my birthday, we celebrate not only my entrance into legal adulthood, but also my parents’ divorce. It has been a long time coming. We continue living in the same house until high school is over. Probably not the best idea, but it is convenient and my parents have been living estranged for so long anyways that we’re all used to it. We drive to my graduation in separate cars. I go with my mom. My father goes alone.
Just before I leave for college, my parents finally go their separate ways. My father is now the fully realized version of the working vagabond he has always itched to be. When I see him on rare occasions, we always meet in a different place, a different country, a different restaurant table. An Indian restaurant in London, an outdoor café in Spain, a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles. We talk about college, about my future. We talk about the food in front of us, neither of us able to say what we really think: She can make this so much better. We also talk about his current business ventures; when he starts to ramble about a new project I have to remind myself that he is a lot like those characters in the books I read as a child who constantly invest in new-fangled contraptions that almost always fail. Sometimes I can just nod and go along with it, but sometimes the talking becomes too much for me and I rush to the bathroom, crying against a stall door as the past comes flooding back. Give him a chance, I convince myself, as I walk back to the table with a red nose and a tight smile.
I go home to my mother whenever I can. At the kitchen table, my body is purged of dining hall food, of college commotion, of constant motion. We talk about everything over plates of food. Fruit salad infused with rose water. Spicy curries. Homemade raisin bread. At breakfast, I study her hands, curled around a mug of Earl Gray, and I trace her startlingly blue veins with my eyes. Later I will stand beside the kitchen counter and carefully follow these hands as they fly across a cutting board and sprinkle spices into three different boiling pots. I don’t want to forget a single step. I am finally ready to learn.

Some possible hooks:

1. The pain. Ice pick jabbing into flesh. An electric shock. As though the wind has stripped your skin. The image of my grandmother’s face, skeletal and raw.

Download Scrapbook with full formatting as a pdf.

These are the sounds of Sunday School: an off-key guitar spitting songs against the stained glass windows. The whispers of boys in vans and kippahs. This is what Sunday School tastes like: grape juice. Challah toasted with honey. This is what the synagogue smells like: a vacuumed rug. This is how I feel: like I don’t belong. Eleven am Sunday brings me here against my will. I am 12 years old and I have better things to do than shift awkwardly in a pew while pondering why the lady with the guitar is always so happy. The room is dark, the windows full of jewels. Stand up, sit down. The red cushioned pews make a whooshing sound when you land. The boys giggle. I mouth words in Hebrew. I don’t know what they mean. Words in my mouth like skittles, full of sweet, innutritious familiarity.

Secretly, of course, I love it. The whole thing, especially the pretending not to love it part, especially the feeling out of place part. I love the songs. I love the crazy lady with the guitar. I love the lamps dangling like angels from the ceiling. I love the doors that hide the Torah, painted with some fantastic abstraction of color and swirl. I love the food, pieces of sweet bread rationed out, savored like chocolate truffles, and cups of juice so tiny they make you thirstier. This is a world unlike my own. Food is scarce and treasured. People smile for no reason. Songs uplifts without meaning. Most of all, God. God! Who is this God and why doesn’t he live above my house too? He must love all those tiny pieces of Challah with honey. He must love music and color and shiny happy people.

Sunday School is an alternate universe where the 10-12 year olds of my largely Jewish town go to learn how to be Jewish Adults. We do not know the truth: This ritual is an excuse for our parents to outdo each other with big fancy parties when we turn 13. I go compliantly every week. I am always late (my parents’ fault – our house, unlike Sunday School, does not run on time, nor does it include morning smiles or songs) The day includes a half-hour service in the chapel and an hour-long class. Here, the jewels of Jewish wisdom are fitted for our ears. We learn about the Torah and our holidays and our great ancestors of the past (yay). We learn about  Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (boo). We learn traditions and food and stories and games and charity.

We sing songs and color and bake and smile. It is one of those places where you know you are being treated much younger than you deserve, like summer camp, or the pediatrician’s office, but you tolerate it. As a kid, you can see there is, perhaps, something inappropriate about this kind of world view, and yet, it is all you really know.

It is here, among honey and music, among the fellow jeans-and-Skechers-wearing sons and daughters of the commandments, where I first learn about Zionism.  Zion. I think I’d heard the word once in a Bob Marley song. Little did I know Zionism was INVENTED by a Jew. His name was Theodor Herzl and he was born in 1860. Cut out a picture of him, color him, put him on the wall. Zionism is a tangible religion. It yields results; the state of Israel was founded in 1948. Cut out the state of Israel, color it, put it on the wall. Many people helped establish and care for this wonderful place. Cut out a picture of Chaim Weizmann,
David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, color them, put them on the wall. However, the Zionist path is paved with hardship. 1948. 1956. 1967. 1973. 1982. And yet we prevail. My name is Amy and I am a Zionist. Color
it, put it on the wall.

I will not remember the face of a single Sunday School teacher I ever have. I will remember every crevice, every eyebrow out of place, every intonation and awkward kitchen smell of my grade school teachers since kindergarten, but I will not recall a face or even a gender of a single Sunday School teacher from these few years. This is who I will remember: Ben Goldberg. Oh how I love Ben Goldberg. He is skinny and white with orange freckles and matted brown hair smashed against his forehead like thick acrylic paint. He always wears the widest leg cargo pants out of everyone, with silver chains that hang  mysteriously from the pockets at his knees, and too-small striped colored shirts. He is the prototypical, alpha, Jewish, 12-year-old Male. Always raises his hand first. Friends with everyone. Wideeyed. Smiling. Always doling out purple pieces of Bubble-Tape from one of his many pockets. Plus, he stutters, spewing words and spit with the kind of delightful enthusiasm that only boys of 12 can expound.

One day we are discussing Anti- Semitism and Unidentified Teacher asks us if we’ve ever experienced prejudice because of our cultural and religious affiliation. I rack my brain. I love to talk in class, but this one has me stumped. I always think racism, or anti-Semitism, like World Wars and black and white TVs, is a thing of the past. Ben raises his hand, my heart pounds and the skin below my fingernails feels warm. We are seated on the floor and Ben rises to his knees. He stutters through his story, loudly chewing his purple gum and rocking his hips back and forth to absorb some of that explosive boyish energy. This is the story: one time Ben was called a Kike. I have never heard this word before and I am rapt in attention as the teacher has Ben explain what this word means. Ben tells us and then elaborates on how he stood up for himself, telling the offender not to use offensive language. Oh Ben, my heart. How dramatic! How righteous to be slandered and given the chance to show such strength and moral standing. What a hero, what a knight. In my charmed middle-class town, the worst name I’ve ever been called is a Robot. I secretly romanticize the strife of a persecuted people. Perhaps it is my legacy. My confused sense of guilt. My 12-year-old brain cells born from bruised and exiled women now buzzing in the shadow of a hatred I’ve never really known. My family’s history is like a phantom limb, a third arm, the one that’s always raised, asking a question.

The teacher tells us about Israel’s “problem.” The problem, as I understand it, is Anti-Semitism. It is beautiful Ben being called a Kike. In regular school we learn about these assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. JFK. Now I learn about the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It has been three years since he was shot and Israeli dreams of peace fell to the ground like snow. Show a picture of Yitzhak Rabin, reaching over the body of President Clinton to shake hands with Yasser Arafat, cut it out, put it on the wall. This tragedy joins the  other benchmarks in my mind. There is a quiet air that settles over a classroom when you speak of important assassinated people. Children learn at a young age not to ask questions about the dead.

But there it is, my third arm, raising again. My phantom limb knows death, knows about the darker things that come from silences. Knows about hatred as more than words and history. Knows about historical cycles that build slowly like musical crescendos. There are always questions. And we, our tiny legs tucked under single desks filled with colored crayons, will learn to ask the right ones one day.

I raise my hand. Who killed him, I ask. The teacher does not answer right away. Who? I ask again. This is what I will remember most: we are surprised that Rabin is killed by a Zionist. Already my mind is forming blockades, easy smiling compartments, black and white, good and bad. The teacher does not want to disturb the clean desk drawers of my young mind. I don’t understand. Why did he do it? I will not remember the answer. But don’t all Israelis want the same thing? Aren’t we on the same side, the right side? The questions
loop in my mind like blank typewriter tape. Forming words into punctuated sentences until there is nothing but the loud hum of misunderstanding. If I could remember, I would see in my teacher’s eyes the reflection of cracked stained glass windows. The tumbling compartments of my mind, sticky with honey and breadcrumbs.

Years later I will go. I will climb the steps, one foot at a time, to the spot where Rabin was shot. I will go to his memorial monument. A pile of black rocks lit with orange lights. An Israeli soldier with sad eyes will whisper in my ear that Rabin’s peace was false, a show, a sham, a detriment, of course the man was shot. He will mumble something more in Hebrew, the drawers of his brain sealed shut, the whole desk wobbling. And mine: unhinged. I will stand and read: Here, at this spot, on Saturday, November 4. 1995,  Israel’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered. In capital letters, scratched in marble plaques: PEACE. In black spray paint on stone: PEACE. On paper, in murals, around necks. PEACE. Cut it out, color it, put it on the wall.