The last thing my boys wanted to do was visit their Zeide, but I talked them into going, my mind racing, parenting’s creative forces zooming. “We’ll make up stories on the way,” I cajoled, “and vote on the best one at the end.”
As the boys argued over who would go first, I imagined myself at a great wooden desk, alone, writing the novel I never have time to write. Instead of writing that book, scraps of dialogue spring unbidden during visits to my mother, images crowd my head as I drive to tae kwon do classes, and paragraphs of description write themselves at 2 a.m. as I lay in bed wondering how I’ll function when the baby cries out at 6.
Before I had children, I worked as a journalist. Some days, when the growing-up of children is going especially slow, I long to hold a finished article in my hand, to see my name at the top of a page, in black and white, complete.
Instead, I am inventing fairy tales for my children.
As we walked, I began a story about an enchanted bluebird who flew and flew to the other side of the Sun. Then Zach, my eldest, told his. But before Micah could begin his story, we arrived at my grandfather’s house.
After much knocking and banging, Zeide opened the door. He looked like Einstein, his white hair flying, his plaid flannel shirt wrinkled and untucked, his tangled beard scruffy and overgrown. It was usually 90 degrees inside; now it must have been 100. In fact, the thermostat was set on 98. The air was dead air, still putrid. A suitcase stood by the front door, as if someone was on their way out.
My grandma, who had not left his side for 64 years, had been taken to the hospital three days earlier. Grandpa had been left alone in his fogged and floating, Chagall-like world-remembrances of a Russian childhood, Belarutka, a forgotten train, games of gin, jars of medicine, a Reader’s Digest in large print.
I grabbed the suitcase and shoved it between the door and frame to get some fresh air in. Then I held out my Rubbermaid container of chicken soup, hoping to snap him back to the present with an object, something tangible, something he could hold on to.
“Do you want to eat, Grandpa?”
“No. It’s not 6 o’clock yet.”
As I moved to put the soup in the refrigerator, he sat me down and began ranting and raving. “That doctor’s a shyster,” he said, “He knows we have Medicaid. He’ll keep her there as long as he can. Trickster.”
I yelled into his right ear, the good one, telling him that my dad had seen the fluid coming out of her lung.
“You trust Dad, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t trust any of ’em.”
He gave up on me, knew I wasn’t buying his story.
Nearly every Sunday night when I was a child, after dinner he would sit me in a stiff, high-backed chair across from him and speak to me of his Russian childhood. He tried to pass on knowledge gleaned from 70 years of living, and I listened intently, memorizing, spinning gold from the straw of his life.
My father was quiet and unyielding, a mystery to me, but when my grandfather spoke, I knew where I came from. It was as if the genetic legacy had simply skipped a generation, spilling from my grandpa’s blood into mine. Lately, when he told a tale, I could fill in the missing pieces he had forgotten.
Now I realized that although he wasn’t telling a story, it was important for me to listen.
He raged on and on, angry and hostile, like an abandoned child. Then he said: “Forget it. It’s no good. I’m gonna give up.”
“You can’t give up, Grandpa, please.”
“You don’t know how hard it is.”
“I know it’s hard, but you have to keep trying. For Grandma, and for me. You have a lot to live for.”
“I can’t do it anymore. I’m giving up.”
“You can’t give up, Grandpa,” I screamed, “I won’t let you.” I spotted Zach and Micah, their eyes wide, watching as I yelled at him. “For them,” I said, as I pushed them both forward, “You need to keep going for them.”
Suddenly, Grandpa noticed the boys too. He turned to Zach. “You know who I am?” he said.
“You’re Zeide,” Zach whispered, a serious child, serious as ever now, his shoulders held straight back, looking up at his great-grandfather but just barely because at 7 years old he was almost as tall.
“Louder,” I coached Zach, “say it louder.”
“You’re Zeide,” he screamed.
Grandpa turned to Micah. “You know who I am?” he said, and Micah, who is good at yelling, rose toward him and screamed, “You’re Zeide.” Giggling, he retreated, looking to his brother for approval.
My eyes welled as I watched them tell their zeide who he was. Don’t we all lose sight of who we are? And how much of our selves do we define and how much is an amalgam of what others make of us?
My grandpa had grown accustomed to living as part of another person. His eyesight and hearing almost gone, my grandma saw for him and spoke for him, yelling into his good ear when he missed parts of conversations. She always cooked for him but insisted he wash the dishes and dry them. She was in charge of the thermostat, but he ruled the TV.
Now, in her absence, he had been reduced to less than one, fumbling in the darkness and heat, alone. Yet our very presence there, the human contact, seemed to be bringing him back. He was talking and, miraculously, seemed to hear also. Half of his self was gone, and he seemed to have discovered another self. Yes. She had left him. But he was someone. Zeide.
He was smiling when he turned from the boys. “Maybe I’ll have my soup,” he said.
I reached to open the refrigerator, and he pushed me out of the way. He showed me how to measure just enough soup into the bowl and let me pour only that portion into the pot.
As I put the remainder back into the refrigerator, I began thinking, maybe this is what it’s all about.
There have been many times in the past that I’ve envied my sister. Years ago she escaped the tentacled arms of our Jewish family, fleeing to a glamorous career on the East Coast. She comes home four or five times a year, regaling us with tales of her travels, tales of life at the cutting edge.
And I remain here, standing poised between the generations, pulled first by my parents and grandparents and then by my children. There have been many times when, overwhelmed by it all, I’ve been tempted to paint NEEDS in huge red letters across the living room walls.
But this was it, moments like this my sister cannot know. In my grandfather’s kitchen, with its rows of pill bottles strung out across the table and the yellow timer that tells him when his egg is done.
“Have you talked to Grandma?” I asked, as I watched my grandpa blindly push at the buttons above the stove, feeling for the right one with his fingers.
“No,” he said, still angry, but less so.
By the phone, there was nothing. I wrote Grandma’s number in huge black script and asked if I should dial for him.
Grandma thanked me for the card I wrote and for the flowers, the card most of all, she said, as I had told my brother she would when I wrote it. My brother and I had stood in the hospital gift shop debating over which flowering plant was “her.” Yellow, we had decided, but I bought the pink instead, a compromise between the purple I favored and the yellow I knew she would like, a blending, an absolution we could never achieve in real life.
Unlike my grandfather, who was an ancient version of myself, Grandma and I had always been like two old goats staring each other down from opposite sides of the mountain. She loved to wave my sister’s filigreed Hallmarks before my eyes. “Read what Lesli wrote me for Mother’s Day. Read it out loud,” she would say.
But now she was in the hospital, her body diminished by cancer, and I had brought the one person who mattered most to her his soup, made just the way she instructed me. The telephone became a lifeline, crisscrossing the distance, connecting us in a way we hever had before.
She told me she loved me, and I said, “I love you too,” and now we were both crying and I felt a release of all the hate and anger, a resolution of sorts, with her and our rocky past.
“I’m telling Grandpa: `Another day and I’ll be home. He can’t handle more than that,’ ” she said.
For the first time in our lives we agreed on something.
Reluctantly, Grandpa took the phone. “I’m OK,” he said gruffly. “Shelly made the soup. I’m gonna eat now. You OK? Go eat your dinner. It’s OK.”
His short, declarative sentences had much love in them-a deep, abiding, interdependent, 94-year-old kind of love, a love I, as a child of two individuals who had gotten married, had children and proceeded in opposite directions, had never witnessed. My grandparents’ love was strong and thick as oak, ringed with age, knowing and full of courage.
He was still angry but reconciled to Grandma’s absence and in a pure act of love, had told her it was OK even when it wasn’t. “It’s OK,” was all he could muster, and it was a lot.
After Grandpa poured the soup in his bowl, he urged us out. He walked us to the door, and the boys ran free.
I said goodbye and told him I loved him. He didn’t say, “I love you too,” out loud. Men of his generation certainly never had time to learn of feelings. But his eyes watered and stared into mine. “So long,” he said. “I never say goodbye to people I love. I say so long.”
As we walked home, Micah began his story, narrating a tale that was hard to follow and never ending.
Or maybe I just couldn’t concentrate, head filled with doubt, thoughts of death, love, dependency, the growing together of human beings. A new meaning for Platonic love had emerged: Maybe it’s not that we find our other half but that we become halves of each other-interdependent, a completion of that which, as the years advance, has grown incomplete, inoperable.
Zach asked why I had yelled at Zeide. I told him it was because Zeide couldn’t hear. But I wonder if perhaps I was angry-angry that he could think of leaving me when I love him so and had begun to believe he would live forever.
We never voted on the best story. Maybe it wasn’t mine or Zach’s or Micah’s. Maybe it was the life story. The life itself. The thing that can’t be written. The thing we breathe.
