NATIONAL LEAGUE OF AMERICAN PEN WOMEN
HONOLULU BRANCH presents
2022 LORIN TARR GILL
WRITING COMPETITION AWARDS
Poetry
1st Sue Cowing “Occupation”
2nd Tamara Leiokanoe Moan “Krakatoa My Heart”
3rd John E. Simonds “Memorial Day Nights” (Six haiku)
Honorable Mention Kaethe Kauffman “The Graveyard”
Fiction
1st Bob MacKenzie “War Games”
2nd Arabella Ark “Blips on the Way to Oblivion”
3rd Susan Killeen “Fragments”
Honorable Mention Phyllis Frus “Breaking Up is Hard to Do”
Nonfiction
1st Sabra Rae Feldstein “Golden Fish”
2nd Elsha Taya Travis “My Mother Tongue”
3rd Kaethe Kauffman “A Large Whale Bone”
Honorable Mention Deborah Ross “Throwback”
Honorable Mention Tamara Leiokanoe Moan “Nā ‘Amakua”
Scroll below to read the works in order of the awards listed above.
Poetry
1st Sue Cowing “Occupation”
When I retired early, others asked
What in the world will you do with yourself? I think I said
that if nothing else I could spend all day
just watching the way light moves
through my house. Well, that convinced them I probably should
step down and go there,
wherever there was.
Still, it has taken me years to arrive,
to realize I truly have nothing
more important to do than to be aware
of light, to delight in the shadow theater
that is my house, or to be there when sun
plays on the ever-changing scrim of clouds
in the domed theater outside. It’s light
I look for every day now, light
shining through and making shadows of my self. And you. And every one.
2nd Tamara Leiokanoe Moan “Krakatoa My Heart”
did not wish her work to be shared.
3rd John E. Simonds “Memorial Day Nights” (Six haiku)
Floating flames display
memories for those we miss,
one May night each year.
Asian hosts deploy
top star brass on jumbo screens
to soothe wars’ mournings.
Shinnyo-en has launched
“Many Rivers, One Ocean”
for two decades now.
Grieving prompts this rare
time we flicker waves to care
for lost lives we share.
Candle floats retrieved,
hushed thousands leave sea beach park,
in dark reflection.
High-rise windows glow
nearby, towered lights of lives
we may never know.
Honorable Mention Kaethe Kauffman “The Graveyard”
My grandparents, great-grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles
All rest together at Ocean View cemetery,
Perched on a cliff above the Straits of Juan de Fuca
Outside Port Angeles in Washington state where my ancestors homesteaded in the 1800s.
It’s a wooded area, surveyed by deer and watched over by eagles.
When I visit with family members, I put myself in charge of flowers.
I tell stories to my son, nieces and nephews about the old folks.
I recite prayers.
I get so caught up in the busy distractions, I feel little but a vague nostalgia.
Last year, for the first time, I found myself alone.
I plopped down on the grass beside Mom, Dad, my Step-dad, Aunt Dorothy and Aunt Lin,
All imperfect and all loved,
Still teaching me to accept my own flaws.
Oddly, I heard the distant sound of bagpipes, so haunting, I thought it might be a ghost.
Several acres away, I spied a tiny figure with pipes on his back.
As the piper slowly walked closer and the dirge-like moans grew louder,
Some inner lock on my emotions, that I hadn’t know was closed, broke open.
Sitting with my dead family, I cried in the graveyard, for the first time,
Feeling grief, heartbreak, and nameless sorrow for
Nature’s timeless cycle that causes our dazzling human energies
To spark, flourish and then disappear.
When the piper drew near me, I called out, tear tracks streaking my face,
“Thank you for your music.”
“This is a good place for me to practice.
But I missed the final note of the last verse,” he said with a small smile.
“I couldn’t tell,” I said, my voice raw.
When he walked beyond me, he began to play Amazing Grace.
The old hymn, in bagpipe drones, unlatched a deeper place in my gut.
I sobbed, shaking with the depths.
I let myself dwell in the crashing netherworld, where I’d never allowed myself before.
My ancestors gave me the gift of a bagpiper
And knowledge, at the feeling level, of life’s realities.
Fiction
1st Bob MacKenzie “War Games”
The Forman home was large and comfortable. It was built of the wood-frame construction so popular throughout the prairies, but it was not of the usual prairie design. It had towers with tall pointy rooftops and it had large airy windows, not a common sight among homes in the mid-twenties. It surprised most people, much as it had young Adam Grey when he had arrived six months earlier. To Adam, it was a castle, a magnificent faery castle. The yard was a full half acre, transformed by Adam's five year old mind into a whole world. He had a jungle, a garden of magic flowers, a lake for his boats which was almost as big as four bathtubs and, in front of the shed where Uncle Ben parked his "Tin Lizzie," the new Ford automobile, he had a desert of sand. The sun was hot. The brown truck raced across the desert faster than it should. It left a smoky trail of dust and oil fumes. So far to go. So little time. Adam must reach the camp before the enemy and deliver the boxes of ammunition which were under the canopy of his truck. Otherwise his men were lost. The enemy would just march in and take over.
Out of the sun came a sleek biplane, a hunter set for the kill. Faster and faster it flew, straight toward the brown truck. Baron Livesay had his target in line. He was sure of another hit. He pulled back the lever and his twin guns grew red flowers. A split second later, a streak of holes opened in the truck's canopy.
"Whaam!"
The hand swooped, overturning the truck, obliterating the roadway, sending sand every which way.
Uncle Ben had made a truck, a gun carriage, and two wagons complete with horses for Adam. When he learned that Adam's friend, Tommy, wished for some too, he had made another complete set, plus a brightly painted biplane for each boy. He hadn't much to do now, not since the accident in the plant five years earlier. Besides, he enjoyed making things of wood, and the boys enjoyed getting them. Adam and Tommy liked Uncle Ben.
All afternoon they had played with their toys on the dirt walkway below the verandah. "She must be very old," said Adam. "Who?" Tommy asked. "Aunt Mary. My Aunt Mary must be awful old."
"Don't you know?" "Know what?" "How old she is." "Nope, but she's an awful lot older than my mother!" "Boy, she sure must be old." "Yeh!"
Aunt Mary was sitting on the verandah. It was peaceful there in the sunshine which filtered through the latticework at the side of the house. She read. She watched the boys play. It was a quiet way to spend the day.
Aunt Mary looked up from her reading. She glanced briefly at the Europe on the path.
"Boys. Adam, dear. Tommy. Come on inside; it's time for tea." She got up and started for the door. It was habit with her. Each day at about three in the afternoon she would prepare tea. There would be a piping hot kettle of tea for herself and Ben. The boys would each have a big freshly poured glass of cold milk. To finish the snack off just right, they would all enjoy a selection of her special homemade cookies.
Adam looked up. "Time for a rest," he said. "Head for the barracks," Tommy agreed. "We all can't go at once." "The other guys can guard the fort." "Livesay and Grey first!" "To the barracks!" The two boys bounded up the stairs to the verandah, ducking and swerving to avoid a hail of gunfire. Inside, Tommy and Adam walked down the hall gingerly. "Young gentlemen do not run indoors," Aunt Mary had told them many times. They sat in their places at the round wooden table in the dining room. The ceiling was so very high here that Tommy always wondered if it touched the sky. Adam wondered what would happen if the whole thing ever fell down.
Uncle Ben came in. He whistled a spritely tune as he rolled his wicker wheelchair up to the table. Aunt Mary followed, making two trips to bring everything that was necessary for afternoon tea.
"Well boys, how goes the war?" "I think we'll win soon, General Forman." "Not too good, Uncle Ben." "That's not a good game for young boys, Ben. Playing at war, with people dying..." "It won't hurt them Mary." "Will I die, Aunt Mary?" "I'm gonna live forever."
"I suppose you are both correct, boys," she said, "in a way. Although we must all someday pass from this world, if we are the right sort of person, if we live good lives, we may live forever, with God at his home in Heaven."
"Will Mommy live forever?" Aunt Mary hesitated, then looked across the table at Uncle Ben. "Benjamin?" Adam was staying with his mother's aunt and uncle because his mother had been
hospitalized. He knew she was terribly ill, but no one talked with him about what was wrong with her. He liked staying in the big white house. Still, he hoped she would soon be well and they could go home. His father had been killed during the war before he was born. ("To make a better world for you to live in," Uncle Ben had said.) His mother was the only parent he had known. He missed her, even though they paid regular visits to the hospital.
"Yes, Adam, she'll live forever." "Is she going to die?" "Can I have a peanut butter cookie?" Tommy reached ambitiously across the table. Aunt Mary stopped him with a glance. "Please pass me a cookie," said Adam. Aunt Mary passed Adam the cookies. Uncle Ben passed the cookies to Tommy. Both boys said thank you. "Gentlemen ask politely when they wish to have something. They do not reach." "Now Mary, they're just boys. It's a natural instinct, and perhaps a good one too, to grab out for what you want. They'll learn sometime that to get anything from life they must fight for it."
"Five years of age is not the time, Benjamin!"
Aunt Mary left.
Adam and Tommy left too. They had finished their cookies and milk. Besides, they knew better than to stay around when Uncle Ben was called Benjamin. It could mean trouble. Aunt Mary only said Benjamin when she was worried or angry.
*** The rest of the afternoon had gone peacefully. Tommy had gone home. Supper had been eaten. After supper, Adam got into the "Tin Lizzie" along with his Aunt Mary and Uncle Ben, and they drove off to town to see his mother.
Her name was Mary, too. She had been named after Aunt Mary, then she in turn named Aunt Mary as Adam's godmother. In many ways she was a lot like her aunt.
The five mile drive took the best part of a quarter hour. Adam enjoyed it. He enjoyed riding in a motor car that moved without horses. He liked watching all the scenery go by in its rush to get somewhere else. He spoke with his aunt and uncle about many things.
"Do clouds have motors like an aeroplane or a Tin Lizzie? How do they move?" "The wind moves them like it does the leaves." "Will I have grey hair when I get old?" "No one can tell. Maybe."
"Why does Mommy stay in that place?" "She's very ill. Perhaps she'll come home soon, though. If the doctor says so." "When?" "Hey! Look at the cows and horses!" "And there's a field of barley; look how heavy the heads are; see how the wind moves it
too!"
They pulled up in front of the hospital. This evening seemed different to Adam. It had started at supper. The phone had rung–two shorts and a long–then Aunt Mary had whispered to Uncle Ben. All Adam had heard were the words: attack, crucial, Benjamin. When Aunt Mary said Benjamin, somebody was in for it.
They walked into the hospital.
Soon, Doctor Stone came around one of the corners. Doctor Stone was a big man, not as old as Uncle Ben but not as young as Mary Grey. He always had a big smile on his face. It wasn't a happy smile or a sad smile either, but it was always big. Tonight, Doctor Stone looked tired; his eyes especially looked tired. Adam thought he even looked a bit sad.
"Adam, come with your aunt and me." "Where?" "I'll take you to a nice room where you can wait with your Aunt Mary. There are lots of big sofa chairs and plenty of interesting picture books for you to read. I'll come back in a while and take you to your mother."
"Oh." Uncle Ben stayed behind to talk to Doctor Stone. They waited a long time. Adam curled up on the davenport with a magazine, but he soon fell asleep in the soft upholstery. He dreamed he flew on a cloud to Heaven. He saw God and his mother and father. He thought he could stay forever but they told him: not yet. His mother left then to return to earth. Then he dreamed he was coming back to the world too–alone.
"Adam, Adam, wake up." "Come on now. Can't sleep on guard duty you know." They walked down the long hall. They turned left into the room.
"Mommy! Mommy! Hi! I'm here again!"
"Oh, Adam. I'm so glad you're here! How are you, my son?" She began to cry softly. Adam wondered at the tears she cried onto his cheek. She looked very tired.
Mary Grey held her son to her chest and slipped into a deep sleep. Suddenly Adam felt very old.
2nd Arabella Ark “Blips on the Way to Oblivion”
BLIP ONE
Time Goes by So Slowly
Wait for It, Wait for It, Allow It Some Time
Lucky arrived at the station just before eleven. It was quite dark, and no one was on the platform. This dream trip was not ideal. It was a scouring of the soul, a “scraping of the last shreds of meat from the bone” kind of trip. She approached the track with luggage unreasonably heavy and saw no one on the other side. The train master’s office looked deserted; the ticket window closed. She rechecked her ticket, and yes, her train was due at eleven, departing Athens for Istanbul at eleven fifteen. She was heading east for the first time.
The wind was sharp; her clothes too thin; her camera heavy; the loneliness at the station palpable. It was Christmas Eve, she the only soul traveling and not toward family. She wasn’t sure why she had come; looking for something or someone; but had found nothing in four days except ruins and closed shops. It felt cold enough to snow, but close to the sea, the icy weather decided to wet and slap her unshielded skin.
He wasn’t there, her husband. He wasn’t in Athens. Sometimes she was lucky, and he turned up as she haunted ancient sites. Not this time. Her fragile wings felt more like claws, clinging to the mire of entanglements through the centuries, of retribution, of guilt from her mortal failures.
And, she missed him. She missed him so much. She pushed down the prickly sensation in her nose and throat of tears about to flow, pushed down the disappointment, pushed down the missing. Maybe this wasn’t the right century. Or country. Or place. She planted herself elsewhere, caught a train, and hoped for the best. She hoped he would catch up with her, grab her suitcase by the handle, and lead her home. She wanted to reach up on tiptoe to place her arms around his neck, how she missed that stretch, when he pulled her into a tight and lengthy embrace.
She left him, her most recent entanglement, a self-styled guru of sorts, the very frank and ascetic, Josh, who was a much-admired practitioner of A Course in Miracles. He was a celebrity of sorts in the eyes of those following the path of new age style enlightenment. Though he had a full mane of wavy white hair, baritone voice, and sparkling eyes, he was a mistake. Sometimes she erred, thinking a new love was her husband, only to be disappointed on getting to know the new man better.
Before they met, Josh spent most of his adult life like the Biblical Joseph, a carpenter, and lived in communes all over the world. He fathered a few children from brief liaisons with various devotees, as he was joyously polyamorous, remembering his children on rare occasions, just as Ibn had occasionally remembered one or two of his. When this Josh became a self-styled mystic, he changed his name, choosing Joshua as it meant salvation. Lucky, too, changed her name. He chose Arbella for her, meaning yielding to pray, or maybe simply, yielding to him. It was then they had married by the temple, holding hands in a ceremony with hundreds of others, outside a hippie communal geodesic dome in the heart of a distant rainforest, somewhere tropical and humid.
She wielded a hammer like other commune members to build such geodesic domes for meditation, covered pavilions for cooking, and huts for sleeping. There were no telephones, no mail, no paved roads, no internet. There were lots of drugs. The group was a polyglot of nationalities, although most were American and all spoke English. They were young, hopeful, and amoral. Lucky come Arbella helped in the vegetable gardens, scrubbed laundry on the rocks near a waterfall, and took care of Josh’s every personal need and desire.
His beard was Jesus length in varying shades of gray, his head topped by that shock of curling white she so associated with her true love, though Josh let his hair grow quite long and unruly. He was ascetic-thin, living on air and religious fervor, more attentive to his notion of God than to food or to her. She was young; her blonde hair draped to either side of her soft, often naked buttocks, her small breasts rarely clothed lifted upward toward her lips, above which her blue eyes shone with the light of naïveté and hope.
He levitated. It was marvelous to see. He sat in a lotus pose, eyes closed, breathing deeply with audible frog-like exhalations. Slowly, his body began to rise until it was about eighteen inches above the floor. He remained suspended while deep in his self-induced trance for varying periods of time.
She was jealous of his practice, of his devotion to God. She wanted his attention on her. He, on the other hand, wanted her to drop acid, drink the toxic and hallucinogenic ayahuasca, eat magic mushrooms, snort cocaine, shoot heroin, smoke peyote and marijuana, swallow ecstasy whole. Then, he said, she might loosen up enough to leave her body, to astral travel, to enjoy the shamanic insights which he so regularly did. But, she did not indulge in pills, drinks, or smoke.
She tried kriya yoga instead. She let her breath ride the down escalator from her nostrils to her pubis, down her spine and back up, through every one of the seven chakras, down and back up until she felt fully charged. When her body vibrated like an electrical circuit board, she opened the long-closed fontanelle at the top of her skull to let her soul fly out on electric volts of energy. The excited air took her on a magic carpet ride through time and the cosmos.
How shocking it was. Bits and pieces of people she knew, actual body parts or whole cadavers, flew by like birds seeking their nests against galactic winds. But, there were no nests in space. She saw babies, a fetus even, drift by, quite out of reach, though reach for it she did. She saw her mother, the Pythia from Amfissa; she saw her dog, Molossus; she saw her headless husband, Sultan Du, and many others from the corner of her eye. Her out-of-body experiences completely unnerved her. Wedding veils, white roses, and children traveled through the galaxies like asteroids nearly colliding with her, above and below her path. Magnetized as though iron filled her marrow, she attracted them to her, as if to no other.
Out there, it was not silent. She heard music. She thought it was the celestial spheres, but the chords were too familiar. Bach, Beethoven, the plucking as Guillaume did of harp strings, and of her own old songs played on the lute and pipa, her fingers striking the keys of the virginal. The old sounds filled her with longing to find the players, find the singers, find her husband whom she realized, whom she knew, was not this present Josh. He was not her true love. He was a misadventure of sorts, a wrong turn in her search.
Disappointed, she returned to her body spent, her spark of life waning. Needing rest, she stayed abed for long, drowsy days, until she remained immobile long enough to feel herself refreshed.
Joshua needed the help of drugs to attain heights before unimaginable. She did not. Her free spirit rose and traveled on its own vehicles of transport wherever she wished to go, even when the destination was unknown. Drugs frightened her. Her inner life was beyond vivid. His was not. Like many of his followers, he needed external stimulation to unleash his mind to unknown realms.
She wanted to gain an ecstatic state with Joshua through orgasmic love-making instead of taking her kriya astral travels, which were so melancholic, the solo magic carpet rides, hurtful to her energy and spirit. She wanted to attain ecstasy in the mindless union attained through her body joined to his, her spirit merging with his. That carnal connection was how she experienced God.
Lucky’s eyes dimmed with disillusion; their marriage had not succeeded. It might have produced a child or two, she could not recall, but no lasting happiness. When, a year or so later, a daughter was born, all seemed well, and the little family left the hospital for the drive home in their rusted-out Volkswagen camper.
But, perhaps discharged too soon, as a new mother, she began to hemorrhage as the van bumped over rutted forest roads. Blood flowed from her womb as expected, but there was too much. It flowed into the upholstery of the car seat. Her head grew light. She fainted while holding the baby in her arms, and hit her head on the console. In a panic, Joshua turned the car back, returning, racing to the emergency entrance of the hospital they just left. They scraped her uterus. Arbella, wait, was it Arbella? almost died from loss of blood. Three days later she was able to go home with a mild concussion. She didn’t know where the baby was.
They became accident prone. They moved the commune to a city. Joshua sought the thrill of speed on the city streets there and rode a big Harley. She thought him part guru and part Hell’s Angel. He had an accident, one where his face was torn, teeth ripped out, jaw smashed, skull bored through by the handle bar of his motorcycle. A car hit his motorcycle on a rainy road. He tumbled under the car’s weighty tires which also drove the handle bar of his bike through his mouth and out the backside of his skull, narrowly missing the medulla. He lay in critical condition when she arrived, but conscious. She gently wiped road grit from his one unscathed eye with a damp white cloth.
He warned days later as she ministered to him, his words barely audible, “Careful around my wounds.”
“Of course,” she replied. “You’re not cut right here,” she said, touching his temple, “just dirty. There’s a tear at the edge of your mouth. I can take a picture of it for you.”
He cut her off. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to see. I don’t want a picture or a mirror. I don’t want to see myself.”
How true, she thought, chastened. He never really wanted to see himself or acknowledge the flamboyant ego he possessed. He pretended to seek Truth, but she saw he was fearful. He demanded his followers engage in trust exercises. He ordered them into a large circle, shoulder touching shoulder. One person stood on a platform or diving board above the group with his back turned. Then, on Joshua’s command, the person fell backward into the open circle, trusting to be caught and held aloft in the outstretched arms. Everyone participated, except Lucky.
This was not an exercise she could do, nor one she wanted to do. She would not risk injury in order to be part of a group. She did not trust her well-being to others. She did not engage in random acts, of what she would term, idiocy. It was only in love that she took risks and was brave. She faced truth, sought it out, even, and dealt with it. She owned her actions. She felt no need for group approval. Joshua did. He lived in a dimly lit, mystical cavern of lies supported by followers all seeking god and devotion, a place where they could avoid truth as he invented a bright, new reality for them all.
She wondered if she was to live her entire life dissatisfied. Why did she not accept Joshua’s love and move with him in his groupie togetherness? Why did she wait for a state of perfection and distrust the validity of his love? Why did she suspect the love mightn’t last or be supportive or quite good enough for her? She knew the answer: it was uncertainty on her part: uncertain that he was worthy of her love and full attention just as she was uncertain he was her true husband returned.
“I was the one who said no, who did not join hands and go through the circle to a future together. I waited. I hesitated. I stayed outside,” she remembered the group wedding where dozens of his devotees got hitched at once.
In a year or two, healed well enough from his accident, Joshua got up to his old tricks of seduction and engaged in a tryst. Then another, and then another. She remembered those years when free love was in the air and on everyone’s lips and tongues. She remembered Joshua ushering loosely amorous young things into her world, into her bed, demanding she share him, expand her consciousness, drop her morals.
She seemed to remember a child, children, rooms filled with children, unsure of whose they were. And rooms, so many rooms, some she built, others she forgot were there but found herself in them. Josh was there, and he was not there. She found other women in the rooms she thought she built, she thought were hers. It was all so dream-like, and the dreams recurred: the children, the boys, the girls, the rooms, the women. Faces recalled but names lost, that sort of thing. But, names soon came back; the lapses only transitory at first. Her grandchildren accused her of repeating herself, telling them stories they heard before. She laughed them off.
All the freedom Josh demanded for himself cost her love, worse, it bankrupted her heart and her hopes. She grew disenchanted, no, she grew disgusted, by Joshua’s endless pursuit of other women, his polyamorous attitude of “the more the merrier,” spreading enlightenment to the spread legs around him. She tired of Joshua’s growing need to be a mystic, a guru, a leader enlightened and worshipped. His cerebral, spiritual epithets, the endless, pretentious drivel of gratitude, the host of holier-than-thou mantras, the mumbo-jumbo he muttered to his adoring followers wore her.
She stopped loving him. She left him. He wasn’t hers, anyway. She moved out, leaving the child, the children, were they hers or his, she wasn’t sure. They were quite strange. They didn’t know how to laugh.
She away from that island on the other side of the world.
An encounter with a well-dressed island couple at the tiny, tropical inter-island airport amused her as it was unusual to see a woman in heels there, unusual to see a man in blazer and tie.
“Where are you headed?” Lucky asked.
“A marriage encounter.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a sort of Come to Jesus meeting for relationships for divorced or widowed couples,” the man said.
“What kind of questions about relationships?” Lucky asked.
“We talk about their eternal life,” the woman clarified. “Which spouse do you meet in Heaven when you die?”
Lucky knew well that true love was everlasting, feeling her many lives as they teetered between laughter and tears.
When they called her flight, she excused herself from further conversation with the couple, and flew east to her new post at a ceramic center in England called Rufford.
3rd Susan Killeen “Fragments”
did not wish her work to be shared.
Honorable Mention Phyllis Frus “Breaking Up is Hard to Do”
did not wish her work to be shared.
Nonfiction
1st Sabra Rae Feldstein “Golden Fish”
did not wish her work to be shared.
2nd Elsha Taya Travis “My Mother Tongue”
The color black has been associated with everything mystical and supernatural. In the old days black flowers were believed to have evil powers that were used by witches in their magic. But do these black flowers really exist? Is the black orchid real? And has anyone ever seen one in person?
~ From The Mystery Behind the Black Orchid (orchidcarezone.com)
My father steps out from the shelter of our terrace into the fierce equatorial sun, dark sunglasses shielding his handsome face. He has come out to inspect his kite strings drying in our backyard. Dipped in a mixture of glue and crushed glass, the strings are laced between four stakes, rammed into my mother’s newly-planted grass. They shimmer in the sun.
My father does not see me. I’m standing in the shade of the laundry house, diagonally across from where he surveys his lines of glass-armored strings, the ultimate weapon in his kite wars. He’s the Man. The Boss. The One who when he calls you, you better drop whatever you’re doing and you run to him. Not walk. No, you run. God forbid he should wait. But he doesn’t know I’m here. He doesn’t know I’m watching him. I’ve learned to watch him vigilantly, to not turn my back to him.
My father is popular on the soccer field. “See these legs?” he brags, “Soccer legs.” He shows off his favorite trick: quickly pulling the ball back with his left foot to change its direction and fool his opponents. Women love him. His green eyes, easy laugh, generous money. I’ve watched in wonder as he entertains guests, one moment acting like a dimwitted local, talking pidgin and scratching his butt, then switching into the high-faluting speech of a tight-assed Dutch official, and just as quickly taking on the stance and gestures of a classic Javanese dancer. All with comic exaggeration. He is clever and seductive. But I know him as a bully, a dangerous little snot of a boy parading as a grown-up. But this is what confuses me: he loves me. But I can’t trust him. One moment he’ll pull me up on his lap, kissing me, stroking my hair, my face, my back. The next moment he’ll beat me up. For nothing. For waking him up from his nap when I bounce my ball or laugh too loud. For speaking up. For catching him in a lie. “It’s just a joke,” he snarls as he whips out his belt. My mother does nothing. “Ask him for forgiveness.” She mutters in my ear. For what? I did nothing wrong! But she has already left the room.
It’s not fair! It’s not fair! Nothing is fair! He’s a bully and a cheat. He gets mad at everything. You never know what he is going to do next. My mother is afraid of him. But I am not. I’m not because I know he loves me. He really loves me. He does. It’s so confusing. I’ve been thinking about it. You know what I think? I think he needs my love. He needs me! But I don’t love him and I don’t need him. All the while when he was gone fighting the war, I never missed him. Besides, I’m not his daughter, even though my mother says I am. I don’t believe it. I don’t even feel like I’m her daughter.
Back in Java during the war, my Aunty Nini took care of me from the time I was born. Maybe she is my mother. I love her so much. When we moved to Borneo, she got left behind. In all the chaos of boarding the boat with so many people crammed together in the hold, I did not realize that she was missing. Now I cry for her every day. I miss her so much that I’m not hungry anymore. I don’t want to eat anything, even when my mother threatens to punish me, I won’t eat.
Nini was the best cook. She always saved some of the most delicious parts for me, like the burnt crust of freshly-cooked rice called kerak. And ondeh-ondeh, delicious rice balls filled with warm runny palm sugar. And oh, my special: Nini always saved any soup bones for me, so I could suck out the gooey warm marrow. Nini was my world. She sewed all my clothes, crochet-ing the edges along the neck and pockets. She is my father’s sister who never married. She walks with a limp and she’s so quiet. She never laughs, never gets angry. When my mother scolds her, Nini just looks down and never says anything back. She just bends over her embroidery as if the flowers she is stitching could rustle up from the cloth and fold her into their silky petals. Afterwards her hands would be stained with blood from secretly pricking her fingers on purpose.
I don’t need my mother either. She is away all day, every day, taking care of sick and wounded people. The hospital needs all the nurses they can get and she graduated just before the war. In the morning she leaves smelling of her lemon grass soap and dragon tongue shampoo. And in the evening, she comes back with the hospital’s moans from fevers and chills still clinging to her uniform. “Do not leave the compound.” She warns, “It’s getting more and more dangerous outside.” One morning when she had almost reached the safety of the hospital, she got caught in crossfire and got shot in her right leg. She still carries shrapnel in her calf.
My father was taken prisoner of war shortly after I was born. He survived torture, dysentery and starvation while doing slave labor in the copper mines of Japan. After the war, the Red Cross worked hard at reuniting survivors with their families. I wish they had not.
“Mamma, who is that red man?”
“That’s your pappa.”
“What’s a pappa?”
“Go up and kiss him.”
“I don’t want to. He’s red.”
“He’s not red. That’s sunburn. Go on. He loves you.”
I don’t understand why people fight. Nini does not fight. Ever. I watch her lick the tip of her embroidery thread, squeezing it flat so she can easily push it through the eye of the needle. Then she ties a knot by wrapping the thread a bunch of times around the needle, sliding it all the way down to the end of it and, like magic, it becomes a knot! Nini is a wonder. I never leave her side, staying close to her, as close as I can without getting in the way. She’s soft as a pillow and I live in her aroma of fried shallots and brown sugar. I follow every stitch she makes. Chain stitch for the flower stems, satin stitch for filling in the leaves and petals. When she gets up to boil water for our tea, I imagine myself picking up the needle and stitching the next flower. What color thread shall I use? I imagine filling in the flower petals, stitch by beautiful, even stitch, until each one is shining with color. Soon Nini is back and we both sip our sweet tea and watch geckos puff up their quivering see-through throats.
I don’t understand why my mother is always angry at Nini, why she frowns and picks on her. Like the day she discovered that Nini and I wash ourselves in the bath house together. What’s wrong with that? Nini and I do everything together. But my mother says that I’m now old enough to wash myself and she sends me off to the bath house alone. The bath house is way back outside by the clump of banana trees. It is full of shadows there. The cement floor is slick with wetness. Moss grows in the corners. I feel all alone and cry and cry for Nini. I wail. It’s scary here all by myself. When my mother finally comes for me, I don’t look at her. I want nothing to do with her. I will never forgive her and I will never be a mother. Mothers are mean. They should stay in hospitals and never come home.
I miss Nini still, as I stand here, watching my father. I watch him take off his sunglasses. He frowns against the sun. With the tip of one finger, he carefully touches the string. A little touch here, a little touch there, checking how ready for fighting it is. Watching him, I hold my breath as if it is me touching the dangerous string. Something in my chest begins to prickle, my neck hairs too, and my left eyelid. It’s a warning. Maybe I should stop watching him. Maybe I should but I can’t. I wish I could hurt him. I wish I had a thousand needles. Tiny needles, but sharp, like tiny metal splinters. They would not kill him, just hurt him. I watch him straighten up, put his sunglasses back on. Now he looks up at the sky, hands in his pockets. He is scanning the sky for kites, wondering how soon he can launch his. I can tell he is excited. He can hardly wait. He wants to fight. He needs to fight. A sharp pain shoots through my heart, through my body, the whole length of me. I feel like I am a kite, sliced through by a killer string. The pain is fast and sharp, eerie and empty.
My father keeps standing there in the relentless sun. A restless man in a starched white shirt with shorts held up by a leather belt. A lost boy, dying to fight other kites and fighting a dead war. It hurts to be his daughter.
Someday I will make my own kite. Not from paper and sticks but from flowers, all kinds of flowers and secret orchids with little black tongues that make magic, from rainbow geckos and palm sugar rice balls and slurpy marrow and mango and lichee and purple eggs and pillowy feathers and everything that is fun and secret. My kite will be beautiful and strong. It will smell of sleep and soap and it will lift me up and take me away, far away, back to Java where Nini is waiting for me with tea and pudding and she will let me sit in her lap and thread her needle and I’ll get to pick the color and…
“OH, MY GOD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” My mother snapped. She didn’t see me and almost tripped over me. She is pregnant again, and sick. She is always sick now.
Startled and angry at the interruption, I start crying. What is she doing here?
My mother bends down, gingerly, and touches my cheek. “What is it?’
I turn my face away. “Nothing. Leave me alone.” But no words come out. Only sobs. Out of breath. Can’t talk. Want to. Can’t. Mustn’t. Shouldn’t. What’s wrong with me?
“Mamma…” I whimper… and then something bursts, something red and hot and sharp bursts from my throat like cracked old vomit and shoots out of my mouth in a frightening rush, making me do something I’ve never done before. I scream straight into her face. “WHY DON’T YOU EVER STOP PAPPA WHEN HE HITS ME!”
Oh no. What have I done? Scared. My mouth feels dry and bitter. I should shut up but there is more. “Take away his belt!” I sob. “Take it away. Please!” My throat hurts and I feel like I’ve ripped open something I should not have. The air around me throbs as if ready to punish me. My mother looks like she needs to throw up too. I’m sorry, mamma. I’m sorry. I don’t dare to look up. I’m sorry.
In the valley below, village boys in bare feet run to the soccer field, shouting, clutching their kites. My father, fingers and hands taped for protection, has finished rolling the strings onto a spool and now takes his position on the hill at the farthest edge of our property where he has full view of the battle field. I watch my mother follow him with her eyes. Never looking at me, she says, as if speaking to herself, “Pappa never hit you. He loves you. He loves you.”
The mysterious black orchid grows in the heart of Borneo. It is not black. It is green with a velvety black tongue, a velvety black tongue.
3rd Kaethe Kauffman “A Large Whale Bone”
“Let’s go, Jean. It’s 6:30 already and I couldn’t get away from that lousy teachers’ meeting until now. And on a Friday night… Brioche is waiting. You’d better be packed.” Mom threw her coat over a chair, mixed a quick drink in the kitchen, took a gulp and ran into the bedroom to grab her suitcase.
A black circle-design on the kitchen linoleum provided a path to drag my toe around; my small 10-year-old foot still fit inside each black circle on the floor. Outside the window, dusk covered the tops of the towering Douglas firs by the pond. The nearby walnut tree, always the first to change into fall colors, sported gaudy yellow leaves already. The trees were giants and I wished they could protect me. “Can’t the boys go with us?” I said, voice cracking on the last word. My older brothers’ torment in the car would be worth their power to distract the three teen-aged Litch boys in Brioche.
“No. They’re working at the neighbor’s farm. We need the money. Come on, Jean. We’re late.” Mom guzzled the rest of her drink and hustled me into our new 1958 Nash Rambler, where I sat with my back hunched, head drooping. Gray clouds surrounded the car, and soon darkness blotted out everything except flashes of headlights. Mom flicked on the radio and snapped her fingers to the beat of Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up” as she jammed the gas pedal to the floor.
I never knew how Mom found the Litch’s latest farm house. Every time we visited them, they lived in a different crumbling home surrounded by acres of flat fields. “How come they moved again?” Our family kept the same old place, even after Daddy died.
“You know Mike is a salmon fisherman. Some years there’re lots of salmon and some years there aren’t. In the good years, they live in a big house, and in the bad years, they downsize,” Mom said.
I scratched my head. We were poor; all of us had to work, even me. The money I earned picking and selling cherries from our orchard and my brothers’ work on a neighbor’s farm helped us keep our house. I straightened my spine.
Two hours later, Mom slid to a halt on a gravel driveway in front of a lopsided farmhouse. With barks and howls, three large dogs bounded toward us. I inched down in my seat, but Mom sprang out of the car and kicked the nearest dog. “Get out of here.” The beast slunk away. But the black hound and the yellow cur snarled at my door. Voices bellowed over the dogs’ racket.
“You made it at last.” I heard a roar that had to be Mike. “Bring your bags in. Ralph is waiting.”
“Jean, get going.” Mom yelled at me through the open door. “Jeez, at ten years old, you should be able to keep up.”
“But the dogs...,” I whined as Mom disappeared into the house. Pat had been Mom’s girlfriend since their school days. When she married Mike, they moved to Brioche so Mike could work on the salmon boats that went to Alaska. They had three teen-aged boys who rode motorcycles, played loud music, and harassed me. I could not hide from all three of them. The dad, Mike, was as bad as the boys. When Mom wasn’t with her latest boyfriend, Ralph, she would tell stories and laugh with Pat. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t understand their jokes.
To avoid the snarling jaws of the dogs, I slid to Mom’s side of the car, grabbed my suitcase, and dashed for the house.
“The little ninny is here,” I heard as I ran in the door. ”What have we done to deserve this punishment?” The Litch boys blurred into a mass of dark hair and husky bodies. Frightened as a running rodent, I looked around the strange room, saw Mom already clasped under Ralph’s arm, and scurried in her direction.
“Go put your stuff in that room over there.” Mom waved me toward the far side of the living room.
Before I could get away, Mike shouted, “Hey, Jean, come look at this.” With a chest nearly as wide as he was tall, a bull neck, and round head, Mike resembled an overgrown troll. “Come ‘ere.” I dropped my duffle bag and took a trembling step in his direction. Normally, he barely noticed me.
Each footstep creaked on the bare floorboards as I crept forward. The unusual quiet frightened me. In front of Mike, a low coffee table held a strange object stretched along its full length--a slender, curved rod. “Check this out, Jean.” Mike pointed toward the odd thing on the table.
I clenched my jaw. What did he want from me? The five-foot rod was made of a stiff material, maybe metal.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think it is?”
I shrugged my shaking shoulders. “I dunno.”
“It’s okay to touch it if you want.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “C’mon. It feels good.” From one of the boys, a snicker erupted. In my lungs, ice settled and spread cold to my mouth, numbing my tongue. I swayed in one spot, my feet planted, as if ice-bound.
“Touch the goddammed pe-thing, Jean,” Mom said.
“Uh, okay.” I reached my fingers out and let them rest on the hard, textured surface. As the room erupted in laughter, I jerked back.
“It’s the penis bone of a whale. You touched a penis!” Mike hollered as he grabbed the long bone and waved it high in the air as he walked toward me. “Her innocence is gone. Everyone witnessed it. Your daughter’s barely a virgin now!”
Hoping not to trip, I backed away from the crowd of leering faces and seized my bag. “She’s so gullible,” I heard one of the boys say. “Jean, come over here. I have something for you to touch.” Everyone laughed, even the adults.
The ice in my chest had simmered into heat that made my face flush. I knew I should laugh at the jokes, but my mouth wavered and wouldn’t turn upward. When one of the boys moved toward me, I stumbled, recovered my footing and bolted through the first door I saw, slamming it behind me. In the dark, I stopped until my eyes could see a long line of doors. I tried each one until I saw Mom’s suitcase on the floor. I sank onto the bed.
I heard Mom’s voice through the thin wall. “Where’s another drink? You’ve all had a head start on me. “
Good, they’re not talking about me anymore. But what was a penis, anyway? It must be naughty from the way everyone laughed.
I sagged into the soft mattress. A growl from my stomach sounded like an angry tiger. The Litches were normal in one way: Pat cooked food for everyone. But there would be hours of loud laughter before anyone thought of dinner.
Looking through my bag for a book, I found Little Women. As I curled my body around the book, I lost myself in Jo’s secret writing. When she ventured out to sell her stories to earn money for the family, I sat up straight, thinking of my work in the cherry orchard that helped support our family.
After a long while, I began to squirm. I had to pee. Where was the bathroom? Opening the bedroom door, I peered up and down the long hallway. No Litch boys. Tiptoeing down the hall, I looked in the rooms I hadn’t checked before – no bathroom. The only remaining door opened into the living room, where the voices were louder than before, but slower. When I edged near the entryway and listened, the laughter after each sentence was longer. The bathroom must be somewhere on the other side of the living room. Cracking the door an inch, I peeked through. Bathed in thick cigarette smoke, Mom, Ralph, Pat, and Mike sprawled on chairs and couches. Two Litch boys lounged in the background.
“...had some nice duck for dinner before you got here. Plenty left over if you want some,” Pat said.
Oh boy, a meal, I thought. I took a step forward.
“Nah. Long as there’s ‘nuff to drink. Don’t need food,” Mom slurred.
Darn. No dinner. Stomach rumbling, I shrank back behind the door. A sudden urge from my bladder made me wince and cross one leg over the other.
“...take you out duck huntin’ when you have some time,” Ralph’s low, gravelly voice droned. “Ever been duck huntin’?”
I couldn’t distinguish Mom’s words, but heard her garbled tones.
“Gotta’ hunt duck in Brioche; biggest thing around...” Ralph said.
“...not what I hear!” Mike yelled. “What I hear is YOU have the biggest thing around. Is it bigger than this?” I pressed my eye to the crack and saw Mike waving the penis bone in the air. “Couldn’t be, could it? You’d drag it around on the ground. Big Ralph the fisherman, I hear the ladies say. Catch yourself a live one. Reel in huge, fuckin’ Ralph!”
“I love to hunt duck,” I heard Ralph say, as if an enormous penis bone wasn’t looming near his nose.
Mom’s face looked lopsided; only half of her mouth turned up. She stopped to take a drink, a cigarette dangling from one hand. ”Yeah, sure, Ralph…ducks....”
I twisted my legs into a tighter knot, trying to hold my bladder one more moment. But I couldn’t go out with Mike waving the whale bone.
“Mike, shut your big trap, and put that creature’s pecker down,” Pat said.
Oh--thanks, Pat, I said to her silently. If Mike would set that thing back on the table, maybe I could scoot out and walk quietly behind the chairs. One, two, three--I took a little step forward.
Then Mom started in. “I gotta tell ya ‘bout las’...week...end,” she slurred. “Took Jean to Scout camp. Drove for eight hours that day.…Goddamned kid.... Left her stuff in the car.…didn’t see her gear until I got home again…couldn’t let her freeze...drove all the way back....” Ralph wrapped his arm around her and gave a big squeeze.
I stopped mid-step. The camp story. I couldn’t go out there now. This was like all the times at home I hid in the hallway listening to Mom say things to all the people around her, stuff that made me look bad. Pressure behind my eyes grew as tears gathered. No matter how many times she repeated the tales, it always hurt with a pain in my chest that made me tremble. But, at home we had a bathroom off the hallway where I could go to cry or pee.
I tightened my bladder muscles so hard I stretched an inch higher with the effort. With horror, I felt urine trickling down my leg. The harder I tried to hold it, the faster it ran.
Oddly, at that moment, I felt a sense of rightness. When Mom got lovey-dovey with boyfriends or told “funny” stories that hurt my feelings, I usually got the shakes. But all at once, I understood that Mom and I were opposites. In some way, we made a complete whole. A whole what, I didn’t know. Like the lichen living on rough Douglas Fir bark and coating the indentations with stunning turquoise-green in winter, together we created something stunning. No matter what Mom did, I loved her. And did she love me? If I kept on doing everything she said to do, she would love me; I was sure of it.
Tears welled up while I listened. “Did she care?” Mom slowly said. “Of course not. Playing with her friends, laughing...never said thank you...”
Tears ran when I remembered her ordering me to touch the whale penis, telling the camp story, and not noticing whether or not I ate. But against logic, something inside of me, so powerful it sounded like a voice, said, Even though it’s hard, it is perfect that she is your mother. You will learn from her. This idea had a form, like roots, a trunk and branches growing within me, so real that I trusted it.
But my tears flowed as quickly as the urine. I sank to the floor, feeling as if I had melted into a puddle.
Weeping, and silently gulping air, I huddled on the bare floorboards, my head pounding with pain. Like the many times Mom told these stories about me at home, I shook and cried until the tears dried.
But this time, I had the strength to stand on quivering legs. Seeing a puddle on the floor, I yanked off my wet pants, wadded them in a ball and scrubbed the spot dry. I carried the dripping pants back to my bedroom, rolled my wet clothes together and crammed them under the bed, hoping that they wouldn’t stink if they were out of sight. Luckily, I’d packed extras.
After finding my pajamas, I crawled into bed and tucked my knees to my chin to keep warm. Cold sheets seemed to be soaked in the damp Northwestern night. As the bed slowly warmed, I uncurled bit by bit until I wiggled my toasty toes. The warmth I created held me like a safe cocoon.
In the morning, I saw Mom’s side of the bed, as usual, unused. I stayed in the bedroom happily reading all morning. Around eleven, I heard Mom holler my name. With a shock of nerves rippling across my hunched shoulders, I dragged my duffle bag through the house and out to the porch, eager for flight. Brioche fog drowned everything; our beige and green Nash Rambler in the driveway looked like a ghost car, obscured by layers of swirling mist.
“There you are, Jean,” Mom said, barely glancing my way. “We’re ready to go, “I’m sure you got breakfast.”
“Yeah,” I lied. The Litch family had assembled on the porch. Pat fluttered around Mom and Ralph, making jokes. Mike roared insults at us, and the boys mimicked their father’s volume while the dogs ran at us, barking and snapping. I understood with a cock-eyed logic that this high-pitched revelry constituted Brioche hospitality. The louder and more outrageous the Litches sounded, the more “fun” everyone had. Why didn’t I like the same jokes they did? I must be “different,” as Mom always said.
As I tugged my gear to the car, I ran a gauntlet of catcalls. At least the dense knot of people kept the dogs at bay. “When are you coming back to feel my bones?” The middle son stuck out a foot to trip me, but I jumped over it.
Mike yelled, “There goes Miss Experience, who lost her innocence in Brioche, now that she’s touched a penis.”
Eager to escape, I scuttled to the car and barely heard the insults. I hauled my bag along the muddy driveway; only one dog nipped at it. Yanking the car door open, I shoved my duffle bag in the rear seat and hopped into the front. When I slammed the door, the Litch’s bluster became a soundless pantomime. Mom always said she didn’t know where I came from, but I knew it wasn’t Brioche.
Mom untangled herself from Ralph’s embrace and plodded to the car. Once we were out the driveway and onto the road, I smiled and leaned my head back in the car seat as I watched the Litch family disappear. I jerked my head up as I remembered something. “Hey, Mom.”
“What Jean?” Mom’s cigarette bobbed in the air while she primped her hair, driving with one hand.
Should I tell her I left my drenched pants under the bed? If I did, she would turn the car around and I’d be back at the Litch’s house. No. They’d eventually discover it.
“Never mind.”
Honorable Mention Deborah Ross “Throwback”
As soon as baby Violet’s hair declared itself as blonde, it was clear that she didn’t look like anyone else in our immediate family. She did look a bit like my husband’s mother, and I’m told she also had a smidgen of my dad’s sisters in their younger days, though by the time I met them they were just regular gray old aunties. To explain to my toddler son, Anton, why his sister seemed to belong two generations back, I said she was a “throwback,” causing him to ask: “Does that mean we can throw her back?”
My mom dealt with Violet’s blondeness by calling her “the little shikse,” implying that she didn’t “look Jewish”—an offensive phrase usually meant as a compliment, spoken just as often by fellow Jews as by unconsciously biased goyim. True, especially with her hair in braids, my daughter looked more like one of Anne Frank’s neighbors than like Anne herself, and so thankfully would be an unlikely target for torch-bearing young white males. But most of our family has always liked to believe that we too could “pass” if we wanted to. In this we are part of a long-standing tradition of Jewish discomfort with Jewishness.
It makes sense: when no matter how many centuries your family had lived in Europe your nationality remained permanently “Hebrew,” you might try everything possible to assimilate--until it all failed and you had to emigrate to survive, only to find (if your ship wasn’t turned back to the hell you had come from) another, more subtle racism in your new home. Small wonder that continental Jewish malaise would simply relocate to America and be passed on to these migrants’ lucky descendants--Philip Roth, for one famous example.
. That history may help explain why, as far back as family lore can trace, my Russian- and Polish-American ancestors, while not exactly denying their Jewishness, still managed to thumb their noses at it—if not literally, through rhinoplasty, then through more or less discreet disobedience. My dad once told me that his father had scandalized his own rabbi father-in-law by spending the High Holy Days playing pinochle with his shady buddies in the back room of his Jersey City cigar store. Dad himself, though he felt compelled to belong to a temple, picked the most Reform one he could find to accommodate his basic agnosticism, and changed our last name to something vaguely Scottish. But that, too, was a Jewish tradition in 1950s America (if the name—probably already mangled by immigration officers--hadn’t already been changed on first landing at Ellis Island). As Gertrude Berg, radio’s Jewish Mother, used to ask her children about their friends: “Vat’s their name? And vat vas it before?” I myself had enjoyed the brief years of my first marriage when I could call myself Cavanaugh, gaining the privilege of Irishness, as my former mother-in-law said, by injection.
I once found myself confronting this paradox of Jewish deniability when some friends out here in Hawaii suddenly decided to have a traditional seder and invited me and my children, to give them some exposure to their heritage. (For most people in Hawaii, Jewishness isn’t really a thing. I once heard a story of a New York transplant who with great trepidation confessed his ethnicity to his local fiancée, only to have her ask, “What’s a Jew?”) There we sat at the Passover table, staring down our edible mortar and bitter herbs, dipping now and then into the Haggadah, finding something disturbing, and setting it down again, out of reach, all of us remembering why we hadn’t tried to do this before.
I had mainly run away from Judaism as a feminist resisting patriarchy, recalling visits during my childhood from my mother’s father, the earthly Jehovah: how my parents would take my Beatles albums off the stereo and replace them with Theodore Bikel; how they would turn up the thermostat at his decree to what felt like 85 degrees, even in summer; how my mother and grandmother would scurry around the kitchen making sure Papa’s tea was dark but not too dark, hot but not too hot. But what I learned at our Hawaii seder was that Judaism isn’t nearly as hard on women as it is on young men. In the Haggadah, every time a young man tries to assert himself, say by asking the wrong question on the night different from all other nights, an old man responds by scolding, or “blunting his teeth,” symbolically handing him over to the Angel of Death. And that may be the most oppressive thing about this ancient religion: that even our feeble attempts at rebellion turn out, like one of Oedipus’s prophecies, to have been part of the script all along.
My children didn’t know this script. They ate none of the Passover food and heard none of the old words, having left the table after the first five minutes to watch Pokemon. By the time my kids were born, their Jewish great-grandparents were long dead, and they had little contact with my parents, who by then were tacitly passing themselves off as retired Presbyterians at the country club in their Arizona elder community. So it is a great mystery to me how my son could have been born with the personality of an old Jewish man. He, and not his sister, was the real throwback.
It would be tempting to explain Anton’s personality as the typical pendulum phenomenon, whereby the lost souls of a younger generation, searching for their spiritual roots, become more religious than their own grandparents. I have one cousin who, once a juvenile delinquent, later in life turned super Orthodox and obeyed the ancient diktat to marry a doctor. Another one changed her name to something that sounds like Sanskrit and became a sort of Buddhist, the pendulum in her case being rather a ball that bounced off in an oblique direction. But this explanation doesn’t work in Anton’s case, since his Jewishness cropped up at much too early an age, suggesting a biological component, which I have provisionally called the Greenbaum Effect (my maternal grandfather’s name, before he changed it). Here are the indications:
From babyhood on, Anton, like his great-grandfather, was given to Notions. In my childhood I was taught to fear Notions as something that might take hold of my grandfather at any time and make him completely unmanageable. “You know how it is when Papa gets a Notion,” Nana would say to my mother. But I didn’t fully understand why Notions had caused such anxious conferring till my son also started having them. Some of Anton’s Notions were: That it’s not possible to poop sitting down (causing delays in toilet training). That because soap is made of fat it can’t get you clean (causing bath resistance). That if he stopped eating he could run faster (causing drama at the dinner table). That everything bad that ever happened to him was his sister’s fault (causing problems too numerous and long-lived to list here).
At age five, Anton began to find every room he was in either stiflingly hot or freezing cold and commanded the prevailing female to fix it. When he and Violet and I rode on the giant Ferris wheel at the state fair, he complained of palpitations and wanted to stop off at the first aid tent to have his blood pressure checked. His whole outlook, though certainly there were no Cossacks out there for him to worry about, was (and still is) gloomy and intense. At age ten, at his first experience with Novocain at the dentist, he developed the theory that not feeling pain is itself a kind of pain: “It hurts.” “It can’t hurt, you’re numb.” “That’s what hurts.”
Around that time, he also made his will.
That’s right, I came out into the living room one morning and discovered that my little boy had made his will. Furthermore, I was not mentioned in it. Where would he get this idea? From his Jewish grandmother, perhaps? My mom did bring up her will in every other phone call, to explain why my sister would be getting the ruby bracelet (which had lived in a safe deposit box for at least three generations) since I would probably just sell it and spend the money on some man with a tattoo and a Harley (though I always refused to listen and insisted they were never going to die and should spend all their money on tattoos and Harleys of their own). But Anton, like his great-grandfather, never adjusted comfortably to the telephone and therefore never heard any of this speech. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the urge to disinherit must be one of those genetic traits that skip a generation.
Even weeks after I found this will, I couldn’t stop fuming inwardly over its provisions. He bequeathed his maps to his Catholic convert father; better he should leave him his bills from the orthodontist. His non-denominational Christian paternal grandfather would get his desk; what does he need it for, a man with one lung and half a colon? He should only live so long. The rest of the estate, including the Yu-gi-oh cards that I had just bought, for $11.95 plus tax, would go to his friend “Criss.” And what had “Criss” ever done for him? Was he in labor for 21 hours? Somehow this throwback, my son, had accomplished what cultural assimilation had been struggling at least a century to prevent: he had turned me into Gertrude Berg.
Of course one might argue that the child cannot be father to the mother. One might note that some of the Greenbaum Effects I’d like to blame on DNA had already appeared in my own behavior, not to mention my phrasing, before they showed up in my son’s. In fact, months before his dental epiphany, the pain of not feeling pain, I had decided to go off Zoloft on the same basic but questionable principle. So can I really say that Anton is a throwback? Am I so sure he’s Jewish by nature, not nurture? Are there really no Jews in his life he might be modeling? Of course, in keeping with ancient tradition, I deny it.
Honorable Mention Tamara Leiokanoe Moan “Nā ‘Amakua”
did not wish her work to be shared.