On the Death of My Grandmother, Teenage Adventures, and Lieby Kletzky.

1.

If you stood two weeks ago, on Wednesday morning at the corner of East 2nd Street and Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn, looking north toward Avenue C, you would have seen a blockade of crime scene unit trucks, a few strings of slick yellow tape, the movement of officials with telephones, and, like an afterthought, two quiet ambulances parked near the sidewalk.  There were also maybe a half-dozen people in white evidence-collecting suits, their faces covered with surgical masks–as if called in to investigate an alien landing.  If you turned to look south, you would see small clutches of Hasidic women, most with baby strollers and other small children, some talking, most not talking, some holding each other, all of them in tears.

On his walk home from day camp, 8-year-old Leiby Kleztky became lost and, outside of a dentist office on 18th Avenue, stopped to ask Levi Aron for directions to the Judaica bookstore.  Then Leiby got into Aron’s car.  Soon after that, signs began appearing all over the neighborhood.  ”Missing under unknown circumstances,” they said.  ”$100,000 Reward,” they said.  They were also strangely blank, no height, no weight, no last-seen-wearing.  There was information, and yet there was no information.  The signs were posted on my block, every fifty feet or so, newer, revised, more desperate versions every few hours, as if what would happen next–the unthinkable–was increasingly thought to be possible, already passing into narrative: an innocent boy taken, smothered with a towel, dismembered.  Here and then suddenly gone.

2.

The hand soap in the bathroom at the coffee shop on Union Square West is cherry-almond scented.  It is the exact same smell of my grandmother’s Jergen’s lotion, which she would smear across my face and hands when I was either fresh out of the bathtub, (green tile, the shower curtain pulled halfway closed,) or just before we went to church together.  Whenever I wash my hands there, I am catapulted back to her big dresser, her hairbrush, her bony fingers running through mine.

Ruth Skaggs Houck died on June 10 at 92 years old.  My brother wrote a generous eulogy, which I read only after he posted it on Facebook, since I didn’t go Tennessee for the funeral.  (I disagree only with his assessment that “She was a great cook.”  She wasn’t.  She was, in fact, an awful cook.  But she was a loving, steadfast, hard-working cook, and it was only when we were older–perhaps when her physical and mental skills were particularly failing–did we really try to avoid having to eat what she made.)

Despite this, she is tied to many of my favorite childhood food memories, most of them my brother shares, and got right: the bacon frying on Saturday mornings, three crinkled pieces on each plate, cold by the time we sat down to eat it.  The grainy paper cup of apricot nectar at the top of the plate, like a shot of horrible medicine.  Fried cauliflower.  Waffles.  Yellow squash.  Sweet potatoes with mini marshmallows burnt on the top.  Sometimes the things you detest become the things you suddenly miss.  The startling pop of biscuits from a can.

I have a photograph of my grandmother in my office.  She isn’t really in the picture, though.  Or so it seems that way.  She is performing what she thinks a photograph is supposed to look like.  She is stiff, only half-committing to the smile.  What is she thinking, I wonder.  My grandmother lost her first child to polio in 1960.  Evelyn was 19.  There was one picture of Evelyn in a frame somewhere in my grandmother’s house, I can’t place where, but I remember it clearly.  Strong jawed, bare shoulders, big almond eyes.  I always thought there was something odd about her expression, as if she lived in another era, some kind of petticoats and horse-drawn carriage kind of time.  Maybe a photograph does that, denies time.  Re-orders it.  Evelyn was a kind of myth in my family–at least to me, no one spoke of her, or rather, of who she was, what she was like.  There was only the marking of time in conversation: “When Evelyn died” and “after Evelyn died.”

I have always wondered who my grandmother was during the before, and if any of that person was left at the end.  At the end, she was loud, insane, screaming, frustrating, complicated, demanding, accusing, confused and combative.  I miss her.

3.

When I was a young teenager, the neighborhood kids and I bought fireworks, shot them like guns at each other as we ran across the fields, firing the Roman Candles from our hands like Ironman.  We laid stomach-down on the sled and pushed down the hill toward the woods, inches from the ice, rolling off at the last instant, to watch the sled slip underneath an oncoming car.  We climbed sideways down the mountain to Rainbow Falls, off the trail, where there wasn’t even an idea of a trail, creeped ourselves across the fallen tree to the swimming hole.  Once someone brought a bottle of Alizé, we swallowed gulps of it–sweet, thick, burning my stomach and throat–I only needed to try that once.  We drove as fast as we could down Hillcrest Drive, shooting out over the hills like a rollercoaster, like insane reckless hoodlums.  We hiked down the stream at Cloudland Canyon, laying flat against the rock, our heads sticking out over the waterfall, singing some invented song, when the rangers caught us, asked me if I wanted to “sing at your own funeral?”  We rode our bikes across the parking lots of Highway 58, from the Exxon Station to the Baskin Robbins.  We drove from New Orleans to Chattanooga, some of us on acid–not me–driving all night, the flashing white paint on the road, the glaring white light of truck stops.  We swam across the lake to the small island where there was a rope swing, the shore eaten away by too many summers of too many kids climbing back out of the water and up onto it.  We swung out, dove into too shallow water, cut our feet open on rocks, bled.  Walked home.

All of this, and more.  100 close calls.  1000.  We survived.

4.

When I heard that Lieby’s body had been discovered in two separate places–part in Aron’s refrigerator, part in a suitcase in a dumpster a few miles away–I thought first of Evelyn, and then of my own stupid adventures.  I thought of the millions of trajectories passing through the universe and the billions of intersections.  Lieby got in that car, or was put in the car, we’ll never know exactly. Evelyn contracted polio.  My grandmother lived happily (for the most part, as much as anyone who lived her life can) to the age of 92.  There are too many unanswerable questions when you start thinking of the chaos of the universe, when you tunnel into the infinite meaninglessness of all the whys you can pour on yourself.  For my grandmother, and for Lieby and Evelyn, I reach my hands into the air.  I grieve and am grateful.

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