Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

The family greets relatives in the living room. I go to the kitchen.

My grandmother bastes a glistening turkey, its skin blistering and crisp. Steam skims the carcass, vapid dancers rising to mist on the goldenrod-yellow oven hood. She notices my gaze and smiles at me. “It’s fun with all you kids here. Thank you for keeping me company here, sweetie. Our little kitchen time.”

The overhead light is dim and the room is quieter than the crowded living room.

I look at my grandma. She’s wearing a pink jogging suit and the jacket is tight across folds of soft fat around her middle. I wonder how those pounds of human fat would look if the skin was sliced with a thin blade. Pale yellowish-white curds slithering out. A flash of memory. I remember flinging my arms around her waist when I was small enough that the top of my head reached her bellybutton. I try to think what hugging my grandma would have felt like. I imagine it would feel like Jell-O trapped in catgut. But I can’t remember. I blink and decide that I fabricated the memory altogether.

I lean against the sink and try to think of something to say. We must share genetic material, although we couldn’t look more dissimilar. For some reason my mouth aches with wanting to say something.

“Your mother said David was with someone now?”

This is news to me. I rub my hand over my face. “We’ll never know if he is.”

Dave still hasn’t answered my calls, but he stopped attending our grandparents’ get-togethers years before I did, shortly after he moved to New York.

My grandmother looks worried at the brusqueness of my tone, so I make my voice sound lighter, happier. “Casanova said he couldn’t come this year. And by this time next year, whoever this someone is will be just one more broken heart on his Wall of Shame.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad.” She smiles. “He’s an attractive, successful young man.”

Sometimes I think my mom’s parents live in a world constructed entirely of 1950s musical sets in which the people they meet are as likely to burst into choreographed song as to snap their fingers and say, “Jeepers!” My grandmother, for instance, talks about Dave like she is under the impression that he is a high-powered workaholic who gives a single pink rose to his female, blonde, Anglo-Saxon dates.

And I wonder again why my mother, raised in this Technicolor Rodgers and Hammerstein set, decided to marry my father with his genetic predisposition for Shakespearean-level tragedy, stages soaked in blood and the entire cast strewn, limbless, around.

My father’s parents were Jews from Eastern Europe, curators of exquisite suffering repressed until it fused with their DNA. My grandmother came from a poor rural Jewish community in Hungary. She spoke Hungarian and German but not Yiddish, so she could never talk to the other women in her congregation. She met my grandfather in a tobacconist’s shop in Harlem, New York. He was that rare type of Jew — German-speaking and so broke he couldn’t afford shoes that weren’t held together with twine. She married him. My dad says that his only memories of his father are of a man whose wool overcoat smelled like cigar smoke and who sat and stared silently at the radiator while his wife yelled in German. My grandfather knocked up his wife, left for a year, came back, left again. Turned up two or three times in a decade, drunk and passed out on the apartment building’s front steps. My grandmother took him in, made him a spicy boiled cabbage soup, then yelled at him. The only German words my dad knows are curses liberally mixed with threats of violence.

It’s not my mother’s fault that she gave birth to reincarnations of horror condensed to its purest, most elemental form. And it’s not her siblings’ fault that they are now related by marriage to a mostly mysterious heritage of immeasurable psychological trauma. I suppose I shouldn’t blame them for finding us so incomprehensible.

My mother’s whole family is really and truly ordinary. They are rural, under-educated, white Protestant Americans. Most of them are rednecks. I mean hunting rifles and jackets and Ford pickup trucks. Fishing trips. Budweiser by the gross.

This one Thanksgiving my mom’s older brother, Uncle Randy, wanted to take us hunting. My parents tried hard to swallow the blind panic. Fluttered. Oh, not Mickey, not a girl , they said. She’d far rather play with Jennifer’s Barbie dolls . Ignoring my rapt eyes, my sunlit voice begging, pleading to go. Dave, winking at me, turned to Uncle Randy and cast down shy eyes, clasped his hands behind his back, and said, diffidently, that he wouldn’t mind going.

Uncle Randy took Dave, a scrawny fourteen-year-old, and our oversized brutish cousins. They were gone for the weekend. We drove down to Uncle Randy’s house to pick Dave up on Sunday afternoon.

The deer carcass swung from the garage beams. Huge slabs of dark meat, white ribs. The smell of blood, but the ribs so white, clean as teeth.

Later that night, he snuck into my bedroom and told me about the hunt. About the slaughter. How Uncle Randy had closed his fingers over the handle of the hunting knife, directed his boyish tendons to tighten, to slice the skin at the backs of the knees and down the jaw, to sever the tough, meaty carotid artery, to jerk the edge of the blade through the rubbery jugular veins. They sliced the skin and peeled it.

Like a thick, meaty banana , Dave told me. Then they removed the organs. Liver and kidneys they packed in wax paper in a tray. The bowels were left with the bones and the skin. They hung the body to drain it.

As he told me, his breath hot on my face, I could picture every step of the process as perfectly as if I were watching it, doing it, in person.

After he told me about the hunting trip, Dave had leaned forward in the dark. He smelled of soap and laundry detergent. I’m sorry they didn’t let you go , he whispered. Maybe next time .

They never let me go on a hunting trip. I can’t really blame them for that, either.

“And you, young lady.”

I blink and look up at my grandmother. She points the turkey baster at me. A droplet of grease dribbles down its side.

“What about me?”

“One of these days you’ll be showing up with some young man. All it takes is the right one.”

I just look at her. “The right one to what?”

Now she looks confused. “Well, to be the right one,” she says.

We stare at each other in silence.

And then I burst out laughing.

She gives me a warped, tight smile and turns back to the turkey. Her skin is wrinkled and the light catches at its scaly patterns as she spoons broth over the bird.

The rest of the aunts and uncles and cousins come over the next day. No one says anything to me. I have always tried to play nice around the relatives. It means a lot to my parents. Mostly I just interact as little as possible. I know my way around the suburbs of Michigan pretty well from all the running I do when I’m here.

When I come downstairs after breakfast the next morning (having avoided the meal with its requisite chatter and cluttered table), the relatives are all in the living room going through their stage performances. Aunt Janine rattles on about the management position my cousin Jason got and Aunt Linda goes on about Jennifer’s boyfriend who was a roadie and traveled with Green Day or something.

I sit down on the stairs so I can look down into the living room through the railing. An uncle cradles a bowl of pistachios between his thighs and pops the shells apart with his dirty thumbnails. His belly strains against his Michigan State sweatshirt. He cites baseball scores with a male cousin while the women glance up at the stairs and lean towards each other to talk in unmoderated voices about their offspring. I can tell by the way they talk about their daughters’ dance performances and their sons’ careers that they don’t think much of me, with my eight years of college, zero work experience, and fewer than zero romantic experiences, fit for nothing but to live in a garage or the spare bedroom of an emotionally fragile art student. Their opinions of me aren’t high, but my revenge is perfect: I don’t give a shit.