Сара Пинскер - Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea - Stories

A coughing spell turned me inside out.

“That’s why you took my guitar?” Bay asked when I stopped gagging.

“Yeah. They must still need music out here, right?”

“I’d like to think so.”

I had something else to say, but a change in the landscape up ahead distracted me. Two white towers jutted into the sky, one vertical, the other at a deep curve. “That’s a weird-looking bridge.”

Bay picked up her pace. I limped after her. As we got closer, I saw the bridge wasn’t purposefully skewed. The tower on the near end still stood, but the road between the two had crumbled into the water. Heavy cables trailed from the far tower like hair. We walked to the edge, looked down at the concrete bergs below us, then out at the long gap to the other side. Bay sat down, her feet dangling over the edge.

I tried to keep things light. “I didn’t realize we were on an island.”

“Your grasp of geography hasn’t proven to be outstanding.”

“How long do you think it’s been out?”

“How the hell should I know?” she snapped.

I left her to herself and went exploring. When I returned, the tears that smudged her face looked dry.

“It must’ve been one of the hurricanes. I haven’t been out here in years.” Her tone was dry and impersonal again. “Just goes to show, sooner or later everything falls into the sea.”

“She didn’t give up on you,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“No.”

I was quiet a minute. Tried to see it all from her eyes. “Anyway, I walked around. You can climb down the embankment. It doesn’t look like there’s much current. Maybe a mile’s swim?”

She looked up at me. “A mile’s swim, in clothes, in winter, with a guitar. Then we still have to walk the rest of the way, dripping wet. You’re joking.”

“I’m not joking. I’m only trying to help.”

“There’s no way. Not now. Maybe when the water and the air are both warmer.”

She was probably right. She’d been right about everything else. I sat down next to her and looked at the twisted tower. I tried to imagine what Detroit or Pittsburgh was like now, if they were all twisted towers and broken bridges, or if newer, better communities had grown, like the one Bay had left.

“I’ve got a boat,” I said. “There’s no fuel, but you have an oar on your wall. We can line it full of snacks when the weather is better, and come around the coast instead of over land.”

“If I don’t kill you before then. You talk an awful lot.”

“But I can play decent guitar,” I said. “And I found a crab once, so I’m not entirely useless.”

“Not entirely,” she said.

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: I was nearly lost, out on the ocean, but somebody rescued me. It’s a different life, a smaller life. I’m writing again. People seem to like my new stuff .

Bay took a while getting to her feet. She slung her bag over her shoulder, and waited while Gabby picked up Deb’s guitar. She played as they walked back toward Bay’s cottage, some little riff Bay didn’t recognize. Bay made up her own words to it in her head, about how sooner or later everything falls into the sea, but some things crawl back out again and turn into something new.

Father built me a new grandmother when the real one died. “She’s not a replacement,” he said, as if anything could be. This one was made of clay and metal all run through with wires to conduct electricity, which Father said made her a lot like us. At her center, where we have hearts and guts, she had a brass birdcage. I don’t know how he made her face look right. He put my real Bubbe’s clothing on her, and wrapped one of my real Bubbe’s headscarves around her iron-gray hair, and put Bubbe’s identification papers into her skirt pocket, and told me to call her Bubbe.

“Does it cook?” I asked him. “Does it bake, or sing?”

“She can,” said Father. “Those are exactly the things she can do. You just have to teach her. She can look after you and keep you company when I’m working.”

“I won’t call it Bubbe.”

“Call her what you like. Maybe you can say ‘the new Bubbe’ and ‘she’ when you’re around me, though. I worked hard to make her for you.”

He had spent months at his workbench. Long evenings after days spent teaching, and then long days after he was no longer allowed to work at the university. I had heard him cry sometimes, when he thought I was asleep. “She,” I repeated, eyeing the machine.

That night, it offered help as I prepared beets for soup.

“Just stand in the corner and watch,” I said. “You don’t know how.”

It followed my instructions. I stained the kitchen red with my messy chopping while it stood in the corner. How strange to see something that looked so much like Bubbe lurking in the dark corner where Bubbe never would have been found. “Too much to do,” she would have said. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.” Now she was dead, and her absence was an ache in my chest.

The fake Bubbe was quiet for a while, then spoke again. “Teach me the songs you’re singing, Tatiana. We can sing together while you cook.”

I hushed it and sang the old songs softly to myself, imitating my grandmother’s quavering soprano. There was no “we,” I told myself. There was Father and there was me and there was the hole that Bubbe had left. No machine could replace her, even one that looked and sounded like her. It didn’t even know to call me my nickname, Tania. Or perhaps Father told it that would be too familiar.

I had started a notebook of recipes and songs back before my real Bubbe took ill. She hated that notebook. She said I should remember with my hands and heart and not leave a book to do the remembering for me. Each night after she was gone, I flipped through the pages and chose something to make, trying to re-create her recipes precisely. I made new notes to myself when the recipes went wrong, trying to recapture the little details that hadn’t made it to the page. On the page for challah, my original transcription said “knead.” “Use your back to knead,” I remembered Bubbe saying when she first showed me how. “Your hands will get tired without the help of your back.” She threw her whole body into the effort. Her whole front was coated in flour by the end. “Bosoms,” she sighed in false despair, dusting herself off.

I wrote “use back” next to “knead.” Still, the dough never worked out as well for me as it had for her. The other recipes were the same way. My father ate each meal without complaint, but I longed to make us something that tasted as good as my grandmother’s cooking. I tried and tried, with the new Bubbe looking on from her corner.

And then Father came rushing home early one afternoon. “Tania, we must leave the house now as if we are going for an afternoon stroll. We can take only what we can fit into Bubbe.” I started to correct him, to say “new Bubbe,” but something in his tone silenced me.

The new Bubbe unbuttoned its blouse and opened the birdcage for us. For the first time, I understood what it was for. Father filled it with what little gold we had: my real Bubbe’s rings and necklaces and the shabbos candlesticks, all wrapped in headscarves so they wouldn’t rattle. Father’s prayer book. I put in the picture of my parents at their wedding, and a portrait of Bubbe with the grandfather I never knew, and my book of songs and recipes.

I saw my father glance back, just once, and I looked back too. The house looked sad. The eaves drooped and the window boxes sagged empty. Father had been too busy to fix the eaves, and I had not known when to plant seeds for spring flowers. Bubbe had always done that. What if my memories of my mother and grandmother were so tied to that house that they stayed behind? I whispered one of Bubbe’s songs under my breath, to show the memories they could come with us.