Глен Хиршберг - The Pikesville Buffalo

Late that November, a few months after his twenty-four year-old wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, Daniel felt a sudden urge to see the Great Aunts. He tried Ethel first, calling five times over a two-hour period, but kept getting the busy signal which meant either that she was talking to one of her children or stepchildren or — more likely — that she’d taken her phone off the hook to avoid talking to them. Finally, he called Zippo and got her on the first try.

“Of course, dear,” she told him, sounding muffled as ever, as though she were speaking through the orange wool shawl she always kept about her shoulders.

“Could you beam the news over to Aunt Ethel?”

“What? Oh, Daniel.” It was an old joke, his father’s, about the telepathic link that seemed to connect the sisters.

“How’s your lovely Lisa, honey?” Zippo asked.

“Okay, I think. Still not sleeping very well. The doctors think they got it all.”

“Poo-poo,” said Zippo, and Daniel hung up.

The next morning, he awoke before five, kissed Lisa where she lay twisting in the blankets, and, for the first time in over a year, drove the hour and a half from his dumpy beach-neighborhood shack on the Delaware coast into Baltimore and out Reiserstown Road toward Pikesville. The early morning gray never lifted, and the grass everywhere had already died. Something about the old neighborhoods near the Great Aunts had always unsettled Daniel, even during his childhood when he’d visited them every weekend. The low, redbrick houses seemed to have too few windows, too many chimneys, and they were always tucked back in the shadows of the tallest trees on their lots like little warrens. Rotting, unraked leaves littered the lawns. The oaks and elms and black locusts stood midwinter-bare.

Pulling up outside Ethel’s house — which was small, stone, and too long at either end for its slanted roof, as though emerging from the maples with its hands on its hips — Daniel shut off the car and was surprised to see his own hands shaking. He sat a few seconds, staring through the windshield at the gray, thinking not of Lisa but of cancer. It was true, what Zippo had told him not long after his father had died. Cancer didn’t just kill people; it blurred them, left a hazy, pointillist blotch where memories of the lives they’d lived before the disease should have been.

Abruptly, he slammed his fist down on the horn. For all they knew, Lisa really was finished with cancer. Forever. They’d caught it early, taken it out. He really needed to get the hell over it.

Which was exactly why he’d come. Popping open the door, he stepped onto the pavement, expecting Pikesville silence, winter wind. Instead, he got Xavier Cugat.

Before he even reached his Aunt Ethel’s front steps, Daniel was smiling. It wasn’t just the incongruity — all those congas and horns sashaying down this street of old homes and older Jews — but the volume. Daniel swore he could see the surrounding houses shuddering on their foundations, the drawn curtains in nearby windows twitching their skirts. He half-expected the police to arrive any second.

Daniel tried the front doorbell first, but of course, that was useless. Hunching against the cold, he slipped around the side. He was already past the screened-in porch when his Aunt opened the side door.

“Oy-yoy-yoy,” she said, nodding at his coat, one hand fluttering off the hips she could no longer shake and making mambo motions. “Is it really that cold out?”

Daniel stared. The rooster-crest springing from his aunt’s scalp glowed a luminous, freshly dyed red. She was wearing blue-jean shorts, a yellow t-shirt with a Queen of Hearts playing card and the legend Aunty Up, Baby imprinted on it, and yellow vinyl slipper-sandals that displayed her virtually nail-less hammer toes in all their glory.

“Can’t you feel it?” Daniel half-shouted, moving forward to give her a kiss.

“Skin of a crocodile.” Aunt Ethel pulled demonstratively at the folds on her forearms.

“Toes of a troll.”

She smacked him playfully on the cheek before kissing him in the same place, then smeared the lipstick she’d imprinted there. “You find a troll who looks this good at eighty-two, give him my number, okay?” With an arthritic lurch Daniel realized afterward was a butt-bump, Aunt Ethel shuffled off inside, beckoning him with more of her rhythmic, slinky hand movements.

“Aren’t you worried about the neighbors?” Daniel called, shutting the door.

“What?”

“The racket. What if they call the cops?”

“The music? Honey, everyone within four blocks is stone deaf.”

She disappeared into her tiny kitchen to bring him the bagel, lox, and purple onion tray he knew she’d have prepared and refrigerated for him last night. The stereo shut down, and for one delicious moment, Daniel found himself alone, submerged in the familiar dimness of his Aunt Ethel’s house.

The memories that assailed him centered mostly around shivas, but were no less sweet for that: there was the midnight flag football game in the sleet fourteen years ago, two days after Uncle Harry’s death, when Daniel’s father — frail already, and with a hacksaw cough, but still slippery as a snowflake — solved the absence-of-spare-socks problem by suggesting they use yarmulkes for the flags instead; there was the morning he’d crept upstairs with Ethel’s perpetually wan, humorless thirty-four year-old son Herm after the early Mourner’s Kaddish at the shiva for Zippo’s second husband Ivan. He and Herm had used an entire roll of electrical tape, some torn-up egg cartons, and a box of discarded nine-volt batteries to try to get Herm’s homemade, childhood train set to run just one more time. It hadn’t, but the light-towers at the miniature baseball stadium flicked on a few times, and one of the crossing gates lowered and its bells rang. There was the three-hour jokefest after Rabbi Goldberg went home on the last night of Mack’s funeral two years ago. It began with Daniel’s recitation of Mack’s favorite about the rabbi, the leather worker, and the circumcised foreskins, and ended when Daniel’s father — barely able to speak, and confined to a wheelchair he couldn’t even sit up in — somehow gasped his way through the Fuck One Goat joke, while all the cousins and step-cousins alternately giggled and snuck glances at Aunt Ethel’s half-horrified mouth, quivering as it fought the laughter welling behind it. Daniel had been laughing, too, until he saw Zippo leaning into the shadows against the hallway wall, her eyes riveted on his father, her mouth pursed and her shoulders drawn back as though she could do his breathing for him.

Or had that been at the shiva for Zippo’s third husband, Uncle Joe, whom Daniel had only met twice, but who had the gorgeous lesbian granddaughter? Or for Uncle Bob, Mitchell’s shyer, gentler oldest friend?

No. Mack’s, because of the jokes. Just the way Mack would have wanted it. If he’d had his way, he’d probably have had Aunt Ethel blasting Xavier Cugat during the graveside service, too.

Standing now in Aunt Ethel’s tan-carpeted living room with the tea mugs on glass shelves and the library-sale Dick Francis hardbacks lining the walls, Daniel thought of what his mother had called Aunt Zip, years and years ago: the Angel of Mercy, or else the Worst Luck in the World. Tears teased the corners of his eyes, which had adjusted to the gloom, now. He glanced toward the wall of photos, blinked and moved closer.

“Uh… Aunt Ethel? Where’d everybody go?”

In she came, balancing not just the bagel tray but a chipped, porcelain jug of orange juice and a set of thirty year-old novelty glasses featuring stencils of Jim Palmer in his Jockey underwear on the sides.