Dawn Raffel: Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

We were taught to spray the telephone for reasons of hygiene.

Our grandparents drove up the block, and the world came to look. That car a boat, our mother said, after so many lifetimes of never enough.

Down on the corner, the gunner fired shots.

The bachelor uncle — our grandfather’s brother — was in from Chicago. He sat in the back. Most of them had died by then, the siblings they’d had. TB and such. The complications of a bris, in one mortal instance. We did not observe. The uncle was rich from betting on something. He spoke about people we had never met — the kid who had crashed in the air, in France.

My sister and I piled in for the ride.

The brother of the child who had died had been haunting the bushes.

Horses and futures, bellies of pork. He lived alone, the uncle.

Into his nineties, our grandpa continued to drive that car. He would enter people’s driveways, thinking they were streets to someplace else.

“Run past the corner as fast as you can!” The gunner was out, or so we had been told, and did not abide children. Dared, we gawked: the soundalike boys — whose mother occasionally raised her hooded head, the boy who’d lost his brother, the girl who in a few more years would be killed by a bomb that was meant for someone else.

The neighbor girls said, “Shut your eyes.”

We peeped, of course. We scouted containers from in back of the drugstore. Redeemed illegally: a coin in the palm.

Our dad was working overtime. The miracle was Herculon, the fabric indestructible, and also — save your investment! — Scotch Gard; spray it and no stain was ever absorbed. The family store was decked out and festive: Orchids for ladies on Mother’s Day, a dozen to a box, plus pins. We helped to hand them out. At Christmastime a glittered tree, not home, but here, as a business decision. Ashes in glass, the angel on the door.

They poured water on our heads so we wouldn’t go to hell.

It was sweet as a stolen candy in our mouths.

When our father died, there was no one who knew where the car was parked.

The day the boys’ mother, colder than ever, rang our bell to complain — Tim, Tom — we were listening in. It was true, what she said.

We were not to play doctor again, our mother said.

Our father offered everyone who pulled up the dandelions a penny a pop. Our lawn sprouted children, some we did not know. Scattered by the fistful. Kicking up daisies. Our father in the doorway stood there and laughed.

The roses were in bloom.

He had his wallet in his hand, and the intent to make good.

The elm trees had their limbs sawed off.

A shot was heard.

Heads, stems: Everything uprooted on the lawn began to turn.

My mother cannot climb so well, a problem with a tendon. She also, I can hear it on the phone, has a cough.

“Do you remember those boys who ran away?” she says. Our fellow transgressors. Stealers of things that were already empty. “Listen,” she says. “They came back home. But maybe that was years ago.” There is something she is taking to reduce the inflammation. “Didn’t I tell you?” my mother says. “I want to say they’re living somewhere else.”

We would fly on the lake — the brotherless boy often giving us chase — stunned with the pleasure and brought to our knees.

“Smell the flowers,” said our mother.

He pummeled us, gently.

Our father would take us off to the air shows. See the pilots’ figure-eights! Full-steam ahead, they had military know-how. Hop on a wing!

Our fingers were stained.

Precision was the issue.

When we wiped them down again, our skate blades gleamed.

Our father would sometimes speak of the bris, a handed-down tale from before he was born, the infant too fragile. Not a slip of the knife, but a cold in the room, contagious. The boy, our father said, had no resistance in him.

“Religion,” he said.

There was a name in the sidewalk, written in cement.

Our father one Sunday drove to Chicago.

The bachelor uncle had saved too much. Papers and papers: currency, insurance. News, old news. The records of the cousins who were killed back in Poland. “Mass grave,” our father said, and never spoke of this again.

Down in the cellar, the bagged clothes stank. No one had touched them. “Except,” our father said, “they were buried alive.” Were they breathing in the earth? We went down to sniff.

Nights we had nightmares.

The uncle was interred, of course.

I have no idea where the papers have gone.

My sister and I like to drive past the house whenever we’re in town, which is rarely together. The elm trees have vanished.

The rifle on the corner, which should, by all rules of convention, have fired to a logical dramatic effect, to the best of our knowledge never did.

There is no one who knows us — what did we expect?

My mother is telling me what’s left, to be divided when she’s gone. “Certificates,” my mother says. “The medal, your father’s—”

Someone is trying to break in on the call.

“Prayer book,” my mother says. “You know that he kept it? The watch set with stones — are you with me?” she says. “Listen,” she says, “with a little repair, it could still tell time.”

I heard a story at my great aunt’s place, which I told to my sister long-distance on the phone. Well, first I said, “Did you know her real name?” because I knew or suspected that my sister did not. I will not repeat it here. But one of the cousins, a man whom I had never before had occasion to meet and whom I doubt I will meet again, explained over coffee, and after the whitefish salad was served, and after I took off my funeral heels, and while we sat watching the boats that were sailing along the lake, through the great, paned windows of my great aunt’s apartment where she had passed so many years in bed alone — for the most part alone — how it was that our great aunt came to be born in Chicago.

“Our story begins in Poland,” I said.

“Where?” my sister said.

“You heard me,” I said. I was walking through my living room.

“Where? Where in Poland? Was it the city where the cousins were buried?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” I said. “It wasn’t that side.”

“I know but—”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Is that your line?”

“They’ll go away. So anyway, our great aunt X’s mother was born in Poland, but fell in love with a man who was German. She followed him—”

“Uh, oh,” my sister said.

“You know,” I said. “But when she arrived, the lover deserted her. Very sorry story. And so, at least according to the cousin—”