Tara Ison - Rockaway

“I guess.”

“Your stuff’s important. You got this big exhibit happening, you’re going out in the world with all that.”

She nods, surprised he remembered.

“The problem,” he says, “is that you are way too hard on yourself.”

“No,” she says. “The problem is I am not nearly hard enough on myself.” She has said this before, to many people, and it is meant to be charmingly self-abnegating, said with a meek smile. But the fresh-cut truth of it stings unexpectedly. Her jaw suddenly feels unhinged in its joints; she realizes, mortified, that she is about to cry. She clenches her teeth.

“Why did that upset you?” he asks gently.

“I’m not upset,” she says. Itzak should call us back into the dining room, she thinks. He should be offering brandy to his guests.

“Give yourself time. Okay, yeah, so it’s cliché, I know, but it’s like an oyster.” He holds up his hands to form an oyster. “It has to start with that tiny speck of sand inside, right? It starts with practically nothing. Then layers and layers, growing a pearl. It takes time. You have to allow yourself that.”

“Did you know that oysters are hermaphroditic?” she asks.

“Huh. No, I didn’t know that.” He seems amused, at last. “I don’t eat oysters. You ever do acid?” he asks.

“I don’t like hallucinogenics.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want my brain getting away from me like that. Running loose in the store.”

“We’re more than our rational mind. That’s not all we are.”

“Ah. The ‘soul,’ right? The divine spark? Breath of God.”

“Yeah, that’s what’s great about tripping. You get there. That pure place. You strip away that layer of intellect, that conscious wall you build around yourself. It’s like peeling the scum off pudding, you get at the good stuff, where it’s all messy and warm. Where it’s real.”

“I bet you’ve done a lot of acid,” she says, smiling.

“Why do you think that?”

“You’re a musician.”

“Maybe. Acid, hash, mushrooms. I like mushrooms. Hey,” he says, waving a hand — he is about to end with whatever , but he sees her smiling, and stops. “Sure,” he says instead. “I’ve done my share.”

“Is it hard to find kosher acid?” she asks, and he finally smiles back.

“There’s lots of kinds of Jews,” he says. “Like this, here. I didn’t want you to miss Pesach.”

“Thanks,” she says. “This one was definitely different.” She glances at the crescent scar on her hand, folds her hands away in her lap. Why is this night different from any other? she thinks.

“You do the whole thing, at home? With your family?”

“Oh, sure. Well, when I was little. It’d be crazy for weeks. I mean, happy-crazy, you know. We aren’t very religious, but still. It was a big production. Everyone had their own job to do, all of us. .” Her mother, chopping the apples. Boiling a chicken. The smell of silver polish, a hot iron steaming the afikomen cloth. Her mother promising a spoonful of honey if Sarah will try, just try , the homemade chopped liver, Show your brother what a big girl his sister is , then she is chuckling, laughing, as Sarah pretends to choke, to gag, to writhe dyingly on the floor. All right, here’s your honey, honey! Now you go set the table, Sarah Bernhardt! Her father is presiding at dinner, slicing the brisket, he is joke-threatening they’ll do the whole service Word for Hebrew word if everyone doesn’t stop laughing! while joke-sneaking bits of meat from the platter, stuffing his mouth with big gobbling noises to make everyone laugh even more. This year is special, this year she is prompting her little brother on the Four Questions, Why is this night different from any other? , it’s his turn now, he is just old enough, Aaron, the youngest child, and he is giggling, delighted with the new role, all the big responsibility. Everyone is so proud of him, clapping. She hides the afikomen matzoh for him, under the stuffed panda pillow on his bed to make it easy, there it is, He found it, give Aaron the prize, Daddy! All of them applauding, celebrating, together.

“We all did it together,” she says. “The big whole family thing, yeah.”

“That’s nice. Tradition.”

“Not really. I mean, it didn’t have time to be tradition. To become that. Because then Aaron died. You know, my little brother?” He nods solemnly. “And afterward, that first year, my parents weren’t doing very well. My dad was working a lot, all the time. Or playing golf. And my mom slept half the day, then she’d get up and have these terrible headaches and go right back to bed. And the TV was always on, like this white humming noise always in the background, they’d just sit there facing it every night for hours. I don’t think they were even watching, or listening. Just zoned out. Not talking. I’m sure it was a coping thing, you know?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I mean, now I can look back and understand. They were depressed. They were devastated. That kind of grief. It broke them. But when you’re a little kid, and your parents just go zombie, right? What do you do? So that first Passover after Aaron died, I realized it wasn’t going to happen, you know, because why bother ? That’s what my dad kept saying, about everything. ‘Why even bother?’ So I got the idea I’d do it. I’d do the whole thing, surprise them, you know? Make them feel better.”

“That was sweet of you.”

“Right, like a seder’s going to make up for everything.” She laughs. “So I made the soup, which means I ‘doctored up’ some broth from a can. And I got that gefilte fish in the jar with the jelly and that bright pink horseradish and I bought one of those ready-roasted chickens in the bag and got out the silver and set the table, the whole thing. I wanted it to be perfect. My friend Emily’s mom Leah, you know, one of Nana Pearl’s daughters?”

“Yeah.”

“She took me to the store for all the stuff. And she even bought the wine for me, and I did the whole service, with all the prayers and courses. And I drew a special Passover picture of us. ‘Our Family Seder.’ To go on the fridge. I had this huge megabox of crayons, you know, a dozen shades of every color?” Burgundy, scarlet, crimson, cerise. “I really went to town on that drawing. Jewish iconography and everything.” Waxy lamb’s blood scribbled on the door. Fool the Angel of Death that way, or was that Pharaoh’s troops? Pass over this house, spare the first-born son.

“They must’ve loved all that.”

“It was pretty awful, actually.” She sees her mother, numbly drinking the wine, her father’s eyes on some muted game on the television over her head. She hears herself reading from the Haggadah, the sound of her own thin little voice in the quiet, quiet room.

Why is this night different from any other night?

Back to being her turn again, her job. The youngest child, only child.

“It was so awful. I oversalted the soup, I even burned the chicken trying to heat it up. The kitchen was full of smoke, that dark gray burn smoke, you could smell it all through dinner. You could smell it for days.”

Locusts, pestilence. Darkness visited upon the house.

“I bet they didn’t care about that,” he says, gently.

“And my mom, when she saw the drawing, she just started to cry. And then my dad’s face. . I’d drawn the three of us. The Mommy, the Daddy, and me”— Mommy, Daddy, come see, come look —“all holding hands. Just us three. Big mistake. In hindsight.”

She remembers clearing the dishes, leaving her mother and father in their weeping and silence at the dining room table, throwing the half-eaten food in the kitchen trash. She remembers throwing her drawing in after, dumping the garish, uneaten horseradish on top of all the crayoned shine. She remembers cleaning everything up, standing at the sink and washing dishes, rinsing out the soup can, everything soapy, slippery, gripping the can hard, remembers the jagged lip of the metal lid making its quick crescent slice, the well of blood into the gray dishwater, a sudden rich cloud of red brightening it all up.