The Best American Essays 2016 (36 page)

I learned to tell my right hand from my left by standing in the kitchen, facing the sink, and thinking about the dishes in the closets. At the time I was still too short to peer over the porcelain rim and learn that in the Northern Hemisphere water swirls down the drain counterclockwise.

Right, I knew, was the closet where the dairy (
milchig
) dishes were stored. They were accompanied by the usual array of implements, such as an eggbeater and a potato masher. We called this the
milchika
side, adding that final a for lubrication between consonants, like a pat of butter stirred into noodles to keep them unstuck. Left was the closet where the meat (
fleishig
) dishes, with their respective eggbeater and potato masher, bided their time. We called it the fleishika side, the
a
in this case analogous to a dollop of chicken fat averting the clumping of peas. “Right” was associated with milk, crumbly white farmer cheese, and sour cream. “Left” was chicken soup, chopped liver, and hamburgers of a doneness in which what juice remained was as dark as the crust.

There was a color code in the kitchen that prevented the mixing of milk and meat. The
milchika
dish drainer was red; the dish sponge was pink. The
milchika
towels had red stripes down the sides, so that red, and by extension, warm colors, meant dairy; you would not use these towels, during some stove emergency, to lift the lid off overly exuberant chicken soup. To do that you would use the towels with blue stripes down the sides. And by the way, how many times do I have to tell you that’s what pot holders are for?

As long as I stayed at home, right and left were relatively uncomplicated. Asked to hold up my right hand, I merely did the preschool version of a thought experiment: planting myself so that the seam of the worn linoleum ran under the arches of my saddle shoes, I conjured up the porcelain of the sink, the glossy white-painted wooden cabinets with chromium pulls beneath it, the glossy white-painted closet doors at each side, and voilà, in less than ten minutes the correct hand would shoot up. If butterscotch pudding (
milchig
, in a dish from the right side) was being proffered as a prize for the right answer, the thought experiment could be accomplished in less than ten seconds.

It was at school, when contemplating a first-grade workbook, that I got my directional signals crossed. As I recall, there were two kinds of black-and-white line drawings, accompanied by two kinds of insidious fill-in-the-blanks. The first was something like:
Look, look, Spot! Dick has a balloon in his _______ (right, left) hand.

This question, I began to understand, required a somewhat more sophisticated thought experiment than those of my early career. I had to put myself in Dick’s place, i.e., pretend I was in the kitchen, but facing the stove, which was opposite the sink. Or maybe pretend I was the sink, with a right-hand closet and a left-hand closet, facing me. Or was I still me, stepping inside the page and turning around, carrying the kitchen closets with me, the cups swinging riskily on their hooks, the cow-shaped creamer lowing morosely at the disturbance, the carefully hoarded, yellowing, reusable plastic containers rolling with every degree of my rotation? Eventually, I figured out that Dick’s left hand was opposite my right hand. This was what it meant to recognize another being; I was mastering the difficult arts of empathy and differentiation.

Then came the second challenge:
Look, look! Dick is on the _______ (right, left). Jane is on the _______ (left, right). Spot is in the middle.
There was Dick again, that person-in-reverse. But what degree of empathy was required this time? Whose right? Whose left? Were we still talking about Dick’s hands, or were we back to right and left vis-à-vis me?

I lurched through first grade somehow, looking both ways and up and down before crossing streets, as the principal, at assemblies, advised. I was pretty good at up and down. But this question of whose right, whose right of way, whose way, has continued to plague me. It was only intensified by my twenty years in Israel, where reading, not to say living, is done from right to left instead of from left to right, though numeration, usually but not always, is left to right.

On a visit to the United States sometime during those twenty years I drove my aging parents to a fish restaurant, got out, and checked the hours on the door before easing them out of the car and propping them up on their varifooted walking equipment. We ambled haltingly over to the restaurant, which, at three o’clock, as it turned out, was not yet open. The hours I’d read as eight to four were in fact four to eight. Some might attribute this confusion to my personal right/left handicap. Others, I hope, will blame the rabbis for determining that fish is
pareve
, considered neither dairy nor meat, and can be associated with either the right-hand, red-towel closet or the left-hand, blue-towel closet, depending on which pot it is cooked in and what accompanies it on the plate. Only recently have I been puzzled by this neutral classification of the finned breed. Hath not a fish eyes? If you prick it, doth it not bleed? Then how could it be served with a dairy meal?

My parents were annoyed and disappointed by our ill-timed foray; so much for my good intentions. But maybe I hadn’t really wanted to take them to this restaurant. Maybe I was just getting back at them for having had such unwieldy, old-fashioned, overloaded kitchen closets that made my thinking lumber so.

For an understanding of family vengeance—as well as empathy and fish—we of course look to Shakespeare: of what use a pound of flesh? “To bait fish withal.” The Bard, incidentally, was kind enough to minimize his stage directions, so that we are spared the question of whether right and left pertain to the actors or the audience. If Christian Portia were to enter stage right and Jewish Jessica stage left, I, for one, wouldn’t know where to put myself.

What directional guidance we do get in
The Merchant of Venice
hardly tells us which end is up. The clown Launcelot Gobbo, Shylock’s servant, walks down the street and meets his father, who is looking for him and, being blind, doesn’t know he’s found him. Young Gobbo, apparently settling some dish-closet accounts of his own, teases his father with these directions to Shylock’s:

Turn up on your right hand at the next turning, but at the next turning of all, on your left; marry, at the very next turning turn of no hand, but turn down indirectly to the Jew’s house.

I happened to be puzzling over this scene while standing in line at a U.S. post office one day, holding some letters addressed in Hebrew and some addressed in English. I concluded my business, and, with empathy in my heart and stamps in my purse, walked toward the exit, where I reached for the wooden handle on the glass door. No thought experiments: I just took in the PULL sign and pulled. The door went nowhere. Suddenly I noticed Dick, Jane, and Spot all smirking at me from the sidewalk. Now in digital color, Dick sported
fleishika
designer jeans with a
milchika
striped polo. “Oh,” he said, “the places you’ll go.”

“
Exeunt omnes
,” I replied.

3. Undo/Redo

During my time in Israel there was a family emergency on Long Island. I got on a plane in Tel Aviv, flew for eleven hours, landed in New York, took a taxi to my parents’ house, picked up the car keys, went out, slamming the door, realized I had locked myself out, remembered which basement window might be unlatched, backed myself into it, landing feetfirst in a sink, got the house keys, dashed out the door, drove to the hospital, parked in a garage, entered the lobby, and stood by a potted ficus deciding whether to go first to my mother with heart failure on the seventh floor or my father half-paralyzed by a stroke on the fourth. A dry leaf from the detritus around the basement window apparently still clung to the elbow of my sweater; a man passing plucked it off, smiling, and handed it to me.

My mother, in a frail voice from her bed—I have the impression of pink, but nothing was pink there, only blanched skin and bleached sheets—my mother, whose warnings and interpretations I usually rejected, said, “Go see him but try not to be shocked.” I walked slowly down the corridor, over beige linoleum squares, practicing unsurprise.

Where, in the middle of my father, was the dividing line, the hyphen in half-dead? I imagined a column of hyphens, like vertebrae, held in proximity by cartilage and air and the goodwill of some unintentioned Being. Or the same hyphens, each rotated 90 degrees, the way you pivot a gurney to get it through the door, hyphens turned vertical, forming a semi-permeable perforated line, allowing a little life to ooze through, osmotic, from left to right, and a little death from right to left. If you listened closely you could hear the backwash, like blood murmuring around a weakened heart valve.

All this so as not to look at his face, which asked me how much I was willing to know of who he now was. And what did I know before?

The German artist Hannah Höch made
mischling
photomontages in her series
From an Ethnographic Museum
, showing alien eyes, unpaired, in an unsuspecting face; exposing rough seams between cultures, raveled and frayed. One montage,
Abducted
(1925), shows an African sculpture of four bare people riding the long back of a beast, two women between two men, all facing left. But Höch replaced the head of the first woman with a Western profile facing right: pale skin, bobbed hair, lipstick on an appalled mouth open in protest against this inexorable motion. The hostage has as much chance of reversing her fate as someone sliding backward through a small, low window, trying to get unborn.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about discreteness of categories as the essence of purity in many faiths and cultures. According to this theory, something is unkosher—unfit, unseemly—if it mixes attributes of two or more categories, as lobsters and shrimp do, for instance:
mischlings
living in the sea but having no fins or scales, not swimming but walking on the seafloor.

All this so as not to look at his face.

Every day for a couple of weeks I exercised my father’s dead half, moving the leg out slightly from under the sheet, bending, straightening, bending, straightening skin, bone, and string of muscle. Someone in charge had told me this would help circulation, maybe muscle tone; there was hope of restoring use. I explained to my father what I was doing, but I never knew what he absorbed. Words would come out of him from time to time, but I couldn’t tell if those were words he intended. Gradually it became clear that nothing in his leg would change, and one day I gave up. Later I pictured the scene as something from a grade-B cowboy movie: lying on a craggy ledge, I had slowly disengaged my fingers, numbed by his dangling weight, and let him slide over the edge. I wondered if he had felt himself slip. His left hand clutched my right arm against the bed rail.

In the next stage of betrayal I moved him on a gurney through the underground passage from the hospital to the geriatric institute, from the live side to the dead side. He and my mother had been volunteers in “geriatrics,” and he had often wheeled patients back and forth through that tunnel for X-rays and tests. I had witnessed his usefulness, his hand on the shoulder of a man in a wheelchair, his nearly nonchalant pressing of the elevator button, his unmindful placing of one foot in front of the other. Did he know now that he was going in the final direction to the last place?

One day I shaved him carefully, crying, and went back to Israel. Years later I saw a 1934 marble sculpture of Giacometti’s: half head, half skull, with open mouth and closed jaw. I recognized the cheekbones.

I picture time flowing from left to right, like prevailing winds on a flat map. On my computer screen is a little arrow labeled
UNDO
, curving back toward the left.
REDO
curves toward the right. Through the open window above my desk I hear a baby crying. I click
UNDO
: silence. Unnerved, I click
REDO
. The baby cries again. I can huff, I can puff, I can blow the winds back.

At the nurses’ station on my mother’s floor in an old-age home, four years after my father’s death, there were signs to help people get their bearings:
THE WEATHER IS (CLOUDY, RAINY, SUNNY).
Once a sign said
TODAY IS TUESDAY
on Wednesday. It would be right in another six days, but who had another six days?

On the day that turned out to be my mother’s last, bad weather took over her body. She tossed from one side of the bed to the other, her head missing the pillow and thumping against the bars. “Wow,” she said, and then: “What’s happening?” I was trying not to be shocked and so was she, but I could tell she wasn’t trying hard enough. Months later I found a photo of a gargoyle in the newspaper travel section, with the same startled eyes.

When one of my brothers and I were called back later that night, whoever she was had already been abducted. Her jaw was tied up with a towel, in the old-fashioned toothache style, apparently to stop her from asking “What’s happening?” wherever she was going, or from saying mean things. When I was a kid she used to say, “Do that again and I’ll knock your block off.” And one night just a few months earlier, when I was visiting her at home and had tucked her in and put the water glass in its place and the Tylenol in its place so she could find them in the night of her “legal” blindness, she turned toward me and said, “Who’s going to do this for you?”

I had cut out the picture of the gargoyle, thinking maybe I’d make a photomontage. I’m still wondering what could share that page.

JILL SISSON QUINN

Big Night

FROM
New England Review

T
HE
U
.
S
. CONTAINS
more species of salamander than any other country, but in an entire lifetime you may never encounter one. Salamanders—secretive, fossorial, nocturnal—exit underground harbors only in darkness. Even those that gather in great masses to breed do so without a sound, moving monklike through the yammering of wood frogs and spring peepers to ephemeral ponds.