At the Grave
I’d have said the reason I went was to see if their names were spelled correctly on the stone. I approached, flinching back in the ghosted air before seeing that all the U’s and L’s and C’s were present in the proper places, the right number, after which I set about looking for something to put the roses in—ones the color of yellowed lace I’d bought at a market in Brooklyn and hauled out to the Island.
It was the first time I’d visited, though they’d been there fifty winters. It’s true my grandparents died within hours of each other, his heart stalling out well before sixty, hers empty after he’d gone. But that’s not the story I want to tell. I want to talk about how I’d begged them, quietly, in unpracticed prayers, a still-new bride, for what they could tell me, who I might be within this confused trammel, wicked encumbering called marriage that held no resemblance to the gush of ardor I’d once ridden astride, sure they’d have an answer, these two who knew each other as babes, married on Valentine’s Day. I rubbed the dark granite like a genie bottle waiting for miracles.
Back in the car—a fat book of Ginsberg’s poems thrust at me by an old teacher in Jersey. I couldn’t very well meet his inquiries as to my well-being screaming on about oh-my-god Thursdays, and how I was so afraid it might be all about remembering to bring out the trash cans. So instead, I explained I’d been writing poetry. “Poetry, Kitty? I’ve got poetry for you!” The book thrust into my hands, cover red as blood, the collected works, too heavy for a suitcase already overstuffed.
My grandparents were as mute as ever, dead two decades before I was born, locked under frozen ground. On the way to Holy Rood Cemetery, my husband driving, I read Ginsberg—searching. “What’s the cemetery’s street number again?” my husband asked repeatedly down the long suburban highway.
Rood is another word for cross, that intersection of faith and life, or faith and death, as the case may be. “What’s the number again?” “One hundred eleven!” I spat back. The simplicity of it—a one, a one, a one—lost on this man who had no kin here, nor in Brooklyn, nor Jersey, but had agreed to come with his new wife who’d held tight to the U’s and L’s and C’s of her name through their union—at first, like any early love, a giggling blaze, fervent breath of everything, that had lately—too soon—become a meeting like salt and wound.
Bible of unconventional liturgy, the book’s pages flapped in my lap like vespers. Ginsberg reportedly met one of his Buddhist teachers when they both tried to get in the same cab. “What’s the number we’re looking for?” “One. One. One. Why is that so hard?”
At the grave, I implored them—these grandparents I never knew alive. How? How to walk this life upright, shed the tracery of bone we’re given to lift our eyes, exit the ossuary and go to work for the sunrise, our hearts balloons and not anchors.
After a little while, we climbed back in the rented car, small trunk hanging low for all we’d dragged with us. We drove, past Dairy Queens and Jiffy Lubes, while the hill of stone marking my grandparents retreated into the landscape. I opened the Ginsberg book to pick up where I’d left off, glanced at the page number—One. One. One. I read: “the weight, the weight we carry is love.”
The Shed
June boredom. The three of us leaning against the hot metal siding in Lil and Gigi’s backyard.
Gigi scampers off, returns with a Ouija board, works the shed’s latch up with effort, one yellow door unfolding like a slow wing, and we enter the dark hovel. Someone moves a bike, the watering can. Someone else opens the card table, its reluctant legs, then, three folding chairs. We sit. My skin is laced in webs and my eyes adjust.
Our small fingers with the lightest touch on the triangle game piece. Gigi gets to ask the first question—she’s the oldest. “Who will I marry?” The piece moves to the D, the A, waits. It travels smooth and sure to the N. “I’m marrying someone named Dan!” Gigi is triumphant.
It’s my turn. I’m the only one with real stakes in this game. That morning last fall when Lil and Gigi’s mom bursts through the back door, grabs my mom, the two of them crying and wailing like alley cats. The hospital set to release him; he was supposed to come home. But instead, this. The only explanation: heaven. Which is no explanation at all. Just a foggy idea of some other world that comes in the color of the suns burning from the top corner of all my drawings. The crayons contaminating each other, their shine is dull-streaked, brown-cauled. And now, in this space with the crying moms, everything is that color—rust-yellow. My nightgown, the living room walls, sheen of the fully-cooked turkey someone brought and left in the kitchen. Everything movement: doorbells, people, the dog inconsolable. I want out—anywhere else—keep my eye on the door.
Gigi gets to ask my question—she’s the oldest. “Is someone here with a message for us?” My thighs beneath my terrycloth shorts splay bare on the metal of the chair. I’m shivering. If I lean back too far, the handlebar of the bike settles in my ribs. Anywhere else, please. I focus on a pinhole of light, another world outside this one, a gap in the door. There’s a bang on the wall of the shed. Lil screams and lifts up from her chair, knocking it over and into a line of empty bottles of car oil that topple and cover the floor. The door. That other world. It’s so close. If only I could see in. If only I could get there.
