He lets himself be small-talked and well-wished, nodding politely in response to even the faintest of frowns. One after another, he receives the pathologically tone-deaf tales of everyone else’s dead parents, the lives cut short and drawn-out passings, the goodbyes exchanged and the laments of those who’d missed the chance to lower eyelids that would forever stay shut.
Larry wants to say, in response, “Thanks for sharing, and fuck your dead dad.”
Instead, he musters his own frowns, consoling in turn. He pats a leg and pats a back, and even dispenses one hug so fierce it sends both their yarmulkes tumbling to the ground.
Whenever Larry checks the clock, it appears to be frozen in place, if not ticking backwards. The relentless Tennessee sun cuts through the blinds, catching Larry in its glare no matter which way he turns.
Having squatted there cramped for as long as he humanly could, Larry hoists himself up and pads out onto the burning back patio in his socks. All eyes are upon him as he transgresses.
* * *
—
When Larry gets his sister alone in the kitchen again, it’s almost time for Maariv prayers. He goes to close the door behind them, when he hears the audible creek of a woman’s knees from the adjoining room. It’s one of the elderly synagogue members getting up to tend selflessly to their needs.
Larry pauses with that door in his hand and thinks at her, with all his might, “Give it a break, you kindly old bag.”
The woman turns rigid under his gaze, before smoothing her skirt, as if that’s why she’d stood. She then sits, slowly, back down.
Facing Dina, Larry can see that she’s exhausted—not from hosting, or grieving, or parenting. His sister is worn out from him.
He waits for her expression to soften.
When it doesn’t, and afraid of missing his window of privacy, he speaks.
“They hover,” Larry says.
And what can Dina do in response but roll her eyes?
“Five more days of this,” he says. “Endless days.”
“Do you know what’s endless, Larry? Do you know what—more than hovering—your sister can’t bear for the rest of the week?”
Larry thinks about it. And Larry answers.
“Me?” is what he says.
“Correct. That is what I can’t handle. What my husband can’t handle. What my sweet children, I can already tell, will very soon cease to handle.”
Larry starts to respond, but his sister, with a finger raised, puts a stop to that.
She is not done.
“Larry, listen to me. I can’t keep reminding you that these are good people. I don’t have it in me to explain, every two minutes, why kindness is only ever kind. If you want to see negative where it is purely positive—”
“Purely?” Larry says. “I’ll admit, from people like this, at a time like this, there comes support. But that all of it,” he says, signaling what lay beyond the kitchen walls, “is straight-up pure?”
Dina crosses her arms. Dina challenges him, silently, to go on.
“Pure would mean that they’d all still be here if you turned not-kosher, or anti-Israel. Or if you were suddenly gay.”
“Why would I suddenly be gay?”
“Fine. Then Avi.”
“Avi, my husband? Avi, who is horny even now—in the midst?”
“Gross,” Larry says. Then, considering, “Sure. Gay-Avi. Would they be here in the same numbers if that was suddenly the case?”
It is a theoretical point.
Apparently, Dina isn’t in the mood right then for the high-minded. And though she’d just yesterday told him not to raise his voice, she yells, pretty loudly, “Enough!”
The sound echoes.
They’ve heard it in both the living room and dining room, for sure. Larry can sense all those bored neighbors, poking about the table of bagels and cakes, with its too-many plates of crudités.
He knows they’ve stopped grazing at the outburst, that they stare through the wall, their chapped and cracking carrots suspended mid-dip over bowls of crusted hummus and baba ghanoush.
Larry takes a deep breath and tries to count to ten.
“Enough, what?” he says, way too long after Dina’s yelled it. And for some reason he throws his shoulders back, proud, as if he’s just delivered the smartest retort in the world.
“I have opened my door to you,” Dina tells him. “My home. It’s always been your home. And my community—it’s always been yours too.”
“What, the Memphis community? Where Elvis’s body is buried down the street from our father’s? Spare me.”
“Memphis. Brooklyn. It doesn’t matter. The Orthodox community, the Young Israel community, it’s the same, anywhere in the world. It’s your home, Larry—wherever you find it, whether you run away or not.”
For her to say he’d run away, in Tennessee of all places. To say that to a lifelong New Yorker. That really had to top everything in this Grand Ole Opry, Gus’s Fried Chicken, Hee Haw state. Where, if Larry wasn’t already up all night because he was losing his mind, he’d stay awake anyway, afraid that a fucking fiddleback spider would bite him in his sleep and he’d open his eyes to his leg rotted off, if he woke up at all.
How could she, of all people, say he was the one who’d left?
As far as Larry was concerned, his sister had married Avi and followed him from Brooklyn to the moon. Larry was the one who’d put down roots in their hometown. Just look at his address. Wasn’t the queen-size Posturepedic bed where Larry lay his head every night—in real blackout-curtain darkness—just three subway stops from where they grew up?
Wasn’t the fact of his counting distance in subway stops proof enough? Could there be any greater sign of having remained within access to what they’d been raised to understand was civilization?
He is about to make this point. To dig into her, for real, when Rabbi Rye (of all the ridiculous rabbi names!) bursts in to drag Larry into the living room for evening prayers.
The wretchedness of the days is unbroken for Larry, but each is still punctuated with its own special torments. There were three occasions, morning, afternoon, and night, when the community made its minyan, and during which Larry was forced to recite—again and again—the Mourner’s Kaddish.
Rabbi Rye convenes the quorum, and in front of all those gathered Larry worships with the shuckling seriousness and kavanah these professional Jews expect.
When the moment comes Larry calls out, so that they can respond to his Heavenly entreaties. He holds his tears before them and recites for his dear, dear father the Prayer for the Dead.
III
Back in bed, Larry stares at those fish in misery, trapped as he is with the single household pet in the whole of the universe that offers no comfort. He hadn’t bothered fiddling with the light before lying down, resigned to perpetual sleeplessness.
What he had done, while the house was busy brushing teeth and putting on pajamas, was pull out his laptop and snake the boy’s telephone line over to the night table where he’d set his computer. Larry poked around the Internet, squinting over at the tank, trying to identify what some of those individual creatures were called. He was hoping he might alienate a bit less and bond a bit more.
When his nephew came in to grab his stuff and to sprinkle food atop the water, Larry stood beside him and, pointing, tried to remember what he’d learned five minutes before. He’d said, “Is that a dragonet, the one behind those two?”
The boy—exactly as his mother would have—rolled his eyes.
“Those are all dragonets. The two in the front are red scooters, and the one behind it is a spotted mandarin. But all of them—”
“Are dragonets?”
“Yes,” the boy said.
“And that little shark-looking one over there?”
“Is a shark,�
�� the boy said, shaking his head and leaving his uncle to his worries.
Larry now watches that mini-shark turn and cut his way, swimming to the glass.
He hugs the pillow to his chest and pulls his knees up, fetal. He thinks about how he’d loved his father. And how his father had loved him, had accepted him, and displayed—for a religious man—a different kind of faith. He’d believed in Larry’s Larryness. He’d held sacred his son.
But part in parcel with his father’s belief in him as a person, came a committed disbelief in all that Larry held true. From his deathbed, his father continued to make clear that the life Larry currently lived, that he’d worked so hard to build, that none of it was Larry’s real life.
Even at thirty, as Larry’s hair showed its first flecks of gray and the bags under his eyes began to puff out, the life he’d chosen was to his father temporary, a juncture that would end with Larry, as his father phrased it, “coming home.”
Home.
To his father and his sister, home was not the singular place one hailed from. It was any outpost, anywhere on the planet, that held like-minded, kosher, mikvah-dipping, synagogue-attending, Israel-cheering, fellow tribespeople, who all felt, and believed, and did the very same things in the very same way—including taking mourning so seriously that they breathed up all the air in the room, suffocating the living, so that the survivors might truly end up one with the dead.
So much did Larry’s father believe his son’s whole existence was a phase, that during one of those farewell discussions, he’d said to Larry, “If you have any of those horrible hipster tattoos, I don’t want to know. But I beg you, if you get any more, make sure they’re hidden. When you return to the fold, it will be hard if you have some silly thing written across your knuckles, or a dragon up your arm. You will be forced to face such a mistake every morning as you wrap your tefillin around.”
In that moment, Larry had felt a strange mix of emotions. He’d felt cared for. He’d felt hurt. He also found himself laughing. “Hipster,” from his father’s mouth! A million dollars he’d have bet that his father had never heard the word.
If they were on the subject of life decisions, it was as good a time as any to discuss the funeral, and the shipping of what would be the body back home to New York.
Larry couldn’t leave it all to his sister. He needed, at some point, to grow up.
It was his father’s turn to laugh, a raspy, dry-throated laugh.
No, he told his son. He wasn’t headed back there. Not to Brooklyn.
The news hit Larry with a jolt. And then Larry’s old head clicked in. Yes, of course, his father would want to be buried in Israel. When the Messiah comes and the dead are reawakened, his father wouldn’t want to roll underground all the way to Jerusalem before he might rise. This is what Larry had been taught as a child, that it’s those in the Holy Land who will stand right up from their graves. The other Jews will have to make the journey, rolling their jangly bones to the home-of-homes, before they might live again.
“Jerusalem,” Larry said, nodding somberly and full of understanding.
His father laughed again.
“Yerushalyim? Do you know what that costs? To fly a coffin? To buy a plot? You want me to mail myself there so they can stick me in a rocky hillside in the shadow of some Western-style mall? No, not Israel, Larry. Here, in Memphis,” he said. “I’m going to be buried by the machatanim. I’ll be buried near your sister’s family’s plots.”
“In Memphis forever?”
His father had nodded.
In Memphis, forever. Yes.
Larry didn’t know what to do with this. What about the plots his parents already had back in Royal Hills?
“My wedding present to her and that fool.”
“You gave your plot to Dennis?”
“The very day they exchanged rings. Let your mother rest under a shared headstone with that fool name for a Jew carved on it. ‘Dennis.’ It’s like spending eternity buried next to a tennis coach.”
“But, Dad, they’re not going to come back to Brooklyn. Not ever. They don’t even fly out to visit.”
“What do you know about the decisions of your mother and that idiot? What podiatrist moves his business to a place where the rich sit with their feet up all day? There isn’t a hard-work bunion for fifty miles from their house.”
“Why are we talking about feet? You don’t belong here, Abba,” Larry said, gesturing to the hospital room, and the hospital, to the city of Memphis, and the great state of Tennessee. “What if I get the plots back right now? What if I confirm with Mom? You should be buried in Royal Hills, where the Jews are. And where you’ve always been. You could take one and I—I could use the other.”
“Yes,” his father said. “Abandon us now, like it’s nothing. But I’m sure you’ll want to come back to us then.”
At the word “abandon,” Larry had winced. His father, catching it, understood. “I don’t mean ‘abandon’ as a son, Larry. You are here. You flew down. You stay at the La Quinta Inn and do your part. A perfect child. I’m talking about as a Jew. Not me, abandoned. I mean your people, your faith. And that is also why.”
“Why, what?”
“Why, here.”
“Because I’m secular?”
“Because I’m dying. And when I go, I want everything done right. Done real.”
IV
It’s the “everything done right” that has Rabbi Rye guiding Larry from the living room to the den. They’ve just finished davening on the last night of lockdown. In a clearly prearranged plan, Dina follows on their heels, with Duvy Huffman in tow.
Huffman is head of the Chevreh Kaddishe—the local burial society. This thick-necked, triple-chinned interloper was the man who’d readied their father’s body for its return to dust.
Dina hadn’t let anyone enter the den since their father had gone to the hospital, and then on to the grave. They were using the room for its emotional leverage, when all that remained of shivah was a single sunrise, and final minyan, after which all those gathered would call on brother and sister to arise and be comforted by God among the mourners of Zion.
Dina’s husband was noticeably absent. She’d left Avi out of it, as she always did when it was time for her and Larry to roll up their sleeves and fight. Really, Avi not being there did not bode well.
Not one of the three who face Larry pretends this is spontaneous. Huffman and Rye stand on either side of Dina. Behind them, a wall of gilt- and silver-spined religious books towers over them all. Larry moves back, only to hit the frame of the open pull-out couch, the blanket still tousled, the sheets in a twist.
As for the premeditated, that jackrabbit of a rabbi, looking even more sinewy in Huffman’s shadow, raises an eyebrow, giving Dina her cue.
“As you must be aware,” she says, speechifying and overly formal, “tomorrow we get up, and tomorrow you fly home. And I need to know, Larry, that you understand your responsibilities as our father’s only son.”
“Why does everyone keep acting like I’m not Jewish?” he says, already heated. “You think I don’t know the rules? You think, without you watching, I’d cremate him and stuff his ashes in a can? That I’d plant his bones in some field of crosses and pour a bottle of bourbon on the mound?”
Seeing where the conversation was too quickly headed, Rabbi Rye pipes in. “We’re not talking funerals. That is already done, executed exactly according to halachah.”
But Dina is ready to rumble. She takes a half step forward, blocking the rabbi’s line of sight and signaling that she has things under control.
“I’m talking about what’s now, Larry. I’m asking about the torch you must carry for this family—our family—for the next eleven months. Tell me you get that the Kaddish is on you.”
“I get it,” Larry says.
“You do? Do you really? You know yo
u can’t miss. Not once. Not a single service.” She uses the English word, which Larry knows is meant to cut, to wound him for how far he’s strayed. “Eight times a day, that’s how many times the Kaddish gets said.”
“I get that too,” Larry says. “I’ve been here all week. Putting on tefillin. Doing my job.”
“But we both know you’re going to quit that job tomorrow. And I desperately need you not to, Larry.” His sister’s eyes are now full of pleading, and the face they plead from shocks Larry with how much older it looks, suddenly aged by their collective loss.
When the mirrors are uncovered, Larry wonders what he’ll see.
“You don’t have to be religious,” his sister says. “You don’t have to believe. You can think nothing and feel nothing and eat your cheeseburgers every meal.” Here she shoots a glance to Rye, to make sure she’s delivering the goods. “But you can’t skip a minyan. Not once. Not ever. It’s what our father expects—what he expects right now from Olam HaBa. Because it’s that alone, what you do, what you say, that sets for our father the best conditions in the World to Come.”
“It’s true,” Rabbi Rye says, with Huffman nodding. Then both men join Dina in what is their best approximation of her sisterly, pleading stare.
They all know Larry has no intention of spending the year in synagogue. That there’s no way Larry can handle—is even interested in handling—a gargantuan commitment like that.
Larry stares back, not at his sister, but alternating between the two men. Dina has brought them to support her, and that’s exactly what Larry wants them to do. Support his sister. Let them make her feel safe and secure and whole in knowing she’s done her part.
As long as Larry promises he’ll say the prayer, what does it hurt Dina if he skips? And, honestly, what does it hurt their dead father, in Heaven above, if Larry says a prayer or not? Does anyone really think God sits up there with a scorecard, checking off every one of Larry’s blessings?
But Dina’s eyes, that gaze, his sister needs to hear him say it.
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