Kaddish

By mid-March, three months after my mom left, she hadn’t called or sent a letter, and there was no way she was coming back. I scanned the faces of women her age who rode the city bus I took to school. Was she following me, trying to blend in with office workers and their somber faces? Had she found a pair of dress slacks, as she called them? Traded her puffy burgundy coat for something grey or black, and put on a paisley scarf? Or had she made it to the prairies and was taking pictures of wheat fields and grain elevators like she said she would? I imagined her parked at the side of a road in the country, asleep in the back under a blanket. There’s nothing worse than worrying about a person who’s ditched you.

My father told me someone was coming for dinner. He took a salmon fillet in plastic wrap from the fridge and cut it in thin pieces. Then he sliced a loaf of rye bread and placed the fish on it. Since my mom first went to the hospital, months before she vanished, we’d lived on frozen pizza, packaged tortellini, and iceberg lettuce with Kraft dressing.

My father bought cloth napkins and ironed them, something he’d never done. And he set the table with my mom’s china that we used two or three times a year. The plates were rose and gold-coloured, and lightly scratched. Just like most of the things my mother owned, she’d found them at the flea market. I wished he’d have packed up the china with the rest of her stuff.

I asked my dad who was coming.

“Kiki,” he said, as if I should have known. He was dribbling on the fish the mustard dill sauce that he’d bought. “She’s from France.”

I went over everything in my head: the number of months my mom had been gone, and how someone named Kiki could possibly be older than twelve.

“Go change, Aziel,” my dad said.

If he was going to demand that I pretend I wasn’t grieving my mother, I’d protest. In my room, I put on black pants and a black t-shirt. Before my dad got to my mom’s things in the narrow spare room at the end of the hall where she painted, I’d taken a few oil pastels from the ground. I held a black one and ran it along my eyebrows, then under my eyes and over my eyelids. In the bathroom, I looked at my face in the mirror. I’d lost weight since my mother went to the psych ward. My cheekbones showed like hers and my ribs were more visible than ever. There was something satisfying about it. And with the black, improvised makeup, I was as close to goth as I’d ever be. My father would hate it.

When his guest arrived, my dad opened the door. Kiki kissed him on both cheeks. I had never seen my father do that with anyone. Kiki’s black hair came to her shoulders. It was permed and covered with a waxy finish. There were green-blue veins at her temples. She waited for my father to take her coat, and as he did, she tossed her head back. Her jacket was white rabbit hair or fake fur, and she had white leather boots. A trail of perfume caught at the back of my throat.

Kiki looked me up and down, and my dad invited her to sit in the living room. Then he gripped my elbow and led me to the kitchen. “You look like you should be hanging out on Rideau Street.”

He told me to go upstairs and clean off whatever I’d put on my eyes and wear something else, not black. Instead, I went to the living room and sat in his rocking chair. Kiki was on the couch and ignored me.

I was used to that. I’m sure when my parents decided to get married and later have me, they never said, “We’re going to get so caught up that we’ll ignore our kid,” but they did. And no one wants to chase after their parents, but that’s what I’d done. Trying to get my dad to teach me to box. To run with me and talk to me. For my mom to lift her eyes from her watercolours. To open her eyes in the psych ward, in spite of how the meds they gave her made her sleep.

Kiki could never replace my mother, but what if she had something to give? Some warmth. Some softness she could add to our home that had become all but walls since my dad got rid of my mother’s art, clothes, and spice bottles from the kitchen.

I let my eyes rest on Kiki’s face, searching for some evidence that beneath her makeup and downcast expression, she might have a capacity to care. If there was any, I couldn’t see it. She wouldn’t look my way. She wouldn’t talk to me. The only one she would ever register was my dad. Just as well.

My father walked past me with a glass of gin and tonic for Kiki and the fish he’d made on my mom’s pressed glass serving dish, another one of her things he’d kept.

“Ooh,” Kiki said, plucking a piece of gravlax with her fingertips. Her nails were painted deep mahogany. My father said he needed to check the quiche in the oven and left us again. Kiki gazed at the ice in her drink.

“Does your father cook?” she asked. Maybe she would notice me, I thought, but my only purpose for her was to fill in any gaps of her knowledge of my dad.

“Barely,” I said.

“Probably doesn’t have time,” she replied, “looking after you.”

“Yeah, I’m a lot of work,” I said.

At the table, Kiki sat in my mother’s chair. My dad put the quiche down and cut it with my mom’s stainless steel pie cutter. Then he balanced a slice over Kiki’s plate, his hand quivering. A grown man, anxious, and trying to impress.

“Not bad,” Kiki said as she chewed. “The crust should be flaky. And it’s a little bit salty.”

My father scrunched his face. I don’t know what he expected. He’d brought the quiche home from the IGA freezer section.

I ate a bite. The fish was slippery and cold, the bread dry. I wished my mom was there and that my father had never met Kiki. My mother might have roasted a turkey, asked if she’d overcooked it and if it was dry, the same questions she always asked. Or she’d have made tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches. Sponge cake with strawberries. “Local berries,” she always said, as if hothouse strawberries sold in plastic containers, imported from somewhere like Chile, were rare and extravagant.

Before my father and Kiki finished eating, someone pulled up in front of our house in their car. Over the sound of their engine, I could hear them arguing. There was a woman’s voice and a man’s. They weren’t young. In fact, they sounded old. What were they doing fighting in their car on our street?

“Why didn’t you tell me?” the woman kept asking.

And the man kept saying, “I didn’t know how.”

They went over the same thing, the woman searching for answers, the man unable or unwilling to give any.

The pair drove off and there was a knock at the door. My dad got up and opened it. It was a couple of Mormon teenagers. My father said he wasn’t interested. The Mormons said they could come back. He said they shouldn’t, and he closed the door and returned to the table. The crease between his eyebrows was deep.  

A couple of minutes later, another knock. My dad put down his cutlery and wiped his mouth with his napkin and let it drop on his chair. He went to the basement and came up holding a hockey stick. Kiki’s eyes were wide. My dad kept another stick in the back of the station wagon. He said it was in case someone tried mugging him again, like a man had once in the grocery store parking lot.

Kiki and I watched him move to the front door. He opened it, and I expected to see the Mormons, but it was a young woman holding a clipboard twirling a pen in her fingers. She looked at the hockey stick, said they were doing a poll, and asked if he’d be willing to say which party he was planning to vote for in the fall election.

My father put the stick behind his back. He said he hadn’t decided, but even if he had, he wouldn’t say.

It wasn’t five minutes and someone else was at the door. Kiki huffed and pushed a piece of quiche across her plate with her fork. This time it was a campaigner asking for funds to save endangered wolves. We’d lived in the house for a decade. The whole time, I couldn’t recall couples arguing in the lane, Mormons, pollsters, or environmentalists turning up, but it was glorious. The thought that my mom might have somehow been behind it made me feel like a beehive had burst open in my belly.

*

Within a week or two, Kiki was back. She walked in with a leather overnight bag. My father went to hug her and she put out her elbow to stop him.

“Traffic,” she said.

“I didn’t mean for you to drive on a Friday afternoon,” my dad said.

“You told me you couldn’t come to my place because of your son,” she said. “I’m not interested in having a relationship on the phone.”

My father leaned over, put on his boots, and went outside to get a couple of grocery bags from her car. He put them on the kitchen floor and reached a hand inside one to unpack it. She moved towards him and pretended to slap his wrist, and he dropped a package of noodles into the bag. Then she latched onto his shirt with both hands on his chest and pulled him towards her.

“Let me spoil you,” she said. “You’ve been working so hard all week.” Her iciness had turned to schmaltz.

My dad slipped out of the kitchen leaving Kiki rifling through the groceries. She retrieved the pasta and a can of clams. At the stove, she tore the noodle bag open with her teeth and tipped its contents into a pot of water. Then she clawed through the drawer for my mother’s can opener. She attached the device to the lid and cranked the knob, but it kept slipping. Kiki lost her grip on the can, and it clunked in the sink. Clam juice splashed on her cheek. She reached for a dish towel, wiped it, and flicked her hands as if the liquid was stuck to her fingers.

“Is he joining us?” she called to my dad.

I didn’t want to insert myself into their date.

When it was ready, Kiki took my mother’s chair again. My dad oohed about the pasta, and I felt like stabbing him.

“How’s the vongole?” she said.

It was gummy and bland.

“Do we have Parmesan?” I asked.

“Don’t,” my father said. I had to pretend, as he did, that Kiki was flawless.

My mom made the same meal, but hers was nothing like Kiki’s. My mother bought baby clams and fresh pasta in the ByWard Market. She pressed fresh garlic and mixed in white wine. Her recipes were from a hardcover copy of The Joy of Cooking that was always on the kitchen counter, and a worn, blue Jewish cookbook. And unlike Kiki, my mother didn’t pretend to be Julia Child.

Kiki opened a paper box with a fancy gold sticker on the side. A tiramisu cake she’d bought had collapsed. She shut the box, opened the cabinet under the sink, and pushed it into the garbage. Then she stood there, palms pressed to her eyes.

My father stood behind her and put a hand on her waist.

“I can drive and get something,” my dad said. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want to be alone with you,” she said, feigning tears. “Don’t you think it’s a little crowded here?”

“What are you talking about?” my father asked.

“Your son,” she said.

“Why do you have to concern yourself with him?”

Was he actually standing up for me?

“He’s pecuuuliar,” she said.

She could have said a lot of things, but peculiar—with its hard consonants and final r, the way it sounded extra sharp with her French accent—landed deep in me. It hurt, and I hated that it did, because who was Kiki to me? What did it matter if she didn’t want me? She’d been dating my father a couple of weeks, wore rabbit fur and white boots, and permed her hair. 

My dad took her hand and led her to the living room. But rather than continuing to defend me, he tried comforting her. “It’s an adjustment for everyone,” he said. It’s true, he added, that I was unconventional. Maybe he meant lost. Ravaged by my mom’s sickness and disappearance. But it was easier not to say all of that and try to make Kiki feel better. To make her feel like a queen and that everything and everyone else, including me, were details.

Kiki had used my mother’s largest pot to cook the sauce and it was on the stove. Inside, there were a couple of inches of silty liquid and leftover clams. I wanted to take the pot, crouch down, and pour the broth on the linoleum. I’d watch it creep across the kitchen. I remembered the custodian at school hosing down the outdoor rink in early winter every year. As the water froze, it was the same colour as the soup. I would have done this, but I needed my dad on my side, even though he was almost entirely on Kiki’s.

That night, I heard them screwing in my dad’s room. I imagined my father, hands pressed into the mattress, propping himself up. I envisioned Kiki beneath him, her thin frame and permed hair, and I had to get out. I’d have to tell my friend Khush.

I went to the bathroom and locked the door. A white cardboard tube the size of a saltshaker that belonged to Kiki was on the window ledge. I picked it up and read the label. It contained ground rice grains to remove blackheads. I thought of her applying the scrub to her face, trying to clear away imperfections. Why did she and my father seem to care so much about concealing their shortcomings from each other? Why was there such a performance?

Up the stairs in my bed, I tried blocking out the sound of their lovemaking, but the house amplified it, and I practically felt their breath through the air vent. I opened the window and lifted the fire escape rope my dad had attached to the wall. I looped it around my hips a couple of times and let the excess fall.

The humping didn’t stop. The house was small.

I wasn’t brave like Khush. I couldn’t do ollies on a skateboard like he did. At the steak house where we worked in the dish pit, I was a minor player and followed his lead, while Khush tackled everything they threw at us. And I hadn’t spent my life without a father like he had, even though my dad had been a stranger forever. But I backed out of my bedroom window and held onto the rope, heart pounding. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of doing that. When my mom was home and the house was full of her paranoia, her raging and hiding, her driving off and coming back late in the night, so many times, I wanted to escape through my window. 

My feet slid a little down the side of the house. I had socks on and no grip.

The air was cold. The city was still, and the Milky Way was clear. My limbs started to freeze, but I didn’t rush, not to the ground or to get back inside. I hung, suspended like a mountain climber, balancing at the side of the house.

I told myself to forget about Kiki. I could do that, but the vision of my mom asleep in the backseat of a car in the prairies came back. In my mind, the vehicle rolled into a river. There was a thin cover of ice, and it gave way, and the car started filling with water.

The rope loop around me slipped. I dropped a few feet and spun so my back faced the wall. I kicked the air, and my heel cracked a window in my father’s room.

Had the glass cut my foot? It was too numb to tell. To reach down would have risked slipping even more.

Their screwing had likely stopped. My dad’s voice would soon be in my ears.

Dangling in the cold, I managed to turn myself around, and watched as they both came to the window and peered out at me. Through the glass, I saw Kiki’s eyes roll back in her head, and my father kissed her head for the longest time, allowing his eyes to close.

*

My dad told me he was taking time off work driving his bus. He and Kiki were going skiing for a few days in Quebec. Since my mother went into the hospital, he’d worked as much as he could. Now he was going on holiday.

The day of the trip, Kiki picked him up, and he left the station wagon in the driveway. I searched his dresser for the extra key that my mom had owned. I called Khush. It was a Thursday evening, and I got in the car and drove to his place. I wouldn’t get my licence for another year and a half, and I’d only driven a couple of times, when Khush took his mom’s car to spin donuts after it snowed, and we swapped places. I checked the rear view, hoping there wouldn’t be any cops, and tried to remember the timing, taking my foot off the clutch and giving it gas.

I arrived at Khush’s place where he lived with his mother, Linda, and he got in next to me. I drove off and he pushed the cigarette lighter and brought it to the end of one of his mom’s cigarettes. Then he put in a tape his mom’s boyfriend Elliott had made for her. He’d recorded himself professing his love. His voice was gravellyand his Manchester accent hadn’t changed since moving to Canada decades earlier. He said how much he craved her this and that, and what he wanted to do with his hands, his tongue, and his lips. I didn’t want to hear, so I pushed the tape out.

Elliot was ten or twelve years older than Linda. He had a grey mustache, thinning hair, boxy metal glasses, and wouldn’t have looked out of place at a librarian’s desk, but he worked as a stagehand at the National Arts Centre.

In the car that night outside Khush’s place, I asked if he’d show me his dad’s grave. It was a month since his father had been hit by a car crossing the road, not on the other side of the country, but blocks from his house. They only found out then that he’d been living there the whole time and had chosen to stay out of Khush’s life.

Khush agreed and I drove to the Beechwood Cemetery. In all the years we’d lived in Ottawa, I’d never been inside. I passed the main sign, took a right, and drove up a long road, headstones stretching out in every direction on snow-covered ground. I cruised for a couple of minutes before reaching the top of a gentle hill.

I shut off the engine. It was quiet around us. There were no other cars and the snow softened everything.

We got out and walked, Khush in front. The clouds were low and greyish white, and it felt like it might snow. Beyond a line of trees that surrounded the cemetery were houses and apartment blocks, lights on, families doing things families did. Inside the perimeter of the graveyard, it was a maze of headstones, bones, and bodies yet to decompose in coffins under the frozen ground and snow.

I followed Khush between graves until he found his father’s. The tombstone was dark slate and read AnokhSingh 1945—1984. Nothing more. Linda had chosen the words. There was no use adding more for a man who’d been deliberately missing for so long.

Khush lifted his flask from his coat pocket. He took a sip and handed it to me. It was his mom’s sherry. I brought it to my lips and downed a bit. It was like syrup made from dried leaves and leather, but it warmed my stomach.

I’d told Khush about my mom’s time in the hospital, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to say she’d split. I’d come close, but never got the words out. Then I told him.

“She took off,” I said, “to the prairies.”

He let one eye close and the other locked on me.

“Some people need space,” he said. “Your mom’s an artist.”

The way he said it made something fall into place. I didn’t need him to console me in any other way. I hadn’t tried to make him feel better after his dad died in the ER. What could I say? We were cut open. It would take years, maybe decades, to see just how deeply. But I couldn’t do nothing. The cemetery felt enormous. No one knew we were there.

I thought of years earlier and one of the odd times my father brought me to the synagogue. The rabbi stood at the front of the temple, the same rabbi with the bald head who visited my mom in the hospital. He recited the Kaddish. I hadn’t thought of it for so long, how the feeling around us in the pews shifted. How people sat still, listened more closely. How sadness sunk down on us, and a wave of comfort from the prayer.

“Oseh shalom bimromav,” the rabbi said.

I couldn’t have explained what it meant. But there was never a time I felt closer to my father. We didn’t know who’d died, but it didn’t matter. I was next to my dad, close enough to feel the heat from his body. And even though he didn’t touch me or put his arm around me, I knew, as long as the rabbi prayed out loud, my father wouldn’t leave.

The words left my mouth, standing in front of Khush in the graveyard. “Oseh shalom bimromav,” not loud and commanding as the rabbi had said them. My words were hushed, but Khush heard me. He closed his eyes and his brow was smooth. I wished we could stay there all night. 

I pictured him at his father’s bedside in the hospital. Why did he have to lose him that way?

I imagined myself placing the rabbi’s tallit, the long white and blue shawl he wore, over Khush’s shoulders. Then I pictured myself wrapping it around him over and over as if the shawl had no end.