Ready on the Firing Line

I own four graves at the Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island. My father and his two brothers were in their thirties when they purchased six plots: one for each brother, one for each wife. Eventually everyone moved to Florida and my uncles decided to stay there (forever) and I got the deeds to graves three, four, five and six. One and two are claimed; my mother is already buried in the first, the second will be for my father. Three more are for me, my sister, and our cousin Gloria. I’ve offered the last one to my boyfriend Mack, but he always shakes his head.

“Maybe, Miri, if I can have the one next to your dad,” he says. “But I am not getting parked next to you three women. Yak, yak, yak.”

When my father comes in from Florida, we visit my mother and my brother at the cemetery. Yes, my brother is there too, his grave is a few rows back. He was just twenty-nine when he died, so my parents had to buy another plot, and there was nothing closer. They never thought to buy graves for children they might outlive. Who would plan for that? I think about planning, though. With my brother gone, it will be my job to arrange my father’s final details: the funeral, the burial, maybe a military service with a folded flag and a Marine Corps plaque, and a fitting gravestone inscription.

I plan to get it exactly right, and make my dad proud. Not that I will know if he’s proud, he’ll be, you know, gone. But we have talked about it a dozen times, so I think I will know.

My father is eighty-eight. Whenever we are together, I think it could be his last year. When I hug his bony shoulders and say goodbye at LaGuardia, I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. When he falls asleep mid-sentence on his Florida balcony, my heart clenches as I bend to pick up the book that has slipped off his lap and check his breath. Sure, everyone gets old. But my father’s old age seems like some kind of mistake. He’s always radiated a rough goodness: part honor, part joy, and once he was as strong as a young bull. In an old Marine Corps boot camp snapshot, he’s at the center of a pyramid of seven brawny guys and he’s holding them all up, grinning, as if balancing a half-ton of strapping leathernecks was nothing at all.

Then he was a middle-aged bull, still so strong he could swing my sons two at a time on his biceps, while I fretted on the sidelines imagining he might have a heart attack: “Boys, be careful, boys.” He was seventy before they could begin to beat him at arm wrestling.

Now he is a frail old man. An overactive six year old could knock him over, and he knows it. There’s a strip of paper taped above his computer at home: “Dear Lord,” it says, “I’m not asking you for anything today. Just please don’t take anything away.” But time is a thief; you turn around and something else is gone.

He visited this past spring and, like always, we were going to the cemetery. We’re getting ready and I’m thinking, it’s going to be chilly out there.

“Dad, let me find you a warmer jacket,” I say.

“I’ll be fine,” he says, working clumsily at the stuck zipper of his plaid nylon windbreaker, which isn’t warm enough at all. I want to make him change, but Mack pulls me aside.

“Leave him alone, he’s a grown man.”

 “Jake!” he says, throwing an arm around my father’s shoulder. “Don’t let her push you around.” He leans in conspiratorially, his good nature smiling from his plain, open face.

 “She’s very bossy, you know.”

I roll my eyes, but I leave my dad alone until he says, “C’mere and help me zip this jacket.” He tips his head back, impatient as a toddler, while I unstick the clasp and zip it up to his chin. He tugs it back down two inches just to show who’s in charge. He straightens the cap on his bald head and sings out in his old Marine Corps cadence, “Ready on the riiiight, ready on the leeeeft, ready on the firing line. Let’s go!” as he, of course, holds the door for me.

In the elevator we meet a couple of impassive young men, neighbors from my building. One stares straight ahead, and the other scans us without much interest. There are many young people here, hipsters as they are known in our Williamsburg neighborhood. In our building, Mack and I are unusually old, even older than their parents. I wonder what they make of my father.

He touches the brim of his cap. “Good morning!” he says in the high volume of the slightly deaf. They start, as surprised as if a mummy had spoken from its sarcophagus. One of them nods.

“Do y’know, I ran a gas station two blocks from here, back in 1946,” Dad tells them. “My daughter here showed me the new art gallery there now, the one on Kent and Calyer. GAS, they call it, very clever.” He gestures with his cane in that direction. “My brother and I owned that place.”

We’ve reached the lobby, but now these kids are interested. They know that gallery. This will make a good story.

“No kidding, man,” says one, and the other nods, “Cool.”

“Cool?” says my father, grinning his grin. “Freezing! We froze our asses off there, the wind off the river could cut you in two.” He goes on to describe the special quality of the ice on those long ago streets: river ice, with its bluish tinge. The elevator boys are rapt, pretty much enchanted. I have seen this before. My father doesn’t know how charming he is. Well, maybe he does.

“But we made a living there, we worked hard, and in the end I’ve had a good life, eighty-eight good years.”

The boys act surprised. One of them says, “Man, you don’t look eighty-eight,” and the other agrees, though I’m guessing that anything over sixty looks all the same to them. Exiting the building, the elevator boys talk to my dad about how he stays strong, and  he says that hard work has kept him fit. But I know that he actually can’t walk half a block before the pain in his legs start to cripple him.

“Dad, I’ll go get the car,” I say. I throw the boys a hard look so they won’t leave him until I return. Anyway, for this moment he is their local hero. Colorful. In their retelling, he will become “the real thing.” When I pull up, they shake hands—a mostly abandoned, formal, grownup man-club ritual, but they proudly dredge it up for this occasion. They open the car door for my father and say, “Yo, Jake,” and, “Take care, big guy.”

I drive. It is mid-week, midday, and the traffic is light on the Belt Parkway heading to the cemetery. This is the same route my father took daily for twenty years to his gas station in Queens. Each time we round a bend, it jogs another memory for him. He talks and I listen, but I don’t need to concentrate—he has repeated every story countless times, always with the enthusiasm of a fresh recollection. I know which cues will call up a particular story, and teasing, pretend to signal him: “number eight, Dad!” He waves me off. My father isn’t senile, it’s more like replaying his favorite tapes. He always says, “Stop me if I’ve already told you this.” But I almost never stop him, and if I do, he tells me the story anyway.

Cars. My father, cars, and gas stations. When I was small I wished my father owned a candy store. As a teen, I wished it were a clothing store, like the brothers Joe and Dave on our block, whose daughters tied for Miss Brighton Beach Baths because they were such fashion plates. But, oh, in the gas shortages of the  ’70s I had the very best dad, as I breezed past the block-long lines to fill up at the reserved “special customer” pump. He taught me how to drive, how to check the oil, how to change a tire, and how to jimmy the carburetor of my flooded engine with a pencil.

Now as we cruise past the old Pennsylvania Avenue landfill, I remember the morning I went to work with him. I was maybe ten. My dad and my uncle were partners at their gas station, and I was going to a sleepover with my cousins at my uncle’s house in Long Island. I would spend the day with them, drawing, doing homework, and playing with the big adding machine at  their office. Then, I would go home with my uncle after work.   

This was when my father left the house before dawn, six days a week. Every morning I would hear him in the kitchen, tiptoeing past my sleeping sister to say goodbye. I watched him lace his heavy black boots, zip his greasy coveralls with “Jake—Uneeda Service Station” embroidered over the chest pocket. The kitchen chair creaked under his weight, and I would bring him a fizzing glass of seltzer. Every day he kissed me goodbye and shut off the light, and I followed the sounds of his footsteps on the stairs, then the big downstairs door easing shut, before creeping back to bed. There I lay in the gray, grainy light, miserable with guilt imagining my father in the cold street and the freezing car, as the radiators banged to life in the snug warmth of our sleeping house.

But the morning I went with my father to work was a revelation. Before dawn, our street was bled of color, like a pencil sketch of the daytime street I knew. When we turned onto Emmons Avenue the sky was just brightening and the streets were so silent that when we stopped at red lights, I could hear their faint churning and clicking as they turned green. On the Belt Parkway there were a few other cars, but mostly the road was empty, and we sailed along, the warm air from the heater toasting my face and settling on my feet like an old cat. The windshield fogged, my dad cracked his window to clear it, and the icy air slashed like a sickle through the dry heat. Every once in a while, a car on the westbound side of the parkway flashed its headlights and my dad would flash back.

“That’s Newman the butcher, coming in from Rockaway to open up,” he explained. And later, “Mr. Parker, I once stopped to help him fix a flat. A big executive, a very wealthy man.”

 As we drove, my father pointed out landmarks: the new shopping center, the old stables, a spot where he had seen a tanker truck roll and burn. Sometimes I asked questions, but mostly I daydreamed to the sound of his voice, gazing out of the windows as the dawn began to break. We rounded a bend that brought us up alongside the bay. The sun rose over the water, the sky turning shell pink, then orange, then blue. Along the bayside was the landfill, a vast dump that burped the sickly-sweet odor of rot into the air in the summer. But that day, the stench was frozen, inert. The trash mountains were golden in the cold morning light, and hundreds of seagulls wheeled in the brightening sky. I looked at my now quiet father; he was navigating more carefully as the road crowded up with traffic. I saw that he loved the world he went to every day, even though it did not include me. After that, I still woke to kiss my father goodbye, but I no longer saw him as an exile from our warm house; I was the one left behind.

*                                              

“Here, turn right here,” says my father, and we switch lanes just in time to take the exit. We drive through the streets of Elmont, a neighborhood of small, single family houses on the Queens/Long Island border. We pass a strip mall, a synagogue, churches, a mosque, and the monument makers, with granite headstone samples set in even rows before their showrooms. On the right side of the road behind its tall fence, is Beth David Cemetery. On the left is a neat row of houses, and I wonder what it is like to live opposite a graveyard. Probably you forget about it, until you have to indulge a wise guy visitor and force a laugh when they remark, “Good neighbors, huh?”

We turn in through the main gate and I park so we can use the bathrooms. They are down a long flight, and it takes my father a while. I watch a funeral procession assemble just inside the gate. The hearse has arrived, and now the driver, in a bad haircut and shiny black suit, waits for all the cars to catch up. I remember gathering like that for my great-aunt’s funeral many years before. A deep bell rang from far off in the cemetery and my mother said, “That’s to let God know someone is coming,” a thought that set me trembling with awe. But my older brother leaned over and whispered, “Nah. It’s to tell the gravediggers the body is on its way.” My mother has been dead eighteen years, and my brother has been gone so long I have to stop and do the math. While I wait for my father, no bell rings, and I think they probably call ahead on their cell phones now.

The main roads through the cemetery are narrow but their names are grand: Sinai, Machpelah, Emanuel, Judah. The cross streets are narrower still, named for American presidents: Wilson, Jefferson, Washington, Jackson. No doubt none would have relished the honor of a street name in this little Jewish city of the dead. My mother and brother are at the corner of Cleveland and Bethel. As we cruise slowly down Bethel Ave, my father says, “Wait, go slow,” and inspects the graves of long-gone relatives to see if they are getting the Perpetual Care their families have paid for.

My mother’s gravestone faces the main street. This seems fitting; my mother was the unofficial mayor of my childhood block. Neighbors rang our doorbell, constantly in and out of our house. She was a good listener and a great storyteller. When she told stories about me, I hung onto her every word, vivid as scenes from movies. My name on her lips was like being famous.

My mom was fifty-two when my brother, her oldest child and only son, died of leukemia. She disappeared into her grief, and for a long time it was like she couldn’t see me. I needed her comfort. Though twenty-six and not a child, I was her child, and had lost my only brother. But her indifference to my sorrow was like a door stuck shut. It would not, could not, open. Until her own death, she managed a public face that smiled and sympathized, and responded on cue. For my sons, she roused herself to play and sing and tell them their stories. But not for me. I would visit and find her on the couch in the dim living room, hands in her lap. “Mom, how about a movie? There’s a seven o’clock at the Avalon.” She would say, “We’ll see,” which, I knew, meant no.

When my brother was dying, my father withered before our eyes. His skin turned ashen and slack. His face was a map of anguish at having to stand helplessly by as his boy slipped away. All his life he had stood at the ready to face danger for us. Now there was nothing to face; only doctors with transfusions and experimental drugs could battle my brother’s leukemia, and they were losing. At the hospital, my father leaned down to hear my brother’s hoarse whispers and plump his pillows. As he helped raise him in the bed, the fading weight of the once strapping body filled him with alarm, then despair. My brother died in his arms.

When it was all over, my father did what he knew: he went back to work. Though his heart was as good as gone, there were long days of tasks: trucks to fix, men to supervise, a business to run. Maybe that kept him from drowning in the sorrow that claimed my mother, or maybe some people can just go on, while others can’t.

I will be someone who goes on, even if I don’t want to. From my father, I’ve learned not to jump into open graves, not to fall apart or surrender to the high drama of grief. I am not always happy about that, but I know it is true.

 At my brother’s funeral hundreds of colleagues, friends, and family members jammed the graveside. Though I was there in the front row, the day was a blur. One year later when we came to unveil the newly placed monument, I was shocked to see it tucked into a crooked row of gravestones all leaning on one another, crowded together like tenements. My memory had created for me a single grave on a grassy hill beneath a willow tree.  Now I walk the rows without a thought, and the tilted stones of other young men are familiar. I imagine they are my brother’s friends. I picture him bringing them around to visit my mom, and it pleases her, like when he was in high school and he and his laughing buddies would pile through the kitchen door to raid the refrigerator.

I pull the car into a space on Cleveland where there is no grave yet. By habit, my father goes towards my brother; I go to my mother. I hear my father seize up with a sob. His back is to me and his shoulders heave as he stands with one hand on my brother’s stone. As a child I never saw my father cry; it was unthinkable that he would. I am more used to it now, but hearing it still makes my throat ache.

At my mother’s grave, I kneel beside her gravestone to talk.

“Mom,” I whisper. “I think you would love Mack. He’s down-to-earth and funny, your kind of guy.” She never liked my first husband, an intellectual who could be aloof.

“The boys are good,” I say, “and the girls are growing up.” My mom would have adored my son’s daughters. I ask her to watch over them. I feel close to her, leaning into the cold stone. More and more often, I recall my mother from the time before, when no one had died yet.  I know it is childish, but I think, Now that she’s with my brother all the time, she can listen to me again.

My father heads my way. His footsteps on the gravel path hesitate as he hangs back, respectful of my privacy. I kiss my mother’s stone and stand, passing him wordlessly as he takes my place, and I go to my brother’s grave. I stoop to pick weeds that have grown on his grave. I remember a day when he came home from school and said, “Hey, Mir, want to hear something great?” He put a record on our new hi-fi: So Much in Love, by The Tymes, and we spent an hour huddled in that corner of our living room figuring out the harmonies, until my mother couldn’t stand hearing the same song again and again and made us stop.

Before we leave, we recite the Mourner’s Kaddish and find small rocks to place on the gravestones to mark our visits. There is always a pile of stones on my brother’s monument. I wonder who leaves them. Not his widow, as she moved to California. I’ve checked with his old friends, and with my cousins. Once I weatherproofed a note and taped it to his stone, asking whoever visited to please contact me, but no one ever did. It is a small mystery; the pile is always so big. He has been dead for forty years, and I can’t think of who might still care after such a long time. Maybe a lover, who remained faithful to his memory? But even then, it is an awful lot of stones.

We make our way back to the car. The skin around my father’s eyes is papery from weeping. He sighs a deep sigh.

“That felt good,” he says, as I lean over to buckle his seat belt for him. “Well, not good, but I’m glad we came.”

“Me too, Dad. Are you hungry? Should we stop for a bagel?”

  *

In the diner just off the Belt Parkway, we slip into a booth. The haggard waitress, too old for this work, goes straight to flirting with my father. She can spot a generous tipper. We order coffee, bran muffins, and a fruit salad to share.

My father pulls a much-folded packet of papers from his shirt pocket.

“File this,” he says. I take care of all his paperwork, and I do keep an actual file. On the top page of these papers is a garish photo of a heavily made-up woman with a helmet of brassy hair, smiling brightly like one of those real estate agents whose faces are plastered on For Sale signs. But this woman represents a funeral home.

It is a contract. I flip through the pages.

“Dad, what is this?”

“I pre-planned.”

“What are you talking about? This place is in Florida. Your grave,” I say, tripping on the word, “is here, the second one, right?”

 I feel a familiar anxiety. Is he losing it? Did he forget?

“Dad, I thought you wanted, you know, to be next to Mom. I thought you–” He puts his hand up to stop me.

“This is in Florida,” he says. “I start in Florida; I end up there.” He points a finger back toward the cemetery. “When I kick the bucket, they’ll come get me, lay me out, they’ll make sure somebody’s with me. They’ll fly me to New York and arrange for someone to hang onto me until it’s time to plant me.”

“Dad,” I start, an argument rising, though I can’t form it. “Dad–”

“It’s the way to go,” he says. “I got the plain pine box, it’s standard anyway. I didn’t want anyone selling you and your sister a fancy casket. That’s what they do, you know, get you to make bad choices when you’re a little upset.”

“A little upset?” I push the papers away. I swipe at my eyes with a napkin; it unnerves him when I cry.

“Listen to me,” I say. “I won’t be a little upset, I’ll be devastated. So I don’t want to hear about you dying. Just cut it out.”

He starts stacking our plates, neatening the table for the waitress.

“Stop that, I’m not done!” I say, my voice rising. I smack the contract on the table, rattling the dishes.

“Look at me,” I say. “You want to prepare, you want to practice? Well I’m not doing that. I won’t. Death doesn’t need your welcome mat.” I’m not crying anymore, but I’m talking too loudly. The people at the nearby tables steal glances at us, then turn intently back to their food. I lean across the table. “I’m not you, Dad. I’m not brave. I don’t know what I’ll do when you’re gone. It scares me.”

The waitress brings a coffee pot, her face filled with concern. “Everything okay here?”

I wave her away.

“We’ll take our check, miss,” my father calls after her. He’s looking into his coffee cup, not at me.

“I’ll tell you something,” he says, “I’m a little scared myself.” 

I am shocked. My father has never been scared of anything.

“In Florida,” he says, “people can be sick, half deaf, half blind sometimes. But they drag their oxygen tanks around, their walkers, their wheelchairs.”

He drains his cup, and balances it on the small pile of dishes. “You know why? They all want to see one more day.”

He puts his hand over mine. “And so do I. Every day, one more day. Just so you know.”

*

 On our way out, my father says to the cashier, “You have a good day, young lady.” She has very black hair and a nose-ring, and is leaning on one elbow, bored. He hands her an extra five for herself, and a twenty-dollar bill, way more than the total of our breakfast. Her eyes open wide.

“Give this to that nice woman.” He gestures toward our waitress, who is swiping a rag across our table. “Make sure she gets off her feet once in a while.”

At the top of the short flight of stairs outside the diner, he puts a hand on my arm. “I still want the Marines to send a few guys. And one of those plaques. You’ll take care of that, right?”

I nod. “I got it, Dad. You can trust me with some of this, you know.”

“I trust you.”

“Good,” I say. “I know what you want, okay?”

“Just put a pillow over my head when the time comes,” he says.

We have had this conversation countless times. He has five “Do Not Resuscitate” signs posted around his apartment, and a Living Will that spells it out: no heroic measures, but he makes me promise anyway.

“I probably can’t do that, Dad. They’ll get me for manslaughter,” I sigh. “But I know what you mean. Just let you go.”

He gives me a thumbs up.

At the car I say, “Now can we stop talking about this?”

“One more thing, this is what I want you to put on my stone: ‘Come up and see me some time.’”

When I lean over to do his seat belt, I poke him lightly in the chest.

“No.”

*

“Home, James,” says my father, like I’m his chauffeur, and we get back on the Belt Parkway. We talk about the cool spring weather. He hates the cold now, though once he stood it fourteen hours a day. He tells me stories I know by heart, about the cold water flat of his boyhood, how he and his brothers went out before school to scavenge wood for the stove, how his mother heated a brick to put at her husband’s feet, and how his younger brother’s job was to climb between the freezing sheets at bedtime to warm the bed for their father.

There’s a dead seagull in the road. As I swerve, I remember a Sunday morning ride with my father, years and years ago. Even on weekends he rose early, so on Sundays when I heard his steps in the hallway, I slipped out of bed and dressed in the dark to meet him in the kitchen. We’d head out for a drive, most of the time to Coney Island, where we’d park on an empty street and walk up the ramp to the wooden boardwalk. I asked questions and he talked. Once we saw two men on the beach roasting potatoes on sticks over a smoky fire. “Hobos,” he said, and told me about the Great Depression.

One Sunday as we drove, two sparrows swooped down in front of our car, hitting the hood with a small thump, and I cried out. When I turned to my father, his stricken face frightened me more than the thud of the doomed birds.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice breaking. “I couldn’t help it. The updraft from the car usually lifts them right out of the way.”

He reached over and laid a hand on my head.

“I am so sorry, child.” Tilting my chin to face him, he asked, “Are you crying?” I shook my head no, though I was. His hand stayed where it was. “Everything dies,” he said. “Even I’m going to die someday. Death is part of life.”

That thought slid into its place alongside the dead birds behind us; me, small, my father, big, driving with one big hand resting on my head. Forty years later, I still miss my brother every day, and I wish my mother could have met Mack, seen the boys grow up, and maybe loved me a little more. But like it or not, my father’s words that day sank into me like an anchor in the sea: death is part of life.

I glance in the rearview mirror, the mash of feathers that was the seagull dwindling to a dot in the road. “Dad, remember those two little birds?”  I look over. His head is on his chest. “Dad?” I whisper. I watch the rise and fall of his shallow breathing. He sleeps beside me as we drive back home.