All the Space in Between Is Water

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

—Adrienne Rich

1. april fools

History begins with someone else’s memory of you. It begins with accepting that memory as your own. I want to remember the sensation of curling into my grandfather’s woolly armpit as he reads to me months before he died. A stack of books in bed with us. But all I can remember is climbing up the furry stairs on all fours and looking over the top step into his bedroom to see if he’s awake. To see if he can read to me. What I remember is the anticipation of warmth, of the perfect fit between my two-year-old body and my grandfather’s armpit. My sensations end with carpet and hope. The only lie I repeatedly tell is when I claim my mother’s memory of these reading sessions as my own, a history in tenderness.

Somewhere in Brooklyn two stone lions still guard these front steps from broken legs. 1923: the house my grandmother was born in. 1983: the house holding the room her husband would die in. I call my mom and ask,

Mom, what neighborhood in Brooklyn are you and Grandma from, again?

Flatbush.

I ask, Mom, when did atheism begin? In our family, I mean?

Well, your great grandfather was an “assimilated Jew” in Germany.

History never begins when you think it does. History doesn’t begin. I think she’ll say, After the Holocaust. It’s April Fools’ Day, my mom’s birthday. Before I ask her anything, I say,

Mom, I love you and I’m sorry I can’t be there.

I have inherited her distinct nose. A nose I was told I would “grow into.” I think I have, although it’s less about growing and more about accepting. America is sick of the Holocaust. I’m glad my mom’s birthday is easy to remember. I am glad I inherited my dad’s teeth.

I think when my mom says, “assimilated Jew,” she means he looked Jewish but did not act Jewish. Academic lingo uses terms like “acculturation,” “interfaith marriage,” an active effort to hide “distinctiveness.” For my great grandfather this meant: studied to be an engineer, did not practice Judaism publicly, did not live in a strictly Jewish neighborhood, (maybe made fewer jokes, didn’t speak Yiddish), married a German Protestant. I’m not going to tell you what I mean by “looked.”

My mom does not like birthday pranks. My grandmother once gave her a cardboard cake covered in icing and my mom tried to cut the first slice in front of her friends and couldn’t. My grandmother did not teach my mom German or Yiddish. Although when I was a child she called me Mein liebes kleines Mäuseschwänzchen (my dear little mouse tail). Otherwise I forget she is fluent, and when she does occasionally talk to a fellow German, I am surprised by the country mapping out of her mouth, how much more I could learn from her.

History begins with forgetting. History begins with memory and its willful lapses. When my grandmother was annoyed at me, she would call me Schweinhund (pig-dog). After Trump’s inauguration, I see on Facebook that my friend’s daughter was evacuated from her (Jewish) day school because of bomb threats. I read in the news that headstones are knocked over in (Jewish) cemeteries. I stare at the photos, crooked headstones like broken teeth. What has been emptied? The school. The lungs at the end of the sentence.

My mother had an abortion between my birth and the birth of my only brother. My grandfather died and my mom said she felt too sad, she didn’t want the grief of her father’s death to override the joy of her pregnancy. A tulip stilled by a March frost. She must have been thirty-nine when she had this abortion. I must have been thirteen...