from When the World Stopped Touching
- from When the World Stopped Touching
April 14, 2020
Dear Julia,
I won’t start with a joke this timebut I do think about a storymy mother tells when she was on a fieldtrip to the beach and she sees her fatheron a boat with a beautiful womanwith hair darker than the Black Sea andit’s funny because my grandmother dyedher hair blonde and I still can’t finda way to translate the Russian idiomabout having a dick full of fishbut the water only reaching your knees.I often hear “the world is your oyster”and I say, yes I know what it is liketo have beauty ripped out of me.My blue baby carried away from mein the fog of the delivery room.My son says he’s “cool as a cucumber”and I think about the bag of them,no longer crisp, slimy, and forgottenweighed down at the bottomof the vegetable drawer.Julia, why is the vegetable drawerso often a pit of death?My son pokes at his salad during dinnerand asks where babies come from?And I am relieved we spend dinnertalking about creation, instead of destruction.Like every Jew from Odessa, I know more anecdotesthan holy stories and I carry this shame and this laughterinto each high Holiday. On Passover, my son asks [End Page 85] to see the picture of baby Moses going down the riverand he points to his baby brother and says bath tub?My father’s father escaped Turkey during the Armenian genocideand married a Holocaust survivor and I thinkabout what their first dates must have been like.Did they share their trauma by candle light? Did they talkabout the weather? How when the sun beat down on the bodiesleft in the streets, one of them looked like his mothereven though that was impossible,Julia, it couldn’t be possible. [End Page 86]
April 14, 2020
Dear Luisa,
My son wants to know whyhe can't have puzik obnimashkiwithout his pajamas on, whyI won’t allow him to pressmorning naked into my bellyanymore. Luisa, do you still letyour sons touch every partof you? I know this isn’tsomething I’m allowed to ask.Something we’re taughtnot to talk about. In the middleof our empty park, Big echo,he screams, I love you everyone.Everyone, do you hear me? And Idon’t have any answers for him.Already, he is longing for a loveI cannot give. I love you,hovers in the air the wayDedushaka proposedthree times before Babushkagave in. It’s not about love, she says,that goes away, if it was ever there.Respect, she repeats, Remains.It’s what we hold on to. She refusesto retire, these weeks beforeher 79th birthday, confinedat home scare hermore than the virus, so shestill goes into the office,I’m very careful, and hides [End Page 87] her morning coughwhen video chatting,confesses, she's neverenjoyed being touched.Have you ever askedyour parents about theirsex life, Luisa? Grandparents?We were taught so littleabout non-platonic touch.My mother does like to recallhow when I was a year, sleepingin a crib beside their bed,I woke and stared and asked,What are you doing? Andto this day, Luisa,she hasn’t really answered. [End Page 88]
May 5, 2020
Dear Luisa,
My Babushka turned 79 last week and we celebratedeach in our own home, faces in one screen, drinkingand singing. My little cousin played "The Star SpangledBanner" on her trumpet and I played something in Yiddishon my guitar and my uncle made a joke about his daughter'smusic being patriotic, of the present, and mine beingof war and loss, always fear and the past.Then yesterday, pra-Babushka would have been108 and I pulled out pictures of our last New Year'sin Ukraine. She...
