Michelle

“And who’re you?” Michelle said.

How long had I not seen her? Had I seen her ever? She was on my couch in a distant memory, just a few months old then, a newborn. She sat with her legs crossed and pulled and pulled at my hair. I remember I let her. The more she pulled the more she laughed. She kept laughing and laughing.

How old was I then? Eleven? Just a boy. And how old was I now? How old did that make her? She stood at the piano and looked at me and around the room, she had a pointed, narrow glance. No more the clumsy baby, she stood without swaying in her small heels, her face lipsticked and eye-shadowed - she seemed at the same time older and seemingly a toddler still, merely dressed for a play.

Somehow it all made me nervous.

“You don’t remember me?” I said playfully, knowing of course, that it was a scientific impossibility. I suddenly felt stale, like a big-breasted aunt who knows everything about you yet whom you have never seen.
I too was becoming older.
It didn’t feel good at all.

Michelle shook her head. “You’re silly,” she said.

An answer of some sort began to form in my mind, I half-way smiled, scratched the side of my stomach, a crowd of perfume circled us and before I could say a word, we were back at the table.

Ah, the table. Again. Two months ago a new year, in two months another, then a birthday, a holiday then a birthday again. Then the year anew - shoulders in, ass out - sit.

I sat.

Michelle was across from me between her parents. Her father stretched over the table continuously, a plate, a joke, cognac, more cognac, you are not nearly drinking enough… he was young, hair black and thick, an engineer from Moldova he lapsed between taxi’s driven in Brighton, windows installed in Boropark, airport terminals planned and instructed, the women kept their eyes on him, husbands forked grape tomatoes around their plates absentmindedly.

“I also make windows,” Michelle said, nodding. No one seemed to hear her, she smiled strangely and said something else, seemingly to herself.

“What kind of windows do you make?” I asked her quietly across the table.

“All kind of windows!” her father said suddenly. “You wouldn’t believe.”

I laughed into my plate and looked across. Michelle said something to herself again and smiled. She had one of the strangest smiles I had ever seen.

“We were at this Hassid’s house one time,” her father went on, “I give him the breakdown: fifty for the windows, twenty for the bars and screens, and we give you the frames for free. So do you know what he says?” His eyes took a lap around the table. “He says – well, can I just get the frames?”

The chorus of women giggled.

I felt it again in me then, the holidays scooping me out, that special brand of knifing that comes when sitting shoulder to shoulder under a warm light in front of a warm pile of food. I reached for the bottle of Canadian whiskey near my plate, let my fingers linger on the small ridges within its neck, and refilled my glass.

What was she thinking? The whole dinner I couldn’t help but watch her. She had a small gameboy by her side but somehow I knew that was not where her attention lay. I couldn’t help but sense as if she felt just as estranged at this table as I did. Who were these people, anyway? I looked around. A few relatives from the Volga. They didn’t look different at all. Same jeans, same shirts. Their Russian was harder, it hacked away at the air in front of their mouths, it came out with a ring from somewhere behind their throats, but that was about it. They passed photos around of a new addition to the dacha, of tombstones, small pieces of rock with sparsely filled glass jars of flowers next to them - forecasts of a merry and shoulder-to-shouldered fate.

What was the point?

I excused myself, pushed my chair back against the wall, climbed over it, balanced myself over a handbag, and made my way to the bathroom.

Of all the ways to escape from myself, (and what are the holidays if not a serving of your assigned self back to you?), the bathroom has long been a favorite.

Click, snap – and you’re invincible.
At least for a moment.

I slid my pants down eagerly and settled on the soft and pink seat. This was my grandmothers’ house. One of the local newspapers was lying by the toilet and I picked it up. For some time I leafed through it. A community college was closing its doors but its community would live on. I flipped again. Pasternak’s love life looked up at me in two columns. Flip. What Kasparov really believes in. Flip. A supermodel’s journey to the Western Wall. Flip. The Odessa holocaust revealed – a column and a photo of two men in striped pants by a skeleton half way in an oven. Their eyes had the half-glazed look of commuters. Flip. I closed the newspaper and tossed it back where it was. I let myself urinate. I let myself sit like that for a while.

Urinating clears my mind and once done, I began to think. Isn’t enough enough? How many more evenings was I to spend hiding in bathrooms and kitchens? Wasn’t it time to grow up? Be a man? Have an argument about a Dovlatov translation or deliver a keen and risqué opinion about Hillary? Wasn’t it about time?

I exhaled. I rubbed my palms against my forehead, shook off the urine, pulled up my pants and got up. I bent over the sink. I washed my hands and soaked my face in the water. I picked up a towel and stuck my nose deep into it. I exhaled again.

Yes. Time indeed.

Yet opening the door only revealed an intermission. Feet moved swiftly between the table and the stove, plates and trays trotted their ways, a dry and warm smell of cigarette smoke yawned from the balcony, the thumb was up - the gladiator lives!

I smiled. Years of introspective escapes had made my timing perfect. I congratulated myself. I made my way to the kitchen where Michelle’s mother suddenly grabbed my arm.

“Can you talk to her?” she said. She was a well-framed woman who worked in a lens shop. Her glasses were nicely picked as always.

“About what?” I said.

“Devil knows,” her mother said. “She saw one of the tombstones and now won’t come out of the bedroom.”

I looked down the corridor. I felt a shove from the side. “Go,” she said.

I went.

From the corridor, I looked into my grandmothers’ room. I saw her there, Michelle, lying on my grandmothers’ bed. They had just won a new bedroom set, a true Cadillac of the faux-Italian line and the bed sat like an obese whore under the bookshelves. It all seemed somehow unfair.

I looked again at Michelle. She was tiny. The bed was enormous to begin with but around her it stretched like a field. She was looking away, her head pointed somewhere into the window. A part of me began to feel like an intruder, but I came up to the bed nonetheless.

“Hey,” I said and sat down.

The small gameboy was in front of her but it was off. She looked up at me. Her eyes were strained.

“Hello,” she said with a bit of a smile.

“What’re you thinking?” I said with an attempted lightness. It was a question I had only recently learned and it seemed like the time to ask it.

She looked down, she moved the gameboy around the mattress slightly with her left hand.

“I don’t know,” she said shyly, leaning her head away.

“Well, you surely must know,” I said in a voice that wasn’t mine and instantly hated myself for it.

She looked up at me with a fixed smile, her lips locked, she shook her head.

I laughed. If only she knew how many spoonfuls I had dodged by that same method. She clearly did not know what she was up against. Then suddenly, her eyes settled on me.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Who’s who?” I said.

She nodded behind me. I turned my head. My grandmother had re-arranged her bedroom, I looked and was caught off guard.

“The old photo?” I asked.

Michelle nodded.

“That’s my great-grandmother,” I said.

“What’s her name?” she asked.

I paused. “Well, she had many. She always changed them.”

“Why?” Michelle asked. I looked at her. This girl really seemed to be big on the questions. I thought about it.

“Well,” I said, simplifying my tone again, “it was a different time back then.”

“So?” Michelle said. She was lying on her elbows, and played with her earrings slightly.

“So?” I said, “so, people had to change their names a lot, sometimes just to live.”

Michelle’s face didn’t move.

“I understand,” she said. “Kind of like trees, right?”

“Like trees?” I said. I thought about the park close to my house, my endless laps around the same small cluster of a forest.

“Like trees,” she said. “Papa took me to the park and he said that trees change the leaves because it helps them live.”

I thought about this for a moment. It sounded like nonsense to me.

“Yes,” I said, “perhaps a bit like trees.”

“Where does she live now?” Michelle asked.

“My great-grandmother?” I said.

Michelle nodded.

“She died,” I said after a hesitation.

“I see,” she said. “That’s OK,” she added after a moment. “Grandpa died last month.”

I nodded. The conversation was gaining the air of post-exam chatter. I thought of ways to switch the subject.

“I liked it,” she said before I could come up with anything. My eyes turned to her.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, I wasn’t in school,” she said, “and Papa wasn’t at work.”

“Right,” I paused. “I understand,” I said and understood nothing.

“We even went to the park,” she said.

“The park?”

She nodded.

“That’s when I got sad over the leaves,” she said.

“Why did you get sad?” I asked rhetorically. With each question I felt myself getting closer and closer to the great-aunt status. I couldn’t help it. What else was there to say?

Michelle stayed quiet. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. I couldn’t tell if it was the makeup or if something was turning within her.

“I think,” she said after a while and her eyes moved down to the floor, seemingly following an extension chord there, “if trees die or not?”

I looked at her. It sounded instantly like a question I myself would ask. But at such an age?

“Not at all,” I said. In truth, I had nothing to say. I tried to follow her fathers’ argument.

“Think about it now – the leaves are all falling, right?” I said.

She nodded.

“But then in a few months – bang, they come back out new,” I said. “That is just how trees breathe,” I added and felt very accomplished.

She didn’t buy it. Her eyes began to narrow on something.

“But have you ever seen a tree die?” she asked and looked up at me. Her eyes suddenly gripped mine, they pulled them by the collar – her eyes had an incredible and surprising strength.

“How does a tree die?” she asked. Her eyes did not let me go. A paramount fear flushed through me: her eyes had the same urgency as my great-grandmothers’ during her last days. I froze. I couldn’t say anything.

“How does a tree die?” she repeated.

I looked back at her and said nothing. Her lips tightened with disappointment. She slid past me, slid off the bed, and quickly went out.

I sat up. I tried to get up and follow her but couldn’t. I sat upright and tried to listen. She was moving through the kitchen now, asking everyone there over and over – how does a tree die? Yet no one seemed to hear her. Still, I listened and listened. It was something I wanted to know as well.