Kisses On Kol Nidre, Redux.

                                                                           Kisses On Kol Nidre

                                                                                Unraveling

 

It’s  September, 2002. The Brown girls are knitting.

According to my mom, everyone in LA is knitting. It’s the new sourdough Pilates. Mom is knitting scarves, fancy ones, in hues of Pippin and Pumpkin and Paprika and Firestorm, which- you’d know this if you follow haute couture at all- are the new Granny Smith and Kale and Persimmon. Keep up.

The Jewish High Holydays are here, and Sylvia and Murray have come to visit me in Portland. They’re going to come to High Holydays services to watch me be a Cantor.  My parents do not go to temple. They do not pray. They have no truck with religion. But no matter. Their daughter is singing at High Holydays services and, by God (in whom my parents do not believe), they are not going to miss my big show.

My dad is in a wheelchair when I pick them up at the airport. He  doesn’t recognize me. He hasn’t been able to recognize me for a couple of years, at least not with any regularity. He doesn’t travel. He likes to be at  home in LA, where it feels familiar. But he trusts my mom, and Mom says that he is going to enjoy the trip. So here he is.

He doesn’t enjoy the trip. Most moments, it’s only spurts of courage -  the last droplets from the emergency tank of his brain - and fear  - which now fills  him -   that hold him up at all. He shuffles around my house, closely following my mom, confused,  trying to keep up, trying to keep up, trying to keep up.

While he naps, my mom pulls out an enormous black suitcase (cleverly distinguished on the luggage carousel from everyone else’s enormous black suitcases by a piece of ancient, faded orange yarn tied to the handle). She opens it and shows me the survivalist's supply of Jolene Face Bleach she has brought for me, as that is one item I cannot find in blonde, hairless Oregon where, evidently, us swarthy  gals are left to simply sport our mustaches or trim them with our hunting knives. Then she pulled out the expected Tupperware containers of leftovers from my parents’ refrigerator that were, truth be told, ready to be dumped days before they left on this trip, and would now  languish - untouched - in the back of my refrigerator for the entire week of their visit, after which my sister, who has the intestines of a wild dog, would take them out of my garbage can (where I will toss them the second my parents leave for the airport in a week to fly home) and my sister will pack  them in the sun-baked trunk of her Subaru,  drive the four hours to her house, leave them on her kitchen counter for the afternoon and then enjoy them for dinner. Her husband, a human, would cautiously try just a taste at Karen’s reassuring urging and spend the night on the toilet, clutching his sides and mainlining a bottle of Imodium Extra Strength. 

 

In a corner of the suitcase, there is something also not unexpected. I smelled it before I saw it. The aroma of defrosting brisket, the star of the break-the-fast dinner,  the thing everyone looks forward to each year,  the thing that I told Mom I would buy and she could cook it here, and now, the thing  Mom had made in LA, frozen, and  left on her kitchen counter for a few hours before they left for the airport - possibly the night before -  so she wouldn’t forget to pack it. It wasn’t a bad smell as much as it was not a good smell. A smell that once was good but now, not so much. It was the smell of my childhood.  Mom is not a big believer in refrigeration.
But under the brisket, there was something else: a long length of yarn: shocking green, beribboned, bejeweled, daring, confident. I smiled cautiously at it. Not my style. At all.

“I love it,” said my sister, wrapping it around her swan neck. It went around, like, twenty times.

“I love it, too.” I told my mom. This was not the truth. Lying right before Yom Kippur.  Badass move, right?

“I’ll teach you both how to make them, I’ll teach you how to knit!” Mom said, and we smiled at each other. We Browns all just love a new crafts project. Except for  me.

 

Karen took to knitting immediately, and we spent the next days before Yom Kippur winding and threading and counting rows and examining stitches.  I was not a nimble crafter, nor was I an enthusiastic one. Frankly, I was bored to death. I didn’t give it up, however, because I loved the look of the three of us sitting around the fireplace, knitting, while my dad slept on the sofa. It was so Little Women.  I also didn’t give it up because this knitting circle offered something I hadn’t realized we desperately needed: a forum in which to broach difficult conversations about my dad. The clicking of our needles and the rows of bright colors were something to focus on; knitting forced us to keep our eyes downward, to dilute our raw, emotional words under a constant silent mouthing of “purl one, over and cross, under, and bring it around...”

Things have gotten so much worse in the four years since my dad’s surgery. I can’t even believe we thought we knew what dementia was then; a few forgotten words or names he couldn’t recall? That was nothing compared to the fog of confusion he now has to slog through each day. And with his decline, we are all falling apart a little, straining at the seams, losing count and dropping stitches, approaching each other with newfound wariness and judgment. Our family, once the paragon of openness and honesty, support and loyalty, levity and joy, is unraveling; thread by thread, ribbon by ribbon, row by row. It’s just the cold clicking of one naked needle against the other sometimes.

This is all normal, evidently, all par for the course.  My friends have similar stories about their parents’ descent into the fog and the affect it has had on the entire family.   I recognize myself in stories and news segments and documentaries about Baby Boomers and their aging parents. Still, I want to believe that our family is different, invincible, fabulous, exempt from the dysfunction that poisons other families. We’ve always been special.  The Golden Browns, I used to secretly call our family. No more.

Every summer of my childhood our family went to camp. We stayed there, living in cabins and eating in a communal dining room in the pine forest for the entire first week of August, celebrating Labor Day, which is the high holy day of leftist, secular Jews. Family Camp, sponsored by the Jewish Center we belonged to, the center my parents helped build, the center that was the center of our lives, was where the Golden Browns shined most brightly. My mom brought her guitar up to camp each summer; her heavy, guitar case overflowing with purple mimeographed song sheets that had the lyrics and chords to the songs of the times. Anti-war songs. Calypso songs. Old English folks songs. And the occasional popular song from the rock radio stations, which were the most mortifying for me. Watching your mom standing in front of the campfire circle at night, leading everyone in a chorus of  “Ruby Tuesday” does not help a teenage girl’s self-esteem. And it really didn’t help to learn that all the boys my age had been slightly turned on by my mom, fixated on how her turquoise and orange woven guitar strap criss-crossed her pointy, torpedo-bra boobs.

My mom’s celebrity did not rub off on Karen and me, although Karen didn’t need the help - she has always parted the sea with her looks. Her parents could have been actual Nazis and she’d still have the Jewish boys surrounding her every night when the Family Camp teenagers gathered downstairs behind the lodge, to smoke dope and slow dance to the twelve-minute version of Bob Dylan singing, “Like A Rolling Stone”.  I wasn’t exactly unpopular at camp, either, having the good fortune to have inherited enough of my parents’ musical talent to afford me a place on center stage every once in a while, although none of  the boys were much interested in the guitar strap criss-crossing its way towards my thirteen-year-old boobs.

We were The Browns. Talented. Funny. Popular. Golden. Always invited, always noticed, always admired. I saw how other families looked at us. 

 

These days I see a different look on people’s faces - pity, maybe. Sadness. My dad so often looks frail, almost sunken. When I hug him, his bones fill my arms. He complains that people are afraid of him, don’t know what to say to him anymore. I think he’s right. It’s hard to understand where his sentences go, so hard to witness as he struggles for words and substitutes completely bizarre ones for the words he cannot retrieve. It’s so much easier to just smile at him and move on to talk to my mom.

During our crocheting, my mom mentions again that it might be time for my dad to go into a Home. He needs full-time care, more than the hourly help she hires to be with him when she is at work. He has become more agitated, she tells us, and he often doesn’t even know where he is when he is at home.  Mom is scared for him, and scared for herself. 

Karen and I are not okay with this;  we will never forgive you if you send him to a Home, we have told her many times. We remind her that years ago, at the onset of Dad’s dementia, she promised us, promised us, that she would never put him in a Home. She starts to cry. “But it’s so much worse than I had ever thought it would be,” she tell us, “you girls have no idea.” But you promised, we insist. You took vows. In sickness and in health. Karen and I make  a secret pact that if she puts him in a Home we will do whatever it takes to get him out, even if it means having her declared incompetent.  My sister and I get pretty whipped up over this, whispering to each other in the hallway and mouthing, “fuck Mom” to each other across the table.

One day I will realize that my mom took great care of him in these horrible years; one day I will see that she gave him love and comfort and the best life he could have, and that all the rage and disdain Karen and I feel for her now, the neglect we blame on her, isn’t warranted. But today I am furious with her for being worn out. Furious with her for needing air. When we talked on the phone last week,  she told me she stopped at the store after work and got herself a new pair of shoes for Rosh Ha Shana, I wanted to scream,  fuck your new shoes, go home to Dad.  You promised.

And still, my heart breaks for her; I am overcome with admiration for her strength and compassion and sacrifice.  Later, after I’ve trashed her in my mind, I acknowledge that she deserves an hour to herself to buy shoes, to clear her mind, to escape. I know that her reality is much, much worse than I can ever imagine.

My mom bears the burden, although I sometimes think I have tasted a tiny bit of it in caring for our cat. 

Midnight  is old, probably not as old as I convince myself she is, but she’s at least fifteen years old, at least. For most of her life, she needed nothing from us. The kids found her when we lived in LA - she was a stray; self-sufficient, wary and clever. We threw out a handful of kibble every evening to her and once in a while we let her in the house, but other than that, it was a relationship that knew no demands. When we moved to Oregon, Midnight  came with us and adjusted to her new life by settling herself in the upstairs of our new house and never setting foot outside again. And now that she is old and living indoors, we are held hostage by her eating,  barfing, sleeping, pooping and aging.

I hate Midnight. I guess I love her, too, because sometimes even after she has shit on the rugs and awakened me four times during the night and barfed up a bloody hairball in my bed, and even after we had to have all her teeth extracted  (to the tune of a thousand dollars) so all she can eat is homemade baby food, I can still look at that aging, dainty cat face of hers and feel my heart soften. I am exhausted all the time because she cries all night long. She needs a spoonful of food at 3 AM, and then another spoonful at 3:30 and then she poops at the foot of my bed at 4:15 and then she meows that mournful, primal meow for about a half hour. I lie in bed and listen to her calls. Murr-ahow it begins, in a soft guttural clearing of her throat. Murr-OHWHW  it crescendos, louder and more alien. If I don’t respond to her, she tries again, in a feigned, cloying meow, precious and undemanding. But I know her game. A few of those sweet calls and then it’s the feline voice of Satan filling the dark halls of my house.

Sometimes I yell, “shut up, Midnight”, but she’s deaf. And anyway, if she hears my voice at all, it just sends her into the talking meows. Conversational at first, and then more and more impatient. Once, I swear, she jumped on my bed and over-articulated her meows right into my ear, the way we speak loudly and slowly to non-English speakers. Me-ow. Do-you-understand-this? ME-OW.  I’m sure she thinks I’m an idiot. Or a selfish bitch. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because in the end I always get up and take care of her. What else am I going to do, let her be miserable? Better me than her.

A few years ago I complained to my mom about how Midnight was taking over my life, and how I was getting sick of being her nursemaid.

“So, put her to sleep” my mom said. Just like that. She laughed.  “Come on. Stick a little poison in some brisket and give it to her. She’ll eat it right up.”  I didn’t know if she was joking or not.

Don’t think I don’t pull up that memory often these days, when I worry about my mom putting my dad in a Home. At the very least, I make sure to call and check up after she’s made brisket for him. 

I don’t think I’d fry in Hell for putting Midnight  to sleep. I’ve given her a good life, and she isn’t really enjoying her existence much. But I will never do it. I won’t ever do it because I once put a beloved dog to sleep on Rosh Ha Shana,  before his time, and I am still haunted by it. I won’t do it because even though Midnight  is old and confused she still gets great comfort and joy out of being with us. She particularly loves chasing and attacking my mom’s neon green crocheted scarf onto which I’ve tied a toy mouse and sprinkled with catnip. She rolls around in the frayed ribbons, kicking up her back paws.  Poison MY  brisket, Grandma Sylvia? I’ll kick your ass, Midnight laughs as her toothless gums grab and conquer the helpless, ragged, ruined twenty-seven-dollar-a-skein prey on which my mom had worked so hard and lovingly.

But mostly, I won’t ever put Midnight to sleep because maybe, maybe if I care for her and love her through these last years of illness and deafness and toothlessness and dementia, maybe if I stay with her and keep her company through the long nights when she can't sleep, maybe if I suffer enough for all of us - Midnight, my dad, my mom, the dog I prematurely put to sleep so many years ago -  then maybe my mom will be spared her suffering and she will spare my Dad, soften her heart and allow him to live out his days in the house that knew him as he once was. Strong. Brilliant. Wise-cracking. Music-loving. Defender of the downtrodden. Protector of his family.  My real dad, living  inside the dad  who is asleep in front of the fire, holding a book that he can no longer read, Midnight on his lap, and the both of them snoring like motherfuckers, drowning out the sound of our crochet needles.

 

It is the eve of  Yom Kippur.

The temple is filling up with people greeting each other, hugging but not smiling, measuring their pleasure at seeing one another with the somberness of the holy day. It’s a precarious balance for me, this holiday, of taking my atonement seriously but also being super happy with my new outfit, which I bought a few weeks earlier, before Rosh Ha Shana. This - buying new clothes at Rosh Ha Shana, the Jewish New Year - is a time-honored tradition,  one that my anti-religious mom embraces with the fervor of a hundred Chasidim at the Western Wall  praying for the Messiah to come.

We are welcomed at the door of the temple, and I go to the private area to tune my guitar and to get my head in the game. The congregation settles into their seats, and the Rabbi and I walk into the sanctuary, holding the Torah, and take our places on the Bimah. My mom and Dad are in the front row. Mom smiles at me and rolls her eyes at the ridiculousness of the holyday. She has already told me, on the way to temple, that she doesn’t feel she has anything to atone for.  I say, “Jesus, really, Mom? Nothing?” but you know, I kinda gotta give her respect. She is who she is. She’s good with life.

The service moves slowly on Yom Kippur. A lot of quiet reflection, group recitation, chanting and singing. I keep stealing looks at my dad. He looks completely lost, trying to imitate the facial expressions of other people, not having a clue about what’s going on around him. Watching him, I can hardly breathe, much less sing. My poor dad. I just want to get off of the Bimah, take my Dad by the arm, and take him home to my house so we can listen to opera and he can relax. My heart is clenched up so tightly. The Rabbi is looking at me, waiting for me to sing the song of Yom Kippur, the Kol Nidre. The song Jews wait all year to hear. But my voice is stuck in my heart. And my heart is stuck in mud. I might not even be breathing. All I can do is stare at my dad and try not to cry.

And then. 

And then, my dad  smiles. Not at me, not at anyone, Maybe he’s smiling at one of his frequent hallucinations, but it’s a real smile. He looks…happy. My heart returns to my body for a moment and releases my voice. And I begin the Kol Nidre. It is the most solemn of solemn songs, sung only once a year. The congregation stands while I sing it,  listening, silent, absorbing the message of the song - a  plea for forgiveness for those who had to make false promises in order to survive, or save others; vows made under duress that can now be annulled because we Jews get it that sometimes there is a difference between intention and deed. We have been slaves, we have been chased by Cossacks, we have been rounded up by Nazis - you do what you have to do to survive and save others. Kol Nidre. All Vows released. 

My eyes are closed as I sing, but I become aware of a single sound. Shuffling, maybe? A chair? I open my eyes and there is my dad, standing, blowing kisses to me. Blowing kisses to me while I sing the Kol Nidre. My mom tries to get him to sit down, but he pushes her hand away.

“That’s my daughter!” he says to me. 

He beams at my mom.  She smiles at him. He sits down. My mom kisses him on the cheek. She starts to cry, turning away from my dad so he doesn’t see her. Suddenly, she looks ancient to me. Frail. Exhausted. Alone. Alone. 

Alone.

 

And as I finish this holy song, on this holiest of days,  I release my mom from her vows.