by Yocheved Friedman
I come from the very last pangs of summer and the tap of a restless foot against a school chair. My mother, the English major. I come from the years she spent correcting grammatical errors in my mumbled speech and the perpetuality of unfinished grading. Half-marked term papers and vocab quizzes stacked on our kitchen table.
“It’s not, ‘these stuff,’” she’d explain, “it’s ‘these things.’ Or, if you’d prefer, ‘that stuff.’”
I come from habitual eye rolling. From bearded cartoons on cereal boxes markered in at breakfast.
And when it snows on our quiet New York street, I come from the painting above our mantel, the tracing of my own fingers across the turpentine path and over the bridge that leads to my great grandfather’s farm in Poland. I come from the wretched night my grandfather was born, when the winds and ice were so fierce the blades of grass in their fields froze in perfect straights, resembling accusing fingers and silent graves. And finally, I come from the mustering of unheard footsteps in that winter’s snow, of the town’s only doctor who dared to cross the bridge during a storm on the night he was born.
If I study the painting for long enough, I can see the outline of his lanky silhouette in the curves of the leafless trees and I can hear his echoing grunts and the sucking-in of burning frost that carried him to their farm, to the only house still burning light in the window that late. But even before the youngest of my grandfather’s brothers had begun to strain his eyes from the front-most window across the icy smog and attempt to make out the black figure coming to help their unborn brother, my grandfather had come at the height of the storm at an ungodly hour on a white night. A still birth, they had thought when he came out. And then came the longest haul of time ever recorded on that farm that didn’t breathe sound or foggy tears. It just passed through the house with a ghostly touch and pushed out into a moonlit oblivion of falling snow.
Still, the black figure of the only doctor beat onwards, each passing footprint slated clean behind him. He did not yet know of my grandfather’s fate, how he had died before seeing his mother’s face and the great white on the day of his death.
Sometime, well into early morning, this night traveler finally came upon the house stooped in an untraceable mourning cape. At least that’s how I imagine it, anyways. But the painting is not that detailed.
I suppose he rapped several times at the door and that one of my great uncles let him in. I’d bet a dime that the morning chores were already being dealt out like short straws to help disguise the long awaited reckoning of a birth that gaped unworn mittens and freshly painted wooden figurines the size of cold, blue fingertips they would have placed around his crib. The baby was dead and the doctor’s late arrival only served as a confirmation to the fact. It would be a swift funeral but a long dig to get to the frozen ground beneath where they would bury him. At least he would touch snow, they thought. But it wasn’t true in the end and the doctor held him up in the blindness of an after-storm sun and announced that he was still alive. My grandfather had survived his first storm and the brooding claims to his death.
I come from the bating of breath timed to midnight shuffles and the impatient waiting at the front-most window for the doctor, or for morning, and then, when they believed him dead, for whichever came first. I come from bone-dried winds that whispered how it would all end. From the innate feeling I can’t shake of always wishing I had more time. I come from dying, things revived by long drags of time and the pale face of the sky gutted after a long snow. From going the wrong way up the avenue. Starting a story right in the middle – en media res.
I come from feminist housewives and dry humor. Unconventional clichés, and the black hole of unanswered questions. I like to beat against the snow, but even more so, to let it consume me. I stand, my mother’s daughter, a critic on the English language, connoisseur of grammatical formalities while I raise my left hand to incriminate my terrible spelling.
But at the very nearest end of it, I come from lying face up on a snow covered street, oblivious to the cold against me, taking in the stillness of things falling all around me like a submission to the most honest death I can believe in. And in that moment, I know that the world is a silent grave laden with fresh snow.
