The Best American Essays 2015 (28 page)

Grandma's father was an older man, tall and handsome, a widower who had been an equestrian back in Russia. Her mother was seventeen when she married him. The couple had four daughters and one boy, who died very young. When the Depression hit, the father was called in to the office of the Brooklyn factory where he worked as a foreman: they had no choice; they would have to let him go. He begged for a job, any job, to support his family, which was how he became a “fireman,” shoveling coal into a furnace. An explosion, a backfire, I think it's called, injured him badly, and he didn't come home. He disappeared. Three weeks after the accident, my grandmother went out to talk to a man who was sitting on the stoop across from their house. His face was covered in bandages. She asked why he hadn't come home, and he said, “I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore.” He was scarred for the rest of his life. I never met my great-grandfather Benjamin, my namesake.

Grandma's first husband, Irving—she was married to him through the fifties and sixties—was adored by everyone, just like her father. He was in business with some Italians, which is one way to describe his trade. After twenty years of marriage, she divorced him, and it wasn't until much later that I got the inkling it might have been because Irving had a frightening side.

In 1982, when he was seventy years old, Irving was in a car accident. He drove his Cadillac off the highway. He might have fallen asleep, or it might have been the fault of the screwdriver that was discovered in the steering column. His head was smashed up in the wreck, but he was a tough old Jew, and after four years he woke up and spent ten more fighting his paralysis before dying in his late eighties. Meanwhile his money became the object of a convoluted lawsuit that resulted in Irving's business partners and second wife (who cared for him) getting most of his fortune. Throughout all that, Grandma would bemoan the fact that she'd left Irving. She'd say, “The kinds of things he did all day, you can't come home and be Mr. Nice Guy, no way.”

Martha, Grandma's oldest child and my aunt, got cancer in her twenties. Grandma cared for her. Martha's disease might have killed her, but . . . well, I don't know. Aaron, Grandma's second husband, also died of cancer back in the 1970s. He was deaf, he hated television, and he yelled at children—Grandma said that she married him because “he was the only one who would have me.” He smoked pipes. After his first operation, for throat cancer, he played Ping-Pong with me; he seemed happy and was less of a monster. He took up gardening. But no matter how much he ate, he kept losing weight and withered away. Or . . . Again, it could have just been the cancer.

Next up in the funerary procession was Norman, Grandma's youngest child and only son. So let's talk about him: Norman was a piece of shit. He was only eight years older than I was, and he tortured me when I was a kid. He had the most hideous laugh, like a pig squealing. Not a happy pig. Like a pig in pain. He'd threaten me with knives and steal and break my things. He'd try to convince me that he was going to kidnap me in the middle of the night and sell me to “the Arabs.” Maybe all that was because he was envious of me; he was chunky and Jewish-looking, so Grandma, with her blue eyes and blond hair, found him repellent. In sharp contrast to Norman, the fleshy failure, I was a natural athlete with Gentile features and therefore her favorite. Once I saw Grandma punish Norman by standing him in front of the open stove, turning up the broiler flames, and threatening to burn off his dick. He was maybe twelve at the time. She'd also cook him huge plates of food and offer them to him. He'd say no because he didn't want to get any fatter, but she'd keep pushing the food under his chin until he finally ate—and then berate him for being so fat.

Norman liked weapons. He collected things that killed, like crossbows and axes, and everyone was terrified of him. He would sometimes storm around the house with a bowie knife or machete, and the rest of us would cower in our rooms. When I was maybe seven, he covered my arm in methane and set it on fire, just to show me how powerful methane was and how lighting it wouldn't hurt me. It's true that I didn't feel any pain, though it did burn all the hair off my arm. Another time, when I was visiting Long Island as a teenager, a bunch of other kids tackled me and kicked me over and over. My mother thought Norman had sent them.

Should I mention that he was a genius? He was; he could do anything. When I was eight, he walked me to Canal Street, just a few blocks from where I lived in Tribeca, to show me how he could buy computer parts and assemble a working machine in an afternoon, which he did.

In the late eighties, when he was twenty-eight, Norman was still living with Grandma, but he was kind of figuring things out: he had lost weight, he had a girlfriend, and he was thinking about some kind of career in computers, “networked computers,” as they called what would become the Internet back then. He was way into scuba diving, too. He would sleep underwater in the tub with his equipment on, and sometimes he'd rent a boat and dive down to some wreck and take photos.

The day of the accident, he was scheduled to go out on a rented boat, but Grandma didn't want him to go—she always complained about how expensive it was—so she slipped him something. I think. He was feeling pretty out of it that morning; he thought maybe he was sick. His partner persuaded him to go out anyway, and then there was a problem with the configuration of Norman's equipment when he was underwater. Maybe it was a malfunction, or maybe it was his own fault; he had customized all his gear (because he was a genius). His diving partner swam to the surface alone, instead of sharing his tank with Norman in a “buddy-system” ascent. We don't know exactly why Norman stayed down there. It might have been that he thought he didn't have enough oxygen to attempt a “controlled emergency” ascent, which is when you exhale all the way up. Or it might have been that he was entangled in the U-boat wreck he and his partner were investigating. Or he might have just been too out of it to save himself. There are these flags that divers can fire up toward the surface to alert the rescue diver, who's supposed to be ready to go on the deck of the boat, and Norman did send up his flag. But this was Long Island, where rules about keeping rescue divers on boats aren't taken too seriously, and Norman died down there, watching that fucking flag wave.

Then there was my wife's miscarriage. Funny thing about that. Or not “funny,” I guess, but I forgot about it until I decided to write this story and I was going over some old notes. When we announced my wife's pregnancy, Grandma freaked out about how there'd be another mouth to feed and we couldn't afford it. We visited her just before my wife miscarried, and even though my wife knew to stay away from her food, everyone slips up a little from time to time. And, well . . . it was late in the pregnancy for a miscarriage. And the dates line up. But it could be a coincidence.

Later, when we did have a child, Grandma came over to celebrate, bearing a present for the baby: a pair of medical scissors—sharp, pointed, big medical scissors. On another visit she brought us beets she had bought. I was like, “Grandma, why are you giving me fifteen cans of beets?” She had recipes, beets this and beets that, and lots and lots of them included sunflower seeds, too. She was enormously proud of one invention: beet-and-sunflower-seed ice cream. You couldn't top it, nutrition-wise, she said. Look it up. I did: “Canned beets and sunflower seeds,” I typed into my computer. “URGENT PRODUCT RECALL,” Google spat back. Everything she gave us should have been pulled from the shelves.

Sometimes when I tell these stories, I have the feeling that people think I should have done something. Well, it was difficult psychologically to piece all of this together, and as a kid I didn't understand what was going on. Before Grandma put me to bed she'd sometimes serve me this really rich hot chocolate that looked oily and thin. And when I woke up it would be twenty-four or even seventy-two hours later. Three or four times we rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night because I was having trouble breathing. But it wasn't until my thirties that I connected all this and it dawned on me that sleeping for three days is not normal or O.K., and that the only times I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, I was at Grandma's.

And even when I did figure it out, so what? After Joe, Grandma's last boyfriend, died, I went to the cops and told them I thought Grandma was involved. They said, “Whaddya want us to do about it?”

And now, once again, I feel like I'm supposed to care. Like there should be closure. Either I purge my past, forgive her, and arrive at a higher vibrational state, or I find proof of what she's done over the years and expose her once and for all. I'd always planned to search her house one last time, but now the house is gone. And nobody is exhuming any bodies, and Grandma doesn't even know what Grandma did. And there's not going to be any grand finale. And as I sat there listening to Grandma sing with my children—not quite crying, I wasn't quite crying—I realized that I didn't care what had happened, that nobody cares what happened, that caring is for cops on
CSI
and doctors on
ER
and muscle-bound Marines in the movies.

Not long ago I was talking to a friend I've told about Grandma. My friend casually mentioned that Grandma could have accidentally killed me, which surprised me. That wasn't accurate, I said.

“But didn't you have trouble breathing? Didn't you rush to the hospital in the middle of the night? She wasn't trying to hurt you, she was trying to manage you, but she could have hurt you.”

“I suppose that's true,” I said, nodding, slowly and in disbelief, because Grandma never would have hurt me. We had a cosmic bond.

ASHRAF H. A. RUSHDY

FROM
Michigan Quarterly Review

I
AM NOW
indexing the second and final volume of my lynching trilogy.

If you are indexing your own book, you might at some point, like me, be resigned to the fact that you are going to keep your day job. Your book is not going to make a lot of money. The kind of book that is lucrative is either not going to need an index or will have one done by a professional indexer.

You have a lot of time to have thoughts like that when you are indexing your own book, since it is not particularly mindful work. Most of my thoughts, fortunately, have not been so mordant, or so obviously envious of others. I would say that they have fallen into three large categories—nostalgia, anger, and sadness.

1.

My first response has been a particular kind of nostalgia—a mixture of joy, resignation, longing. Indexing, after all, is probably the last time an author will read the book through in its entirety. We might look up particular things for future reference, to pillage our own earlier research, but most authors I know are not going to pick up and read a book on which they have been working for a number of years. It is with mixed feelings that one recognizes that here is a book that one will not read again. I remember reading a beautiful short essay, by Jorge Luis Borges, I think, in which the blind author lovingly runs his fingers over his books and nostalgically reflects on never again reading each specific volume in his library. The experience of reading for one last time a book I have read in so many different forms during the fourteen years I have been working on it is not nearly so grandiose. Writing this book cost me much, but it did not cost me my sight or sense of proportion.

It is not just a relief to know that the task is completed, that the research and writing are at an end—although there is that. There is a curious sense of reversal in indexing. You can see the logic of the composition of your book backward, as it were. As I develop a list of particular words and page numbers, I see where I made specific choices, the places I developed key connections, when I made revisions that put this section here and not there. I see, then, through the selection of key terms and page numbers, just where the book took the particular shape it ended up taking. And I remember where I might have written a specific passage, or how a set of ideas came to occupy the same page or the same series of pages. To a reader, the index is a way of navigating the book from the back. To an author, an index reveals just how this book came to be the one it is.

That nostalgia made up of remembering and relief at finishing is likely a common one for academic authors of all books. The other two feelings that I have felt pervasively as I compile this index are more personal and specific.

2.

One is a long pent-up anger that is the result of a persistent and undue restraint. As someone trying to produce a historical study of a horrible and cruel practice, I wanted to make sure that I examined the phenomenon with as much detachment as I could muster. I don't mind reading something that is polemical or indignant, dripping with righteous antipathy for injustice, but I did not believe that the study I was writing in the historical mode and moment in which I was writing it could assume that tone or stance, or that it would be the most productive way to understand what lynching means in America. I had to be measured and temperate in my assessment of what people who performed inhumane things believed themselves to be doing.

I envy and admire those historians of an earlier age who could express their opprobrium without restraint. It would be wonderful to be able to say of some people who appear in my work, as Thomas Babington Macaulay said in one of his historical essays on the English Revolution, for example, that of Archbishop Laud “we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than, for any other character in our history” (Macaulay, “Hallam”). Or as he said of Bertrand Barère in an essay on the French Revolution: “Barère approached nearer than any person mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of consummate and universal depravity” (Macaulay, “Barère”).