Short Fiction | ‘What to Say’

Two months after we buried our mother, I received an email reminding me to reserve myself a spot in my synagogue’s block of plots at the cemetery: “Deborah, don’t let the opportunity to rest alongside your loved ones pass on!” I called my sister, Susan, to confirm that she’d received it too. 

The submission form allowed the future grave inhabitant to customize the text and graphic icons carved into the headstone, and we could also request neighbors to rest alongside, “so long as the request is mutual.” I imagined a synagogue administrator, or maybe the junior rabbi, sliding labeled rectangles around a grid, arranging congregants according to who stood next to whom during kiddush luncheon. 

Susan submitted the form hours after the email arrived and nudged me to do so well before the deadline a few weeks away, because otherwise, her one-sided request to be buried next to me would look “sad.” I’d filled out most of the details, typing in the names of Susan and her husband, Jeff, as our underground roommates, and all that remained to choose was either a Star of David or a menorah icon to be etched into the stone. 

“Which did you choose?” I asked Susan on the phone.

“Jeff preferred the star, but I went with the menorah. I thought it was less likely to get vandalized,” she said. 

“It’s a Jewish cemetery, I don’t think the menorah will protect you,” I said, and Susan scoffed, “Maybe they’ll get the grave next door and not us.”

“Nate and I are the grave next door!”

“Well, then you’d better get the menorah.” 

***

Our mother Ruthie had lived her final years at Maple Glen, an assisted living facility. When Susan and I visited, we’d take her to get her nails done and sit with her at community Bingo. Sometimes my mother would call “Bingo!” early just to upset her competitors, which she and her buddies Betsy and Esther considered the height of hilarity. 

She had her wits about her till her last breath and died in her sleep, undramatically. She had been weaker in her last year—she’d fallen while getting out of bed one morning 14 months ago—and her general affect seemed a little quieter too. I hoped she’d died burdenless, with nothing left undone or unsaid. 

When she passed, Betsy and Esther insisted on spending a night watching over her body leading up to the funeral, per the Jewish custom. None of us were particularly religious, but some things you just do. Maple Glen let their two elderly wards stay up all night at the funeral home, so long as they had a chaperone. And so Betsy, Esther, Susan and I spent the night by our gal Ruthie, yelling “Bingo!” whenever moved to do so. We ignored the book of Psalms resting on a small table, suspecting my mother’s soul preferred lower brow entertainment and ruckus.

***

I missed her like hell once she was gone, but I didn’t fall apart. She would have hated that. I kept trying to call her like I used to, on a whim. I almost called her to ask which icon she thought I should choose for my headstone. 

In the weeks that followed her death, I found myself going back to Maple Glen to visit her friends. Listening to them joke and complain about the food, activities and other residents made me think of the long phone calls my mother used to have with her neighborhood friends, catching up on what everyone’s kids were doing, the latest ways their bodies were breaking down, the news, the snow. The damn Boston snow that never melted till late April. 

I knew the Maple Glen residents and they knew me, at least as “Little Ruthie,” which warmed me inside. It gave my mom a tiny extended legacy, even if the bestowers of said legacy were also on their way out. 

Residents would talk at me, story bleeding into story, like a chant. Sometimes their family came to visit, and when the nurses told me someone’s end was near, I was so relieved when the family showed up, no matter how frazzled or awkward or even irritated. The important thing was that they made it in time. 

***

I visited the nursing home the Sunday following the synagogue email. I wandered into the rec room, where a table of ladies with coiffed platinum and auburn hair played hearts, and Gregory, an older Russian man, sat alone with a chess set before him, playing against himself.

My father had taught Susan and me to play when we were 8 and 6, respectively, and we’d spent many a winter evening hunched together over a board, tapping the timer back and forth and asking, “Are you sure you want to do that?” He wasn’t a very playful man, but during chess, while his bushy brows furrowed in a way that might seem menacing, his eyes instead reflected mischief. When one of us slipped up and made a careless error, he groaned, “Lord have mercy, you’re killing me!” and “Steinitz just rolled over in his grave!”

One day, when I was 12, he left our mother, and us, for another woman, someone who worked in his office. For some time, he would pick Susan and me up on Sunday mornings and take us to a diner, where we ate pancakes in silence. He brought a folding chess board and we’d play a couple games, which filled the time, but our fingers were sticky with syrup and it was hard to concentrate amid the clanging and shouting coming from the kitchen. Susan started bringing something more to the games, asking our father “Why?” incessantly when he guided our moves, even when the strategy was perfectly clear. After a year of breakfasts at the diner, Susan demanded, via our mother, a stop to the “infantilizing visitations,” and we stopped seeing him. Susan and I stopped playing chess. Six years later, our father was dead. 

Now, Gregory waved me over and gestured at the board. 

“You play?” he said in his thick accent, and I shook my head and took a step backwards, holding my hands up. 

“Yes, yes, you play, sit.” He waved again at the seat across from him, and I gave in, sitting down for a game. I was there to make people happy, after all.  

A few moves in, I picked up my knight and purposely moved it into the path of Gregory’s bishop, but before planting the piece down, Gregory said, “No,” and I looked up. 

“Stupid move. You must concentration!” he said, tapping at his temple with a finger. I smiled and replaced the knight. We continued to play, and the hearts ladies ambled over with their walkers to watch. As pieces on the board thinned, more residents shuffled and wheeled over to watch the game progress, and their cheers and jeering attracted others until a crowd encircled us. 

Playing felt like hearing an old song, lyrics flooding back into my consciousness after decades. A song I liked? A familiar one, at least. 

I checked Gregory twice before dealing the final blow. He reached across the board, delighted, and we shook hands. 

“Very good,” he said. “You have good mind, good teacher.” 

***

For a long time, fatherhood surrounded me, but it didn’t touch me. I watched my friends’ fathers walk them down the aisle and my father-in-law cradle my babies as they were born. When my father came to mind, I had pangs reminiscent of reading a story on the front page of the newspaper, only to later realize the inner section where it continued had been discarded, perhaps used to pad the bottom of a compost bin. The narrative arc of our relationship chopped off mid-sentence. 

Every so often, my brain surfaced the odd memory of him, or an image from the family room with yellow walls flashed across my mind. When my son Jeremy thrust his foot into my lap to tie his ice skates, I was suddenly bent over a red sneaker, slowly threading a lace through a loose loop while my father demonstrated beside me in the old leather easy chair, pants hiked up his calves and work socks bunched around his ankles, fingers exacting and deliberate. 

He had been a good dad, at least decent, at least as far as I’d been concerned at that age. What were dads supposed to do? Go to work, come home for dinner, watch the football game on Sunday—it all checked out to me. It felt like a blink and he was gone from the chair and the television and the dinner table. No one explained what was going on, except Susan, who was 14 and only two years older than me. He got a new family, she’d said. 

“But from where?”

“A lady at work.” That was all I got. 

Our mother didn’t address anything beyond the fact that he would no longer be living at home, as though the new family configuration were impersonal as a corporate reorg. She started sitting at the head of the table the night he left. 

His car accident was six years later, when I was about to graduate from high school. Susan wasn’t back from college yet, and my mother made me go to the hospital alone. 

“It could be your only chance to say something,” she said. 

“Like what?” 

“Anything you need to say.” 

I had gone and hadn’t said much, and neither had he. By then, it seemed we had no common ground between us. “Why did you choose another family?” seemed a little complicated to ask an ashen man hooked up to oxygen. In that moment, it hadn’t seemed like the Most Important Thing to clear up. I’m not sure what I would have done differently if I’d known he’d die of his injuries within a week. 

***

After the chess game at Maple Glen, I stopped by Susan’s to help her garden. We chatted and dug holes to plant pansies. I recounted my morning bout against Gregory.

“Dad would’ve killed you for trying to throw away that knight,” she said.  

I paused with a flower in my hand. We never talked about our father. He’d rarely come up in the thirty years since we’d deposited the money he left us in his will.

“I know, it felt sacreligious. I was just trying to do the man’s ego a favor,” I said.  

Susan frowned as she patted dirt down around a yellow and purple bloom. I sunk my trowel into the moist soil and scooped out enough to fit the roots of the flower, which sat neatly packed into a rectangular plastic carton from the hardware store. 

“I guess Dad’s been on my mind since mom died, and, you know, making our funeral arrangements,” I said. 

“I bet my funeral will be nicer than yours.” 

“You wish.” 

Susan slapped her gloved hands together, dismissing my fancy funeral, and I pressed on. 

“He died so suddenly, I almost could’ve missed it. And it’s not like it made a huge difference in my day to day.” 

“The money made a difference.”

“That’s true.” I had been able to put myself through school working only one job, and the remaining money went toward my eventual home down payment. 

“I didn’t plan to have him walk me down the aisle or anything,” I said.

“And?”

“I guess I thought we might reconnect, eventually. Remember Mom made me go to the hospital?”

Susan nodded. “I wasn’t back from school yet.”

“And I went, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.” I leaned back on the foam board resting under my knees. “And a week later, that was it.”

It wasn’t just me—none of my immediate family members were great with words. They were great at deflection, and the more modes, the better. Our mother deployed her killer sense of humor like a defensive missile, while our father barely spoke and then ultimately abdicated. After Susan’s long-ago explanation of our father leaving, we just hadn’t talked about him. I followed her lead, and my mom’s, and his presence in our lives faded to the level of a distant cousin. These days, someone would’ve stuck kids like us in therapy before we could blink, but it was different then. 

“If you were wondering what you should’ve said at the hospital, I have no idea,” Susan said.  

She didn’t even see him before he died. After the car crash, he was released from the hospital with a decent prognosis before Susan made arrangements to come home, and then he passed.

“I’ve overheard people saying their last words to their relatives at Maple Glen. Like they don’t know when it will happen, so eventually they start cramming it all in,” I said. 

“Like what?” 

“A lot of memories, happy times. Or they read from their favorite books.”

“I guess we didn’t do that for Mom, either,” Susan said. 

“That was different. We’d already had so much time.” I chuckled. “That reminds me of a story a nurse told me. There was this family that came and spent a week with their dying father. They were very sweet, and they’d all written him letters and taken turns sitting with him. When he was dozing, one of his kids goes, ‘Dad, you can let go whenever you’re ready.’ And the other one says, ‘Yeah Dad, don’t worry about us, you can go, we love you.’ And the man’s eyes snap open and he rasps, ‘Christ, I’m leaving! Give me a minute!’” 

Susan threw her head back and an enormous laugh erupted from her throat. “That guy might’ve been Mom’s true soulmate, that’s too bad,” she said.  

“I think they were friends, actually.”

“Well you know what they say about nursing homes and STDs.” 

I frowned and flicked dirt at Susan. “You’re disgusting, that’s my mother you’re talking about.”

“Give me a break,” Susan said. “I hope they did it.” She threw dirt back at me, which I found stuck to my neck hours later once I was back home and getting dinner ready. 

***

A few weeks later, I arrived at the cemetery where we’d held our mother’s funeral to pick up the guest book we’d accidentally left behind at the chapel. A brusque office admin had alerted me to our oversight via increasingly terse voicemail messages, and I finally made the drive over. 

In the small office, a woman about my age sat obscured behind an old computer monitor. I knocked on the doorframe and her face appeared around the side of the screen.

“Hi, I’m here to pick up the guest book from my mother’s funeral, her name is Ruth Gold,” I said. 

“I’ll get that for you, just wait right here.” She stepped out of the office, and I took a seat. My gaze shifted to the rows of headstones visible through the single window. My father was also buried at this cemetery, but I’d never come back to visit.

The woman returned, book in hand. 

“Here you are,” she said, but I didn’t get up. 

“Can I help you with something else?” 

“I was just thinking you might be able to tell me the location of my father’s grave,” I said. 

The woman gave a curt nod. “What’s the name?”

“Howard Green. He passed in ’89—you probably weren’t digitizing things back then.” The woman clacked on her keyboard. 

“We have every known grave in our database. We need to know where everyone is.” She looked up. “Haven’t you visited him before?”

I let out a slow breath. “No, we weren’t on good terms.”

The woman studied me for a few moments. “My mistake, I thought you had,” she said. She handed me a map. “Turn left out of here, walk to the end of the road, then turn right. You’ll want the third row on your left.” She ran a highlighter over the map and circled a square marked 212, like a hotel concierge giving me directions to a nice restaurant or the Eiffel Tower. 

“Thank you.”

“Of course. Have a meaningful visit.” 

***

I followed the directions, making my way to the grave. I scoured the ground for some pebbles to leave behind on his headstone. Why did Jews do that again? I recalled a myth about the stones tethering the deceased’s body to earth, but it didn’t strike me as ideal. I thought my own soul would prefer to roam the galaxy, not endure a stifling existence underground. 

I found myself before the headstone engraved with “Howard Green.” His Hebrew name was beneath, “Hayim ben Tuviya.” Hayim son of Tuviya, my grandfather, whom I’d never met and hadn’t had time to ask about. Below that were the dates of my father’s birth and death, March 5, 1938 – May 12, 1989. The anniversary of his death would be in one week. And below that: “Beloved husband and father.”

I had banished my father’s burial to the corners of my mind, but I mainly remembered huddling close to Susan. The new wife had come over and placed a hand on my shoulder, and I swear my skin burned under her skinny fingers. 

“It’s good of you to be here, girls. He loved you very much.” Voice like a razor blade. 

I hadn’t been able to look up from the bits of grass stuck to her pointy heels, but Susan had answered, cold and steely. 

“Thank you, Carol. He’s our father, we only got one.” 

Now, I saw there were some small rocks sitting on the headstone. Maybe a cemetery worker or some volunteers had left them. I placed my rock as well. I figured I would tether his soul to this place just for this visit. But now that I was here, what to say? 

I brushed some dirt off the headstone and sighed. “You didn’t make it easy, Dad.” I knelt facing the stone and pictured my dad at the dinner table, then in his easy chair. I ran my fingers through the grass and thought about his decomposed remains feeding the blades, half my genes growing out of the ground. That wasn’t science, but it felt right. 

“Alright, Dad, good to see you.” I stood up and walked quickly through the cemetery back to the parking lot. I made it to the car just as a storm opened up the sky. I let the car idle and focused on the wipers performing their cyclical work, shepherding water back and forth across the windshield. 

***

I had forgotten the date of his death, May 12. I’d never commemorated his Yahrzeit by going to synagogue to say mourner’s kaddish, like I’d seen my mother do for her parents, so I don’t know what force propelled me back to the cemetery a week later. I don’t know what I thought I’d find at his grave that I hadn’t found the first time. 

But when I turned into the parking lot, I saw a familiar car, with its Boston University sticker and dent in the bumper from a long-ago parallel parking mishap.

I followed the path through the cemetery to find Susan standing before our father’s headstone. She looked up as she heard me approaching.

I could see she was beyond surprised—she was something else. She crossed her arms, shoulders hunched into her neck, like a cornered cat. I stopped where I was on the path, about 10 yards away from her. 

“What are you doing here?” she said. 

“It’s Dad’s Yahrzeit.”

“You’ve never come before.” She must have been doing this for a while. Did she only come on the anniversary of his death? Or other times too? 

I shrugged. “Does that mean I can’t come?” 

“Obviously not.” 

“Okay then,” I said. I wasn’t familiar with this non-composed Susan. It had always been impossible to surprise her, and yet, I had. I saw that another pebble had been added to the top of the headstone. 

Susan sat down in the grass, and I sat next to her. 

“Can you believe it’s been thirty years?” I said, touching the year of his death etched into the stone. 

“In some ways yes, others no,” she said. 

“Have you always come on his Yahrzeit?” I asked.  

“No. I started once my kids were born.” Her voice was husky, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. 

“Why?” I said. She was so quiet, maybe she hadn’t heard me. 

“Once I had kids, I stopped understanding how he could have left us,” she said. She was about to cry. “I mean I never actually understood it, I pretend-understood ’cause I was an obnoxious teenager. But how could he have left us?” Her voice cracked on her last few words. I wrapped an arm around her shoulder, like I would’ve done for Mia or Jeremy. Susan leaned into me, and tears ran down her cheeks and into her sweatshirt. 

I didn’t know what to do. We weren’t a family that embraced, but here we were. I didn’t know what to say. 

We sat like that, quiet. I imagined Susan having come here for all those years, having a version of the unsatisfying conversation I had with our dad’s grave last week. It reminded me of a trip I took as a teenager to the Western Wall, standing before it and touching its rough, ancient stones and feeling none of the things I thought should be coursing through me—reverence, connection, rootedness—things I felt now, with my stoic sister leaning on my shoulder. Perhaps our dad was here, on some level, but the person who was definitely here, in her entirety, was Susan. It seemed we were outside the flow of time. Indeed, the chirping birds and daffodil buds knew nothing of us, or our parents, at all.

Susan’s phone rang, and I felt her start against my shoulder. She sat up, sniffled a couple times and answered.

“Hey. No, I’ll be home soon. I’m—with Deborah. Uh huh. What, for tomorrow?” She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “I’ll stop by Target. Just make him sweat a little so he doesn’t—exactly. Alright, talk to you later.” She hung up.

“Jeff just told me Gabe has a science presentation tomorrow and needs poster board. So I’m off to Target.”

She pushed herself off the ground and brushed off the seat of her jeans. I held my hands out, and she pulled me up too. We started walking back to the lot. 

“You know what we should do?” I said. 

“What?”

“You should get the poster board and drop it at home, and then we should go out for pancakes.” 

“Pancakes?”

“Yeah, Yahrzeit pancakes!” 

Susan looked skeptical. I feared her recoiling from the seed of emotion we’d just shared. “Just us? Or everyone?” she asked. 

“Well, sounds like Gabe has a lot of homework.” 

Susan thought it over and finally nodded, and we agreed to meet at Casey’s Diner in an hour. 

***

When Susan arrived, I’d already gotten us a booth. She sat down and accepted the glass of wine I pushed across the table. We clinked our glasses together. 

“To dad, but mainly, to us,” I said. 

Susan reached into her canvas tote, but then paused, as if thinking better of it. She looked at me, and then she retrieved a magnetic travel chess set from the bag. “I saw it at Target and thought, what the hell.” What the hell, indeed.

“Don’t think I’m suddenly not mad at him. I’m still mad,” she said. 

“I know.” 

We set up the board. She opened with her king’s pawn, and I pushed to match. She followed with the king’s knight, I defended, and she attacked with her bishop. I couldn’t resist the smirk that snuck across my face. Our father had been a fan of the Italian game, too. 

“Why didn’t you tell me you were craving pizza?” I said. 

“How about you focus more on your game and less on your dad jokes.” 

The waiter set down a glass pitcher of syrup and pancake laden plates, warm and fragrant. When my fingers got sticky, I didn’t wipe them off.