An Underwater Sauna in Heaven

After so many years, I should've known better:

Never pick up the phone when my mother calls until I'm done working for the day. At best, she'd just drain me emotionally, but today I let my guard down and caught her hidden knife.

I don't even remember what we were talking about, just how quickly it turned from me being curious/empathetic to her feeling judged/attacked, and she laid into me:

MOM: That's what you ALWAYS do, because you're SELFISH! You... you always FUCK your family out of ANY chance to be proud of you!

ME: Mom, you can still be, always be, proud of me. I don't see how--

MOM: You're JUST like your father! ARROGANT and COCKY! You're not HALF as smart as you THINK you are. I can't wait until you have ASSHOLE kids too… and then I’ll LAUGH!

The call ended the way 95% of them did: she hung up on me, violently severed our connection with the press of a mushy button on her Nokia phone.

Was this what family was supposed to feel like? I grew up watching other families on TV and in real-life who seemed to actually enjoy and nurture each other. Mine just cut each other down, a pack of wounded animals snarling and whimpering in the same space, needing love but not knowing how to give or accept it.

I put my phone down too, angry and drained and shaking. She’d already gotten under my skin. There was a list of drawings I had yet to do that night, but sitting at my little homemade desk, I couldn't force my eyes down at my laptop screen. They wanted to stare out the window at the bare oak tree, the snow-dusted brownstones across the street, the church steeple four blocks away.

Seven feet to my right, L took off her headphones and asked me if I was okay:

L: Daijobu? Did she hang up on you again?

I nodded, but I wasn't okay. She took four steps to the left into my workspace and put her arms around my neck, staying there for a while. It started to snow again, so lightly that you could count the flakes falling past the window.

ME: I'm going out for a walk. Would you like to come?

L: Yes. Unless… you prefer to be alone.

ME: I do not prefer to be alone right now.

++++

We wound up in a bar called Jimmy's a few blocks away, drinking one happy hour ale each. It helped a little bit. The bartender Charlie told me I looked "fuckin' haunted" and gave us free french fries.

An alarm went off on my phone: I had to go home and get back to work. Deadlines.

++++

I could not work. The wriggling tentacles of my emotions could not, would not sit still. I climbed up into our bunk bed next to L and Wedge, who curled up on my chest, both snoozing peacefully.

But not me. I lay there in the dark, numb and bleeding with two breathing forms who loved me. Snow was gathering outside. I lay there for hours, reviewing a decades-long file of similar interactions with my mom, examining them for any kind of pattern or insight.

Slowly the light in our studio changed, brightened from the hazy dusk of winter into the cool bright blue of clear sky and sun. As I lay in my bed, I felt sand on my bare feet, heard the slow roll of a calm ocean in my ears, all around me.

And I was vertical now, standing, and L was there too. She was wearing a sun hat with a wide brim that made her look like she was on vacation. Something pulled at me: my hand in hers, fingers intertwined. I felt suddenly peaceful.

ME: Because I'm dreaming.

We walked down a deserted boardwalk past empty shops and restaurants. All the lights were on, the air conditioners humming, neon signs buzzing, but we could not see another single soul stretching down along the coast, no matter how hard we squinted.

L: This is where you grew up, right?

ME: This is like the place, but it's not the place.

I felt a pull, a familiar presence calling me from far down the boardwalk, past where I could see. L’s hand in mine, I guided us ahead towards it:

ME: I know where I am now.

And L disappeared. In her place was a rusty old BMX bike, white and red with blue rubber handles, blue rubber tires. I had this bike all through elementary school. I rode it through imaginary adventures on vacant neighborhood lots, visited friends’ homes, almost ran away a few times on it too. On my very first day of junior high, someone cut my chain and stole it and I walked all the way home in tears.

ME: Hello again, bike.

I climbed onto it and started pumping the pedals with calm purpose: I had to get way down there. That way.

Tasting my own sweat, I rolled off the sun-bleached asphalt onto the shoulder, bumping over crags of limestone and glittering triangles of broken beer bottles. Looking up at the sky, it was as clear and blue as the endless sea over my right shoulder.

But this coast was not a Florida coast, this was a coast in the dream-world: still formed of bone-white limestone but rolling away from hotels and t-shirt shops to suddenly rise high above the sea, opening up into hills and cliff faces and empty beaches below.

Rattling my spine and clicking my teeth, I rode the BMX off the road's shoulder and down a fifty-foot hill of broken dead coral until it deposited us on a seaside dirt road with a single rusted Datsun parked on it whose hazard lights had gone out long ago.

The rusty chain on the BMX suddenly snapped and I let it fall to the roadside, where it turned back into my wife. She smiled and shaded her eyes from the sun like nothing had happened. We walked onward along the dirt road until we came upon a sign that read "BEACH" with an arrow pointing the way that I didn't need. Because I have been here before.Turning towards the beach, sunlight blared even brighter, reflecting off the sea and flooding my retinas. Even squinting my eyes shut, I could barely make out anything. We walked further towards the source of the light until a large pink shape emerged: the yawning skeleton of an old hotel, punched through by past hurricanes, still standing but barely.

Behind the hotel, a row of large boulders formed a jetty to break the surf. At high-tide, the boulders appeared to rise up out of the sea, but low-tide – as it was now – revealed a sliding glass door set beneath them.

Fiddling with its corroded latch, I slid the door open and we went inside, where we entered an immaculate hardwood sauna. I knew this already because I’d been here before: this was where Szulim, my zeide, lived after his death in 1994.

++++

I always forget about this place until I return again: the front room is a hardwood sauna looking out through the glass door onto the beach. In the next room were the saltwater hot springs, like at the Dead Sea. Which made sense: the only time I'd seen Zeide truly relaxed was when he lay prone like a baby on our trip to Israel, just before his last heart attack.

As we stepped inside, the smell of spiced lamb and onions roped its way around us, into every corner of the place. In the next room, Zeide had carved a large bowl into the stone of the hot springs and filled it with glowing coals over which he’d placed a hibachi grill. He was fussing over it until he poked his head into the hardwood room and smiled, all gums. He always took out his false teeth when he was at home:

ZEIDE: Denny! You came. Good. Soon, ve’ll eat.

Then he disappeared again to tend the grilling. Thicker smoke, sweeter onions, louder sizzling filled the room. L and I sat on the cedar benches, shining with sauna sweat, growing hungrier by the moment. 

I never saw my zeide cook a meal in his life, he always had my bubbie do that for him. Watching him fuss over this meal, seeing his serene focus on the process, made me beam with pride.

He re-entered the room with an antique porcelain platter of still-smoking lamb with thinly-sliced grilled onions and three tall glasses of room temperature sea water. He looked exactly as I remembered him in life: skin tanned to leather, tiny dark eyes set deep in wrinkly folds, lips puckered inwards where his teeth should have been. He was wearing beige linen pants with a tank top, his brown shoulders sprouting stray hairs an inch and half long.

I desperately wanted to hug him but we were never really like that in my family. Feelings were words spoken, not touches. And words were easy to say, whether you felt them or not.

His eyes looked from my face to L’s. I hadn’t introduced them yet.

ME: Zeide, this is L. She’s my… my wife. We got married four months ago.

He was silent for a moment, regarding her. She didn’t shrink in his gaze, but I was terrified he’d be disappointed that she wasn’t a Jew, that he’d hurt all of us by making that clear. But he smiled big at us both:

ZEIDE [offering his hand]: I am Szulim. I am Denny’s zeide. Velcome to the family!

ME: Really? No judgment? No hurt feelings?

L smiled big and reached out to take his hand. He pulled her in for a hug, their sweat blending as our families have. I was in shock. He never behaved with this grace in life. I did not recognize this grandfather. Also, I was still dreaming.

ZEIDE: This doesn’t matter, Denny. In life, you should be happy. And in death, also happy.

We sat down around the cedar table built into the sauna, baking in the heat while tucking into the delicious lamb. You know the food is good when everyone stops talking.

And in that silence, a female voice carried from several rooms away, asking an upwards-floating question in a language I didn’t understand. 

I assumed it was Freida – my bubbie – but then remembered in a black tar bubble of guilt that she wasn't dead yet, just a tiny scrambled-egg of a stroke victim, a withering bird in a wheelchair in real-life Florida. 

Zeide’s eyes met mine for a split second. His cheeks flushed red, then he looked away. He was living here in this place – blissfully – with someone else.

We ate in silence for a little, taking tiny sips from our glasses of salty water. I wondered suddenly if they were tears, and if so, whose?

He talked about building things in the back room:

ZEIDE: I have a vorkshop, vay in the back there, behind the hot springs. Always making things vith mein hands.

I didn’t think I’d been back there before, in previous visits.

ME: Can I go see it?

He shook his head.

ZEIDE: No. Someone is… back there.

He didn’t elaborate, but in my bones I knew who it was. Not her name, but my father had told me a story, shortly after Zeide died, about a young woman he loved before the war broke out. Before the concentration camps, before he met my bubbie. He’d carried a photo of her in his wallet throughout the war, throughout his entire life. She was still there in his wallet after his body was vacant and cold in a drawer at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Just the mention of her name would send my grandmother into a suicidal rage, but somehow Zeide held this woman’s pedestal high, keeping Freida in her shadow their whole American life together. 

I wanted to press, to get answers, but I hoped I’d find out during my next visit.

Reaching across the table, Zeide took L's hands in his and stared at her seriously, both of them framed by the rising sea on the other side of the glass door. The tide was coming in slowly behind them, the waves inching further and further up the beach. 

ZEIDE: Mein granddaughter, such beautiful children you vill make together.

A sudden and involuntary tear welled up and ran down L’s cheek. We actually weren’t planning on having any kids, but she didn’t say a word.

ZEIDE: In life, family is the most important thing. 

He turned to me then and took my hands and I knew it was almost time to say goodbye. For now. I gave him a hug and realized I was bigger than him, this leathery old reflection of myself. 

The light was changing, the sea level getting higher by the minute, now slapping up halfway against the glass door, revealing an aquarium beneath the sky, striped tropical fish darting through the blue. The waves licked higher and higher until – with an audible plunge – Zeide’s cave was submerged and the sun was only visible as a shimmering eye through the rippling surface above us.

ZEIDE: Right now, this is my favorite time of day. 

His tiny eyes crinkled at the edges as we watched the sun together from below the surface like a family of fish or mermaids or souls in the land of the dead and I realized the tears I’d been drinking were my own and my alarm went off and I jumped up out of bed and ran to type all this out before it was gone.

Até a próxima, my lovelies,