By J. Dancoff
It was the dishwasher’s hands Ruth noticed first. She did not know his name then, did not care to know it, only registered the flat, platypus fingernails as he operated the cafeteria’s coffee urn, or the twitch of his arm muscles beneath his uniform as he carried a tray of dishes.
He appeared at the small Brooklyn museum in late November. She was pushing her tray along, taking the cafeteria’s offerings for the day and thinking of this or that collection and why it was important: Etruscan coins, Venetian earrings, a group of Titian paintings, each with its own story. Her specialty was the history of collecting. She and a few other curators had invented it – the idea that the patronage of the church, or of kings and billionaires, was as important as the artwork itself, since after all, it was their support that had saved the artifacts or made the paintings possible. To value and be valued was key. Her father, a retired medievalist from Columbia University, said what people collected was irrelevant and to prove it, had given away most of his possessions to Goodwill when he moved to a senior citizens home in New Jersey. She visited him every Sunday and he invariably brought up the topic – why the history of collecting was a meaningless pursuit, even though she’d built her career on it and was now herself lecturing at Columbia on the topic. He spoke from a large, brown recliner which looked out on a sun-drenched patio, an oxygen tank nearby, and said that the things people accumulated in their lives, even relationships, were mere accident and it was digressionary to think otherwise. Her birth was an accident, he would announce in a crescendo of logic, since if a different sperm and egg had met inside her mother, she herself would not exist. He never regarded her as he spoke, as he had rarely looked at her throughout her childhood. She would patiently counter that the first collector had been Noah, and if he had not built his ark, none of them would exist. Yes, it was just a story, but the Bible itself made the point. Her father was unmoved. Sometimes when they spoke, she imagined her words hovering in the air above him, waiting for a recognition that never came, and in the parking lot afterwards, dizzy and disoriented, she was unable to recognize her car from the scores of other compact models, lined up as though on a car lot. He had been a young man at Auschwitz, which more than one psychiatrist said accounted for his detachment, but the explanation never comforted her. Only returning to the museum office could orient her again, and to the careful charts she and others had made to show the influence of this or that Medici’s taste on the history of art – proof that what people chose to include in their lives did matter.
“When did you first notice me?” she asked, lying in the dishwasher’s arms. His name was Juan Estrada, but she preferred the dishwasher. That’s how she described him to herself. It was a Sunday morning, a late January snow drifting down on the sidewalk outside, but it was warm in his Queens apartment, and warmer still in his bed.
He stroked her face gently, kissing her eyelids. “I always noticed you. You were a bird. Put that woman in a cage with my birds. That’s what I thought.”
The dishwasher spoke like a poet, which was no accident. Before spending ten years in prison on a bad drug charge, he had been a high school Spanish teacher who wrote poetry on his days off and did his thesis on Pablo Neruda. Now no school would have him. One day he would write poetry again, he said, maybe when she went with him to San Juan to meet his family or at least to his sister’s apartment in Coney Island, where he had dinner each Sunday. He had put his sister’s address in Ruth’s purse that morning and repeated again that she should come; it would be his nephew’s birthday. He spoke frequently about San Juan, the blue of the ocean that met the fragile pink beaches, and how he longed to take her there. He kept a small aviary of finches in his small Queens apartment, but his sheets were always clean for her, the yellow light from the window spilling across them now, making her think they were already on the pink sand.
He moved his body over her and she could feel him getting hard again. It was mid- morning and she should leave, but she did not want to. She was fifteen years older, but he said he liked it that way. Their affair had been going for three months, and though she intended to end it, there was never a right time.
He put himself inside her, and they began to make love.
“What made you see me?”
“It was your blue suit,” he said softly into her neck. “It matched your eyes.”
And she had seen his hands, stroking the coffee machine gently, the way he stroked her now.
When they finished, he made her the Puerto Rican coffee she loved and they ate pan dulce, sitting at his small table by the window. He opened one of his many poetry books and read a poem by an obscure Bolivian poet, first in Spanish, then in English: “I had no one before you,” he recited. “You rose me up/Your face at the window/Tears as large as jewels falling from your eyes/My childhood is forgotten in your arms.”
The beauty of the poem stayed with Ruth all morning, the truth it evoked, of sadness healed by love. Before she left, he asked her again to come to his sister’s, and she could see it was important to him. Meeting relatives, being introduced as his girlfriend, though, was not something she was ready for. She said she would try.
By the time she pulled into the parking lot of her father’s retirement home, it was afternoon, the snow melted in the winter sun, and though the words were gone, the feeling of the poem made Ruth more aware of the moment – the crisp air and tall pines that surrounded the building. Sunny Pines was an hour outside of Manhattan, and though a long drive, she always appreciated the small forest of trees that greeted her, like Thomas Mann’s mountain resort in Switzerland, she thought. She sat for several moments at one of the picnic tables that edged the forest, a community area for the warmer months, and tilted her head back as far as she could to see the branches of snow-covered trees that reached into the sky. Trees preserved nutrients in their roots to see them through the winter, but what had she set aside in her life? Thanks to her job, she had been able to purchase a small apartment in Park Slope when prices were reasonable, and fix it up with some decent furniture. Nowadays, though, it just looked cramped and dusty to her, barely worth the cleaning lady who came twice a month. It was only her table of Roman glass from the third century that was important, and that she had managed to buy over the years at auction. The small pieces were slightly damaged or considered less important, so in her price range.
She displayed the lavender and pink objects near a window that looked out onto a neglected backyard. Since she rarely had visitors, only she saw them, which is how she liked it. She would kneel next to the pieces at eye level to better appreciate their ripples and iridescence in the light – small fragilities too delicate to share with the world.
“Father?”
At first Ruth did not realize his room was empty. As usual before she saw her father, she steeled herself for his arguments, or, as more often these days, his refusal to acknowledge her. She was about to say hello when she turned and saw his stripped bed, with no sign of occupancy.
A deep fear shot through her. She went into the hall to find a nurse to yell at for changing his room without notifying her. She refused to consider anything worse. Besides, when residents died or were hospitalized, Sunny Pines was obligated to contact next-of-kin. It is true his health had been failing, congestive heart failure with its risk of stroke now added to his list of ailments, and since she was his legal guardian, his doctors had encouraged her to sign a DNR for him, a do-not-resuscitate order, should he have a medical crisis. The thought of her father in some hideous state and hooked up to machines was not a vision she wanted to contemplate, and he had agreed. They discussed it a few months before, or rather she did, as was their custom. He lay in bed staring at a cloud out the window and mumbling in answer to her questions and comments. Frustrated, she had stood between him and the window so he was forced to look at her, and said she needed an affirmative answer, that ‘yes,’ he agreed to the DNR.
“Yes,” he said, in a surprisingly clear voice.
“I will be here and so will the nurses. You will not be alone.”
She squeezed his hand and he squeezed hers back. His blue-grey eyes seemed to open to her and it made her think of the young man he must have been in the concentration camp, not more than fifteen or sixteen. Toward the end of the war, he had organized an escape with five or six other young men, and they actually made it, hiding out in the dead of winter in Poland, eating God knows what, then after the war he made his way to Israel where he met her mother, before they came to the U.S. As a teenager, Ruth would stare for hours at an old passport photo of him from the time, a broad-shouldered young man with wavy dark hair and glistening eyes, wondering how that person had become her father. Her mother had died of breast cancer when Ruth was sixteen, and that was what changed him for good. She and her father stood at the gravesite, Ruth adrift and broken-hearted and her father barely able to hold her hand. Hunched in a long overcoat, he reminded her of a mourner from an old etching, brooding and entirely hidden.
She caught sight of her father at the end of the corridor being wheeled back to the room, his usual expression to see her, or rather non-expression, on his face.
“A little accident,” the nurse mouthed to her. “We had a nice bath, didn’t we?” she said into her father’s ear, whose hearing was also failing.
He made a face.
“Hello, father.”
He glanced at Ruth and turned away.
While an orderly put on clean sheets, she asked her regular questions of how his week had been and whether he wanted anything special from the city for her visit next week. Their conversation was as it usually was, Ruth doing most of the talking, her father falling asleep as soon as he was back in his bed.
“The orderly made a mistake and didn’t put on diapers after his bath,” the nurse explained to Ruth in the corridor. “It won’t happen again.”
Ruth did not go to dinner in Coney Island, did not even think of it, until she saw the dishwasher in the cafeteria on Monday morning. He shrugged and looked at her with a mixture of pleasure to see her, disappointment, and acceptance.
He was a fatalist where love was concerned, he told her once. You got that way in prison out of necessity. He did not believe in broken hearts. She liked that, his constancy, knowing he would be there for her, and at the same time asking little of her. She wondered how long it would last.
The first week of February, the museum was more crowded than usual, their gift shop holding its annual sale. In addition, visitors were there for an exhibit of Jackie Kennedy’s suits that a woman on 5th Avenue had assiduously collected and then left to the museum. Most of the suits were Chanel originals in pastel colors of angora wool and silk, and the show’s curator had dressed the mannequins in matching platform heels and earrings. Once inside, tapes of singers like Frank Sinatra and Perry Como played at very low volume, perfectly evoking the intelligence and chic of the First Lady when her husband was in office.
Ruth had seen the show when it first opened, but stepped into the gallery at the end of her lunch hour to enjoy it again. People called the period Camelot, and then the end of Camelot when the president was assassinated. It was well before she was born, but she had studied it in an undergraduate class, and met the collector on opening night. Greta Epstein was an immaculately dressed woman in her mid-eighties, her father’s age, but with the grace of someone much younger. The suit she wore was from the period, in a deep rose pink, with matching shoes and stockings.
Ruth asked questions about the garments, who her favorite designers were and what other objects she owned. She told Mrs. Epstein about her specialty and why the influence of one person could be so important. They could bring the past to life, like Mrs. Epstein had.
“Of course, it’s not a pleasant thought, but these suits make me think of Dealey Plaza,” Ruth said, “and the suit Jackie wore that day. Do you know where it is?”
“It’s in the National Archives,” Mrs. Epstein answered in a low voice. “It will never be put on public display, but they keep it for historical reasons.”
Now as Ruth wandered the exhibit alone, she thought again of the blood-stained suit, and how the First Lady had kept it on the entire day of the shooting, so the cameras would see and record it. The Zapruder film also played in her mind, of that hopeful motorcade, and then the fateful bullets and the First Lady leaning out the back of the car, the president’s shot-out brains on the seat next to her. Ruth had watched different versions of it for the class, in slow motion, fast motion, with different enhancements, frame by frame. For years frame 313 of his head exploding had been kept out of it, too gruesome, Zapruder said, to show the world, but by the time she was in at NYU, all the gunshots were in: the first, catching him in the throat, Jackie turning to tend to him, and then the fatal one, with the puff of smoke cutting his head in two. Seconds later, Jackie was out the rear of the car in the pink, blood-drenched suit, escaping, some said when they first saw the film, but that wasn’t true; she was reaching for the forensic evidence, the piece of his skull blasted away, grabbing for it as though she could put him back together.
February passed quietly at the museum, then March. By the middle of April, the rows of the museum’s renown yellow tulips had appeared in the museum garden, poking their heads through the soil. Ruth and the dishwasher continued their liaison – that was a better word for it than relationship, Ruth decided – though on some weekends she was gone on business trips or he at a chef certification class he was taking at a local college.
She had yet to visit his sister’s in Coney Island, and he had stopped asking her. Her father’s health remained stable. The regularity of her life was what so pleased Ruth, like the regularity of the seasons – moments of excitement limited to when she might read an interesting article in one of the journals about this or that collector, or an important idea she might have about an artist.
Nearing fifty-five, her time of great love affairs and revolutions was over, and she was glad of it. Life was to be looked back upon, like art history. As the philosopher Kierkegaard said, while life was lived forward, it could only be remembered backward, and she much preferred the backward glance.
She ran her hand over the internal memo listing the upcoming openings for the following six months: household silver of Czar Nicholas’ court at the time of the Revolution; Picasso’s ceramic works; second and third century glass techniques. That time was wracked by civil war and conflict, and yet it had produced arguably the most beautiful artifacts of the Roman era. Her pieces were not important enough to be shown, but she would contribute an article.
The call came in from Sunny Pines about a half hour before the end of the day. Her father had suffered a serious coronary incident. Because of his DNR, they were not sending him to the hospital.
When she arrived in the early evening, he was in a coma, his eyes open but unseeing, grayed over, his mouth open. His face was turned toward a window, and though she knew this was unlikely, he looked happy, as though he were encountering someone he had not seen in a long time. She hoped it was her mother.
The nurse said it could take anywhere from two to six hours for the death process, probably not longer. She advised Ruth to sit with him and hold his hand, talk or sing to him; that hearing was the last sense to go. Periodically, an orderly came in to give him drops of morphine in his mouth, in case he was in pain.
She picked up his hand and felt his whole body tremble, as though he were trying to rouse himself to consciousness to say something.
“I’m here, daddy,” she said, whispering in his ear. She stroked the silver hairs on his forehead and kissed him.
“I love you so much. I promise, I won’t leave you! I’m here.”
She cradled his head and kissed his forehead, humming to him, trying to think of a song he would like. As a young man, he had been a wonderful singer, a relative told her. In Germany where he grew up, he had tracked down and transcribed many old Yiddish folk songs before the Nazis came. Sometimes he would sing them at night in the camps, his voice rising through the silence, and people called him the Singer. “Will the Singer sing tonight?” they would whisper. He had to be very careful. He could be badly punished, even killed if a guard found out, for giving solace to a broken heart.
What songs did she know? What had he sung to her? A scrap of something in Yiddish came to her, from when she was five or six, laughing on his knee and staring at the sunlight out the window – a lilting melody in a minor key of a boy who dreams of being a bird and flies to heaven, and she hummed it to him now, picturing the young man in the passport photograph. It was when he had first met her mother, before his years in the concentration camp had carved themselves on his face.
A hospice nurse came in and began to stroke his feet.
“It’s started,” she said. “The bluing of the cardiovascular system – Do you see? – the blood rushes to the feet, then back up and down again. It will be about thirty minutes now.”
The nurse positioned herself at her father’s feet and lightly held them as Ruth cradled his head and continued to sing – louder now, unself-conscious, of the boy and the bird. She saw the boy-bird in her mind taking off across the sky, and just as she did, her father’s breathing became labored, then stopped. Just like that, it stopped.
She looked at the nurse, who nodded.
In a rush, her love for him came to her, the intensity of running into his arms as a five- year-old, the rock he was for her, and for a few minutes as she sobbed, she was that child again, fully a part of her father as he was of her, before their lives happened, before his great sadness that had driven them apart.
The rest of the day was consumed with waiting for the mortuary and paperwork, her father’s empty body in the bed but unimportant. The funeral would be in three days per Jewish tradition, though there were few people to invite – maybe some old colleagues from Columbia, a neighbor or two, a few old relatives in the Bronx.
When she finally got back to her apartment in Park Slope, it was night of the following day, her cat whom she’d forgotten crying at her legs and desperate for food.
She fed her quickly and got into bed. It had been two days now since she slept, and though she was exhausted, her eyes were wide open and she knew she was a long way from sleep. When she closed her eyes, she saw a jumble of images – Jackie Kennedy’s bloody suit, a screaming face, her mother, paintings by Titian – her ears buzzing. She got up, made herself some herb tea and took a sleeping pill. Only with difficulty did she drift off.
In the days and weeks that followed, Ruth set about composing a new life. Her father had always worn gold spectacles, and when the doctor prescribed reading glasses, she got herself a pair, stepping into her father’s academic persona with flair. She gave a keynote address at a museum conference on her specialty, speaking with authority and ease, and without the nerves she usually got at such events. Nearing the end of her adjunct contract at Columbia, the chair invited her to submit for the tenured position that would be opening up in the fall, implying she had a good chance. For an interview with the hiring committee, she bought herself two new suits, unsure which to wear since they both gave her flair mixed with professionalism and grace, and besides, she would need them for the professorship she was sure she would get.
She was only sad that she had to break it off with the dishwasher, who had just been promoted to assistant of Kitchen Services. They met in the cafeteria one afternoon when it was quiet and both had free time, and she told him she was too busy, which was only partly true. She had begun dating a physics professor she’d met on OK Cupid who was older and “more appropriate,” she told herself, though sometimes he bored her, and he did not please her as much in bed.
When she said it, he stroked his coffee cup, his sad eyes looking down and away, but said it was all right, he understood.
When he could, regardless of the season, the dishwasher went to Coney Island, in the summers to fish and gaze across the ocean as though looking for Puerto Rico, and in winters, to sit in the warm, steamy coffee shops on the boardwalk, reading his poetry books and occasionally, trying to pen one of his own. He had taken Ruth a few times to his favorite spots – life guard stations near the water or coffee shops on the boardwalk. At the time, Coney Island wasn’t to her taste – the smell of corn dogs on sticks, the merry-go-rounds. Too much tinsel and noise, but on a Sunday morning in early May, Ruth woke up and without too much thought, threw on a pair jeans and a sweatshirt, her suit underneath, ate something quickly, and headed out on the subway. She had recently broken it off with the OK Cupid physics professor, but that wasn’t the real reason. There was something about the light outside her Brooklyn window that made her want to smell the ocean.
She called and texted him several times, and when he didn’t answer, remembered what he had told her, that he liked to turn off his phone when he went to the beach, to feel more like a kid again, before cell phones, which was before he went to prison. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he’d be.
There had been a rainstorm at five or six in the morning that only lasted a few hours but seemed to wash everything clean. Not yet warm, Ruth nursed a cup of coffee on the boardwalk, then started out across the sand. Juan – she no longer wanted to call him the dishwasher, or even Johnny, what they called him in the kitchen, but his given name and his name as a poet, Juan Estrada, the person she could see him becoming one day.
The waves were green and blustery, foam and seaweed crashing on the shore. It made Ruth think of Christopher Columbus who had come from the Old World to Puerto Rico in just this weather, bringing his ships and soldiers to kill and be killed, so much violence, and all to spread Europe on a new continent. She spotted him standing near a life guard station.
As she walked across the sand to him, she felt different – less composed, emergent.
A couple of crazy kids in wet suits walked past her and down to the shore with their surfboards. When she was about twenty feet away, he saw her and waited, an open look on his face. As she drew closer, he came into focus, and for the first time with him, she felt shy.
“I thought you might be here,” she said.
“I am.”
He looked down at her and smiled. Ruth was a small woman, and in her sweatshirt and jeans, she looked almost like a child.
“I’ve been thinking about what I said.” She paused. “I was wrong. I don’t want to end it.” He stroked her cheek lightly. “I’m glad.”
“Here, I brought you something.”
She dug in her jeans and took out a small fragment of pink glass, not more than half an inch long. On the top end was a little hole and she had threaded a chain through it, so it was a kind of jewelry.
“It’s Roman,” she said. “From the third century.”
He held it up to the light. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”
He put the chain around his neck, kissing her lightly on the cheek, and the scent of him brought back their Sunday mornings in his Queens apartment and all the ways she had missed him.
Ruth put her arm through his and they watched the surfers for a while, paddling out now, Ruth hoped not too far, but kids liked to do that, test themselves against nature. She told him she wanted to go to his sister’s for lunch and they were going to leave, but they didn’t. Instead they began looking for shells, showing each other their finds, becoming increasingly excited like children. For something to do with the shells, they constructed a small mountain of sand and embedded it with the shells, enlarged the mountain, embedded more. The surfers came back in, their wet suits dripping with seawater and perspiration, and when they saw the shell mountain, they pitched in, their wet bodies adding the scent of the ocean. As the boys worked, they joked quietly to themselves; she saw them as boys now, not more than fifteen or sixteen, their cheeks covered in fine down, to suggest the men they would soon be.
She held up one of the larger shells to the sun. It brought to mind the face of the ocean and the unknown, and how many sailors had gone down in that sea. Stories came to her, great books of those crossings that she had read, and then other stories, of wars on the island with indigenous people, along with the wars of the second and third centuries in Rome when the Empire had almost fallen and when her glass was made. The primary component of Roman glass was common beach sand, no different from what she touched now.
It was getting warm on the beach. She pulled off her sweatshirt to her bathing suit top, rubbed on some sun screen, and went back to gathering shells.
Judith Dancoff’s fiction and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Other Voices, Southern Humanities Review, Tiferet Journal, Creative Nonfiction, Ekphrastic Review, and others. She has been awarded residencies from Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Djerassi, and best story of the year from Tiferet and Southern Humanities Review. She holds an MFA in writing from Warren Wilson, and an MFA in filmmaking from UCLA.