DIRTY GENES
Esther Minskoff
Copyright 2011 Esther Minskoff
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[email protected] CHAPTER 1
Thank God there was a Starbucks across the street from the funeral home. At 7:00 that morning, Abra had taken the subway from her midtown Manhattan hotel to Queens so she could find an unobtrusive spot to observe the funeral. She had been shaking since she got on the subway. The trembling was especially noticeable around her neck. She thought she looked like someone with Parkinson’s or Katherine Hepburn, in her old age when she shook like a leaf in a hurricane. But when she looked at her reflection in the subway window, she saw that she wasn’t shaking on the outside, only on the inside. As she gazed at her reflection in the glass, she began to ease. The rhythmic rocking of the subway soothed her.
It didn’t really matter if someone saw her sitting in Starbucks looking at the funeral home. No one would recognize her. She was not the same Abra who was last in Queens 16 years ago. She didn’t even have the same last name. Then she was Abra Ginzberg, now she was Abra Berg. She had chopped off the first half of her name the same way she had chopped off the first half of her life.
She got off at the Queens Boulevard subway stop and as she walked up the steps to the street, she felt as if she were rising from a grave. She pictured herself like a figure in a horror movie - a transparent ghost in a white shroud wafting up from a coffin with arms outstretched and hair flying. She was coming back from her afterlife to her first life.
Before she saw the street, she felt it. With each step, her ears were bombarded by the sounds of traffic – buses moaning and groaning, cars beeping and screeching, people rushing up and down the steps speaking English with thick New York accents or babbling in incomprehensible tongues. The smells engulfed her. They permeated her skin and were absorbed by her cells. She felt that she would forever reek of exhaust fuels and frying oils expelled into the street air from the restaurants. By the time she reached the top step she was immersed in 1990, the last time she had walked these streets.
She headed in the direction of Goldstein & Simms Funeral Home. What a name for a funeral home, Jewish and WASP. That way almost everybody was a potential customer, whatever their religion. All they needed to do was add names like Hussain and Chang and they would cover everyone. As she walked, she recognized every inch of the streets. She had spent so much of her teen years walking these streets to do the family shopping. Not shopping for clothes, music, or jewelry, like other teenagers. No, shopping for life’s necessities.
The funeral home was three blocks from the house where she lived the first 18 years of her life. She stayed glued to Queens Boulevard not daring to venture anywhere near 17th Street. She didn’t want to get a passing glimpse of the house or the street even though her family no longer lived there.
She searched the stores along the way to find those that had withstood time. There were still the kosher butcher, candy store, grocery, and cleaners. They looked so small and dingy. They probably had always been small and dingy when she shopped in them, but the 16 years had shrunk them further and made them seedier and grayer. The grocery store still had fruit displayed out front. In 1990, she considered it old-fashioned and unsanitary, but now she thought it looked almost quaint. Like what you would see on the streets of some of Europe’s cities. Open air fruit markets in London or Paris were charming. Open air fruit markets in Queens with circling flies and dirty, germ-ladened hands pawing the merchandise were disgusting. What bacteria and deadly viruses were transferred from those hands to those tomatoes? Years ago, when she had to buy the produce that was only in outside bins, she dug to the bottom to find the fruit that had been least contaminated. After she got home, she washed this produce as if she were an obsessive compulsive washing her hands.
But now there were new stores. There was Barnes and Noble, Old Navy, and, of course, the ever-present Starbucks. There were all types of ethnic restaurants and even a halal market to counterbalance the kosher butcher. She shifted her attention from the stores to the hordes of people on the street. She recalled that the streets had always been jammed no matter the time. In New York, people looked like automatons, especially early in the morning. The ones rushing to the subway looked like they had been wound up tight, like toy tops that start turning in perfect circles and gradually wobble until they fall. So many were talking on their cells, and still others were holding the cells to their ears for security or their downloading of brain cancer waves. Who were they talking to so early in the morning? If you didn’t see the phones, you would think that they were the schizophrenics wandering the streets talking to their demons. They really sounded crazy because they spoke in loud voices as if they were yelling orders to underlings. Why did people have to scream when they were on cells? They didn’t do that with land line phones. There were only a few facial expressions visible on these early morning rushers – preoccupation, worry, anger, but never smiles or eagerness.
There were women shopping at the old stores at this early hour. The old stores weren’t like the new ones that opened at 10. The old ones opened early and stayed open late to accommodate people who worked long hours and had long commutes and, of course, to make more money. She noticed that some of the stores had different owners. In the candy store, there were now Asians in place of the old Jewish couple who had kept the store open from 6 AM till midnight. When had those people slept? Where had they slept? They never made conversation when Abra bought cigarettes for her mother or candy for Rachel and Noah. They never looked in her eyes even though she had been in the store countless times. They exuded anger and hate, not for Abra, but for life, their lives.
Abra remembered her morning shopping trips at 7 before she left for school. She had to make sure that there was enough food for her parents while she was at school. She knew the location of everything in the grocery store. She could find the soup shelves with her eyes closed. She bought gallons of soup, especially Campbell’s chicken noodle. Everyone loved that along with thick slabs of challah slathered with butter. Suddenly she realized that the Jewish bakery was gone. Everyday she bought challah and bagels and bialeys. They never got stale because they were eaten three meals a day. Where had the bakery been? She thought maybe that was where the Thai restaurant was. What a trade – pad thai for challah.
She also remembered the night visits to the pharmacy. She must have been 12 when she started going to the pharmacy to get medicine for whatever was wrong with the kids or her parents. Wasn’t she afraid to walk the streets at night even though they were well-lit and filled with people? She couldn’t remember what she thought. She only remembered her actions. She did what had to be done and she didn’t think about it. Now she was reflective about every action she took. Now she was alone – she wasn’t responsible for anyone but herself. Then she had the weight of the Ginzberg world on her shoulders, and what a heavy world that was. But she never consciously thought about it. From an early age she knew she was responsible for the whole family, but she always knew she wouldn’t be chained to them for her whole life. She knew she would make her great escape.
She walked slowly and examined the women who rushed by her. Some were dressed for work and pushing kids in strollers or holding their hands, probably taking them to day care. These women looked so harried, so frantic, like the day had opened with hundreds of hours of things for them to do in the next confining 24 hours. She wondered if she had looked like that when she went off for her morning shopping. Rachel and Noah didn’t go to
day care. When they weren’t in school, Abra was their baby sitter. Even if day care had been available, no one would have taken such damaged kids. She was even her mother and father’s baby sitter. It was a shame there had been no parent day care where she could leave them. Oh, how she needed respite from her never-ending responsibilities.
The neighborhood had changed over the last 16 years, but it also hadn’t changed. There were still lots of Jews, but they were different now. There were lots of old Jews. The younger ones had moved to the suburbs or the exurbs for a different geography, one with distance between people. In Queens, people were squashed together in their apartments, on the streets, and in the stores. There was no greenery. Everything was gray and concrete. The younger Jews had opted for space, greenery, and the proverbial white picket fence. Now, there were also foreign Jews, especially Russians, on the first stop before they, too, moved on in search of space and greenery. To add spice to the neighborhood, there were a number of non-Jews from all parts of the Arab world, Asia, and Latin America. This old Jewish neighborhood of New York was dissolving.
Abra knew diversity first hand. She worked for the Fairfax County schools in Virginia, one of the most diverse school systems in the country. There were kids from hundreds of countries speaking a babel of languages. She had to test and counsel kids who spoke Urdu, Kurdish, Tagalog, and languages no one had heard before the kids arrived on the school’s doorstep. But Fairfax County diversity wasn’t the same as Queens diversity. Fairfax had started with a small white WASP population, while Queens had started with a large population of Jews, some American born and others from European countries. There had never been a “real American WASP” in Abra’s Queens.
Although she worked in a multicultural melting pot, Abra lived in an enclave of mostly affluent American-born whites. Her personal life was like a small island of white bread floating in a huge ocean of humus. Her friends were primarily white, with a sprinkling of Asians, all American born, all well-educated, and all middle class.
She was surprised that she remembered the stores so vividly. She even recalled some of the big cracks in the sidewalk. She had always walked with her head down determined to carry out her missions and careful not to trip on the jagged pieces of concrete sticking up. She made thousands of trips to the grocery, pharmacy, and different government offices. She was the lifeline to the outside world for the people who lived in apartment 2D at 4313 17th Street. She was the official representative who spoke to the world on behalf of the Ginzberg family. She made telephone calls and filled out forms. She was even the one who did the banking. From an early age, she knew how to deposit the government disability checks that supported them. She started writing checks for rent, electricity, and telephone when she was 10. Using her best penmanship she completed each section and then had her father sign on the signature line. He wrote like a child with large, shaky letters bunched together. Jacob A. Ginzberg. A for Aaron. Everyone in the family had biblical names, although no one read the Bible or went to synagogue.
Today Abra worked with kids who acted on behalf of their parents dealing with the demands of living and working in a foreign culture. These kids were like UN translators as they ably spoke English to doctors, lawyers, policemen, landlords, and translated back into their parents’ tongue. But it was different from what she had done. The parents of these kids usually made the decisions, and the kids were only translators. Abra had to make decisions for people who didn’t have the mental capacity to do so. Her parents had grown up in the culture, but hadn’t absorbed it. They were children in adults’ bodies.
She entered Starbucks and ordered her usual grande skinny latte. As she looked around, she again confirmed that Starbucks was the equalizer for all cultural groups. There were Hispanic construction workers, Asians in business suits, and blacks with government ID tags around their necks. All were buying exotic coffees that were alien to their cultures, in fact they were alien to everyone’s culture. These were coffees that were created to unite all Americans, and now all coffee consumers of the world. People of all nations loved caramel macchiato, although no one knew what it was.
She picked up a much-read New York Post and settled on a stool at a window counter facing the funeral home. She looked at the paper and thought about yesterday. Was it only yesterday that she had seen the newspaper article about Rachel’s drowning? A picture on the front page of a New York tabloid was how Abra learned that her sister died. That picture pulled her back 16 years to a place she never wanted to revisit. She was at National Airport on her way to Charleston for a professional development workshop on computerized assessment of ADHD and OCD. As she reached for a USA Today, her eyes were drawn to the picture and headline of the adjoining New York Post. The headline “Retarded woman drowns in park lake,” was plastered over a picture of Rachel. How did she know it was her sister? She hadn’t seen her in 16 years. She knew. She just knew. She knew even before she read the article.
She bought the paper and found an empty gate. She sat facing the field so no one could see her face or her rapt interest in what she was reading. Her eyes skimmed the article in a second and then went back and devoured it word by word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. Her face was so close to the paper that her nose almost touched Rachel’s picture.
On the front page was Rachel’s school picture when she was about 16. Inside, there were pictures of the lake and the front of the group home where Rachel lived. The text was short. Rachel Ginzberg, a 32 year old woman with moderate mental retardation, drowned in the lake at Hillside Park yesterday. Ginzberg was a resident of the Oak Valley Home for Adults, a group home for adults with disabilities. She was on an outing with five other residents of the home and three counselors. She had become separated from the group while taking a walk. When the counselors learned that she was missing, they called 911 and searched for her. An hour later, police found her in the lake. A jogger, who refused to give his name, recalled seeing her running through the park crying hysterically. He thought she was screaming “A-B” over and over. The counselors refused to be interviewed. An investigation into the incident is pending.
A-B. Abra tried to teach Rachel to read some of the letters of the alphabet, but she could only remember A-B. Sometimes she called Abra A-B, mostly when she wanted Abra to read to her. She loved when Abra read books to her, especially books about baby animals. They would both make the sounds of a kitten, a puppy, and a duckling. Abra said meow. Rachel said something like meow. Abra said arf. Rachel said something like arf. Abra said quack. Rachel said something like quack. Those books always calmed Rachel when she was agitated and nothing else worked. The sight of Abra taking out her books, especially the baby animal books immediately sedated Rachel. She might have been a great reader had she been born with100 more IQ points.
Why had she called out for Abra in her final moments? Did she still remember Abra after 16 years? Did she think that Abra would somehow materialize from behind the trees and carry her off to safety? Why had she gone into the lake? She didn’t even like to take a bath so why had she gone into a huge bathtub? What went through that poor lost child’s head those last minutes of her life? How did she get into the deep water in the lake? When Abra thought of Rachel’s hysteria and frantic searching, she was weakened with feelings of pity.
She continued reading. Ginzberg is survived by her parents, Jacob and Miriam Ginzberg of 3457 Seaview Rd in Brooklyn and a brother, Noah, 31, of the Wakefield Home for Adults in Queens. The funeral will be held at the Goldstein and Simms Funeral Home in Queens on Thursday. No mention of Abra. Her parents didn’t even think of adding her name. She was no longer part of the Ginzberg family. She shouldn’t have been surprised. She deserted them 16 years ago, and they accepted it. They had no choice. What did they think of Abra after all these years? Did they put her out of their minds just as Abra had put them out of her mind?
After reading the article several times, she knew that she had to go to New York. She had to have some closure
on what happened. She had placed her family in an isolation chamber in her brain. Weeks would go by without Abra ever thinking of them. But now, she had to know what had happened to her family over the past 16 years. Her mind went into action mode as she mentally listed all the things she had to do in the next few minutes. This is what she did best – organize, systematize, prioritize. First, she called Beth, her college roommate, who was also attending the Charleston meeting. She wasn’t answering her cell so she was probably with a client. She left a message saying that something had come up and that she would be arriving on Thursday, instead of Wednesday. She told her that they would still have time to stay up late and talk as they downed glass after glass of pinot grigio. Beth was Abra’s closest friend even though they only saw each other at professional meetings and some holidays. Their friendship dated back to the first day of college when they had been randomly paired as roommates. Beth, too, had chosen a career as a psychologist. She was married and had a 5 year old son. Even though she and Abra loved each other dearly, Beth didn’t have much time for Abra. Her existence centered around her work and family. Abra’s existence centered around her work and keeping vigil over her buried memories.
Abra went to the US Air gate and changed her ticket for a Thursday afternoon flight from New York to Charleston. The changes would cost a fortune, but she couldn’t think about money right now. Then she went to the US Air shuttle gate and bought a ticket for the next plane to La Guardia. She called the Marriott in midtown Manhattan where she had occasionally stayed when she attended professional meetings in the past and made a reservation for that night at a rate that would have made Shylock shout “usury.” Then she called the Charleston Marriott to cancel her Wednesday night stay.
On the shuttle, she closed her mind to all the memories that were trying to escape from the isolation chamber where they had been quarantined. She took out her book of New York Times crossword puzzles and solved page after page at a faster than usual clip. She shut out her surroundings and focused on the pages of black and white squares. She was trying to fight off the images of the past that were trying to invade her consciousness. She knew that the images always fluttered around her subconscious, but she worked hard at keeping them on the outskirts of immediate awareness. She smiled faintly when she had to come up with a 9 letter word for AWOL: d-e-s-e-r-t-i-o-n.
When she arrived in New York, she took the shuttle to midtown and then a cab to her hotel. She loved staying at the midtown Marriott because of its location. Being in the middle of the bustle of the city made it possible for her walk out of the hotel and stand in the center of Times Square below the shimmering images projected on the bordering buildings. The whole world was pictured on those signs – the Lion King, Smirnov vodka, and Calvin Klein undies. She especially loved nights in Times Square – there was no darkness, just bright, pulsating lights. On this trip, she wouldn’t get a chance to walk down to the village and sit in Washington Square. Nor would she be able to walk to Central Park and see the zoo as an adult, something she had never done as a child. She was going to Queens. That wasn’t New York City; that was hell. Although she had been to the city many times over the last 16 years, she had never considered crossing the river to Queens. To her, Queens was as far from Manhattan as Australia.
When she got to her room, she checked her laptop for the address and phone number of the funeral home. She called for specifics about the funeral. It was at 10 o’clock on Thursday. Then she checked the conference program. She would only miss the opening dinner and keynote speech. She could still get the 2 days of training that she needed for certification to use the tests. She had planned to get to the conference a day early so that she could visit the school where she had interned eight years earlier. She was glad that she was flying home on Sunday. At least, that would give her time to see her friends, the Nelsons, and walk through the charming streets of Charleston. She would transport herself to other times... to the days of the Civil War and the Revolution. She would hear Porgy and Bess singing or the guns of Fort Sumter introducing the Civil War. This was a perfect city for Abra to forget the here-and-now and transport herself to the past, to romanticized times that were made real for her in books and movies. She envisioned herself in a hoop skirt holding a parasol as she strolled the cobblestone streets. Sometimes her dress and parasol were a vivid blue, sometimes a bright yellow. Her blond hair was in ringlets covered by a bonnet. Her full face covered with freckles and her lips sparkling with a light coating of pink lipstick. Smiling coyly up at Rhett Butler and fluttering her pale blue eyes. Yeah – sure. Jewish Abra Berg walking in a hoop skirt in Charleston in 1860.
She certainly wasn’t wearing a hoop skirt now. She was outfitted in a professional uniform of a beige linen pant suit with a white silk blouse and three inch spiked taupe sandals. Her jewelry was limited to a gold chain around her neck and pearl studs in her ears. No blond ringlets for her. Her jet black straight hair looked like it had been ironed. Since the age of 18, she had worn the same hair style, cut shoulder length straight across. She wore the Veronica Lake look with the hair falling over her left eye, except when she was at work and used a barrette to keep her hair behind her ear. Her black eyes appeared even blacker because the whites of her eyes looked bleached with no tinges of gray or pink. To accentuate her large black eyes and long lashes, she used a black liner on her upper and lower lids and thick mascara. The whites of her large eyes and the bright red lipstick she wore gave her a vivid Technicolor look. She never had freckles, not with her dark complexion. When she tanned, she looked like the many immigrants of color from all points of the globe. She didn’t have a round face. She had the Ginzberg long horse face. She, Rachel, and Noah all had long horse faces, like Jacob. They looked like they were related to English royalty with their world-renown horse faces. The Ginzbergs and their cousin, Prince Charles.
And she certainly wouldn’t be looking up at Rhett Butler because with her 3 inch heels, she was 5’10”. She probably would be taller than Clark Gable, the true Rhett Butler. He would have to coyly look up to her or she would have to painfully bend her knees to shorten herself.
She emptied her latte and looked through today’s Post for more information on the drowning. The paper was filled with pictures of yesterday’s gangland killing of a Mafia boss in Little Italy. The drowning was old news, literally and figuratively. There was not much to read in the paper so she found a New York Times. For a few minutes, she was absorbed by articles on what was happening in the world…famines in Africa, coups in Asia, melting ice bergs in Antarctica. Why do they call it news, when there was nothing new about this information? It was the same old stuff. They should call it the olds, not the news.
At about 9:45 a black stretch limo pulled up at the entrance of the funeral home. The funeral home worker ants rushed out to open the limo door. They looked like bugs in their black suits and white shirts and their fluttery, obsequious movements. She had always wondered what kind of personality enjoyed working in the funeral home business. How did they cope with the endless grief of everyone they encountered? Were these people like other professionals – did they make jokes about their clientele? And who was their clientele – the dead or the survivors?
She caught fleeting visions of her family as they exited the limo. She tried to take mental photographs of them, but everything was happening too fast. She couldn’t stop them in time. First out was her father. He was as huge as ever, but now his hair was all gray. He was stooped over and looked like a puppet whose master had forgotten to pull up the strings making the puppet flop around. He didn’t look like he was 6’3”. Next was her mother, covered with a black veil making her invisible. Abra couldn’t tell if she had changed. A worker ant brought a wheel chair for her and briskly pushed her through the front door. Then came her brother, Noah. He had put on weight. She remembered him as a skinny, pimply-faced kid. She couldn’t see his face clearly so she didn’t know if he was still pimply. An older woman got out after Noah. She took his arm and
assertively guided him in. She must be an aide or a nurse who was there to help Noah cope with the incomprehensible. His sister, Rachel, had died. His sister, Abra, had died 16 years before and now he had no siblings. Although Abra had only fleeting impressions of Jacob, Miriam, and Noah, she knew who they were. She had spent 365 days a year for 18 years knowing them.
They survived these last 16 years without her. Somehow they had been able to find someone to shop and cook and pay the bills. They didn’t die without her. Rachel died, but not because Abra left. She died because she was a frightened 32-year old with the intelligence of a four year old. The four year old got lost and panicked. The four year old fell into the lake and drowned because she couldn’t swim. The four year old didn’t die because Abra wasn’t there even though she called her name. Abra had to keep repeating that to herself to make sure there were no doubts creeping into her mind. She had to make sure that she didn’t feel any tinges of guilt about Rachel’s death. Even if she hadn’t left the family, she wouldn’t have been able to save Rachel. She kept repeating that to herself like a Zen mantra. “I couldn’t have saved Rachel. I couldn’t have saved Rachel. I couldn’t have saved Rachel.”
She became aware that she wasn’t the only one who had come early to watch the funeral. The paparazzi were there. She hadn’t noticed them at first because she was totally focused on the family. There were so many of them. They snapped one picture after another as each family member was rushed from the limo to the funeral home. Fortunately, they were kept back by barriers. Otherwise, they would have been in the family’s faces. The Ginzberg family was getting their 15 minutes of fame. Tomorrow, she would see these pictures on the front pages of all the New York papers no matter how many Mafia killings there were. New Yorkers, like everyone else, loved to see grief. There were even a few TV reporters standing in front of a barricade with the funeral home in the background. Fortunately, they couldn’t get close and thrust microphones in the grieving family’s faces and ask “How do you feel?” That had to be the stupidest question in the world. “How do you think we feel after losing a daughter?” But this was just another way our society basks in the grief of others. Maybe it was a superstitious way of saying “If this terrible thing happened to this person, it won’t happen to me.”
Abra watched as the mourners entered the funeral home. Who were all these people? She was sure that most were here because of the notoriety of the case. There were few surviving relatives. Abra’s paternal grandparents were dead. She didn’t know about her maternal grandparents. There were many professionals, probably from the social services agencies and group home that governed Rachel’s life. There were probably lawyers too, eager to sue the group home and the city for negligence. Maybe, at last, the Ginzberg family would get rich. They would get rich by the newest, most stylish method – wealth by lawsuit.
Abra couldn’t keep sitting in Starbucks. Even though no one was watching her, she felt restless. She left and walked to a Barnes and Noble down the street. She leafed through the best sellers without seeing any words. She went to the psychology section to see what the charlatans were telling the masses about having “good psyches” and how to raise “Garrison Keillor children who were all above average.” She didn’t bother to look through any of the books. She knew the glib advice that poured from TV talk shows and self help books. She frequently had to cope with parents who would challenge her by saying “But Dr. Phil says…”
She walked back to Starbucks and waited for the family to emerge. Slightly before 11, a hearse came from around the back of the funeral home. The family limo lined up behind it. The funeral home ants whisked each family member into the limo as quickly as they had been whisked in an hour earlier. The paparazzi snapped their pictures again. The TV reporters gave their on-the-spot coverage of nothing. The mourners streamed out and got into cars in the adjoining parking lot. Abra didn’t wait for the procession to leave. There was nothing more for her to see. What she witnessed confirmed that her family had survived without her. She walked to the subway station and took a train back to Manhattan. She went to her hotel to collect her suitcase and took a cab to LaGuardia to catch her flight to Charleston. She vowed to never again see any of her family. She vowed to never again see Queens. This was a momentary drop-in that she would never repeat. She couldn’t. The pain in her soul was searing, threatening to break through the steel armor she had painstakingly constructed over the last 16 years.