We spent Tuesday morning cleaning the bathroom. On our hands and knees, my mother and I scrub the gray tiles one-by-one, wipe fingerprints off the mirror, polish the corners of the sink. She takes out the trash, and I screw the top back onto the toothpaste and fold the towels. We don’t speak, we just use our hands to wipe down the door and scrub the tub.
From my bedroom I can almost hear everything. Some days I wake up to the clatter of dishes, the crack of an egg, a pan sizzling. The dryer bangs; steam pours out from under the bathroom door from a hot shower running. We’re a symphony, the five of us, opening and closing drawers, typing, picking up the phone, washing our hands.
Right outside the sliding door there’s a rusty bell cemented into the brick, a dinner bell left behind from some sort of past life, someone else’s life in a neighborhood where children ran through backyards, barefoot, picking flowers, tossing baseballs, spotting beehives, climbing fences, waiting to be summoned home.
One afternoon I slip into the basement, brave the spider webs, switch on the lights and venture through a junkyard of old suitcases and garbage bags of clothes for Goodwill, abandoned pieces of furniture, an old brown couch with mismatched pillows, one-eyed teddy bears, and baby clothes. I rifle through waterlogged boxes of dusty photo albums, old diaries, book reports, an old bowl for the dog, hand-painted at one of those birthday-party pottery places. An unfamiliar framed picture of a brown-eyed older woman, and a porcelain-skin teenager, a dead-ringer for my aunt. I will trace my fingers around the mauve velvet frame and bring it upstairs, back to life, to my mom who will tell me that the older woman is her grandmother, and the one with porcelain skin is mine.
Let’s take a trip to that wall of exposed brick, to the box under the sink filled with old pairs of glasses, to a page of my favorite book and a cabinet of mismatched mugs, and a record player, and ceramic set of Friday night candlesticks, and a bible, and a lost chapstick wedged between the couch cushions, and to my favorite kitchen drawer, the one with muffin tins and a little bag of decorative cocktail umbrellas no one has ever used, the one with the homemade place mats.
A list of places to go tomorrow: the backyard, to pick up branches the wind keeps knocking down, to notice that pink flowers bloomed on the tree next to the dinner bell, to the hallway where my sister will gently water her plants, to the kitchen where my dad eats cereal out of a bowl I made myself out of clay, to my grandparents’ record collection that lives under the TV, to the top shelf of my closet where I keep a ninth place ribbon from a 2011 track meet, handwritten notes from a tall blonde named Ben, a music box that plays Hava Nagila, a strip of photo booth images with the green-eyed boy, with the top square, the one where we were kissing, cut off. the shelf lined with cookbooks, the patch of sunlight in the yard, a bowl of flour in the kitchen, a pile of clean laundry, a hot shower, a dusty piano and a trip around the house with a broom.
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On the morning of Passover:
My mom crawls into my bed one morning in the way I used to climb into hers when I was a little kid. Today we drive to my aunt’s house and wave from the window. tomorrow she’ll go work at the hospital.
Tomorrow my middle school basketball coach will die and I’ll watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Over FaceTime, we teach my grandfather how to use FaceTime. One morning we go into the basement and open a cardboard box full of old dolls. The only thing that can put me to sleep is Jewish melodies, prayers in the tunes from my childhood, on Spotify.
News briefings: Michigan, bronze medal for devastation. I pray for New York City. I use the crayons to write “thank you essential workers” on a piece of paper and tape it to the front door. If I wanted to help I should have been a nurse, not a writer.
A part of the Passover Seder is to wash your hands, twice.
“Before we get to work, especially on such a sensitive and cosmic task as the ritualistic handling of food to manipulate spiritual truths, our hands should be clean. Wash them clean of the impurities of a life in a materialistic world.”
Right hand, repeat, repeat again. Left hand, repeat, repeat again. Twenty seconds, scrub your nails and hum “dayenu” seventeen times, or “happy birthday” twice.
Dayenu- it would have been sufficient. It would have been enough.
Why is this night different than all other nights?
Last year in Venice; a tour of the Jewish ghetto. Italian yeshiva boys handed us a box of matzah and we ate pasta for dinner anyway.
Next year in Jerusalem.
Next year in person.
Emily Stillman || Bloomfield Hills, MI || May 2020