May We Be Forgiven

Lillian’s on Long Island. I have the guy park a couple of houses away, hoping to avoid having to discuss my circumstances with Lillian.

    W alking slowly up her driveway, I have flashbacks to summer birthday parties, Fourth of July sparklers, hot dogs. The houses on her street used to be uniform, split-level brick, every house the same, distinguished only by what year Pontiac or Buick was parked in the driveway. The houses now are bastardized versions of their former selves. Some have had additions, renovations, making them look like they grew room-sized tumors; others were leveled to make room for postmodernist steroid monsters. Double-height living rooms and grand entry parlors have replaced the beloved bay windows that gave every home of the 1950s and ’60s a unique fishbowl effect. I unpack the grocer-ies at Lillian’s kitchen table, wondering, could the ancient, almost crispy oil-cloth table covering be the same one she’s had for thirty years? Lillian puts things away like a scurrying mouse. She’s tiny, maybe four feet tall, and shrinking fast.
    “What happened to you?” she asks. “You’re all banged up.”
    “Car accident,” I say. I can’t bring myself to tell her about the stroke; it makes me feel old. “Beautiful flowers,” I say, nodding towards the vase on the table.
    “I’ve had them for years,” she says. “They’re plastic; I wash them once a week with Ivory. This you should keep.” She hands me back a container of kasha. “I won’t eat it. This too,” she says. “Can’t have poppy seeds, no seeds, nuts, or small kernels—that means no popcorn at the movies, no pistachios. I’ve got trouble with my gut.”
    The way she says it, I’m tempted to make some crack about “hardly makes life worth living,” but, given my recent experiences with how precarious life is, it’s starting to seem like something I shouldn’t joke about.
    “Your brother should be ashamed,” she says.
    “Yes,” I say.
    “Is he?”
    “No. I don’t think so.”
    We sit at her dining-room table. She makes me a cup of tea, Lipton, strong and incredibly good. “Do you take sugar or do you want Splender?”
    “Sugar is fine,” I say. It’s sugar that’s been in the bowl so long it’s lumpy, sugar that many generations of wet spoons have touched, celebratory sugar, infected sugar—old sugar. Lillian comes out of the kitchen carrying an artifact, the blue metal tin marked Danish Butter Cookies that if I didn’t know better I would swear had been in the family for generations—when the Jews left Egypt, they took with them the tins of Danish Butter Cookies. And tins, which as best I could tell never included Danish Butter Cookies, traveled from house to house, but always, always, found their way back to Lillian. In every family or tribe there is a keeper of the tin, whose job it is to intone annoyingly, “Don’t forget my tin,” or “How could you forget my tin? No more for you. I don’t bake without the tin. What’s the point, the cookies will rot.”
    Aunt Lillian’s long, thin gnarled fingers twist and turn the thin metal top; the contents knock around inside—trapped. Lillian’s hands are leopard-spotted with age; her fine-gauge hair, dyed a deep unnatural red, is fixed highon her head like rusted steel wool.
    She finally gets the tin open; there are only about ten cookies left. “I don’t bake as much as I used to,” she says.
    I take one, bite into it: hard as a rock, like Jewish biscotti. “Good,” I say, with my mouth full.
    “The last time I saw you was at your father’s funeral,” she says.
    I dip the cookie into my tea; the second bite is better. I finish the cookie, and when I move to take another, Lillian yanks the tin away from me and puts the top back on. “I have to ration them,” she says. “I don’t bake often; in fact, this may be the last batch ever.”
    “Tell me about my father,” I ask, and it’s as though, after exhaling the word “father,” on the next breath I inhale the look and smell of him, five suits hanging in the closet after he died, his hair tonic some kind of oily, spicy-scented stuff that he splashed on his hands, ran through his hair, and combed back. It left stains my mother called “fat” on the pillowcases, the sofa, the living-room chairs, anywhere he rested his head.
    “Middle management,” Aunt Lillian blurts, “that’s all he ever was. There was always someone above him who he hated, and someone below that he took it