TREYF by Elissa Altman

silence, rolling around the ice cream scoop of chopped liver and onions, the dollop of Matjes herring, the small ball of sweetened Galician balik fish—boiled chicken dumplings made by poor, landlocked European Jews with no access to or money for actual fish—on her plate silently. My grandmother pours everyone tea; my parents drink it down, zip me into my coat, and we leave.
    But today, my mother has decided to stay in the car.
    I turn to look back at her when my father and I step into the elevator, just long enough to see her reach over to the ignition; her eyes are closed and her head is pitched back, and I can see her lips moving on the soundproof stage that is our Buick:
Nothing cures like time and love.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    W e sit in the darkened living room before lunch, and my grandparents mumble to my father in Yiddish. He responds in Yiddish while I sit on the couch, kicking my feet beneath the poster-mounted print of Bruegel’s
The Harvesters
, which bends and pops out of its rococo frame, concave with the humidity of half a century of damp Coney Island summers.
    â€œPerform for Grandma and Grandpa,” my father commands. I unzip my vinyl guitar case and tune it up while I pick out familiar words from their conversation:
kinder
, and
a broch
, and
a nishtikeit
, and
tsuris
, and
chaleria
.
The baby. A curse. A nobody. Trouble. Evil woman.
    I pluck a full six-string E chord and my father and grandparents look up.
    â€œPlay us a song, sveetheart,” Grandpa says and I open my music book to my new favorite Christmas carol—the one with the fancy minor chords that have taken me hours to master—and I begin to strum.
    â€œYou have to sing it,” my father says, “or we won’t know what you’re playing.”
    I blush. I say no.
    My mother is the singer. I can’t sing. I don’t sing. I won’t sing. They’ll compare me to her; they’ll laugh.
    â€œ
Sing it
, dammit,” my father shouts and so I begin, playing the introduction before I sing with a shaking voice.
    God rest ye merry, gentlemen,
    Let nothing you dismay;
    Remember Christ our Savior
    Was born upon this day . . .
    My grandmother stands, takes the guitar from me, rests it on a chair, and steers me to the kitchen table, which is set for five. Her white-and-gold-flecked house slippers squeak on the waxed linoleum floor as she putters around me in an apron embroidered with apples; she picks up one of the place settings and dumps it—napkin, silverware, and all—into the sink.
    She pads over to the walnut china cabinet where she keeps her good tea set and pulls out a plate. I hear her bang a glass container on the drain board, and then a
thwack
. She spoons something out onto the plate, tapping and scraping.
    â€œVy vould she drive out vith you if she didn’t vant to see us?” I hear my grandfather say.
    â€œI don’t know, Papa.”
    â€œMakes no sense. She said she vasn’t hungry? She doesn’t eat anything anyway. Like a boid.”
    My grandmother reaches over me and puts down a small gold-rimmed plate dotted with magenta petunias, upon which is perched an entire brain the size of my father’s fist. She touches my shoulder; she hands me a salad fork.
    â€œEss, honey—it’s delicious,” she says, before trundling back to the sink.
    I stare at the plate; my napkin is folded in my lap. I’m certain I’ll vomit: my breakfast will come up. I look down at the brain; it looks back, with its cool gray fissures and swirls, its light pink blood spots shimmering in the afternoon sun streaming in through the window, past the fire escape.
    I want to scream, to run into the living room and out the door and down the stairs and out to the car, where my mother is having a cigarette and listening to Melba Moore
. I want Gaga; I want Gaga’s familiar food—latkes, and goulash, and chicken soup. I don’t want