“Anchor: A Brooklyn House”
by
Brahna
Yassky
Greeted by the sea breeze and the ship’s
anchor on the manicured lawn of my parent’s mid-century house, our family
assembled every spring for Passover Seder.
We began in the living room seated on the green silk sofa around the
large wood coffee table with inlaid stone.
“Armagnac?” my father offered while my mother served her stuffed
mushrooms, chopped liver and eggplant salad.
We
then moved into the dining room, covered with gold brocade wallpaper. At one end of the room, a wood breakfront
with big glass doors exposed crystal, blown glass goblets, Limoges and silver
vessels. At the opposite end of the
room, on a built-in wood console a tray sat with little glass memorial yahrzeit
candles for our many relatives who had passed.
My mother lit the candles that blazed a ghostly glow. Twelve of us gathered around the large
mahogany dining table. A grand carved bronze chandelier hung above, with candle
shaped lights. Wax unlit candles
interspersed the electric ones and started to lean and bend as the Seder and
meal wore on.
Customarily
the conversation during the meal was competitive. Whoever could voice their opinions the
loudest received my father’s attention and the power to engage with him on
politics. However, one particular Seder
in 1992, was more subdued because I had laryngitis and my brother, Jimmy had a
very bad cold. The next morning my
father sobbed into the phone, “Jimmy’s dead….asthma attack…died in Georges’
arms.”
Two
days later, joined by a crowd of relatives and friends, we returned to my
parents’ living room after the cemetery.
The house sagged with sadness.
Neighbors brought smoked fish platters, spreads and bagels but who could
eat. I walked to the beach and watched
the waves roll.
In
1952, my family moved to Manhattan Beach from Hell’s Kitchen. I was 3.
My Manhattanite parents could have joined the suburban flight, but they
did not want to go further than Brooklyn to have a lawn, safe tight-knit
community and local good school. Our
house, situated between the ocean and the bay, was their American dream. With water always in sight, I grew up with
wide horizons and a sea breeze. My
Russian grandmother taught me the joy of being in the ocean and to swim,
putting me on her back while breast stroking through the waves.
Manhattan Beach was the only shoreline
community in Brooklyn that didn’t have a boardwalk or food concessions. Residents simply walked down the block to the
ocean. The only infiltration of food was the ice cream man and the knish
man. The latter, clad in white shirt,
and pants trudged across the hot sand in heavy black shoes with bulging brown
paper shopping bags in each hand. The
bags contained large patties of baked dough filled with coarsely mashed
potatoes, each one individually wrapped in wax paper – a popular snack for the
descendants of European Jews who lived in the neighborhood. Hot knishes,” he
shouted. My mother waved her hand and he appeared casting a shadow over
her asking,
“How many? Do you want salt?”
“How many? Do you want salt?”
I loved the comforting taste and texture of
the hot potato filling as it slid down my throat. Then in the haze of the heat,
appearing like a super hero with a white plastic helmet, the ice cream man
approached. He wore the same white clothes and dark shoes as the knish man, but
had a hard black box, filled with ice cream pops attached to a diagonal strap
across his chest.
In my early thirties, I returned to live
with my parents while recovering from an accident. “Smell the ocean. It will
help you heal,” my mother said. She was right. As always, the summer air was
thick with a salty breeze stirring the humidity, mixed with the rich musty
scent of the leafy mature trees that marked the neighborhood. That clear, pure
smell filled and soothed me.
During the summers of my childhood, my
mother, in halter-top and shorts sang “Summertime”
on our back porch. Her beautiful, slow deep voice was the sound of her love.
The still air smelled of honeysuckle and salt. Cool drops of water sprayed from
the lawn sprinkler as she crooned.
She used to sing on the radio, but at seventeen chose my father’s marriage proposal over that of being in the spotlight of a big band, devoting her life to being a mother and wife. The house was a showcase of her sophisticated4 taste and organization. When she passed in 2009, my father insisted I take her seat at the Passover table. The chair felt too big for me. The extra yahrzeit candles seemed to tip the tray.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy swooped through
Manhattan Beach creating havoc and destroying houses, blowing out the walls,
floors and everything in the basement of the commodious refuge that was my
parents’ dream house; the limestone and brick exterior was the only part that
couldn’t be blown down. My ninety-one-year-old
father and his black Labrador retriever became homeless and escaped to my
apartment in lower Manhattan, which we evacuated a few days later. Georges, my brother’s past partner, took them
into his Park Slope brownstone for three months. A lifetime of my father’s memories, including
my mother’s shoes, washed down the streets.
They scattered and melded with his neighbors’ belongings. They formed piles of indistinguishable
relics; collective remnants accumulated over decades – trophies, old bottles of
vintage wine and champagne, hardwood floor boards, shards of walls with peeling
silk wallpaper, shattered pieces of Royal Dalton china, the curlicue top of a
broken gilded mirror frame and brocade and velvet sofas stuffed with water and
growing mold.
Unlike many of his neighbors who sold their battered
homes, my father insisted he would live the rest of his life in his house,
imprinted with the sixty-two years of his marriage to my mother. He hired Ari, a contractor to replace floors,
walls, pipes and ceilings. As the contractor worked to restore his home, new
owners next door and down the block demolished or rebuilt their houses, gobbling
up side yards in the expansion, adding stone facades with columns.
After
Sandy repairs, my father, frail but happy to be home, moved back. We sat on the upstairs terrace on dilapidated
plastic chairs eating hummus and drinking seltzer, smelling the ocean, watching
the gentle breeze through the trees and the cement mixer next door noisily
pouring cement in the new neighbor’s front yard. Weeds grew around the edges
wrapping around his wood railings like ivy.
Every Friday, my dad dressed in jeans and flannel shirt hardly making a
dent in the cushion of his paisley covered love seat in the den waited for
me. I was his messenger from the outside
world. We sat close to each other.
Photographs of generations of relatives spanning over a hundred years, adorned
the wood paneled walls, and every surface of the room. Humans haunt houses more than ghosts do. My father, my son and I were the only ones
left.
I
told him about my day, knowing he was the only one who cared. In the summer, after chatting, I walked over
to the beach for a long distance swim.
The other people at the beach were Orthodox women with long skirts and their
sons with payos flying as they ran in and out of the ocean. Muslim women
covered from head to toe, briefly submerged in the water, a woman swimming next
to me in glittered sunglasses and baseball cap asked me in a thick Russian
accent if I knew the time, couples in shower caps hugged and splashed each
other, tattooed men and women in skimpy bathing suits sunbathed. When I returned to the house my father
always asked if I had a good swim, happy he could provide that opportunity for
me. I called for take- out shrimp
Yakitori, from the Japanese restaurant in Sheepshead Bay run by Russians or
pizza from Pizza Delmar in Sheepshead Bay, whose great pizza I had been eating
since they opened in 1957. We sat around
the circular table in the breakfast room, with black and white faux marble
wallpaper coming apart at the seams.
I was now my mother taking charge of my
father’s life. I invited cousins and a
few of his younger friends to celebrate his 95th birthday with chocolate
ice cream. They sat in the living room
around the stone inlaid table.
Engineered wood floors replaced the carpet ruined by the hurricane.
That
night, I slept in the very yellow room upstairs, on a foldout flowered yellow
sofa bed, underneath a small painting I made of three razor clams on the
beach. I navigated around odd pieces of
extra carpet, used to cover the hurricane damage in the den, a box of my old
books, piles of dad’s crime fiction novels.
A picture of me dancing in a field in Mendocino in 1972, another picture
of me with short hair, don’t- mess –with- me stare in New York 1979 stared at
me in the overstuffed room. I covered
myself with the same quilt, which had belonged to my brother decades before.
The
next night my father passed. Incapable
of talking to car service in the middle of the night, I called up Ari, the
contractor who restored the house and remained friends with my dad bringing him
sugar free rugalach for three years. He
arrived in his van with giant signage “Ari’s Cleaning,” on the side and took me
to my apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
**************
I
couldn’t stay away from the house. I was
going home to the ghosts of my parents who were a part of me. I opened a drawer, looking to see its
contents and if I wanted anything, smelling and touching leather gloves hoping
to find vital signs of my mother and father.
Crying, I turned around and took the subway home. I received phone calls from people asking if
the house was for sale a week after dad’s death. I was shocked at their brashness. How did they get my cell phone number? I hung up on all of them but their numbers
remained in my phone.
For many, Manhattan Beach is a very desirable
place to live, an urban neighborhood that feels suburban because of its
isolation from the rest of Brooklyn and Manhattan. That was what my parents loved. Now populated by new unfamiliar people, this
neighborhood did not feel like home to me.
Even if it did, I couldn’t afford to keep their house.
Two
months after my father’s death, I decided to sell and knew how much money I
wanted and should expect. I called back
the numbers in my phone. A young woman
and her father came over and offered me less.
When they left, she kissed the mezuzah on the front door and held her
hand over it for a few moments. The
next day, they called and offered my price.
The father was buying it for his daughter, her husband and their small
children. They did not want to knock the house down. They wanted to keep it the way it was, and update
the kitchen and fabulous pink tile bathrooms with a radio built into the
wall. I felt good about them keeping my
family legacy intact.
Once
the word was out, I was selling the house, neighbors knocked on the door telling
me they had a son, daughter, nephew, friend who might be interested. When I said I had a signed contract, they asked
about buying the anchor on the lawn. It
goes with the house I told them.
I
had to empty this 3,000 square foot container of the collective pasts of four
generations and I had a broken foot.
Urgency and my new role of being the one in charge filled every waking
moment. I saw my mother in every room,
every piece of furniture – the thirty years she spent molding the house to her
impeccable good taste. Yet as orderly as
she was, my father’s messiness created chaos over the last seven years since
her death. She used to say that she woke
up at 4am worrying about who would take care of everything after she died. I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about how
to deal with everything she worried about.
Anything I found with my mother’s name or evidence of her aliveness I
kept - a pad with her name and address on the night table, a little round
pocket mirror for putting on lipstick, her wedding band pressed against the
corner of a drawer.
I
was on an excavation, a treasure hunt. I
threw out twelve bags of garbage every day. The neighbors across the street
helped move them to the sidewalk. I grew
to know the community of people on the block.
During
my deep reveries and heavy lifting, the buyers came to see my progress, anxious
to close on the house. When they arrived
amidst the chaos, the daughter made faces of disgust at the mess and scrunched
up her nose remarking on the odor of the master bedroom rug. For me the room
smelled like my dad. I held onto the
last visceral trace of him. Yet, the
house, my legacy, felt like a shambles looking at it through her eyes.
I
gave away most of the furniture, dozens of boxes of books and clothes and furs
and pots and pans and dishes. I discovered
the network of plumbers and electricians that make the houses in Manhattan
Beach function. They fixed antiquated
electrical wiring and plumbing and replaced an air conditioner and toilet. I took things that reminded me of my youth
and appealed to my aesthetics -a chandelier with a bronze Pan, the old wrought
iron table and chairs upended on the patio on the side of the house and the
inlaid coffee table from the living room.
After three Salvation Army pickups and six
Housing Works drop offs, after the movers took what was remaining to a storage
locker the size of a garage, I hired a cleaning service to scour the
house. I was only required to present it
broom clean but wanted the new family to move into a sparkling home. The sparkle cost me $1000, a fair price to
pay, I rationalized, to hand them a jewel.
A
few weeks after closing I received a text from the neighbor across the street
asking if I had sold the house. I texted
back that I had closed. He replied that
there was a “For Sale by Owner” sign in the window. The new owners never moved in, they put a
sign up instead, leaving the house empty and neglected. He followed this texting me that the anchor
was no longer on the lawn.
Two
years later, the new owners are still trying to flip the house.
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