Hannah Ratner
Dad and I visit Papa before I leave to go back to school for the summer. It is a hot, thick-aired June day and I wear a tank top and shorts, but Papa makes me take one of Nana’s old jackets to the Chinese restaurant with us, a blue one made of a shiny vinyl fabric. I sit in the back seat of Papa’s car, Dad up front in the passenger’s seat, and in the rearview mirror I can see the corner of Papa’s face, the papery brow and flossy cornsilk hair. He is ninety-one, and I think that maybe he should not be driving, but Dad says his reflexes are good. “Better than mine,” he says.
In the restaurant I am embarrassed when Papa can’t understand the waitress through her accent. I don’t order soup with my meal and Papa says I’ll be hungry, that he should call back the waitress to get me a soup. I’m fine, I say. These words are meaningless to Papa; I have to insist or he’ll call her back, and he might be accidentally rude and I will be embarrassed again. Papa blows on his hot and sour soup, lips puckered.
“Remember to light the Yizkor candle tonight,” Dad says.
“The WHAT?”
“The Yizkor”
“WHAT?”
“The Yahrzeit candle*,” I say. The Yiddish word he can hear, somehow.
“Oh yeah. It’s on the kitchen island.”
We pack up my leftovers; they leak through the styrofoam box so we triple-bag them. Back at Papa’s house he walks us around to the side to see his plants. His shoulders bent, he is barely taller than I am. Dad fingers the shoots of a plant where flower buds have started to open, then died, during a sudden cold snap of early spring. He tells Papa to break off the tops of the shoots, prune them back; there might yet be some living plant beneath the brittle dead parts.
Papa is most proud of his raspberry bush. In a month or two, he says, there will be so many raspberries that we won’t be able to pick them all. We will have to come back and visit him soon, to help him pick all those raspberries. The first time we visited after Nana died– it must have been late June– we filled two big Tupperware full of raspberries. I remember it felt wrong that she was gone and we could still go on picking raspberries. Now it is almost June again and here we are and here is the raspberry bush, always the same.
Whenever we visited when I was a kid, Nana had the fridge stocked with berries. Before dinner, she always served cantaloupe or honeydew melon. She loved “cuties”—the easy-peel, sweet clementines—and would eat one after another standing at the kitchen island, saying they tasted just like candy. But the real treats were the things I didn’t get to eat at home—Bagel Bites and Klondike Bars.
“You’re eating us out of house and home,” she would say to me and my brother. But we knew that she loved to feed us.
In the kitchen Dad puts the pie he brought in the oven, and Papa gives me a hunk of frozen birthday cake to eat, more than a month old. I feel bad that I didn’t make it home from college for his birthday dinner, so I eat it although it tastes like the freezer. Papa finds a lighter in the drawer but can’t get the flame to catch, and he and Dad try to get it to work for a while, bickering back and forth in their too loud hard-of-hearing voices, but when the flame flickers awake Dad stops mid-sentence to light the candle. We are all silent for what feels like a long time, and then Dad sighs and turns away and Papa says quietly, “three years”, and Dad says we should get out ice cream for the pie.
After dessert Papa turns on the TV. He wants to show us a clip from Real Time with Bill Maher, which he has on his DVR, but getting to the right spot takes forever because he fast-forwards too far and rewinds too far and fast-forwards too far again and gets confused.
The Yarzheit candle burns quickly– the one in our own house is almost to the wick by morning. When we first lit the shiva candle three years ago, it burned for over a week. Every morning when I came down for breakfast I expected it to have gone out, but it just stayed lit, like the miracle of Channukah on our kitchen island.
*In the Jewish tradition, a yahrzeit candle is a memorial candle that is lit each year on the anniversary of a loved one’s passing.
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Hannah Ratner is a Boston-based writer. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Boiler, Meniscus, Fiction on the Web, and The Smart Set. You can find her on Twitter/X at @ratner_hannah.