“It is the definition of racket,” says my mother.
“Listen,” says Levi. “When the first radio programs came to India during British rule, people would gather from all over and sit together and listen to English radio shows. It was the first time a lot of them had heard Western music, basically ever. After the programs were over, there would be long periods of white noise, just static. And the Indians would all stay and listen to that as well.”
“Your point?” asks my mother.
“They’d never heard it before, so to them that was music too.”
“So?” says my mother.
“So, don’t you see that it’s all just perspective, Ma? Our white noise was their music. Your racket is my masterpiece.”
“That’s a cool fact, Levi,” I say diplomatically. “About the Indians.”
“You’re going to have to travel a lot farther than India to find someone who thinks that’s a masterpiece,” says my mother.
*
He died.
*
Outside the hospital I wait for my mother and Levi to arrive. Next to me, an elderly woman wrapped in a pink blanket despite the heat sucks on her cigarette between great hacking coughs.
“Can I bum one of those?” I ask.
“Trade you for a dollar,” she says.
“I don’t have a dollar,” I say. “My father just died.”
She looks at me from under her wiry eyebrows.
“In that case,” she says, “no.”
*
My mother has driven over to speak to my father’s brother. Levi is upstairs on the phone with his girlfriend. I sit in the garden and watch the birds dart around the feeder. Today is almost done. The sky is apricot with golden clouds. A chorus of grasshoppers surrounds me. The earth is alive. I am alive. I wait to feel whatever I’m meant to feel, but nothing comes.
*
I practice ways of telling people the news. He is no longer with us. He has departed. He’s six feet under. He’s deceased. He passed away. He croaked. He rests in peace. He is no longer of this world. He went to meet his maker. He bought the farm. He’s with the big guy in the sky. He’s pushing up daisies. He expired. He’s dead as a doornail. He kicked the bucket. He’s no more. He’s been reincarnated, we don’t know as what, but we’re hoping anything but a Jets fan.
*
“The rabbi called,” Levi says. “He wants to know why we’re not sitting a week of shiva.”
“What business is it of his?” I say.
“I’ll deal with it,” says my mother.
“What are you going to say?” asks Levi.
“I’m going to say, ‘Who has the energy for all that sitting?’” she says.
“What if he disagrees?” I ask.
My mother shrugs. “So what?”
“That’s it?” says Levi. “Ten years of Hebrew school, and it comes to that? So what?”
“Let me tell you something,” says my mother. “Those are two of the most powerful words in the English language. Right between them is a free and happy life.”
*
My father has been buried. I’m in the garage looking for birdseed for my mother. I clamber over piles of life’s detritus. Boxes of school yearbooks. A rusty stationary bike. A vase Levi made in middle school. Finally I see a bag of birdseed on the top shelf.
I’m just reaching up for it when I trip over some electrical cord and skid my knees against the cement floor. I’m on all fours. Pain shoots through me. I grab the baseball bat and use it to prop myself back up. Then I start hitting. I pummel a cardboard box filled with holiday decorations. I thwack the stationary bike. I hit a deflated soccer ball like a pi?ata. I hit the metal door of the garage until it dents. It sends reverberations through the walls that are so strong, Levi’s vase wobbles and falls off the shelf. It shatters on the floor just as Levi appears in the doorway. He looks at the vase, then at the bat, then at me.
“Birdseed,” I say.
*
I find Levi crouched on the basement floor, gluing his vase back together.
“God, Levi,” I say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you cared about this.”
He looks up at me, a shard of vase in his hand. “I don’t.” He shrugs. “I’m doing kintsugi.”
“What?”
“Kintsugi,” he says. “It’s the Japanese art of mending broken pottery.”
“Again, what?”
“They use a special gold lacquer, so the mended pot becomes more beautiful than before it was broken.”