Coney Island Avenue
The morning of Al’s funeral we wake to streets, sidewalks, trees, and cars encased in a sheet
of ice one-eighth of an inch thick so that everything under our overcast sky gleams
grayly
Al is my neighbor Felicia’s father
His father’s surname was Rabinowitz, but the family anglicized it to Roberts
A week and a half ago, Al died, aged ninety-four and ninety-five days
*
The last time I saw Al, he was wearing a Chicago Cubs cap and was sitting on Felicia’s back
deck in a wrought-iron chair on a warm day in early November, watching the
orange-yellow leaves of the sugar maple tremble in light breeze
His eyes were a watery blue. They almost matched the Cubs cap
By the end he had lost his short-term memory
The Cubs had just won the World Series for the first time in one hundred and eight years
He didn’t say much
His eyes kept tracking the squirrel leaping from half-bare branch to black telephone line and
back
*
Even after salting the sidewalks, everyone walks slowly, baby step by baby step on the ice, as
if they too are nonagenarians and have misplaced their canes or walkers
*
Joshua, his eldest son, gives the eulogy and tells the family story of how Al was supposed to
meet them all at the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard
They got on the ferry—Joshua, Felicia, Matthew, and their mother, Audrey
“All aboard!” the captain called out over the loudspeaker
No sign of Al
The ferry started to move away from the dock
Then they saw Al sprinting toward them
At the last possible moment, Al jumped from the dock out over the four-foot gap of
saltwater widening between dock and ferry
Joshua says, “To me at eleven years old, it looked like my father was Superman, able to leap
tall buildings in a single bound”
He starts to cry
He cries silently for almost a full minute
Everyone in the retirement community’s nondenominational chapel is quiet
*
Grief is like walking on ice
One has to go forward, knees bent, leaning forward slightly
Our bones are fragile
Be careful not to fall
Al leaped
He landed safely on the steel deck of the ferry that carried him, his daughter, two sons, and
wife across seven miles of water to an island
They lived there for two weeks one summer
*
Joshua looks out through his tears at the surviving family and friends
It is hard to see them
Crying is like chipping the ice from his windshield this morning
At first, that opaque sheet wouldn’t break
He had to hammer at it with the edge of his plastic yellow scraper
Then one hairline crack
The ice separated into three tectonic plates moving slowly apart on a film of water
Suddenly one whole plate shattered into shards of glass
*
Tears come unbidden
Then they stop as suddenly
It is as if he has been crying splinters of ice
They come from water frozen inside himself
He wipes ice melt from his cheeks
*
Joshua sees the room again with aching clarity, as if he just had the lenses of his glasses
changed to a new prescription
He sees people he should know
They are strangers, dressed in various shades of black and gray
They are a black and white rainbow
No, here are his mother, brother, sister
He sees them as if for the first time
His mother dabs at the tears streaming down her face with a small sodden bit of Kleenex
*
Joshua tells another story
How, during the Depression in Brooklyn, an ice-cream truck drove past 902 Coney Island
Avenue
As it turned the corner, its back door flew open and a cardboard cylinder of ice cream—two
feet long, ten inches in diameter—fell out
It was chocolate
The truck did not come back
Al and his childhood friends had two choices: they could either eat it or let it melt
They sat on the stoop and ate all the ice cream
Throughout his long life, Al would remember that hot afternoon, how cold the ice cream
felt going down his throat
It felt, he said, like trying to say an incomprehensible word from the Torah, a word of many
syllables, all the hard consonants turning in his mouth to that one vowel of
chocolate, so dark, bitter, and yet silken sweet
