Dead Opportunities
The photographer snaps a 1957 moment in a dimly lit restaurant, freezing eighteen members of the Fleisher family. Nobody touching, yet, camera-obedient.
They’re all dead except for me.
The photograph sits under a plastic mat on my desk, where I see it daily. Each person stares at me as if they are about to tell me something about the family.
Looking at them from the left, Jacob, his expression guarded, sits beside his wife, Jenny, whose radiance is evident. She was Yetta’s younger sister, who sat a few people over. Then Naomi sits next to Lippy, her first husband, who died just days before my Bar Mitzvah, who married three men with last names starting in "K," a quirk she wanted to commemorate on a license plate as “KKK,” until her son, Michael, intervened.
Then Ceil, whose life was cut short, was burned in a car accident, and next to her husband, Israel, who treated me kindly. Behind him, my sister Debby lost her life to breast cancer on September 9, the same day my dad would die a year earlier.
Debby competed with her children for attention, her presence fierce and fleeting.
Uncle Jack, to the right, Anne’s husband, tried to teach me about orchestras, his passion evident in every lesson, among my yawns. Bubbe Yetta stood four feet ten inches tall, her hearing aid visible around her neck--a constant source of amusement for my cousins and me as we lip-synced words to watch her adjust it.
My mother, Beatsy, stylish and adorned with high-priced jewels, is next. She died at fifty-seven from a bottle and smoking two packs each day.
Zayde Abe is next, who spoke nine words to me in thirteen years (“get off the couch,” four of them). He usually wore a vest, a suit coat, and a tie, frowning under his bald head. Then there is my mother’s sister, Anne, Jack’s wife.
I’m the only child there, ten years old. Harry, my father, sits before me and pays for everything. He never recovered from Beatsy’s passing. He would drive to New Jersey to buy her rye and then vodka that looked like water, trying to hide her drinking.
Next, Danny, the doctor, my mother’s brother, and his wife, Bobbie, who laughed at my college indecision.
My philandering brother-in-law Bernie, whom Judee eventually left for Stan, sits at the end. Judee's family was marred by tragedy; she died of breast cancer at fifty; two of her children died from drug overdoses; two of her grandchildren, whom she never knew, suffered the same fate.
I’m older than everyone frozen in that room--the mosaic of love, loss, and memories that traveled through time but never fully unfolded.
Questions never asked and stories untold, slim connections.
