Birds once Bees

Eleanor used to say, “Now we're cooking with gas”, and Ray “that'll be the day” again and again in everyday conversation. They would say it in tandem. Ray would speak over El, El over Ray and their propensity to anticipate each other didn't stop with movie catch phrases. If one watched television, the other turned a radio dial. When disciplining one child, another was sure to hear hell. They had a natural buoyancy unsuitable for anything outside the realm of elastic love. So that when El complained, Ray atoned. When El lamented, Ray purchased. When El thumbed through a photo album of Ray making memories and spoke of her happiness for the first time in years, Ray died.

All I ever knew of my grandparents were their differences. Blue and pink, coffee and tap water, brick and linen. We would play a game of conversation tennis. Anyone other than my grandmother and grandfather would lob their head from one side to the other whenever they spoke. Arguments weren't heated, nor were they controlled. They lobbed up and down like strokes of a wave. So it never felt threatening. No one anticipated a divorce or a scandal. We all sat, seasick in our seats, waiting for one or the other to do one thing so we could witness its opposite. Ray would tend to the cherry tomatoes. El would read the diary of her youngest daughter.

I had asked my mother what she considered the opposite of death when I received the news. She opened her mouth and said, “birth”. She said it clearly, using its one syllable naturally and with good ease. She always wore her shoulders high and lifted her chin in ways they teach graduates of Ivy Leagues. And my father, who could lift a chin himself, was known to follow suit. I could ask him, but he'd say “birth” too. My mother would knot my father's tie. My father would pick lint off my mothers blouse.

Hands held they ushered me to the car. But they fought the whole ride in. Less peaks and lulls of tides and more atom collisions. I pushed back on the soft upholstery of the car seat and longed for the wind to tangle my hair. So I turned the radio up, so loud it drowned the very synchronized voices of my parents. And I asked again.