Bloodline

My wrists are decorated with a lattice of blue veins. It turns out that this deep sea color is an optical illusion. I am surprised to learn that the blood inside my body is not in fact blue. This isn’t because I harbor any illusions about my aristocratic lineage. I come from generations of shopkeepers. My father’s blood ran red like yours and stained the pristine antique linens when he cut his finger on a brandy decanter that had shattered in his shop. We always called it the shop, never the store, as if a store was where you went to buy milk. Aristocratic pretensions if not bloodlines. This story about blood being blue on the inside turns out to be one of those myths they fed us with our lime jello in the ‘50s. Like the one about how eating cubes of sugar out of a dish on the formica table at the luncheonette could encourage worms to colonize your stomach or how staring at your own nose could leave you permanently cross-eyed. These were bubbemeisehs or grandmother stories that originated in places sclerotic from chicken fat during the last fifty years or so that those places remained habitable. 

The idea of blood preoccupies me. It’s the river that circulates in my veins, sending energy to my heart, my belly, but also the genetic material that has been miraculously passed down from those grandmothers and their menfolk from the Black Sea, from the Danube to the Hudson and then to the Mississippi where I find myself living. Another great surprise. I imagine my Romanian great-grandmother, Rose, staining her crepe dress with menstrual blood during the long crossing from Hamburg to New York. Blood is notoriously difficult to wash out of clothing whether it originates in a woman’s body or on the knees of children falling from the monkey bars, whether it is the result of combat or viruses propagating in the lungs.  This happened to my Uncle Irving, known as Hobby, one of the missing links I never got to meet. Hobby, who came back from WWII coughing up blood from a mysterious disease, and promptly died a tenement death. Whatever its origin, the grandmothers tell you to wash blood out with cold water, as if the heat of it, the carnal nature of it must be counterbalanced by cold.

Photo by Robert Wiedemann on Unsplash

We want to keep blood inside like our most unmentionable secrets which are often secrets about the body. We don’t want anyone to know. We don’t want it to leak out and reveal our animal nature. It travels around like a continuous traffic cloverleaf, like a system of canals. Sometimes it overheats. I have choleric days when I feel my blood rushing like rapids pouring over boulders, days when I’m as angry as the little girl on 83rd street who felt unnoticed, shocking her decorous parents by picking up the piles of Life magazines and heaving them onto the floor. I have days when my blood seems to trickle phlegmatically, like a stream in a drought, when I just want to give it a rest, crawl under the covers and keep it warm, keep it on simmer. Maybe I could invite my grandmothers and grandfathers to leave their corsets and pocket watches behind and join me under the comforter to rest for a while. Maybe we could hold each other close and feel our blood pulsing, our hearts beating in the same grimy Balkan rhythm. 

I’m issuing an invitation to all of them to visit me in my dreams and tell me their stories. Not just the bubbemeisehs and the ones about how to make pickled fish, but the ones that clawed at them, about leaving Iasi, traveling for days to reach Hamburg where the people on the street had yellow hair and spoke a different, guttural language. I think we have something to teach one another. It is, in the end, a continuous loop. They pass their wisdom down to me and I send it back up to them transformed. Swimming in that river of blood, I see myself serving a glass of tea with lemon to my Grandpa Louis, dying in Harlem in his forties. I want him to tell me about Romania, about the crossing, but also about the slightly shady business dealings he engaged in with his brothers in lower Manhattan. I am greedy. I want it all.

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