Moonlight Sonata

The staccato of late night TV wound down as Avi watched his father slowly shuffle off into the gloom of the unlit staircase leading up to his room, forgetting to turn on the lights as always. “Dad, turn on the lights so you don’t run into anything,” Avi called after his father, knowing well that his words would go unheeded again.

Resignedly, Avi himself shuffled into the kitchen to clean up. The yellow moon hung outside the window, its round belly peeking in upon the dirty dishes that lay—some in the sink and some around it. Avi flicked on the switch, and the moonlight slunk away into the realm of the unseen under the glare of yellow recessed lights. The cutting board sat next to the sink, painted with strawberry seeds and stains, a knife lying askew upon it. Charred remains of something crusted the skillet. A fine dusting of flour and crumbs traced the weathered floorboards, gathering in seams and pits. Ignoring his rising exhaustion, Avi methodically began the everyday thankless work ahead of him.

With careful strokes, he swept up the line of breadcrumbs, trailing from the edge of the kitchen counter to the toaster, trying not to let any join the already present scattering on the floor. He picked up the toaster and shook out any remaining crumbs over the trash. Wetting a rag under the tap, he wiped down the toaster on all its sides, then its bottom, and then the length of its cord. Finally, he set it back in its place and moved onto the refrigerator.

The love of his life had come and gone years ago, leaving behind an array of colorful knickknacks dotting the house and a score of pictures to remember her by. One such picture was pinned to the fridge with one such colorful magnet. Her face, and his own, smiled out of the picture, aglow with their lack of foreknowledge about the fleetingness of happiness. Avi averted his eyes from the picture and focused on wiping down the sticky refrigerator handles.

This used to be her thing—cleaning up, having everything just so, everything clean and tidy and in its place—a place intended just for it by the authority vested in her. Of a night, after dinner, she liked to take her time setting everything to rights in the kitchen. She would do it quietly. Or sometimes, with a hum upon her lips. And sometimes, while singing softly out of tune. Soon enough, he started joining her and it became his thing too. It was their thing then. He would look up from wiping the counters and see her playing Tetris with the dishes in the dishwasher with an intense look of determination on her face. The gentle music of clinking cutlery as it was slotted into its basket and the cacophony of clanging pots as they rubbed shoulders on the top rack was their song as they worked in silent togetherness. On nights when she managed to fit everything in, she would smile gloriously at having bested her wily nemesis. On other nights, she would blame him for his injudicious use of the oversized salad bowl to make just a single serving of salad. On some nights, when she was very tired, she would curse the dishwasher for always awaiting her at the end of every night. He would tell her to take a break then, they could do the dishes the next day, he could instead give her a neck rub in bed, his cold fingertips softly tapping her warm skin, and rarely, she would succumb. But mostly, despite what she said, she liked to clean up at night. Once she was done, she would turn off the lights and invite the moon to shyly silver the clean surfaces with a measure of pride. It made her happy in the morning to wake up to a clean kitchen, where she would then make terrible tea to start the day. And it made him happy in the morning to wake up to a clean kitchen and sip terrible tea with her to start the day.

Until one day she was gone. Then, for a long time he did not have a thing anymore.

His aging father had moved in some while ago, forgetful, messy, strange, leaving dirty dishes, and sticky smudges and crumbs scattered around. Necessity made this his thing now. There was no music anymore, or cacophony. No hums, or tuneless songs, or curses, or smiles. He never learned the art of loading dishwashers, so he hand washed everything under the running tap. It was just white noise to stave off the black void.

Sometimes, while he cleaned after a long exhausting day of work and chores and putting up with the strangeness of having to care for a grown adult as if they were a child, Avi would bubble with annoyance at his father’s messes. At others, as his father helplessly shivered from the cold while a blanket lay unnoticed right next to him, Avi would twinge with guilt for his earlier feelings. Growing old and rusty was like losing the music and rhythms of movement and thought. It couldn’t be easy for his father either—having to live with his son away from his own house and his own comforts and his own routine days and nights, being cared for by someone who only yesterday was a child in need of his father’s care in the strangest yet oldest turning of the tables.

Filtering down through the ceiling of the kitchen, he heard the creak of the floorboards, his father pacing upstairs in his shuffling gait. Avi finished with the refrigerator and looked at the photograph again. Like skipping stones on the river of time, memories sprang up from over the years in another house long ago, another life, the innocent days of childhood, learning about another woman through a now-familiar system of assorted knickknacks and pictures on the fridge. Avi's mother had passed away when he was very young, forever hidden beyond the veil of his memories. His father had never talked about it, about her. He had wanted to ask about her—what was she like? Did she love him? Did she love his father? Did his father love her? What was it like when it wasn’t just his father and him all alone in the house?—but he never had. Silence had been his constant companion in his childhood, the silence not of unhappiness, but of solitude, not of deprivation, but of insufficiency, not of stillness, but of cloaking, of missing something not quite known. The silence of living and moving in the same house without togetherness. And here they were again, still waiting for something to happen.

Avi picked up a sponge and began attending to the dishes. Over the gush of the running tap, he heard the sounds of his father opening and closing doors, footsteps between bedroom and bathroom, the flush of the toilet, the hiss of the shower. Plates and bowls clattered as he stacked them on the drying rack. The reprise of scrubbing, rinsing, wiping and stacking hushed all thought in his mind for a while as he rhythmically worked through the dirty pile. Every so often, the noises from upstairs kept him informed of his father’s bearings. The clock hands ticked their way through the minutes as the moon inched across the night sky and strove to fit more of its roundness within the rectangle of the window above the sink. Gradually, all seemed to quiet upstairs as his father went to bed.

Avi paused in his work then, contemplating the silence, grieving it, embracing it.

He turned off the tap, wiped his hands, climbed the stairs quietly and lingered at the doorway of his father’s room. He lingered as his eyes sought to make out the shapes of things in the dark - a glass of water on the bedside table, his father’s slippers at the foot of the bed, the lace on the edge of the window curtains, the slow rise and fall of his father’s chest. He lingered as unsaid thoughts and unasked questions of decades past pressed against his lips and fell away. He lingered as unbroken silence pressed in all around him, an old friend now. He lingered, still, as he remembered his father lingering back when he was a young boy, back when the tables were the other way around.

Eventually, Avi headed back down again. The kitchen awaited, and he resumed his chores. Almost done now, he thought, yawning, rinsing the cutting board. Wiping down the counters at the end of it all, he listened to the silence of the house. He hung his rag above the sink, turned off the lights and watched the moonlight seep in through the window to silver the clean surfaces. He heard, softly at first, then steadily in a crescendo, his father’s snores carried down the stairs to clamor resoundingly all around him, and the silence slunk away into the realm of the unheard under the blare of the sounds of life.

Tomorrow, he would make tolerable tea for himself and his father to start the day.