by Anca L. Szilágyi
My mother stuffs my father with chocolate-covered espresso beans so he won’t fall asleep while driving. More than once, he’d been ticketed after a long day of work while on business in Vegas, his car drifting off course in the desert night. What did he dream about as he drifted?
His father died in a car accident in Romania when he was 15, but it wasn’t because he fell asleep, it was because he was teaching a family friend to drive. Up a steep hill they were going, and on the other side: a truck. The student-driver survived. Once, my father and I were looking at an Art Deco-ish painting depicting just that: “That’s how my father died,” he said.
In the late 1940s—I don’t know if this is before or after my grandfather had de-Judified our family name but it was definitely before the purge that happened anyway—he’d taught his wife, my grandmother Eva, to drive, and for some reason, she told me, she was barefoot and he had to slam the brake on her foot and she screamed. A border guard, because they were by the border with Hungary, had to ask them: what’s the matter, what are you doing here? She doesn’t remember why she was barefoot or why they were at the border. To me it sounds like a dream.
Sometimes I worry about who will pass on these fragmented stories. It was only when my uncle developed a tumor around his vocal chords, making speech difficult, that my cousin started asking questions.
My uncle’s childhood comfort food was meatballs with mashed potatoes; that was the main thing I was poised to tell my cousin. I don’t know what my father’s comfort food was; if he was like he is now, maybe it was more wide-ranging. At 15, he became the man of the house. My maternal grandpa said to my mom, when she was in high school, who’s that sad boy coming around?
Anca L. Szilágyi is the author of the novels Daughters of the Air and Dreams Under Glass. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere, and has been listed as notable in Best American Essays 2023.
Emerge Literary Journal 