born again

APRIL 2024

This wasn’t April, this was March. The tail end of March, so it counts; spring break week, school groups in neon shirts at every major intersection, and the cherry blossoms blooming in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, so that every group chat I am a part of was ablaze with clashing opinions on which day was optimal to visit. The weekend, and the month, made a flourishing exit with Easter. Co-workers, misjudging its personal import, asked if the holiday was the reason for my parents’ visit, and I said, Not to my knowledge. This rattled around with the 1.5 other facts they’d been given about my background and showed on their faces as benign confusion. 

But it turned out they were right. That last Sunday in March, half a mile from the nearest LDS church, a portion of my family gathered. We met shy of noon at Hannah’s place, where April showers were nowhere and bells rang over the neighborhood through the open patio door. My parents had trekked from their hotel in Brooklyn Heights and were dressed in their walking clothes. It was hard to tell how heavily Easter weighed on their minds, since I’d forgotten the occasion until moments earlier, when I’d been walking from the bus stop on Dekalb and passed more than the usual number of old guys in pastel pink ties. “Have some salmon,” said my mom, forking lox onto a paper plate. “I never get salmon like this.”

I don’t always know when Easter is. It seems likely, though not certain, to happen in April, though it likes to prove you wrong. Its presence is little felt on Myrtle-Broadway. The Easter spirit lives on the side streets, where clunky-looking churches with red awnings and long names spill praises into the street at near hourly service-times. My mother likes to ask about churches like these when we’re walking through Bed-Stuy, cataloging with her eyes the painted Spanish, French. When I first moved to the neighborhood, I was startled one spring morning by the sight of a mother and daughter on the corner outside Mr Kiwi, holding hands and sporting matching yellow floral frocks, reverent and still, out of place beneath the J train’s chemical drip. Then I remembered He is risen.

Whether it was tact or diffidence that kept my parents from reminding us of this fact as we carried breakfast plates up the stairs and onto the rooftop—this evergreen fact, that He is risen—I don’t know. Hannah and Ryan debated whether their Turkish towels were called Turkish towels and whether they had or had not been brought up yet, and then we sat on the Turkish towels, and we ate. I couldn’t recall what we’d normally have eaten, what holiday tradition we broke with now. I have only one sense-memory of Easter, and it’s the smell of two old cloves my parents kept enclosed in a plastic Easter egg, symbolizing the spices with which Jesus’ body was prepared for burial. Every year we retrieved these from the attic in a box which also held stiff felt bunnies and wicker baskets and pink grass and we passed them around the living room, smelling cloves to conjure up a gravesite in Jerusalem, 33 A.D., smelling them to put ourselves there. In another egg there were nails. We pressed them into our palms.

“We were thinking of stopping in one of the Catholic services,” Hannah said, folding her legs beneath her. Our mother sat beside her in a lawn chair, facing away from the sun. Would they look at us weird? I wondered, Would they know we weren’t one of them? Hannah shook her head. “They’d be used to new faces,” she reasoned, “on Easter.” And she had a point. Those of my friends whose parents were vaguely anything as opposed to vaguely atheist had grown up seeing the inside of a chapel only two days a year, and this, though you couldn’t tell from our store-bought breakfast or our ungodly garb, this was one of them.

But it hardly lived up to the other. Christmas still plucks certain strings in me; Easter has not left much mark. It never felt that different at church from any other week, and not having missed any Sundays since December, I lacked the necessary leisure time to forget that Jesus sacrificed himself for my sins and then be stunned by the reminder. I watched now, groggily, as Ryan produced a carrot cake slice from Prima, cutting it with a butter knife, its size still half-hidden in the box. There had always been treats at church on Easter, but there were usually treats at church. After the sacrament, partitions peeled back to reveal card tables heavy with Sister So-and-So’s cinnamon rolls and my own mother’s chocolate chip cookies, sweet-smelling, hot still in glass serving plates from the seventies. We stood around eating them, not sure how to feel—grateful, or guilty, or glad—while we waited for Sunday school to start and for more adults to cry to us about sins that were washed away.  

My father often cried on Easter. My mother rarely did, on that or any Sunday. They were dry-eyed now, and in the light of a churchless morning it seemed unclear which part was more worth tears, the dying or the being born again. One year, a man so old he looked like the Prophets from my laminated handouts told me Mormons don’t wear cross necklaces because it’s morbid to fixate on Jesus’ death. “He came back,” he reminded me, his breath in my face. “That’s what we like to focus on.”

He came back—undid death—and that’s what this, the pastel ties and packed brunch spots, was about. It must have been in spring; it must have been while cherry blossoms bloomed in what would two thousand years later be the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and cost $17 to enter. “We’d go again,” said my mom, waiting for Ryan to dole her out her fifth of cake, “if it weren’t so expensive.” Once, testing the length of the seatbelts in the backseat of our van while she loaded groceries into the trunk, I made a comment about Jesus’ birthday being two days after my dad’s. She told me casually that He was actually probably born in April, and that he actually probably died who-knows-when. I yanked the seatbelt and it choked, thinking I’d been flung for dead. What’s the point? I wondered, flabbergasted in a Costco parking lot. Like, what are we doing here?

It was not a come-to-Jesus moment. It was also not its opposite. Really I just cherished the sanctity of my own birthday and found it difficult to do the same for a made-up one. It had been Charlie’s birthday the night before—confirmed; golden; not apocryphal—that had me on the rooftop looking uncharacteristically pious in front of my parents as I turned down a mimosa on the not-so-secret grounds that I was hungover. I’d been up late at Charlie’s party drinking wine and singing karaoke until my Britney-voice cracked and all the wine in my coffee-mug was gone. For my gift, I left a plate of my mother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. Merida said they were the best she’d ever had.

I repeated this praise to my mother while we ate. “And she asked your name,” I said, “and she said to say, ‘Thank you, Suzanne,’ specifically. She went to St. Mary’s,” I added, “so you know she’s polite.” My dad pulled the brim of his new Mets cap over his eyes and I put on a pair of Hannah’s sunglasses over my regular frames. We’d all been to a game the day before, where we got to watch the home team nearly not lose. No one in our group cared much about baseball except Ryan, and then only glancingly, but still my dad texted his brothers a photo of the view from the good seats I’d nabbed through work, and I felt momentarily useful, a rare thing for a fifth and final child to be. 

“Tell her, ‘Thank you, Merida,’” said my mom. She smacked her lips. “Well, I’m glad that worked out.” She meant the cookies, the birthday cookies, the ones she’d rushed over after the Mets game to bake on time for Charlie’s party. My dad had had to run out to the store for flour and sugar I didn’t have, and I’d underestimated how long the baking would take, how far it would bleed into dinner-time. I fed them pre-packaged salmon and grapes to atone, saying “Sorry” and “Thank you” on an endless loop. They kept saying, “Stop worrying.” They kept saying, “We’re your parents.”

On Hannah’s roof we took off our jackets for what felt like the first time that year. We ate grapefruit, ripe, warmed by the sun. The carrot cake, its pleated frosting, its patchwork lemon zest, its orange feathered flowers, decorative, fragrant, reminded me that it was Easter, and that it was nearly April, and already spring. My parents ate reverently from paper plates. The bells of a hundred churches rang, none of them, today of all days, ours. 

&

reading list

• Emily Dickinson, “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – (236).” (1864)

• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, lines 1-18 (circa 1392). Modern English translation by Larry D. Benson (1987)

• Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After (1952)