A Stranger on the Planet

by Adam Schwartz

  “I don’t mean sleep sleep with you. I mean like sleep next to you.” As I said this, I knew how fraudulent my words sounded. Of course I was hoping to score some sympathy sex.

  “I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” Rachel told me.

  “Come on. I slept with you the night before your mother’s funeral!”

  “Yes, and remember how badly that turned out?”

  “I promise I won’t tell Lucinda.”

  “Seth, I’m not saying no because I don’t want to.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, and that’s why it’s a bad idea. Get some sleep, Seth. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” I replied, and put the phone down.

  I HAD TOLD SEAMUS THAT I wanted to deliver the eulogy for our mother; we had been in her hospital room just after she had died. “Absolutely not,” he had said. “My rabbi’s doing it.” I had been angry, but I wasn’t about to face Seamus down with our mother’s body between us. I knew he didn’t approve of the “Mom stories” Sarah and I loved to exchange. Perhaps Seamus was remembering the one time he and Ruth had come to see me do my comedy routine. I acted out my version of the deathbed dilemma over young Samuel, yukking up the Yiddish accents of the old men. In the twist I added to the story, Samuel suddenly awakens, but the old men are so caught up in their Talmudic tête-à-tête that they don’t even notice him when he tries to get their attention. Finally, he rises from the bed and shouts out that he’s alive. The old men stop their discussion and turn to look at him; then they tell him to shush and go back to debating whether or not he is dead.

  My mother had laughed heartily, but Seamus, like Queen Victoria, was not amused.

  The funeral was on Long Island, where all of Ruth’s family was buried. I was surprised to see my ninety-six-year-old grandfather at the funeral home. His mind had been gradually splintering apart for the last ten years. He was on the arm of his other daughter, my aunt Rhoda, who cared for him day and night. Before senility set in, my grandfather had been cold and manipulative. He had expected his daughters to compete for his love, and Ruth had been no match for Rhoda.

  I went over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Hello, Poppa,” I said.

  “Do I know you?” he replied.

  I removed my glasses and brought my face close to his. “I’m Seth, Poppa. Your grandson. Ruth’s son.”

  “Oh, Ruth. How is Ruth? I haven’t seen her in so long.”

  Rhoda said, “Ruth is dead, Daddy. I told you this morning. She died yesterday.”

  “Ruth died? Does Esther know?”

  “Daddy, Mother died thirty-five years ago.”

  My grandfather stared at the ground and placed a hand on top of his scaly, liver-spotted head. I imagined he could feel the brain cells whooshing out like steam from a kettle.

  “What about Rose?” he asked, referring to his second wife.

  “She died twenty years ago, Daddy.”

  Rhoda whispered to me, “I always tell him the truth, not that it matters to him in his condition. I could tell him that everyone is living happily on the Riviera and he wouldn’t know the difference.”

  I wondered why Rhoda just didn’t tell him everyone was wonderful, but she spent the most time with him and I figured she knew best. Then Rhoda said to me, “The woman who came with you. That’s the rabbi’s daughter, right?”

  I told her she was.

  “Is she still a lesbian?”

  My grandfather looked up at Rhoda. “Who did you say was dead?”

  “Ruth,” I said, trying to be helpful. “She and Esther are together now, Poppa.”

  He gave me a perplexed look. “Do I know you?”

  Rachel and I found our seats in the front row of the small chapel. I stared sullenly at my mother’s coffin as the young rabbi of Seamus’s congregation droned on about her life. He described her as a loving mother, a devoted grandmother, a woman who led “a good Jewish life.” He kept repeating that phrase, and I knew he was running out of things to say.

  Ruth’s casket had already been lowered into the ground by the time we arrived at the cemetery. She was next to her mother, Esther (1912–1962); next to Esther was the plot reserved for my grandfather. Then came Rose (1915–1976), who was next to Esther’s father, Jacob (1885–1955), who was next to his wife, Dvorah (1888–1933), who was next to her son, Samuel (1914–1926). Seamus, Sarah, and I stood together on the lip of the open grave and chanted the mourner’s Kaddish: “Yisgadal, ve yiskadash . . .” Sarah and I tripped over the familiar Hebrew words, trying to keep up with our brother. I concluded with a resounding amen and then announced that I had something to add. Seamus looked at the ground and brought a hand to his brow. I reminded the other mourners that my mother had loved her biblical name, and then I recited Ruth’s declaration of love to Naomi: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Nothing but death shall divide us.” Sarah squeezed my hand and pressed her head into my arm. Seamus smiled at me, no doubt relieved. I wondered if he had any memory of our visits to the cemetery when we were children, and how our mother had fashioned those words into her own personal Kaddish. We had kept just far enough away that her words were a dim murmur as she recited them over her mother’s grave; somehow we had known not to disturb her rare moment of privacy and grace. When she got down on her knees and plucked the grass along the borders of the grave (I always suspected she was just trying to get a little closer to her mother), I would go off in search of interesting headstones. I liked trying to conjure a complete life from the thin line of numbers engraved on a tablet. I was especially drawn to families who had all died on the same day (fre? disease? car accident?) and to children, like Samuel, who had died before their parents. (I closed my eyes and wondered what it felt like to lose your child.) On two or three occasions I had found husbands and wives who had died within days of each other. I always presumed one of them had died of sheer grief, and I had tried to imagine how two people could love each other that much.

  The three of us each had a turn casting a spadeful of earth onto the casket, and then we stood around in the sunshine accepting more hugs and condolences. Some of the more remote relatives attempted to introduce themselves, but I surprised them by revealing that I knew everything about them.

  “Oh, Cousin Sandy! Yes, of course I remember you,” I said to a cousin of my mother’s I probably hadn’t seen since I was thirteen. “You’re Mimi’s brother. Do you still own that shoe store with her husband, Bill, in Hempstead?”

  “Why, yes . . .,” he said, as if he had just learned these facts about his life.

  I turned to Sandy’s wife. “Selma, how are you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, doll, just fine,” she replied, appearing moved by the illusion of familiarity I had created.

  “How are your daughters, Susan and Mindy?”

  Seamus scrolled his eyes up into his head.

  “Is this your wife?” Selma asked, looking at Rachel. She and I were holding hands.

  “Former wife,” I explained. “But we’ve stayed very close friends.”

  Rachel cast me an incredulous look. Selma looked sad and perplexed.

  “We were too young when we met,” I continued. “We were just college students.”

  Just as Sandy was saying we had to get together soon, Selma pointed to a black woman accompanied by two black men.

  “Who’s that?” she whispered, even though they were a good twenty feet away. “Your mother’s girl?”

  She was referring to Alice, Ruth’s closest friend and coworker for more than thirty years.

  “Yes,” I whispered back to Selma. “But Tara is lost.”

  Rachel burst out laughing.

  “Now you know why we divorced,” I said to my not-so-amused cousins. “She caused a scene every time we went to a funeral.”

  I excused myself and went over to Alice.

  “I’m so sorry, Seth, honey,” Alice whispered into my ear as we
embraced. One of the men with Alice was Freddy, her husband. I didn’t know who the other man was, but I was surprised to see that his eyes were red from crying. He wore a faded blue satin yarmulke.

  “This is my cousin, Elijah,” Alice said, introducing him to me.

  “Oh, so you’re Elijah,” I said. It had never occurred to me that Elijah might be black. “My mother kept a postcard you sent her by the side of her bed when she was in the hospital,” I explained. Ruth had kept a veritable shrine by her bedside—letters, photographs, a locket, an old menorah. On the front of the postcard was a picture of a woman standing barefoot in a field at sunset, holding a sickle. On the back, someone had written: “If I keep you alive in my heart, not even death can divide us. May the Lord keep faith with you. Elijah.” I had asked my mother who Elijah was and was disappointed when she said he had been our mailman years ago. I had been hoping she would tell me a story about Elijah being some secret lover.

  Elijah nodded slightly.

  “Thank you for thinking of her in such a beautiful way.”

  Whether it was remembering the words that Elijah had written to my mother or the long, difficult morning finally catching up with me, I was overcome at that moment; tears coursed down my hot, splotchy face. Elijah turned away to press a handkerchief against his eyes.

  Everyone returned to their cars, but Seamus was still saying goodbye to Alice, Freddy, and Elijah. He briefly embraced each one of them, then tramped back to where his family was waiting. The plan was to meet up back in New Jersey at Manny’s, a restaurant where Ruth and Alice had been regulars for over three decades.

  As Rachel and I drove away from the cemetery, I said, “I apologize for last night.”

  “No need to,” she replied.

  “I was actually surprised you came out here for the funeral.”

  We were not nearly as close as we had once been, time and distance eroding our connection. Rachel didn’t reply; I looked over and noticed she was crying.

  “Rachel, what’s the matter?”

  “Oh, Seth, Lucinda and I are going through a hard time.”

  She told me that she and Lucinda wanted a family, and Rachel was the one trying to get pregnant because Lucinda was seven years older. On the morning she was scheduled for her third and last IUI procedure, Rachel and Lucinda had a brutal argument. Rachel wanted Lucinda to accompany her to the clinic but Lucinda refused to skip a department meeting. She didn’t see any reason why Rachel needed her to come. Later, Rachel was lying on the examining table in the clinic and the technician, a young Filipino woman, was having trouble inserting the tube into Rachel’s uterus. The pain was unbearable. “Fuck this,” Rachel finally shouted. “Go get a fucking doctor to do it!” Eventually, the donor sperm was shot into her through the tube, and then Rachel was left alone in the room for thirty minutes, her legs and her life up in the air. Tears slanted down across her temples. She had never felt so alone, so angry. She wanted Lucinda to be in the room sitting next to her, holding her hand; she needed to know that Lucinda wanted a child as much as she did. She thought about how she had done all the sacrificing from the very beginning of their relationship. She had turned down an attractive offer from a prestigious East Coast university and accepted a position at a second-rate school in the Bay Area so Lucinda wouldn’t have to leave her tenured job at Stanford. Lucinda had a lighter teaching load, a higher salary, and numerous leaves; Rachel’s career, her scholarship, had stagnated while she taught four brain-numbing classes a term. She had sacrificed her career, and now she was sacrificing her body—powerful drugs were injected into it, blood was drawn out it, her belly was slit open for a laparoscopy—and Lucinda couldn’t skip a fucking meeting!

  “That’s difficult,” I said after Rachel had told me all of it. “Sometimes I wonder whether Molly and I might be married now if she hadn’t miscarried. I mean, if not for some chromosomal abnormalities, my whole life might have turned out differently.”

  Rachel put her hand on my leg, and we rode in silence, two longtime friends and long-ago lovers, both of us motherless, both of us middle-aged, and wondering if we would ever be parents.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED AT MANNY’S, I was happy to see Alice and Freddy were joining us. A line of people came over to offer condolences—Sammy, the waiter; Jules and Leon, the countermen; Rhea, the woman who worked behind the cash register; and many of the other regular patrons—Bob Robinson, Ruby Herzon, Ted Krell. Jules and Leon pulled together four tables to accommodate our large party. Everyone, except for Alice, who always ordered the same lunch, sought refuge behind their menus.

  Seamus’s two children, Zipporah and Avi, were sitting directly across from me, next to Sarah’s children, Vanessa and Jason. I clowned around a little with Sarah’s kids, who knew me because I always stayed with Sarah during my visits to New Jersey. But neither of Seamus’s children would look in my direction, though seven-year-old Zipporah did lift her eyes for a microsecond, compelled, no doubt, by the same curiosity that did in Lot’s wife. I wondered what they had been told about me. Seamus was not a rigid zealot. His orthodoxy was a suburban, contemporary variety: He kept his beard closely trimmed and covered his head with a handsome, wide-brimmed fedora.

  The lunch crowd was enormous, and Sammy the only waiter, so we sat for an interminable amount of time after everyone had put their menus down.

  Finally, Alice said, “I’m glad to see you two boys are getting along now. I know how much it meant to Ruth before she died.”

  “Amen,” Freddy said quietly.

  Seamus and I both pulsed arterial red. We weren’t worthy of this pronouncement. The brotherly affection Ruth had witnessed during the last six months of her life was mainly an act for her sake. I still wanted Seamus to apologize for not sending me condolences when he had learned that Molly had miscarried and then when she left me, for placing orthodoxy before love and family, but of course he wouldn’t. Now that our mother was dead, I wondered what would keep us connected.

  SAMMY FNALLY CAME TO THE TABLE to take our orders. His hands had a chronic tremble and a heavy Star of David lay against his sallow chest. When he got to Alice, he said, “The usual?”

  “Sammy,” she replied, “is that a Jewish thing?”

  “Is what a Jewish thing?”

  “Asking questions you already know the answers to.”

  I was surprised to see that Seamus was smiling; perhaps he had caught this act before.

  Sammy considered the question for a couple of seconds. “If I do it,” he concluded, “then it has to be a Jewish thing.” And he went back to work.

  We all laughed, but my laughter suddenly turned into a high-pitched honk. Everyone looked at me as if I were possessed. Zipporah stared the longest. Her eyes gleamed with tiny triangles of light, which, to me, revealed a very avid nature. I winked at her and she immediately looked down.

  Sammy returned to the table, bringing complimentary bowls of mushroom-barley soup for everyone.

  “Thanks, Sammy,” Alice said. “You’re a good Jew.”

  He placed a bowl of soup in front of her, and replied, “I’d like to know who told you there were any bad ones.”

  Before eating their soup, Alice and Freddy both bowed their heads and prayed.

  After lunch, I asked Seamus if he would come back to the apartment with me.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “I want your advice about what to do with some of Mom’s things.”

  “Seth, I thought we already did this.”

  “Seamus, just go,” Deborah said.

  “Oh, all right,” Seamus replied, as if, as I suspected, he depended on Deborah to tell him the right things to do in life.

  Everyone embraced and kissed good-bye until later that evening, when we would all reconvene at Seamus’s house. Rachel told me that Sarah had offered to drive her back to her hotel and gave me an especially tight embrace. Then Seamus and I drove to the apartment.

  “I remember Rachel from your college graduation,” Seamus said. “She’s
a nice girl.”

  Apparently Seamus didn’t know that she was a lesbian.

  “Because she’s Jewish?” I asked.

  “Seth, don’t start in with me.”

  “All right, Reb Seamus.”

  “Don’t make fun of my name, either.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Seamus had avoided our old apartment since Ruth had gone into the hospital. I understood that it held memories that were just as bad for him as they were for me, but I also remembered bathing with Seamus in this apartment; I remembered the scar on his leg from a skin graft, the constellation of birthmarks across his back, the way his tush was pocked and puckered from injections our mother had given him for an early childhood illness. Recalling these details made me feel deeply intimate and connected with my brother, but I couldn’t imagine communicating such feelings to him.

  Inside, Seamus kept his coat on, apparently anxious to go as soon as possible. Despite his beard and hat, he looked exactly like Ruth, and seeing him standing in the living room I longed to hold my brother’s face in my hands. Since I had no hope of doing that either, I asked him if he knew Elijah.

  “Yes, we’re friends,” Seamus answered.

  “You’re friends? Really?”

  “What’s the matter, Seth? You don’t think it’s possible for me to have a black friend?”

  “No, but—”

  “But you think I’m closed-minded, don’t you?”

  “No, Seamus, I don’t think Mom brought us up to be closed-minded.”

  “That’s right,” he said emphatically, as if this were the one thing we could agree on.

  “Did Mom introduce you to Elijah?”

  “No. He’s a clerk at the post office. I see him every week when I mail my bills and buy my stamps.”

  “So he just introduced himself?”

  Seamus reddened. “He told me that he and Mom were friends and that I looked exactly like her.”

  “I knew it!”

  “Knew what?”

  “Seamus, don’t you think he and Mom were once in love?”

  “Seth,” he sighed, “stop it.”

  “Stop what?”