by Ilana Masad
“Fuck you too, Mom,” Maggie tells the filing cabinet. She imagines Iris sitting at the small desk chair beside her, tapping on her phone in that slow, older-lady way, not listening because she’s dealing with work. “Fuck you very much.”
She stuffs the will back in the drawer and slams it so hard it bounces back.
Tomorrow morning is the funeral, she thinks, and Ariel’s pot sucks. She finds Gina’s number in her phone and calls. Calling isn’t a thing she and Gina do, much. It’s not a thing Maggie really does with anyone anymore. She’s pretty sure today was the first time she talked to Lucia on the phone, though they did have video-chat sex a couple months ago when Lucia was out of town for two weeks at an artist’s residency.
“Gee,” Maggie says. “Yeah, hi, I’m in town. Yeah. I know, it wasn’t planned. My mom died. No, not shitting you. Yeah, thanks. Look, I want to see you, for sure, but also I really need something to get through tomorrow. Are you still selling?”
AUGUST 23, 2017
Up, Daddy. You’ve got to get up.” Maggie pulls on Peter’s arms. It’s almost six thirty in the morning, and she’s already high. When the alarm rang, she rolled over and began toking, right there in her bedroom, which she’d never done before. Even in St. Louis, in her own apartment, she can’t smoke inside because someone got evicted for stinking up the place before. She usually goes out onto the porch of the four-apartment house, or if the weather is nice, climbs out her kitchen window onto the sloped roof. But Peter as Dad is MIA, leaving behind only Peter as new widower, so Maggie figures he’s not going to care. And if he does notice the smell and smoke, well, maybe it’ll snap him back from wherever he’s gone.
Peter responds to her tugs, agrees to get up from the chaise he slept on all night again. His face looks like it got left in the washing machine too long, the wrinkles unfamiliar, like they’ll need ironing out. Maggie steers him toward his bedroom and its en suite bathroom, but when they reach the doorway and he glimpses the large bed, the shared bureau, Iris’s vanity, the open walk-in-closet office, the filing cabinet with its half-open drawer and Iris’s will and those letters lying on the floor, he stops. He puts his hands up and holds on to the doorframe, pushing against it, refusing to go in. He shakes his head over and over like a child and Maggie almost laughs. An inappropriate response, weed-driven, surely, but she knows she wouldn’t be able to handle this role-reversal thing sober.
She brings him to the other bathroom. Tells him to wait. She gets the clothes he most hates from his closet—his monkey suits, he always called them, the business attire he had to wear to rare meetings. In recent years, as more and more of his calls and meetings take place through video chat, he’s only needed to wear the top half, the white shirt and black blazer. She hopes the pants still fit him. Back in the bathroom, she finds him leaning over the sink, staring at himself in the mirror. “Shower, dress, got it?” she says. He nods, and his eyes well up, and he mouths something that might be “I’m sorry,” but she isn’t sure and doesn’t stay to find out.
Ariel’s closed and locked door is hiding, mercifully, only Ariel himself. Last night, when Maggie came back from her brief meeting with Gina in a McDonald’s parking lot—where Gina hugged her tightly and refused payment for the weed and the two MDMA capsules she’d added in there in case Maggie needed to let loose sometime before she left California—she saw that Leona’s car was still parked on the street and had shuddered at the notion of needing to deal with Ariel’s crush first on this of all mornings. But it isn’t there now, thank goodness.
“Is she coming to the funeral?” Maggie asks when Ariel finally opens the door to her pounding. He looks exhausted, as if he hasn’t slept a wink, but also over the moon at having gotten lucky. “Also, get dressed, we have to leave in like an hour, and you’re driving.”
“No, she’s not. She said it was too triggering for her.” Maggie snorts and Ariel glares at her. “Fuck off, you’re not the only one who matters,” he tells her and slams the door. It’s like they’re back in his teenage years, his prime banging-things-around days. She gives his closed door the finger and goes to shower in her parents’ bathroom.
* * *
• • •
MAGGIE SITS IN the back. She wants Peter and Ariel to handle getting to the cemetery. It’s the least they can do, she figures. She closes her eyes for most of the silent ride, willing them to speak to each other, to her, to curse at other drivers, anything. Finally, when they arrive, she realizes the socializing is going to fall to her.
“Please, please, please just be nice,” she tells them when she opens the car door. She doesn’t wait for them to follow because she knows they will, but also she has no idea what she means with her directive. They don’t owe it to anyone to be nice, she knows this, and yet—and yet, don’t they? Isn’t there an obligation of sorts? A need to be present and aware? Socially acceptable grief, she thinks, is fucked up, but she feels like she needs to perform it anyway. Mostly, she wants this to go smoothly, so that they can get it over with and go home. She hasn’t bought her return-flight ticket yet, but she’s going to have to stay for the shiva, and after that, well, she isn’t entirely sure. She can’t think that far ahead, though, or she’ll panic.
They walk into the chapel, and a woman dressed in a dark blue skirt suit introduces herself as Dena Gershon. “I met both of you when you were very young,” she says, then turns to Peter, “and you I haven’t seen in years.” She hugs him and says something softly, touching her forehead to his in a way that looks far too intimate, but he nods at her and wipes tears away from his eyes. She takes them through how the ceremony will go, the brief service in the chapel and then the drive to the grave site, where a rabbi will say some words. Mrs. Gershon tells them that they can stand near the doors and greet people or sit in front and choose to disengage. “Both options are quite all right,” she stresses, but she gives Maggie a look, and when Ariel and Peter head to the front row of the chapel, heads bowed, she grabs Maggie’s hand and pleads, “You’ll come stand with me? It’s good to have someone from the family there.”
“Yeah, of course,” Maggie says, though she doesn’t want to at all. “But we’ve got a bit of time before people show up, right? Is there anywhere here I can get some coffee?”
Mrs. Gershon shows her a small back room with coffee and tea fixings, and Maggie gets herself a Styrofoam cupful and reluctantly brings two out for Peter and Ariel as well, though she thinks they could have figured this out themselves if they wanted. They both have brought books with them and are sitting in companionable silence in the front pew, reading, like this isn’t a funeral, like they’ve just gone out to a café or are sitting in their living room. Ariel is dressed in a black metal-band T-shirt and cargo pants, and seeing the outfit again makes her angrier. She’s pretty sure that he didn’t get the kind of talks she got from their parents about the difference between what they were okay with—“Wear whatever you want!”—and what the world was okay with—“Oh, you can’t wear that to a job interview/nice restaurant/the theater, though.” If he did, the lesson has clearly passed him by.
She smokes more outside before needing to greet people coming in. Her buzz is on, her heart palpitating a bit too fast with the addition of the caffeine, when she sees the first two cars come in one right after another and prepares herself next to Mrs. Gershon.
* * *
• • •
IT’S A WHIRLWIND. Most of the people who arrive knew Iris professionally or are old friends, and they almost all remember Maggie or claim to have heard a lot about her. Anya, whom Maggie is certain she has never met, says it’s good to see her again. The assistant’s narrow face is pinched, and she makes a valiant effort at smiling, but her eyes are red and she excuses herself with what sounds like a choked sob. Peter’s stepbrothers arrive, the first truly friendly faces because Maggie actually recognizes them, though they’re not close. But still, they have children around hers and Arie
l’s ages, none of whom could come but who Maggie is Facebook friends with, and so they have something to banter over, which allows her to relax for a moment.
But then they’re seated and she continues greeting the attendees, occasionally casting her eye toward Peter and Ariel. People keep walking up to them, touching them, trying to make a connection. Ariel kneels backward in his pew and talks to one of the stepuncles while the other sits next to Peter and wraps an arm around him, though Peter doesn’t appear to notice. The awkwardness of tangential grief is palpable in the room.
“Iris? No, of course, I’m so sorry.”
Maggie whips her head around. An old man with a walker is in front of her, his forehead broad and deeply grooved, his cheeks softly pockmarked. His suit jacket is as baggy as the pouches below his eyes, but those seem clear and his red tie is crisp. “Hello,” she says, shaking the man’s hand and giving the little half bow she’s been perfecting over the past twenty minutes, a kind of shorthand for thank-you-for-coming and yes-this-is-very-sad-and-shocking.
“You must be the daughter,” he says. His grip is warm, firm, but not trying to prove anything. “Iris’s hair looked like yours when she was young.”
This stops Maggie short. “It did?” Her mother hated it when Maggie buzzed her hair. She claimed to love Maggie’s tangle of curls.
“Yes, in the late nineties, she was very hip,” he says. Mrs. Gershon is greeting other people and casts a glance at Maggie, as if she should hurry this man along.
“Who are you?” she says instead, rather rudely.
He smiles, and she can see he was handsome once. Maybe he still is. “Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of me. I’m an old friend of your mother’s.” He looks into the chapel, then back at Maggie’s face. The room is fuller than she expected it would be. Some young people have shown up, looking uncomfortable and out of place. No one she knows; she hasn’t kept in touch with anyone who lives in the area except for Gina, who couldn’t make it—Anthony lives in Oregon now, predictably working on a pot farm; Kyle got weird in college and moved to Yogaville in Virginia, where he married a waifish blonde; and Morgan . . . well, Morgan and Maggie don’t talk anymore, not since Maggie made the mistake of sleeping with her one spring break when she was twenty and found out Morgan had been pining after her quietly for years and was hoping the sex meant they’d U-Haul. No, Maggie has no one here. The young folk must be Ariel’s friends from college and high school. “Are your father and brother here as well?” the man asks, startling her out of her resentful musings.
“Yes, they’re in front,” she says. And then adds, because this man seems nice and understanding, “But I don’t think they’re up for talking right now. It’s, you know, a hard day.” She feels flustered. No one else, she realizes, not even her step-uncles, not even the two sets of neighbors from their street, has really looked her in the eyes since she started this farce. They’ve looked down, away, past her into the chapel. But this man feels present. Maybe it’s his age, she thinks. Maybe the older you get, the more you can be present in the moment with people.
“Of course, I completely understand. It’s good of you to tell me, though. Kind. Maybe I’ll come by during the shiva, if the stuffy nurses let me out again.” He’s still standing there, and his genial expression changes. “She was a very special woman,” he says. “I’ll miss her.” Then he bends a little, as if returning her bow, and turns to walk slowly into one of the back pews.
* * *
• • •
THE SERVICE ISN’T long. There are some prayers, the shapes of Hebrew words surprising Maggie’s tongue. The body remembers, she thinks, the melodies rising through her, familiar from her childhood, from funerals of distant relatives, from her mother’s yearly insistence on saying the kaddish on Maggie’s grandparents’ yahrzeits. Ariel is holding Peter’s hand, though it doesn’t seem that Peter is reciprocating the pressure. Sitting on Peter’s other side, Maggie holds her fists tightly in her lap, pushing them down between her knees, denting the dress. She hates dresses. She hates dress-up.
Ariel and Peter are called on to be pallbearers, but Maggie isn’t. Four men rise from the crowd, volunteering to help carry the casket, but Maggie refuses this sexism. Not now. Not here. Come on, she thinks. She stands behind Ariel and stares down one of the men. He walks back, hands held in front of him like she’s a rabid dog. She, Ariel, Peter, his stepbrothers and a stranger to her lift her mother’s casket together. It’s heavy, even with six of them, and she feels her shoulder muscle strain as they shuffle out together to the hearse that will drive to the burial site. The pain is good, though. It makes her feel like she’s doing something, even if inconsequential. She wishes her brain would shut up, void itself of all current thought, but that’s not going to happen, so she tries to accept the strange floating thoughts like she does when she’s smoked too much and is paranoid. Then she remembers she probably has, probably is.
After the casket is deposited in the hearse, they climb into Peter’s car again with Ariel at the wheel and drive at a snail’s pace through the winding paths of the cemetery. Maggie finds it terribly ugly here. Almost all the headstones are nestled flat into the earth, making it seem like some Swiss countryside, like Julie Andrews will run up from beyond the horizon and burst into song at any moment. Cemeteries have never bothered Maggie, really, but she prefers the ornate Catholic style, the run-down churchyard look. This place, clean-shaven, seems polite and apologetic about the decomposing bodies under the earth.
When they arrive at the grave site with its mound of freshly turned dirt smelling like rain and gardening, things begin to go awry. Peter refuses to get out of the car. He’s mumbling into his hands, “No, no, no, I can’t, no, Iris, no,” and Maggie looks at Ariel with alarm, sees the blood has drained from his cheeks, his eyes fixed on Peter’s helplessness. Neither of them have ever seen their father this way, and while he’s been bad the last couple of days, this despair, the ache in his voice, is worse than anything Maggie has ever heard.
No, she realizes moments later, it’s not. Peter follows Maggie and Ariel out of the car eventually, accepts the shovel from the rabbi, picks up the first bit of dirt, and lets it go over the hole the casket has been lowered into. As the earth hits the wood and makes a terrible, muffled thump, Peter lets out a cry that is more animal than human, and that—that is the worst thing Maggie has ever heard. It’s then that she begins to cry and doesn’t stop until halfway through the ride home when Ariel curses loudly at another driver in exactly the same way that Iris once did, which is when Maggie’s sobs turn into a blissfully brief bout of hysterical laughter.
* * *
• • •
“WHAT’S THE PLAN for this shiva thing?” Ariel asks as he pulls into their driveway. “I mean, do we have to do anything?”
Maggie shrugs and gets out of the car. She’s empty, depleted from crying, from the laughter, from the silence that reigned again after it was over. “I think we just leave the door unlocked and hang out and people come if they come.”
“But one of us has got to always be around then, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” Maggie isn’t thrilled about this either but it appears that they don’t have much of a choice. The idea of a shiva makes sense to her, in theory, because mourning rituals are important, a conviction that has only grown from keeping up with the news in the past few years; every time there’s some kind of mass shooting or hate crime, people gather to mourn, after all. When she was a junior in college, a kid named Rudy from one of her classes died by suicide, jumping off Eads Bridge; Maggie hadn’t known him well, but she and her friend Allison and Allison’s boyfriend at the time all went to the candlelight vigil that Rudy’s friends organized on campus. Even the professor who taught the class Maggie shared with Rudy was there, wearing a white salwar kameez. Maggie had felt something like virtue then, or self-satisfaction, for attend
ing and sharing a space of grief with others. Now she wants nothing of the sort, no matter how much sense it makes. She sighs. “I mean, I guess we can like put a sign on the door or something if we’re out?”
“Gone grieving,” Ariel says, and they both smile at the lame joke. Peter shuffles after them into the house, saying nothing.
People start showing up soon. They bring Swiss rolls and croissants and casseroles and hummus and bottles of juice. Maggie helps lay these out on the kitchen island, finds paper plates and plastic cups in the bowels of a cupboard, lugs the big trash can from its corner into a more prominent position so that people throw things away properly. She doesn’t absorb much of what is said to her. Ariel and Peter sit in the living room on separate couches, and people make conversation with them, though Peter seems mostly silent and those sitting around him turn uncomfortably to talk to one another instead. They ask Maggie if he’s okay, if she’s okay, if Ariel’s okay, as if there’s any possible answer to this question. There isn’t. She says yes, she says no, she says they will be, anything but the real answer, which is that she has no fucking clue.
In the late afternoon, after all the other first day’s visitors have left, Mrs. Gershon helps clean up, washes the mugs that were used for the several pots of coffee Maggie brewed, covers dishes in cling wrap and puts them in the fridge, dumps out the flattening bottles of soda and puts the empties in the bin for recycling. Before she leaves, she cups Maggie’s face firmly in her palms and tells her, “Breathe, mamaleh. Breathe and eat and sleep and you will get through this.”
The house is quiet again and Maggie feels like she’s run a marathon. Peter is asleep on the couch in the living room and Ariel emerges from the bathroom freshly showered—his second in one day, an anomaly—looking lost. “What now?” he asks her.