We sat for lunch at Pampano, a Mexican restaurant on East Forty-ninth Street where my mother and I had celebrated Father’s Day a couple of years after his death. I stared at the smoked swordfish dip and ignored everyone’s pleas to eat. My stomach had shut down; the prospect of eating made me feel guilty for some reason. I also didn’t want a drop of alcohol, as I was afraid altering my state would somehow compound my grief. Monika, a friend of mine from the Redeye Grill, joined us mid-meal; Rita and Angie were scheduled to fly in that evening. Everyone at the table eyed me warily, and I realized that, unlike when my father died, I was mourning alone. I selfishly wished Arline had stayed. But more than that, I wished my mother was sitting in the empty seat at the head of the table—she’d tell everyone to leave me alone and let me sulk. No one knew what I needed like she did.
Afterward we drove to my apartment so I could get some clothes, and as I peered out the window the familiar streets of my city suddenly seemed foreign to me. The sensation, exacerbated by the cruelly vivid sunlight, was akin to an acid trip: I was seeing everything as if for the first time, through eyes that had never before been used. As Ji Young looked for parking I hopped out and went upstairs by myself. The apartment was just as I had left it on Friday as I’d rushed off to work, but it seemed much quieter than I remembered. The air had been sucked from the room. She was gone—from here, too. Her energy had been zapped right out of my life. I felt her absence from my kitchen, my living room, my bathroom, and my bedroom. I’d never be able to escape the void her death had created. I rested my elbows on the kitchen counter and put my head in my hands and wept.
I wept all the way to my bedroom, where I began packing fresh underwear and socks. As I folded a few shirts on my bed I remembered some of Eleanor’s quirks, which made me laugh through my sobs. Like her habit of bringing her gym bag full of jewelry to my apartment. I suddenly remembered her telling me sometime before Christmas that she’d hidden her jewelry somewhere. Up until last Friday, in fact, she’d reminded me at least half a dozen times that she had stored everything in my closet. Which I’d found strange, because why would she do this even after her roommate moved out? In a flash everything she nagged me about that I’d shrugged off came to the fore: “Jenny,” she’d been saying for the last month, “don’t forget—my jewelry is in your closet. Don’t forget.”
“Okay, okay, I got it,” I’d said dismissively, clueless as to why she was so adamant about it.
Like lightning I ripped open my closet doors and tossed shoeboxes aside until I spotted the red gym bag. The last time she’d come to my apartment was the night of the mini-stroke—an unexpected trip, which meant she must have put it in my closet long before that. I hurled it onto my bed and unzipped it, and it was all there waiting for me in little black boxes: the imperial topaz, the platinum and diamonds, my grandmother’s cocktail ring. I cried harder as I opened each box, embracing the meaningless stones as if they were pieces of her, until I got to the last one, a nondescript white box. I snapped it open and gasped: There, on her long gold chain, was my father’s ring—the ring she never took off, the ring she kept around her neck as a symbol of her boundless grief. When had she stopped wearing it? She didn’t tell me she had, which was strange. It seems like a decision she would have made, to take off my father’s ring, and one she definitely would have shared with me. That ring was a piece of my father that she proudly showed the world—she wanted people to know her husband had existed, and that she still loved him even though he was gone, just as I now wore a piece of her around my neck because I wanted her to be more than just a memory. For me, there was only one answer.
“She knew,” I repeated to myself, over and over, through my tears. “She knew. She knew. She knew.”
WE MADE OUR WAY back to Staten Island plus one: Monika had decided to follow our little grieving party across the Verrazano. I wasn’t sure what to do once we got there except mope and wait for Rita and Angie to join us. But as the night wore on I noticed Sarah pulling Tina and Ji Young aside and murmuring things I couldn’t hear. Ji Young later told me that Sarah was coordinating the cremation, the sale of some of my mother’s furniture, and the transport to my apartment of the things of my mother’s that I wanted to keep. Sarah had a mission: to pack me up as soon as possible and get me the hell out of Staten Island. It was a good plan—my mother didn’t own the apartment, so I didn’t need to sell it—and if left to my own devices I might have wound up sprawled among the detritus, examining every slip of paper until four months had passed and the city marshal was banging down the door. I would have to go through dishes, papers, dirty laundry that my mother had let pile up, pots, pans, patio furniture, a closet full of clothes that still included a few items of my father’s, and my old bedroom, the same room my mother had begged me for five years to empty so she could rent it out. She’d laugh if she knew it took something as monumental as her dying to finally get my ass in gear.
My mother couldn’t bear to part with my father’s clothing for a year after he died, but under Sarah’s direction I zipped through my mother’s closet in an hour, placing items to be donated in big black trash bags that I’d drive to the Goodwill the following week. I kept a lot less than I thought I would, coming away with one suitcase full of clothes that I saved mostly for sentimental value, as my mother’s waist had been the size of my thigh. Shedding her 1980s finery—the fruit of all those shopping sprees—wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Monika went through my mother’s drawers and held up socks, panties, old makeup: “Keep or toss?” she’d ask, her strong, capable hands emptying and sorting and stacking so fast my head was spinning. Sarah placed ads in the Staten Island Advance for an open house to take place that weekend, at which we’d sell the treadmill my mother had bought and never used, various kitchenware, the patio furniture, even my childhood board games. I was adamant about keeping the baker’s rack, as acquiring one had been a dream of hers, and the mahogany dining room table, which could fit in my living room with a little tinkering. Tina shoved a box of my father’s videocassettes under my nose and made me choose. There were hundreds of them, all movies taped off the television in the 1980s.
“Jenny, do you really need a fifteen-year-old copy of The China Syndrome?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Jen-ny,” she said, rolling her eyes and sounding very much like my mother, “do you really need Flashdance? Foul Play?”
“Yes!”
“Ooh, look at this,” Tina said, unscathed. “‘Eleanor’s Childhood Movies.’ You want this, right?” I’d seen those movies only once before, when Arline had them transferred to VHS a few years ago: a collection of images of my mother’s family from the thirties and forties, recorded on her father’s movie camera. Since the medium was fairly new, the tape consisted mainly of random clusters of aunts and uncles huddled together and waving, a family portrait come to life. I’d forgotten it existed. The sketchy bits I remembered featured my mother, aged four or five, sitting on the grass at summer camp with her nose shoved in a book, oblivious, while rambunctious children gallivanted around her. I grabbed the tape from Tina. God only knew when I’d gather up the courage to watch it.
Angie, who arrived on Friday morning, helped me go through the laundry basket full of papers and bills that had accumulated, because my mother’s idea of dealing with financial obligation meant randomly tossing bills onto her bedroom floor until the collection agencies started calling. Rita, who pulled up in a Town Car on Thursday night, stayed in her nightgown for the entire weekend and only left my mother’s bedroom to pay for the cremation and eat pretzels.
“Rita, put some clothes on!” Monika barked in her rigid Polish accent. “Your ass is hanging out!”
Rita, massaged into submission by her daily cocktail of Xanax and Percocet, obeyed and sheepishly headed back to the bedroom. Which was a relief—before Rita arrived I’d hidden my mother’s Percocet, Xanax, Ambien, and whatever else was small, round, and white in the trunk of my mother’s car, para
noid that Rita would have a narcotic field day on my mother’s tab. I knew exactly how my mother would want me to deal with Rita and acted accordingly, as if she was issuing instructions from the hereafter. After Sunday, the day we made the big move, Rita would lounge on my futon—hemmed in by boxes and hastily assembled furniture and wearing the same nightgown and eating the same pretzels—for a week.
“Rita,” I’d ask her one day while we watched my mother’s TV, newly installed in my living room, “did anything ever happen between you and my father?” It was random and impulsive and it left my mouth before I could think twice about it, just as it had when I’d asked my mother the same thing.
“No,” she’d say, shaking her head, adding: “I wish.”
I was taken aback by the way she volunteered that last part—admitting to a lesser degree of guilt is the hallmark of the guilty—and figured she had something to hide, but perhaps that “something” was all the cocaine she and my father sold, which she probably figured I didn’t know about. I filed the conversation away, my mind too muddled to pursue any line of questioning to its terminus.
Going from an empty apartment to an apartment suddenly filled with worker ants boxing up a precious part of my life was a shock, but if someone hadn’t directed me toward a firm goal, grief and pity would have gotten the better of me. I was determined to return to school in ten days—my mother didn’t want me to sacrifice any part of my life, that’s what she had said—and ripping off the past like a Band-Aid was probably the best approach. Though they could never substitute for my mother’s company, having this motley bunch around me was therapeutic, and before I knew it the mop-up operation had morphed into something else entirely: We were sitting shiva, albeit in our own nonreligious way. I wished she could have seen just how alone I wasn’t—in addition to our core group of mourners, Jeff, who had popped in and out of my life since my father’s illness, stopped by on Saturday to sample the seemingly endless supply of Italian pastries.
But my shiva couldn’t last forever, and Sarah, Ji Young, Monika, Tina, Angie, and Jeff couldn’t hold my hand through everything. Like during the last week of January, when I had to cross the Verrazano alone to clean out the scattered bits we hadn’t had time to pack into the U-Haul. I took everything that wasn’t broken or worn out, incorporating even my mother’s everyday items into my life: towels, shower caddy and shampoos, bottles of Windex and Tide. My gang couldn’t be there when I cleaned under the bed one last time and found a folder containing the small calendars my father had kept on the road when he was painting. I gasped when I saw that each day in calendar years 1996, 1997, and 1998 was marked with either “Work” or “Rain,” including my birthday. I’d forgotten how meticulously he’d recorded everything having to do with his business, and I suddenly missed that quality of his very much. I was alone when I located my father’s gun, an unlicensed .22 he kept for “protection,” which I promptly unloaded and hid in my closet as soon as I got home. And no one was with me when I finally cleaned out my old bedroom, distilling my entire childhood into two or three boxes.
I remember that it was a Saturday and I’d grown tired and sad from packing in utter silence and I went into my mother’s bedroom and lay down on her mattress, which had been stripped bare. The canary sun began to set, and as the rays hit my face through the bare window they forced my eyes closed. I rested my chin on the mattress, and it was quiet. Too quiet. And that is when I felt the void most acutely: a dull pain, located in my chest, just behind my heart. It was such an empty ache, an utter abyss, like someone or something had gouged out my soul. I remembered how my father had moved us onto Merle Place six years earlier and wondered if he’d be surprised to see how I’d finally vacated it. Would he feel sorry for me? A thought raced through my mind and repeated over and over again:
I am the only one left. I am the only one left. I am the only one left.
For a long while after that I felt I was still in that room, on that bare mattress, where my parents had slept and made love and suffered chemo fevers. And that afternoon, as my twilight sleep gave way to dreams under the setting sun, I thought that maybe a part of me would always be in that room, no matter how old I got, because that was the room in which I’d finally lost them for good.
But I wasn’t alone, thankfully, for the moment that transcended all the packing and the moving and the hospital directives and the takeout Chinese food—the moment when I found my mother’s will. There were two of them, actually, and I discovered them as I was erasing the hard drive on her computer before I sold it. They weren’t notarized, and I printed them out and resumed my place on the floor, where I’d been sorting all the files my mother kept under the bed—birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, all of my report cards from every grade, teaching credentials, old checkbooks, both my parents’ lung X-rays, programs from all my plays, and the letter dated 1988 informing my father that he’d been released from his parole. My parents’ rich past, reduced to a stack of papers.
The first will was dated June 10, 2003, and it was brief: a few paragraphs leaving everything to me, including any potential future earnings, because even though “I have no property and/or money nor insurance, one never knows what this life could bring.” She hoped, if this mystery wealth ever materialized, that “my daughter will put her business affairs in good hands, wise hands, as I wish with all my heart I could have made her financially secure.” She left directions for the dissemination of her ashes: a third to go to Laguna Beach, where I’d scattered some of my father’s ashes in 2004; a third to be sprinkled on the Mascia family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery, where she’d scattered a third of my father’s ashes in 2002; and the other third “commingled with my husband’s and scattered in any part of Central Park my daughter deems fit.” That explained why she’d kept a third of my father’s ashes in a blue and white ceramic jar in the linen closet. The way she ended it thickened my throat into a lump:
I do not want a memorial service. I just want to go and I hope there is a place where we three can sometime meet again, although I know in my heart it is not to be.
I love my daughter with all my heart. She is my heart. She is the best.
But it was nothing compared to the second will, also not notarized, and twice as long. It was dated the day before she’d had the mole on her nose removed, right before her cancer diagnosis. Reading it aloud to Sarah and Angie and Tina on the living room floor, I know I didn’t cry—at first I chuckled at my mother’s obsession with credit cards and jewelry hocking, not knowing what awaited me at the end, and maybe even then I simply whimpered, too numb to do much else. But later, when the numbness wore off, the pull of these words, her final act of grace, did their work, and I was forever changed.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “Check this out.” I began to read:
I, Eleanor Mascia, being of sound mind, hereby declare this to be my last will and my wishes for the disposal of my body and belongings.
I will type this in the form of a letter to my daughter.
Dear Jen,
Have me cremated. Call Social Security and ask how much they will contribute toward a funeral. I think it’s $250 dollars. Use a credit card of mine for the rest or hock some of my jewelry.
I don’t want to wait three or more years to be with Daddy. My last wish is to be with him, floating around the Pacific Rim or wherever, and I want you to scatter my ashes on the beach where you scattered Daddy’s. Use the debit card to get any money out of my bank account. Take out everything. Wait until the third of the month and take out my Social Security check. Don’t worry—they won’t find out, and if they do, screw them.
At this we all laughed.
Try to hold onto the apartment and sublet it for $1200 a month. Add $60 or more for the parking spot. Take anything you want from the apartment—sell it or keep it. If you want to move to the apartment, tell them I am living here and that you stay with me when I don’t feel well.
“Like Weekend at Bernie’s,” I remarked. “So
morbid!” I continued reading:
I have some new Cuisinart pots I haven’t used—take them. Take the dining room set, TVs, treadmill—all the dishes in the buffet. Put into storage whatever you don’t want.
I looked over at Sarah—everything my mother had instructed was already in motion or completed. I felt a deep sense of pride that I’d been one step ahead of her all week without even knowing it.
Take all the credit cards and max them out. Try to have Ji Young do it, if she will, because they will think the cards are stolen. Buy her a couple of things in return, or talk to Arline. She has a larcenous streak, like me, I think.
“I can’t wait to read this to Ji Young,” I said, laughing. “My mother sold her down the river for a fifty-five-hundred-dollar line of credit.” I read on:
Buy stuff you can sell for the most part—jewelry, etc. If you want cash advances I think you need a pin number. If I’m okay after this surgery I will get them. The Fleet, Bank One and Discover Card have quite a bit of money left on them. Call customer service, they have automated balances: S.S.# 130-26-XXXX, mother’s maiden name is Funt.
“She wanted me to clean her out!” I said, shaking my head. I had already emptied her checking account, but I didn’t have it in me to perpetrate fraud. I silently read ahead to the final paragraph and my breath caught in my throat. “Oh, my god,” I said, and my hand started shaking. Sarah came up behind me and followed over my shoulder as I read the last part aloud:
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers Page 32