I wished I could feel the celebration everyone at the table was experiencing, but I couldn’t fake anything more than a smile. “Congratulations,” I mustered. I hated myself for this selfishness, but when the rest of the world went on living, getting married and having babies, it was affirmation that time was going on. And if time was going on, Steve was really dead. I kept hoping that if we all stood still long enough, we could get back to the place we were at last year. Of course, this is wholly inconsistent with my packing up Rachel and moving to Santa Bella, but that’s the thing about grief. The terms are fluid. One day I feel terrified of change, and the next day it was my escape hatch.
Sometimes, I enjoyed steady movement backward, if only in my mind. Almost every day, I played the game, “What were we doing a year ago today?” I took out my calendar and looked at the notes I jotted down. I smiled recalling the night we all went to see Wicked. Rachel’s school choral concert will always go down in my memory as one of our sweetest family nights. I sat next to Steve as we watched Rachel’s grade belt out nineties “oldies” that we listened to when we met in college. They followed the younger kids who did an absolutely scrumptious tribute to America. “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” were cute, but nothing charmed us more than the little boy with Coke bottle glasses standing in the front row thoroughly transfixed with the spotlights overhead. Although the later dates were filled with less activity and more doctor appointments, I still pored over those calendar dates with nostalgia. Steve was sick, but we could still chat. Much to his credit, we could still laugh. When we went for a second opinion, the oncologist said he gave Steve three months. The first gave him six. “I should’ve stopped while I was ahead,” he told the team of somber looking doctors. “Okay, no third opinions or I might find out I’m already dead.” They laughed uncomfortably, not sure how to respond to him. I knew how they felt. There were so many times Steve had to remind me that he was still the same person I married. We could still talk about things other than his lymphoma. Terminal illness or not, Steve still wanted to go over every detail of the World Series games with his buddies. He still wanted to hear about my new client, the Bagel Bastard, who lashed out at me when we had trouble securing a domain name for his bakery website. He still wanted to hear Rachel’s book reports, then tell her how the teacher would be crazy if she didn’t give her an A+.
The day after Thanksgiving, I got the third strike through the mailbox. I saw a bright red envelope with a familiar script and a yellow mail-forward sticker on it. Glancing at the return address, I saw that it was Maggie Jennings’ annual holiday letter. They seemed to arrive earlier and earlier every year. How I would miss Steve’s dramatic reading of her obnoxious, self-important “Christ-missives.” Some families read traditional classics like ’Twas the Night Before Christmas. Ours giggled uproariously at the Jennings’ family letter with Steve’s dead-on impression of Maggie’s southern accent.
Beloved Friends and Family,
As we reflect on the year that has graced us, we feel so blessed that all of you are part of our lives. Thank you for being part of the Jennings holiday experience. As our oldest friends (the gold ones!) know, our family chooses a theme every year and uses it as a guiding spiritual principle. Last year, the Jennings clan adopted the theme “Caring enough” and found that when we extended a hand to those who are less fortunate, we helped them reach greater heights. This year we all agreed that it was time to take our volunteer work to a new level. And boy have we done that in a big way! Jessica reminded us all that it was Jesus who said that if we give a man a fish, we feed him for a day, but if we teach him how to fish, we feed him for a lifetime. Since we are celebrating the birthday of Jesus, we decided to use his little motto for our theme for the upcoming year. This year, I hope you will join the Jennings family as we urge others to “Grab your pole!”
As you may know, Maggie is a gifted wreath-maker. Imagine the joy she’ll bring to the needy when she shows them how to make their very own festive door hangings! Through the community center, she will also teach poor mothers how to make hand-crafted velveteen stockings, with all the glitter and bells to show the world their unique sparkle.
Ed knows how important it is for young men to learn to golf so he’s set up a special clinic for recovering gang members. As a reward for the boys who stick with the three-week class, Ed will take them to our country club where they can see what the future can hold for them. Many of these boys believe that their only way into a club is working as a busboy, but we believe that anyone can rise to the top if they work hard and adopt a can-do attitude.
Jessica and Jimmy continue to let their heartlights shine wherever they go. Their loving spirit is both our joy and our gift. Jimmy got a very impressive score on his SATs and the headmaster at his school says he cannot wait to see him start applying for colleges. Jessica is a true gem who makes her parents proud. She continues to excel in school and her rigorous figure skating competitions.
While we are proud of Maggie’s record-breaking Junior League fundraiser, “Hats! Hats! Hats!” there’s an even bigger announcement we’d like to make about our charitable giving. Recently, a dear friend of ours passed away after a brave fight with lung cancer. He didn’t even smoke. While mourning, we talked about what we could really do to help Steve’s memory carry on. In this spirit, we began the Steve Emmet Foundation for Non-Smoking Related Lung Cancer.
What?! I dropped the letter. Picking it up again off the floor, I reread it. Not only did she misspell our last name, she botched Steve’s cause of death. He never had lung cancer.
I couldn’t read another word, though the letter went on for three single-spaced pages, including color photos of the family’s trips and events. I had to assume that Maggie was at her Hats! Hats! Hats! fundraiser in the photograph where she had the Eiffel Tower on her head, but one can never be sure with her.
I tore the letter with rage and threw it in the trash. Not feeling quite enough distance from it, I emptied my half-filled kitchen garbage, and counted the days until trash collection. Steve was not a close friend of Maggie Jennings. He could barely stand Ed, though he was always cordial to the senior partner. I absolutely loathed when people tried to sidle up to the deceased as if they were best buddies. It seems like such a cheap ploy for sympathy, a way to make the tragedy their own. It was sort of like people who have their pictures taken with celebrities, then hang them on the wall to show the world that they hang with Jay Leno. That I could understand. But this was like posing for a picture with a casket. Even worse was when people tried to one-up each other about how recently they’d been in touch with the newly deceased. They’d yelp, “What?! How could he be dead, I spoke with him just last night?” Obviously, he died after you spoke, imbecile, I thought, starting to get angry. It seemed that people were just showing off, as if they were saying, “Look how close I got to death without actually dying!” It’s the adult version of riding a bike without holding the handle bar.
Maggie’s letters had always been such a source of holiday amusement for Steve and me. Now, this woman, who hadn’t even been in touch with us since the funeral, was exploiting my family’s very real tragedy for her moronic Christmas letter.
After a long, fruitless discussion with my lawyer, I resolved that the best course of action was not litigation, but flight. I logged on to Expedia.com and typed in the word Paris, whispering it like Citizen Kane calling out to Rosebud. Paris was one of my favorite travel locations because it reminded me of my first trip overseas with my mother and sister. I was six, Kathy was ten and my parents were “taking a break” from each other while Daddy stayed with a friend in Florida. Many women would have seen this as a sad time in their lives, but Mother flourished in her newfound freedom. I didn’t understand the full context of our trip, only that our mother was uncharacteristically generous with her time and attention. On our first day in Paris, she bought Kathy and me matching Madeline pea coats with blue and red wool hats that had earflaps and a string tie.
“Ah, my little ones,” Barbara sighed as she left the store and spun around with shopping bags dangling from each arm. I remember thinking she looked like a kite as she flung her head back and began laughing. “It is absolutely impossible to be unhappy in Paris.”
If I ever needed to test her theory, it was now.
Chapter Six
On the plane to Paris, I felt torn about my decision to take Rachel away for the holidays. Admittedly, this was a bad time to second-guess myself, but as we flew above the Atlantic Ocean, I looked at Rachel sleeping and wondered if I was doing the right thing.
As we were packing, I thought about how lucky Rachel was to visit Paris at Christmastime, but when I was strapped in my seat, surrounded by the quiet breathing of slumbering passengers, I was forced to think about my choices. Was this a mother-daughter adventure, as I’d originally told myself? Or was it an escape, as Kathy and Mother suggested? Perhaps it could be both, I realized, simultaneously giggling at the sight of the snoozing supermodel drooling on her green cashmere sweater. People always talk about running away from problems as if it’s an entirely irresponsible thing to do. I’ve always found that a nice vacation from reality could provide much-needed perspective on life.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to face the memory of our last Christmas. Steve lay in a hospital bed in our family room with round-the-clock hospice care. He died seconds before the New Year, which made it all that much more surreal. Though he hadn’t been conscious for four days, it was still horrifying to hear the steady buzz of the monitor letting us know that Steve’s system had shut down completely. We had perhaps ten seconds of complete silence followed by the sound of horns blowing and people cheering twenty stories below. Steve would have appreciated the timing. I could imagine his spirit rising, his hands overhead, head nodding feigning modesty. A transparent ghost of Steve would laugh and say, “Thank you, thank you very much, folks. Life, you’ve been great.”
Death becomes real in waves. First, the sound of the monitor let me know he was gone. Yet less than a minute later, I opened my mouth to remind him of the time we were in New York for his birthday and the Yankees had just won the World Series. Taxi cabs honked their horns (more than usual) and people shouted cheers and hugged in the streets. Steve turned to me and said, “All this fuss over my birthday.”
When Steve failed to renew his Sports Illustrated subscription, a telemarketer called to ask why. I almost renewed just to keep the magazines coming.
Sometimes I’d run into friends Steve and I hadn’t seen in years and they’d propose that we all get together. “Oh,” I’d stammer to their expectant faces, “Steve passed away.” I’d catch another wave of reality as I watched their expressions fall and they scrambled for condolences. They’d promise to call anyway, but I knew they wouldn’t. They weren’t being callous, but they no longer had any idea how to deal with me, which was my own state of being most of the time.
Almost a year later, I’d still sometimes see a shirt that would look good on him before I had to remind myself that he was gone.
In Paris, Rachel and I pretended we were American movie stars hiding from the paparazzi as we hurried along the streets, covering our faces with bright colored wool scarves. As we battled the cold on our way to the Metro stations, we turned to each other and lamented the loss of our privacy. “Just because we’re famous doesn’t mean we don’t deserve a personal life,” I said, shaking my head as we spotted a Japanese tourist with a camera.
“Really, how would they like it if we were always trying to take photos of them?!” Rachel huffed convincingly. We giggled mischievously and trotted down the Metro steps as we made our way to our next destination.
Rachel was entranced by the paintings at the Picasso Museum. I watched her looking at the fragmented shapes and wondered what drew her in to them. Did she feel fractured and jagged like the cubist pieces? Was our life like a puzzle that didn’t quite fit? Finally, Rachel turned to me to speak. “Picasso sure liked goats,” she said.
“Seems like it,” I said.
“These are really weird,” she said.
“Weird good, or weird bad?” I pressed.
Rachel scrunched her face as if she were trying to decide. “Neither, just weird.”
“What else do you find weird, Rachel?” I asked, probing for her thoughts on life’s oddities, inconsistencies, and injustices.
“Um, I guess that no one in America speaks French, but everyone here seems to speak English. That’s kind of weird, too. Oh, and the fact that they have chicken sandwiches here, but not turkey; that’s kind of strange, don’t you think?”
That evening, as we dined together over candlelight at a cozy restaurant with a view of the city, Rachel told me she had the best Christmas ever. “You did?” I asked, hoping she’d elaborate.
“Yeah, totally,” Rachel replied as she ate her last bite of chocolate crepe.
“Me too,” I said.
Because we shared a hotel room, I had the chance to watch her sleep more than I did at home. I loved the smoothness of her fully relaxed face and wondered why I didn’t stop into her room more often and look at her after she’d drifted off. Jetting off to Paris together gave me the chance to rediscover Rachel in a way that I couldn’t—or hadn’t—at home. There was always homework or email or the telephone. Getting away let us escape mundane distractions that interrupt intimacy.
As we were pulling into our driveway from the airport, I saw Darcy standing on a ladder, removing the holiday lights from her house. I’d changed my mind about her. I enjoyed her frenetic energy when we chatted, which was now a few times a week. Whenever we’d see each other, we got going for at least an hour. She had a more raw honesty and vulnerability than many of the other mothers I’d met. While so many mothers spewed clichés about the wonder of motherhood, Darcy seemed unafraid to admit she found it to be a grind sometimes. I remember the exact moment I decided she was going to be a good friend. About a week after our first discussion about club soccer, I ran into Darcy at the gas station, fueling her trash-filled minivan. Veronica, her six-year-old, was screaming about Kelly not sharing her juice with her. Then Kelly whined that she didn’t want her little sister’s “gross, snotty mouth” on her drink because she didn’t want to catch her cold. Darcy rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Ya know how everyone says these years go by so fast?” Darcy asked me. Not waiting, she finished, “Today I feel like, meh, it could go faster.”
Darcy waved from her ladder and shouted, “Can you believe I have to do this? Chivalry is definitely dead.” I smiled and rolled down my window to ask if she needed help. “Welcome home. How was Paree? Come by and tell me everything. I’m alone again, naturally,” she said with a pained grin.
A while back, Darcy complained that her husband’s work hours were killing their marriage. He was a surgeon and worked more hours than anyone with a scalpel should. Still, she said, Ron always made time to be at Kelly’s soccer games. He even coached Veronica’s rec team so she’d be ready for club when she turned seven. It wasn’t that Ron worked too many hours to have an outside life. It’s just that he filled it with everything except Darcy. She once confessed that she fantasized about divorcing Ron and moving to the city to help her brother Ira run his textile business in L.A.’s Garment District. “I find the hustle and bustle of it energizing,” she told me. She would. I went there exactly once with my mother and Kathy on a mission for Garb and got vertigo. “When Ronnie graduates high school, I’d love to go back to work,” she said. “I was good at it. Damn good. Ira always tells me when I’m ready to leave this bum, he wants me back.”
I wondered why Darcy had to leave Ron in order to go back to work, but didn’t ask. Darcy was a smart woman. I didn’t need to point out to her that she could do both. Plus, who was I to talk? When Steve took his medical leave, I let my website design business completely fall by the wayside. The Bagel Bastard wasn’t unique in the toll he took on my reserves. Listening to small business owners talk about how they needed graphics that c
ommunicated their “corporate synergy” and “client-centeredness” seemed so trivial compared to what we were going through. As I listened to the manager of a podiatry office drone on about foot pronation, I dug my fingernails into my thumb just so I could experience a different type of pain. The last contract I had was for a yoga studio where the business manager kept telling me how sensitive they were to the individual needs of their clients. Hoping she would understand when I explained that I needed to cut short our forty-five-minute conversation in order to get Steve to chemotherapy, she replied, “Oh, right, that reminds me, we need to include info on our cancer rehabilitation program on the website. The classes are so healing.”
When Steve got sick, we were in the process of upgrading our life insurance policies and changing providers, so we hadn’t yet canceled our lesser one. He joked that having two life insurance policies would certainly cause him to go into remission. As time went on, he became more solemn in his gratitude of our timing. With two life insurance policies paying me upon his death, I would never have to work again. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine wanting to. I even gave up my labor of love, jewelry design. Necklaces and earrings seemed so irrelevant when our family was dissolving.
“Why don’t you come over to our place?” I shouted to Darcy through my car window. “I want to get unpacked and download our photos. Bring the kids, we’ll order pizza and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“I hate you for being able to eat pizza,” Darcy said. “How’s six o’clock?”
“Perfect,” I replied.
Many women hated me for being able to eat pizza, but the truth of the matter was that I had the sort of body that was only appreciated by hungry women and clothing designers. I never drew too many cat calls from construction sites, just a few unsolicited suggestions that I eat a burger.
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