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The Peace Process
A Novella and Stories
Bruce Jay Friedman
For Molly and Mike, Peggy and Josh, Kathy and Drew, and Ann and Kipp
Contents
The Big Sister
The Storyteller
And Where She Stops …
Any Number of Little Old Ladies
The Movie Buff
A Fan Is a Fan
The Friendship
Orange Shoes
The Choice
Nightgown
The Strainer
The Savior
The Impulse
The Peace Process: A Novella
A Biography of Bruce Jay Friedman
The Big Sister
When my sister passed away at age eighty-five, I felt a responsibility to do some grieving, and I tried, but I did not get very far. She had been preparing to die for at least twenty years, sending me—and my wife at the time—beads and necklaces and throw rugs and old salad bowls that she no longer needed. I have a sheaf of papers telling me who to contact and what to do when “The Day” came. But when one of her daughters made the call from New Jersey, I didn’t bother to take out the sheaf, since most of those mentioned in it—the lawyers, friends, and neighbors—were long gone themselves.
I didn’t feel much of anything when I got the call. I thought a wave of grief would come over me at some unexpected time—while I was watching a movie, or on line at Whole Foods—but that never happened. It was as if I’d heard there was a coal strike in West Virginia. Losing her didn’t seem to have anything to do with me, which is weird since Holly was my only sibling and, except for me, the last of our little family in the Bronx to go. Did I love her? Of course I loved her. She was my sister, for God’s sakes. But would I give up my life for her? My last dime? What about a kidney? If she needed one, would I come through for her? Mercifully, I wasn’t put to the test.
When I was born, Holly was eight years old. I’m not sure she welcomed my arrival. She insisted on naming me “Bunny.” Fortunately, my parents intervened and there was a compromise. For seventeen years, I was known as “Buddy,” which was a comfortable fit. When I went off to college, I became the more grown-up “George.” There is a sepia photograph somewhere of Holly wheeling me about with pride, which seems feigned. She wasn’t very nice to me. I recall her being put in charge of preparing dinner for me one night, when my parents went off to the theatre. She made a picture-perfect omelet, let it cool a bit, and then threw it in my face and ran off crying. I felt awful—for her, not for me. She had a large collection of picture postcards from around the world. A few had been sent to her. I don’t know how she’d gotten the others. After a few years, she became tired of the collection. I asked if I could have it. She said, “Of course not,” and emptied it in the garbage. Oh, how that stung.
Though she could be cruel to me, there were times when she was protective. She learned—not from me—that a neighborhood bully had been making my life miserable. I have an image of her flying down the street to confront the boy, who was almost a man, and then a horrible flurry on the pavement—my sister in a short plaid skirt, white sneakers and bobby sox, her strong legs exposed, a flash of white panties for all the world to see. Awful for me. What if she’d been hurt? Punched in the white panties?
My eyesight wasn’t good. God knows what happened on the pavement. But she got to her feet, breathing heavily. Her knees were skinned, but otherwise she was unruffled. I thanked her. She walked back to our building, a step ahead of me, muttering, “I should have killed the sonofabitch.”
We lived in, or were crammed into, a small one-bedroom apartment in the East Bronx. My father, a bathrobe salesman, and my mother, who drank, shared the bedroom. Holly and I slept on cots in the living room, which were folded up and put out of sight in the daytime hours. My sister was nice-looking. Not a beauty. Not homely. Nice-looking. But she had a figure that wouldn’t quit. This made the atmosphere, toward evening, close to maddening. My father read his books about great world leaders. My mother drank and complained bitterly about various injustices. And my sister, in her teens, flitted about the apartment in a little petticoat, while I gnashed my teeth and pretended not to notice her. On several occasions my father “caught me” looking at Holly and complained to my mother.
“What is the boy doing?” he said, exasperated.
“I never worried about that,” my mother answered simply, and returned to her grievances.
The atmosphere became even more suffocating when Holly began to date in her late teens. I stayed up half the night with a major erection, hoping to catch a glimpse of her changing into her pajamas. She was discreet about this, getting undressed and preparing for bed in the bathroom, and I never quite succeeded. Only once could I claim a small victory. Long after midnight, with weary eyes, I saw her examining her breasts in what was called the “foyer.” They hung a bit lower than the way I’d imagined them. Still, I was amazed that I wasn’t struck blind. She was attending to a blemish on one breast, which brought down the experience a bit.
One night she returned from her date and stood above my cot, staring at me in silence while I tried to hide my erection. What could she have been thinking? What would have happened if, just once, she touched my flaming penis? Or worse (?), took it in her mouth. Would the stars have shifted in their alignment? Would I have had to be institutionalized? I might have gone on to have the satisfying sex life that I was never quite able to manage.
My bedside torture ended when Holly, at seventeen, met Steve, a garage mechanic, and quickly became engaged. Somehow it wasn’t as much fun stealing glimpses of Holly in her underwear once she was properly accounted for. Steve was a bit overweight, but he was a handsome man with a winning smile. And my father assured my mother and me that people in his line of work made “good money.” Still, his occupation troubled me. All that time on his back, tinkering with the underbelly of cars. And all that grease. Weren’t people like Steve called “grease monkeys”? Why couldn’t my sister have gotten engaged to a pre-med student? Or an engineer? I was a snobbish little sonofabitch. Still am.
Looking back, I didn’t want her taken away from me at all.
Steve got drafted soon after the engagement and spent the next five years overseas, repairing army vehicles in a London motor pool. He wrote to Holly every single day. I came home from school one afternoon and caught my mother reading from a packet of Steve’s letters. (In the small apartment we were always catching each other doing things.) I got angry, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. She quickly stuffed the letters back into a desk drawer, acting as if she had taken them out by accident.
While Steve was away, Holly dated a whole flock of servicemen. Army, coast guard, you name it. It seemed to be in a spirit of patriotism, her way of helping the war effort. She was “doing her bit.” Her visitors came across as a decent bunch except for a couple of dark, wiry sailors who were in a hurry to get to Holly. Or maybe get at her. When I opened the front door, they slipped past me and didn’t even bother to say hello. There was a lot of shuffling in the bathroom and I heard my sister say, “You promised.”
For the most part Holly dated enlisted men, but there was one captain. He looked wonderful in his uniform and I was impressed by his rank. Why couldn’t Holly have gotten engaged to an officer instead of a lowly PFC grease monkey? This particular fellow, I had to admit, didn’t have much per
sonality. He seemed glum and dispirited. He might as well have had a note pinned to his forehead saying: “I am now and will always be a boring person.” But he was a captain.
I went off to college in Montana when I was seventeen and I lost touch with Holly, not that we were ever that close. Now and then she sent me letters, and they were unlike any I’d ever read. The handwriting itself was about half an inch away from calligraphy. And there were the perfectly formed sentences. No matter how many clauses she used, she never got lost, and brought all the clauses home to roost, so to speak. It was like having Elizabeth Bowen for a sister. Elizabeth Bowen with a great body. And that was the sister I wanted. The sister in those letters. Let’s face it. If Holly weren’t my sister, and all I knew about her was the letters, I would have been insanely in love with her. Forget the body. All it takes for me is a bunch of letters. One characteristic. That’s my nature. So it was probably a good thing that she was my sister.
After college, I did a short stint as a grunt in Korea. I didn’t see much combat, although I may have shot one guy, I’m not sure. There was a lot of fog that day. And that’s when I got some of Holly’s best letters. When I was freezing my ass off in Pyongyang. I heard—from my mother—that when Steve came home after the war, Holly got frightened and ran off to hide in a girlfriend’s family cabin in the Berkshires. And who could blame her. She and Steve hadn’t seen each other in five years. Steve, bless him, shot right off to the Berkshires to track her down. He was never a favorite of mine, but I can say “bless him” now, because I know about the terrific sixty years they had together. Terrific to a point, that is. They got married and bought a house in New Jersey, on the GI Bill. And that’s where they remained, Holly safe and secure, a bridge away from a city that would have recognized who the real Holly was and all that she had going for her. A city where she could have made something of herself. Would you believe that she never went to college? (Strictly speaking, I think she put in half a semester at Hunter, and then packed it in.) I vaguely remember something about typing school. Typing, for God’s sakes. I don’t want to go too far with this elitist attitude. That’s not me, and I’m aware that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with typing. But to have it as a goal? Aspiring to be a wonderful typist? My sister? I don’t think so.
In the later years, I always told people that Holly should have been the writer in the family. The truth is, she was good, but she wasn’t that good. All right, I’ll say it. I don’t think she was as good as I was. Still, she could have been a travel writer or done something with health and beauty, those areas that I don’t care that much about, although obviously lots of people do. Or maybe she could have been some kind of editor. Could she have written a novel? I’m not the one to say.
After the service, I came home, moved back in with my parents, and got married to a woman I met on the subway—just to get out of the house. She wanted to get out of the house too, so we had that in common. My mother saw that the marriage was going nowhere. She said that if I left Gretchen and ran off to live in Paris she would pay all my expenses. (And this is the mother who was accused of smothering me.) I often wonder what would have happened if I had accepted her offer. Knowing me, I probably would have wound up living with a girl who wanted to get out of a French house.
I’d gotten interested in theatre in Korea and knocked off an absurdist play that I staged for the troops up at the DMZ line. The GIs seemed puzzled by the absurdist nature of the play, but not the Koreans. They ate it up, hooting and cackling and throwing popcorn at one another, right through to the final curtain. Without realizing it, I must have tapped into some absurdist strain in their culture. It was sheer luck, but never mind, I’ll take it.
When I got back to the States, I joined a little theatre group on Hester Street, fleshed out the play, and before I knew it, I had an off-Broadway hit. One critic said he saw some Edward Albee in me; if I would just rein in the absurdist stuff a tad he’d see a lot more. He worked for a weekly in Brooklyn, but still.
I hadn’t seen much of my sister at the time. One day, on an impulse, I decided to rent a limo and head out to New Jersey for Steve’s fiftieth. I’d gotten a film option for the play, so was feeling flush. And maybe I just wanted to show off a little with the limo. It was an oversized stretch, the kind movie stars hire. The minute I got out there I saw it was a mistake. It stuck way out of the garage driveway and was completely out of sync with Holly’s place and all the other modest little split-levels down the street. Holly had invited some neighbors over for the occasion. She introduced me by saying, “This is my gorgeous brother,” which I could have done without. I had a couple of drinks and made another mistake by saying to Steve: “If you ever need anything, let me know.” He didn’t appreciate that. “Tell me if you ever need anything,” he said. My tribute to him at the end of the party only made things worse. “What else could you possibly want in a brother-in-law?” I said, holding him tight against me. He’s shorter than I am, so he didn’t appreciate being held that way. One of my nieces approached me, the one with the MS, which fortunately seemed to be under control. “Are you sure you want to be with everyday people like us?” she wondered.
Don’t think I didn’t get the message and go off in the fucking stretch with a hole in my heart.
My second play was absurdist, but not quite as absurdist as the first one. Maybe that was the problem. I probably should have gone full-out absurdist. It didn’t do that well. Actually, I got killed. (There were such high expectations.) I decided to get out of town for a while and lick my wounds. I ended up in Las Vegas, where I made a move into the producing end, putting together tributes to luminaries such as George Burns and Perry Como that I staged at the small hotels. There was plenty of money in the pipeline. I stayed out there for a while, but there’s only so much glitter you can take so I decided to move back to Manhattan, my spiritual home. Obviously there’s glitter in Manhattan, but it’s authentic glitter, not the superficial kind you get in Vegas.
We lost our parents, within the same week, which brought Holly and me a little closer. My nieces were away at school, so Holly went up to the Bronx and took care of everything—I’ll give her that—the cremations, the disposition of their meager possessions. At least, I thought they were meager. I know my mother had jewelry that must have been worth something. It crossed my mind that maybe Holly scooped it up—and whatever else that was lying around up there, but I never questioned her about it. If it was helpful to her, let her go crazy with it. (She did throw me my father’s ring, so I guess we’re even.)
With my parents gone, Holly felt a need to take over the mothering role—“Are you sure you’re dressed for the weather? And you’re eating properly?” This of course irritated me. I had a quick second marriage, to a Bangladeshi, which also didn’t work out—the clash of cultures—so maybe Holly felt that I needed someone to look after me. I could have dealt with that if she hadn’t taken on a New Jersey accent. It was so thick that I thought it might be parody, but then I realized that nope, this is it, this is your sister. And where have you gone, Elizabeth Bowen?
I got back into business in Manhattan, co-producing a couple of Chekhov one-acts on Rivington Street. But slowly, in a subtle way, I found myself being sidelined, squeezed out of the business. Funny how you don’t realize it when it’s happening. Either the business changed or I was doing things wrong. I can see why people might not want to sit through a Red Buttons retrospective. But wasn’t Chekhov supposed to be money in the bank? Done tastefully, of course. Maybe if I’d set the plays in a bowling alley. My coke habit didn’t help. The Vegas money went up my nose, six hundred at a time. All right, so there were some hookers in the picture. Big deal. To my huge embarrassment (and shame too, there was a lot of shame involved) I was forced to borrow eight grand from Holly to hold off the IRS. It was money that really came from Steve. Poor sonofabitch is up to his ass in grease all day and I show up and raid his bank account.
I did stay out o
f jail. Some money came in from my friends in Korea, who had staged my old absurdist play successfully in venues all across the peninsula. And there was some interest from Sri Lanka.
Holly took a bad fall in her bedroom where they’d neglected to put down carpeting. I don’t get it. How much does a patch of carpeting cost? Did she want to fall on her head? She had to undergo brain surgery and it was touch and go for a while. There was some kind of recovery, although it was all she could do to get out a couple of sentences. When I leaned down to kiss her, at the hospital, she pulled back the bandage on her head to show me the long line of railroad-track stitches on her head. Part of it seemed to be saying “Look what they did to me,” as if it were my fault. But there was also something lewd about the way she “revealed” the wound, as though we were back in the Bronx and she was finally letting me see her naked.
Holly was never the same—and who would be after all she had undergone? When she got back home, she called me each day to tell me about the takeout that she and Steve had ordered for dinner. “We’re having filet of fish tonight.” I told her it was nice that she was having filet of fish, but I didn’t really enjoy that type of call. Still, it was probably all she had. Her world. Filet of fish.
She got worse and the calls that came in, by every definition, were heartbreaking. Except that they didn’t break my heart. And what does that say about me? The content was on target. Maybe it was the wording that bothered me. It was a little pedestrian.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t feel I belong on this Earth.”
Did I expect the language to soar? Was I looking for Coriolanus? What exactly did I want from a poor sister with brain damage?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Manhattan, I wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. I downsized to a studio on Ludlow Street and my own health went south. I had to have not one, but—get ready for this—both shoulders replaced. If anyone thinks that operation (both of them) is a picnic, have them give me a call. Along the way, I’d gotten married a third time, even with the shoulders, and I’d finally gotten it right. But wouldn’t you know it, Setsuko got a case of food poisoning and died in my arms at the Tropicana in Atlantic City.
The Peace Process Page 1