Back in the 1940s, after they’d forgotten all the headlines about breadlines but before they were corrupted by postwar prosperity, our mothers were sweet, pretty young women. Though they thought smoking on the street, visiting bowling alleys or wearing an ankle bracelet made you look like a whore, they were quite practical. Somewhat shy, they never looked at the Varga Girl calendars hung on the walls of neighborhood gasoline stations. No. Our mothers were much more modest; they believed in good behavior. They would never wear brown flats with navy-blue skirts and were always careful that their shoes, belts and handbags matched. They never wore their white high heels before Memorial Day and packed them away again right after Labor Day Weekend. They were fanatic about blotting fresh lipstick on a square of toliet paper several times so they wouldn’t look brassy. They always kept the seams of their nylons straight and their powder dry.
During the war years, they were very brave. On weekends they crouched down in the garage and patiently tied old newspapers into bundles. They flattened out empty tin cans and went door-to-door around our neighborhood selling Defense Stamps to support the war effort. Proudly we watched the way they saved used Crisco in empty coffee cans to reuse again and again so they could hoard our ration stamps for butter to bake us beautiful birthday cakes. We felt proud of them when they went out alone at night to air-raid warden meetings, leaving us home in the care of babysitters, who set their hair with bobby pins they snapped open on their front teeth while they wrote sheer pale blue overseas “V” letters and listened to Crosby crooning over our Philco console.
But after the war, when our mothers quit their factory or office jobs to become homeroom helpers, Brownie leaders, and chaperones on grade-school field trips, we felt they’d betrayed us. Though they sewed the badges we earned on the sleeves of our Girl Scout uniforms, whipped sour cream into the Jell-O molds they made for dinner, and produced identically shaped Toll House cookies for ecclesiastical bake sales, we felt they’d somehow diminished themselves. Occasionally at night when they were feeling real frisky or flirting with our fathers, they tried to teach us how to do the Charleston. But by then we were totally disapproving and unforgiving toward them because they had become so enthusiastically conventional and energetically middle class, while we had remained disaffected, dissatisfied and depressed.
Miriam, who grew up in Salt Lake City, had a terrific mom whom she hated passionately. Miriam was severely unhappy because she had no public way to prove her mother’s malevolence. One day the young Pia Lindstrom arrived in Salt Lake City with her physician father to matriculate at Miriam’s high school. Instead of being supportive of Pia, Miriam felt enormous jealous toward her because Pia’s mother had actually run off with an Italian movie producer—the perfect crime that every adolescent girl wanted her own mother to commit. Essentially, our mothers were so nice they inhibited our instinctive rebelliousness.
“What exactly has to be taken care of?” Max asks in a voice now as rigidly frigid as his earlier one had been warmly reassuring. “What do we have to decide?”
I return myself to the present and its particular pain.
“A lot of things,” Elaine snaps. “Where the service should be held. At what time. What sort of a service it should be. Where Sukie should be buried. If she should be cremated.” Her flat, bitter voice skids to a halt. “Everything, Max. Absolutely everything.”
Max stands up. “Okay. I’ll stop by my place, take a shower, and then go check things out. I’ll go over to Brownell’s and see what the options are. I’ll find out the whole drill and then come back here to brief you.”
Instinctively each of us looks away. Clearly Max is going home to see Elizabeth and we are not yet prepared to acknowledge her existence.
“Anything else I should know?” he asks querulously.
The three of us shake our heads, so Max moves abruptly out into the hall.
We remain in the kitchen. Elaine eventually serves up three plates of eggs and English muffins. We pick at our portions; even Elaine can’t eat. Finally we spread out the classified section of the Post and dump our food on it for Happy. Then we sit in silence, drinking our coffee, smoking cigarettes, and watching Sukie’s dog enjoy our breakfast.
“Well, Max seems to be holding up all right,” Joanne finally says.
“No reason he, shouldn’t be,” Elaine shrugs. “He hasn’t lost anything he cared about. Anyway, he was always charming and always will be, so I don’t think we have to worry about him at all. He never lost any sleep over any of us. He always treated us like the crazy ladies.”
“Not always,” I correct her out of fairness to Max. “Not originally.”
But Elaine ignores my defense as if it were a relic of ancient high-school boy craziness.
“Men like Max always get what they want when they want it because they’re takers,” Elaine says grimly. “They’re winners not losers. They’re movers and shakers. They’re wheelers and dealers. They know how to protect their own little creature comforts. I’m sure this situation is kind of difficult for Max right now, but by the time the funeral’s over, he’ll probably be back here with Elizabeth—settling into Sukie’s bedroom.”
Joanne and I look at each other warily.
“Why are you looking like that?” Elaine challenges us immediately. “Max is—and always was—a flashy four-flusher, a show-offy, superficial kind of guy. Now he’s just going through male menopause, that’s all. Anyway, forget him,” she says, shifting into her organizing mode, “we’ve got to make a list of all the things we have to do. We really have to.”
Traditionally, the writing of a list is a comforting procedure that gives us the illusion of being take-charge people. Inveterate list-makers, we quarrel briefly about who actually gets to write on the yellow legal pad Elaine finds, but since she is also the first to produce a pen, she wins.
Go through all of Sukie’s papers including insurance policies, mortgages, bank statements, etc. etc. etc.
“That should be a real trip.” Joanne stiffens her bottom lip into a downward slant of disgust.
Strangely enough, few of us married for money. That was odd since our mothers always said it was just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one. When Sondra returned home with a half-carat, emerald-cut diamond engagement ring, her mother looked at it and said, “May none of your troubles be bigger.” We know this is a true story because Helen was there. Since women like us prefer living hand-to-mouth rather than nine-to-five, we never earned much money. Lots of us drive ten-year-old cars, wear coats that are even older, receive “insufficient funds” notifications on a regular basis, and think only of Ireland when we hear the initials IRA.
Since half of us are divorced, many of us are in dire financial straits, but it is only very recently that we began to wonder if we are eligible for any of our former husbands’ Social Security benefits. We still have not learned how to manage our personal finances and now admit that our lifelong wish to see a comma in the balance of our bank statements is highly unlikely. We continue rounding off the amounts of those checks we remember to record and although we know how to double a sales tax to arrive at a proper tip for a waiter we are not able to do so if fractions are involved.
Go through all Sukie’s manuscripts. See what Carol and David shouldn’t see. Check for any new assignments she’d acc’t, why covering Senate debate? Royalty statements, copyrights on her books?
Only a small number of us became successful. The biggest surprise about success was its failure to provide much satisfaction other than money. Failure felt familiar to us—intense, evocative and engrossing. Success somehow seemed limited or superficial and, anyway, usually arrived so late that any unexpected proceeds went directly to some college bursar’s office for our kids’ tuition. Unfortunately, not many of us sold out since few of us were offered the opportunity. At worst, we have been known to lease ourselves for limited periods of time.
Check S’s jewelry, old letters, clothes, makeup, appointments, library books, magazine subsc
riptions, etc., etc., etc.
Telephone Sukie’s out-of-town friends who won’t see obit.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “We’ve got to break this down and be more specific.”
“I’ll make another pot of coffee,” Joanne offers.
This is the same Joanne who once placed dishes into the bottom rack of a dishwasher horizontally so they looked like some swami resting atop a bed of nails.
Take Sukie’s clothes to Brownell’s.
Silence. No one believes herself capable of doing this.
“Damn it. We should’ve made Max take the clothes,” Elaine says fretfully. “He was going there anyway.”
“Call the obit department at the Post and find out the drill over there,” Joanne dictates.
Elaine records her remark.
Emboldened, Joanne says, “Get tough with them.”
Absently, Elaine adds that comment to the previous statement.
“Think about an appropriate kind of memorial service,” Elaine says slowly, in rhythm with her own writing.
“I think we should wait on that until her dad gets here,” Joanne says. She is standing at the sink, refilling Sukie’s teapot again. “Unless we find something to read from her journal. Hey, how about that? Why don’t we just read a selection from her journal?”
A small silence follows her remark.
“I don’t think that’s very politic,” I finally comment dryly.
“Oh God,” Elaine suddenly whimpers. “I wonder where Sukie left her car.”
Her question hits me like a body blow. Sukie’s car. Sukie is dead, but she drove herself to Capitol Hill and parked her car somewhere before she died. This thought causes my lungs to tighten up, decreasing the flow of oxygen to my brain.
“That’s a problem,” Joanne observes, returning to the table. “She might have left it in a space with a parking meter. It just might be collecting tickets somewhere.”
“Call police,” Elaine recites as she records her own words.
And then, suddenly, Elaine is stricken with grief and breaks out into loud grating cries, spiked with murmurs of “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
No one moves.
It is now clear that each of us will break down at different times about different things, recover, and then break down again later. It is also clear that each of us has different trigger points and pain thresholds. There is no predicting when or why a breakdown will occur. We each have to grieve our separate griefs when they overtake us.
Without any policy decision, we have established a certain routine of simply waiting until the crying person finishes or regains control. No one tries to comfort the mourner, because that could cause the grief to become contagious and spread. Instead, Joanne and I wait in silence. Finally Happy rises arthritically from her station near the sink and walks, nails clicking like typewriter keys, toward Elaine. Once there, she plants her front paws on Elaine’s knees and looks up, inquisitively and sympathetically, into her face.
“Remember when Mailer complained about sleeping with single mothers during the sixties because he could hear their poodles’ toenails clicking past the bedroom all night,” Joanne asks in an effort to divert everyone.
Elaine is struggling to control herself. Finally the sounds she makes sound only like echoes of her previous cries. After a while she forces herself to her feet.
“You better go outside, Happy,” she says, opening the back door for the dog. “Go take a leak.”
“I can’t believe Sukie had a root canal last week,” Joanne muses. “She called me up to say how much it hurt. She could have skipped it.”
“I wonder if she has another … appointment. You usually have three sessions. I mean, Nat had three in a row.”
We sit stricken at the thought of Sukie’s future appointments.
“They’ll call here,” Joanne says coldly. “Don’t worry about that. My mother missed a dental appointment the day my dad died, and the dentist’s nurse called up all pissed off to say they were going to charge her for the visit because she hadn’t given them twenty-four hours’ notice. So my mother said she was sorry but her husband hadn’t given her twenty-four hours’ notice either before his heart attack that morning.”
“What about Sukie’s magazine subscriptions?” I ask.
“She never paid those,” Joanne says. “She was a real deadbeat. But I wonder if we could run a different picture of Sukie if there’s a second obit. I have a terrific picture of her up in New York.”
“Let’s make our telephone list,” Elaine urges.
Joanne moves over to Sukie’s little kitchen desk and begins to flip through the Rolodex.
“You know Sukie kept two different Rolodexes,” she muses. “She had some system for dividing up people, although I can’t quite figure it out yet.” She begins rippling through the Rolodex, flicking her nail across the alphabetized divider tabs so the cards fall back like dominoes. “She kept the ones for dead people in the back.”
“Really?” I ask in a shaky voice.
“Uhum. But they’re turned around backwards.”
“How do you know that?” Elaine asks irritably. She could become quite severe at the first hint of frivolity.
“Because I know who those people are and they happen to be dead,” Joanne replies curtly. “Different people have different systems.”
“I don’t believe Sukie did that,” Elaine challenges her.
“Please, Elaine. Don’t get all uptight now.”
“Look, let’s try to be serious,” I interrupt as the air of hostility heightens. “We’ve got to finish making our list.”
CHAPTER 6
“I don’t want to do this anymore now,” Joanne says sharply. “I want to read more of Sukie’s journal. I want to see what’s on some of those disks she left on her desk.”
Quickly, Elaine stands up and begins to clear the table. This is her way of saying she cannot bear reading any more of Sukie’s pain. So only Joanne and I walk through the dining room into the narrow side porch that was glassed in years ago to make Sukie a private writing room.
The computer table is set against the long expanse of warehouse windows overlooking her garden. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves climb the brick wall of the house. Silently we gaze at her library. Even from the doorway I can see all the familiar titles crawling down the spines of editions that I too had carried around until finally planting them in my West End Avenue apartment. Sukie had the same undergraduate texts—early Modern Library editions of the classics—plus all the novels and critical works required by undergraduate and graduate English departments during the 1950s.
Joanne walks slowly past the books, studying the eye-level shelves where Sukie kept her collection of contemporary novels.
“The only catalogue system she ever used was gossip,” Joanne breathes with a soft laugh as she inspects the titles. “Pure unadulterated—or adulterated—gossip. See how she’s got The Mandarins in between Nausea and A Walk on the Wild Side? And her House of Fiction next to Tate’s collection of poetry? There’s Paul and Jane Bowles together, and Mary McCarthy next to Edmund Wilson, and Robert Lowell in between Jean Stafford and Elizabeth Hardwick. Did you read Sleepless Nights? And look. She’s got Joan Williams’s Morning, Noon and Night next to all the Faulkner, and Jean Stein’s Edie on the other side.”
I’m smiling now, enjoying Joanne’s review of the books arranged by authorial relationships.
“See? There’s Hot Property by Judy Feiffer next to Jules’s collected cartoons, and Clancy Sigal next to Doris Lessing’s stuff. Oh God. She’s got Barbara Probst Solomon on the other side of Clancy, and Erica Jong next to Howard Fast. He was her last former father-in-law. And there’s Antonia Fraser with Harold Pinter. I love it. Sukie’s such a romantic. Look. She’s put Ruby-fruit Jungle next to Martina’s autobiography, and Sinclair Lewis with Dorothy. Thompson and Lillian next to Dashiell and Joan Didion with John Gregory Dunne and his brother’s book, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, on the other side.”
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p; “Right,” I say, picking up where Joanne left off. “And look. She’s put all our friends together. There’s Ellen and Marge and Marilyn and Laurie and Ann and Ann-with-an-E. Everybody. And I bet they’re all autographed, too. But see? She kept the youngsters separate. And of course all her divorce novels are together. Oh, but look, Joanne. She’s put the older women in a group. Oh, how nice of her to do that. There’s Mary and that marvelous Harriet Doerr and Diana O’Hehir and Grace and Tilly and Tess and Jane and Elizabeth. You know, most of them suffered even more solitary sentences than any of us did. They really had some rough times. I mean, their isolation was a cultural calamity. And they’re all so nice and helpful now. Elizabeth wrote Sukie two sweet letters when her last book came out. Did you read Tilly Olsen’s book about silences?”
I feel a rush of bibliophilic love for Sukie that makes me shiver. We had shared our literary lives as well as our political ones, and we had gossiped about writers as often as about friends. We had both spent a good portion of our lives reading. We read during long car, subway, plane, bus and train trips. We read while we nursed or bottle-fed our babies. We read on beaches and in bistros and in beds around the world. We remembered the places where we first read favorite books, just as we remembered certain rooms where we had slept with favorite lovers.
Lots of times we discussed fictional women in the same way we discussed our friends. We always remembered Madeleine, the woman in Herzog who instructed a luncheonette counterman to tear, not slice, her English muffin one morning while she was eating breakfast out with Mr. Herzog. From her we learned that a forked muffin surface absorbs butter better than a slick sliced one, which was the kind of practical information we liked to find in novels.
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