Why I must curl my eyelashes to go to my best friend’s funeral, I do not know. However, I cannot analyze such idiocies at the moment and I just do it—standing there with a knock-off of a medieval torture machine clamped dangerously close to my eyeball while I rhythmically tighten the handles to produce enough pressure to bend the lashes. Presumably this adolescent compulsion is too deeply ingrained to excise and probably serves to reduce some of my ancient angst so that I can continue to function.
Then I watch my tanned face start to disappear as the steam curls toward the center of the mirror. Suddenly I feel frightened and terribly old. My almost colorless eyes look panicky. The curves etched around my lips look like parenthetical brackets that punctuate my smiles and set them off from the serious statement of my features. As the mirror erodes, I see myself fading away and I remember Sukie’s journal passage about feeling unloved while she sat in The Bread Oven.
When my face is finally lost in the fog of steam, I experience a sense of total bereavement. I am lessened and endangered by Sukie’s death. Often our identities are fixed by our friends’ feelings about us, and Sukie’s vision of me was vitally important to my own self-image. She saw me as strong and self-confident, and I both needed and used that reassurance. I always trusted Sukie’s view of me and her admiration was important to my own sense of identity.
I clear a patch of mirror, using my hand as a windshield wiper, but it immediately fogs over again. A little panicky, I open the door a crack to let some of the steam escape, and then turn around to check the condition of my dress. It is precisely at that moment that Max materializes in the doorway.
I blush, flush, and resist the urge to cover my body with the dress I’m holding. Instead, rather boldly, I walk back toward the mirror and station myself at the sink while I pull on the dress as if Max were not watching me.
Then I reach behind my neck to fasten the zipper. Of course, some of my hair has already become tangled in it. Lowering my elbows, my arms still locked behind my head, I watch Max watching me in his dead wife’s mirror—somehow summoning her image up with mine—and I feel a hot flash of recognition. Looking back at him through the glass, I remember my husband watching me in the same sweetly studious way. The last vestiges of steam soften our features and suddenly all the images converge so that the past superimposes itself upon the present and there is a sense of unity published, some continuity of the past within the flux of the present. Then the steam is gone, clearing the looking glass.
I smile through myself back to Max.
“You left the door open,” he apologizes.
I nod, still tugging at the hair immobilizing my zipper. I am trying to segregate some strands so I can break them off like threads. But then, silent and serious, Max takes over my job, so I no longer see his face in the mirror as he bends over to examine the problem.
“The limos are coming here at two-thirty to take us over.”
I nod again.
“There are two. I told Rosetta that she and Manny should take one and ask whoever else they want to ride with them. But I’d like you to ride with the kids and me in the other, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to take David back to my place now. I think I have a suit he can wear this afternoon.”
I nod.
Through the glass I see Max raise his face for a moment. His eyes are fond and smiling, but still absorbed by the zipper problem. Finally he lifts the full weight of my hair off my neck and, holding it back with one hand, lowers his face to work on the individual strands more closely.
My hands, gripping the edge of the sink, begin to shake.
The feel of his face against my neck is producing waves of weakness in me. Through the looking glass I see only the top of his head streaked with silver flashes. I cannot see his face.
“Did you know you’re a liar, Diana?”
His words slap me so unexpectedly that my face flinches in the mirror.
“What?”
“You’re lying when you talk about having no more expectations—which really means no more needs or wants or desires. You’re just lying to yourself to avoid any possibility of pain. Because no one can turn off those feelings. That’s some kind of autohypnosis you’re talking about. Like lowering your own blood pressure or speeding up your own digestive enzymes. You can’t do that. No one can.”
I smile nicely back at him, not arrogantly, but with the certainty I’ve savored for more than three years.
And that’s when he releases my hair, letting it fall loose upon my back again. Putting his hands on my shoulders, he turns me around, curling his forefinger to knuckle my chin up higher.
“What you’re saying is that you would like to stop having all these feelings that open you up to disappointment or hurt or fear. But you can’t. If people really could do that, we’d all be home free. We wouldn’t let ourselves need or want anything from anyone else, because the danger there is obvious. That way we’d be safe from every painful emotion in the book. In fact, we could throw the book away. But no one can just turn them off. You’re kidding yourself, Diana. And I’m not going to go along with the gag. We’ve got to talk about things. About the past and the present and the future. And you can’t be lying to yourself while we do it, because then we’ll both lose out. We’ll both be two-time losers.”
“Don’t be silly, Max,” I say looking straight into his eyes. “I’m not a kid. I know what I’m feeling. I’ve thought about all this. A lot. I know what I know. I know who I used to be and I know who I am now.”
“Look, Diana. I know who you were, too. I was there, you know? And you’re not this person you’re impersonating. Someone frozen. Paralyzed. You’re so afraid to make a wrong move now, you can’t move at all. You’re not even running scared. You’re stationary. But I don’t believe you’re burned out. I think you’re just scared. I want to say one thing. You don’t have to me afraid of me. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Then he puts his arms around me. He holds me very tight and close to him.
He is holding me too tight. He is holding me for dear life. He is pressing my resistance, like grapes into wine, so that I feel myself relenting.
We remain like that for a long while. Finally he draws back.
“You okay?”
“Yah,” I nod, almost believing it.
Then he turns and walks away.
CHAPTER 20
In the plain, unadorned chapel, the Amrams sit on one side of the main aisle while the Smilows sit on the other as if at a wedding. David is between Max and Max’s parents, who look like civilized New Yorkers trying to cope with the funeral of a former daughter-in-law. Carol and Neil sit beside Rosetta and Manny Smilow.
Sukie’s friends try to blur the hard edges of this division by filling in empty seats on either side. I find myself in the front row of the Smilow section, unable to turn around to see the people filing in and filling the seats that stretch back from the stage to the ominously wide double-door exit. I can hear only the shuffle of flat shoes on the uncarpeted parquet surface of the aisle and the heavy silence of awesome grief.
The one time I wedge myself against Elaine so that I can turn around, I see hundreds of women. Hokey and embarrassing as it feels, the truth is they really are of all different ages and races and colors and sizes and styles. Weirder yet, they all look alike. They all look like they’ve just lost their best friend. And they all look like the kind of women who could hear the song Sukie sang, with its crazy, bittersweet lyrics about the way we live now. The women coming to bury Sukie must have felt she was prototypical and responded to her as a symbol for all women who struggled to survive in the same psychological subsistence society. They must have seen Sukie as allegorical, symbolic, mythic and real.
There are fewer men in the chapel. Those men who are not simply accompanying a female companion seem especially intelligent and sensitive—the kind of men women like us like most. Gradually there begins to develop a certain comfortable closeness among those
present, almost as if we are already back from the burial and sitting around Sukie’s kitchen, indulgently eating Rosetta’s freshly baked sweets.
Having turned forward again, I misunderstand Elaine’s nudge. When I do look up, she nods to indicate something in the rear of the chapel, and when I turn around again I see my two beautiful daughters standing in the aisle just inside the double doorway.
They look a mess. They look as if they have just driven eight or nine hours on Labor Day weekend from the tip of Long Island to Washington, D.C. They look as if they have turned themselves inside out and the world upside down in order to get here. I should have known.
Assuming I would worry if I knew they were driving, they simply took off without telephoning to tell me first. It seems I have become so self-protective I have lost my perspective. Of course, Loren and Lisa wouldn’t miss Sukie’s funeral even if their classes did start in New Haven tomorrow morning, because Sukie was their favorite of all my friends and they were crushed by the news of her dying. Also, I mustn’t fool myself. My daughters would kill to get here to be with me at this terrible moment in my life. I should have known.
I should not have anticipated rejection before it occurred. Or perhaps I was actually soliciting rejection. Perhaps I am doing the same thing with Max—courting the worst in him.
Loren and Lisa are pressing inside the hall, each holding one of their matching blue suitcases. Somehow they had actually found quite suitable dresses and decent shoes to wear to Sukie’s funeral and the fact that they are totally disheveled does not reflect badly upon them or me. They did the right thing and look messy only because of their travel.
Then, staring at those two, tall, slim, towheaded beauties who are my daughters, I begin to cry.
A minute later, Max rises from his front-row seat and hurries up the aisle, somehow embracing both of them simultaneously. Very shyly they each give him perfunctory, European-style kisses on both cheeks, remaining as reserved as politeness allows, for they too are women and understand the disasters of the Amram divorce. I see them asking Max about Carol and David, and that’s when they catch sight of me and together wave sad little waves in my direction. Loren blows me a kiss, a hang-over habit from childhood.
I am so proud of them—of their grace and their beauty—and I know they have come here for me as much as for Sukie. Then, because I am weeping uncontrollably, I have to lower my face and I don’t see where they sit. A little later Max returns to his seat on the aisle again. He was dear to go and greet my daughters, knowing they had traveled so far to come here, acknowledging the awkwardness of their reunion after more than five years and all that had transpired. Max obviously noticed their reticence with him, but he still related to them as the little girls he had watched grow up. The three of them also share a history and Max had to welcome them as young women he knew well and for whom he had feelings.
But I am not ready when Max suddenly turns his faded-denim-blue gaze upon me. Silently, but very clearly and specifically, he is asking me something. He is asking me to take a chance. His eyes are saying, What the hell, let’s proceed with the possibility of who-knows-what from this point forward, from this place where we’ve come to bury a loved one—whether loved intermittently or with constancy, whether loved poorly or loved well, but loved in this world where love is hard to come by. Because now we are sharing one of the most painful moments of our lives and we must prepare ourselves for afterwards, ready ourselves for a future.
A rush of tenderness toward Max momentarily destabilizes me. I remember the riotous feelings he stirred in me that night in his apartment and uneasiness invades and occupies my mind. Now I must honestly ask myself whether I really have stopped wanting, stopped expecting, stopped needing anything from anyone else. Perhaps I’ve only trained myself to simulate indifference, to practice calculated withdrawal prior to rejection, to avoid people and abort events prior to any possible disappointments. Perhaps I am not being wise but cowardly.
But I am not yet ready to commit.
Shortly after three o’clock, a young man wearing a yarmulka rises to approach the lectern set beside the elevated platform on which Sukie’s closed casket rests. The young, New Wave rabbi leads us in Hebrew and English through those few essential prayers for the dead required by Reform Judaism before offering some carefully chosen words of condolence to Sukie’s father, aunt and children.
Then he leans against the lectern and speaks modestly to everyone gathered in the chapel.
“It is in the nature of organized religions to have their priests and rabbis deliver the eulogies for the dead. However, nowadays, religious leaders most often do not know the deceased personally and can only try to intuit, through hasty descriptions provided by the bereaved—sometimes only minutes before the service commences—the nature and character of the departed. Thus it falls to strangers to speak eloquently, at the most significant of moments, about a valuable human being whom we never knew. This is difficult—if not impossible.
“Unfortunately, in modern times, religion no longer plays a central role in many people’s lives. Nowadays, especially in this country, people build their own communities or join networks that help them survive. Mothers of young children, senior citizens, students, divorced individuals, workers in different industries, various victims, political activists, singles, handicapped persons, artists, athletes, alcoholics—all types of people now build intimate communities to meet their most fundamental needs and to assist each other in achieving chosen goals. Where once people looked to religion, they now look to their own networks.
“Because Suzanna Smilow Amram lived the last years of her life with her children in a community of cherished women friends, it is members of her community who will now say farewell to her. Sukie’s son David, her daughter Carol, and her friend, Diana Sargeant, will deliver her eulogy in my stead.
“We are also going to witness another …” he pauses uncertainly for a moment, smiles nervously and then continues, “departure from tradition. Eight of Sukie’s female friends will carry her casket out to the hearse which will bear her to the cemetery. I suppose the fundamental reason why women have not, to my knowledge, ever carried a coffin before is because historically women have always been viewed primarily as the bearers of life. This is true. But because death is also a part of life, and because women are belatedly expanding and extending their life functions and activities, they themselves should have the final say as to whether or not they choose to carry their dead to a final resting place.
“If I have erred in my judgment in allowing this break with tradition, I alone accept the responsibility for my decision. Will the spokeswoman for Sukie’s friends please come forward at this time?”
Suddenly I am behind the lectern. I do not remember walking up on the stage. I look down at all the faces, take a deep breath, and clutch the pages Kate Constant has given me. But even as I start reading aloud, I find myself editing and adding as I proceed, much in the same manner as when I give a lecture from prepared notes which I use primarily as memory-joggers. Each sentence I read triggers a rush of my own memories.
“Sukie was one of us: Sukie was all of us.
“She was a bundle of contradictions in total sync with the contradictory times through which she lived.
“She was many things to many different people in many different situations. This perhaps is the genius of American women. And she was very much an American—an instinctively political person who struggled with—and against—her government to achieve those basic decencies and freedoms she believed inherent to—and implicit—in democracy. But Sukie was also a woman of the world—in both senses of that phrase. She knew her way around and saw herself as a citizen of the world. She often cried about the many painful contradictions existing on this planet of ours.
“Once she told me a story: She said the first time she’d tried to explain the Biafran famine to her children, when they were young, they thought she’d said ‘salmon’ when she had said ‘famine’ and they thou
ght she’d said ‘trout’ when she had said ‘drought.’ And those childish errors had made her weep because the innocence of affluent children was as authentic to them as pain is to the have-nots of our world. She also wept after a huge Mexican earthquake because it was reported that the impoverished Indians who suffered the most destruction believed they had inadvertently done some terrible wrong to cause God to hate and punish them with such vengeance. That broke her heart. The world’s children belong to all of us.
“Sukie was a student of American literature in which she sought information and reassurance about the nature and character of our people through the art and skill of our writers. She was also a writer who could bat out journalistic pieces in a night or suffer for centuries over a single sentence of fiction. That was because she believed a higher truth affixed itself to fiction than to fact. She loved some of the things she wrote and disowned others—as if they were good and bad children.
“For a long while Sukie was a wife. She loved it when her family was whole and when it broke apart she grieved for its death as if it were a real person. As Sukie would say: There are plenty of resource materials to read up on this subject if you want to pursue the nature of her experience. You can check out The Pumpkin Eater, A Woman’s Place, Smart Women, Love and Friendship and innumerable other studies of broken families, broken hearts and the consequences of both. There are also many movies dealing with this subject that Sukie would suggest you’d see if you haven’t already: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, An Unmarried Woman, Shoot the Moon, Hannah and Her Sisters—all well-done studies of this contemporary condition.
“Sukie was also a mother. She would have died for her children but didn’t necessarily want to spend every afternoon in the park with them. For further information see: Up the Sandbox. Diary of a Mad Housewife, Loose Ends, A Mother and Two Daughters and so on. Sukie adored both her son and her daughter. She once told me her children were like precious jewels set into the bracelet of her marriage.
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