“Buried her next to my father,” I said.
“See, we should have buried her. At least you still have your parents somewhere. Like, they haven’t been burned to ashes. At least they’re in the ground, their bones are still there, I mean, in one place. You still have that.”
“Pull over,” I told her. I’d spotted a McDonald’s up ahead. “Let’s go through the drive-through. Let me buy you breakfast.”
“I’m on a diet,” Reva said.
“Let me buy me breakfast then,” I said.
She pulled into the parking lot, got in line.
“Do you visit them? Your parents’ graves?” she asked. Reva mistook my sigh of frustration for an expulsion of buried sadness. She turned to me with a high whining, “Mmm!” frowning in sympathy, and leaned on the horn by accident. It honked like a wounded coyote. She gasped. The person in the car ahead of us gave her the finger. “Oh, God. Sorry!” she yelled, and honked again in apology. She looked at me. “There’s food at home. There’s coffee, everything.”
“All I want is coffee from McDonald’s. That’s all I ask. I came all this way.”
Reva put the car into park. We waited.
“I can’t even tell you how disturbing it was at the crematorium. It’s the last place you want to be when you’re in mourning. They give you all this literature about how they burn the bodies, like I really need to know. And in one of the pamphlets, they describe how they cremate dead babies in these little individual ‘metal pans.’ That’s what they call them—‘metal pans.’ I can’t stop thinking about that. ‘Pans.’ It’s so gross. Like they’re making personal pan pizzas. Isn’t that just awful? Doesn’t that make you sick?”
The car ahead pulled forward. I motioned for Reva to drive up to the intercom.
“Two large coffees, extra sugar, extra cream,” I said and pointed to Reva to repeat the order. She did, and ordered herself an Oreo McFlurry.
“You can sleep over if you want,” Reva said, driving up to the first window. “It’s New Year’s Eve, you know.”
“I have plans in the city.”
Reva knew I was lying. I looked at her, daring her to challenge me, but she just smiled and passed my debit card to the woman in the window.
“I wish I had plans in the city,” Reva said.
We pulled up to the next window and Reva handed me my coffees. The lids smelled like cheap perfume and burnt hamburger.
“I can call you a cab back to the station after the reception,” Reva went on, her voice high and phony as she spooned her McFlurry into her mouth. “Ken is coming, I think,” she said. “And a few other people from work. Do you want to stay for dinner at least?” Speaking with her mouth full was another thing I couldn’t stand about Reva.
“I need a nap first,” I said. “Then I’ll see how I feel.”
Reva was quiet for a while, cold white puffs of air rising up off her tongue as she licked the long plastic spoon. The heating was way up. I was sweating under the fur. She stuck the McFlurry cup between her knees and continued to drive and eat.
“You can take a nap in my room,” she said. “It should be quiet down there. My relatives are over, but they won’t think you’re being rude or anything. We don’t have to be at the funeral home until two.”
We passed a high school, a library, a strip mall. Why anyone would want to live in a place like that was beyond me. Farmingdale State College, a Costco, five cemeteries in a row, a golf course, block after block of white picket fences with perfectly snowblown driveways and walkways. It made sense that Reva had come from a place as lame as this. It explained why she slaved away to fit in and make a home for herself in New York City. Her father, she’d told me, was an accountant. Her mother had been a secretary at a Jewish day school. Reva was, like me, an only child.
“This is it,” she said as we pulled into the driveway of a tan-colored brick house. It was ranch-style and small, probably built in the fifties. Just by looking at it from the outside, I could tell that it had wall-to-wall carpeting, humid, sticky air, low ceilings. I imagined cabinets full of crap, flies flurrying around a wooden bowl of brown bananas, an old refrigerator covered in magnets pinning down expired coupons for toilet paper and dish soap, a pantry packed with cheap store-brand foods. It looked like the opposite of my parents’ house upstate. Their house was an eerily spare Tudor Colonial, very austere, very brown. The furniture was all dark, heavy wood, which the housekeeper polished religiously with lemon-scented Pledge. Brown leather sofa, brown leather armchair. The floors were varnished and shiny. There were stained-glass windows in the living room and a few large waxy plants in the foyer. Otherwise it was colorless inside. Monochromatic drapes and carpets. There was very little to catch your eye—cleared countertops, everything blank and dim. My mother was not the type to use alphabet magnets on the fridge to hold up my kindergarten finger paintings or first attempts at writing out words. She kept the walls of the house mostly clear. It was as though anything visually interesting was too much aggravation on my mother’s eyes. Maybe that’s why she ran out of the Guggenheim that one time she came to visit me in the city. Only the master bedroom, my mother’s room, had any clutter in it—glass bottles of perfume and ashtrays, unused exercise equipment, piles of pastel and beige-colored clothing. The bed was a king, low to the ground, and whenever I slept in it, I felt very far away from the world, like I was in a spaceship or on the moon. I missed that bed. The stiff blankness of my mother’s eggshell sheets.
I sucked down the rest of coffee number one and put the empty cup in my Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s. Reva parked the car in the driveway next to a rusting burgundy minivan and an old yellow Volvo station wagon.
“Come meet my relatives,” she said. “And then I’ll show you where you can lie down for a bit.” She led me up the shoveled pathway to the house. She was talking again. “Since her passing, I’ve just been so exhausted all the time. I haven’t been sleeping well with all these strange dreams. Creepy. Not really nightmares. Just weird. Totally bizarre.”
“Everybody thinks their dreams are weird, Reva,” I said.
“I’m overwhelmed, I guess. It’s been hard, but also sort of beautiful in this sad and peaceful way. You know what she said before she died? She said, ‘Don’t worry so much trying to be everybody’s favorite. Just go have fun.’ That really hit me, ‘everybody’s favorite.’ Because it’s true. I do feel the pressure to be like that. Do you think I’m like that? I guess I just never felt good enough. This is probably healthy for me, to have to face life now, you know, on my own. My dad and I aren’t really close. I’ll just introduce you to my relatives real quick,” she said, opening the front door.
The interior of the house was as I’d predicted—cushy, lime green carpeting, yellow glass chandelier, gold patterned wallpaper, and low stucco ceilings. The heat was blasting, and the air carried a smell of food and coffee and bleach. Reva led me into a sitting room with windows looking out onto the snow-covered front yard. A huge television was on mute, and a row of bald men wearing glasses sat on a long paisley sofa covered in glossy clear plastic. As Reva stomped snow off her boots on the mat, three fat women in black dresses and curlers in their hair came out from the kitchen with trays of donuts and Danishes.
“This is my friend, the one I had to go pick up,” she said to the women.
I nodded. I waved. I could feel one of the women eying my fur coat, my sneakers. She had Reva’s eyes—honey brown. Reva took a donut off the tray the woman carried.
“Is your friend hungry?” one woman asked.
“Pretty flowers,” said another.
“So you’re the friend we’ve heard so much about,” said the third.
“Are you hungry?” Reva asked.
I shook my head no, but Reva steered me into the brightly lit kitchen. “There’s so much food. See?” The counters and the table were covered with bowls of pretzels, chips, n
uts, a plate of cheeses, crudité, dip, cookies. “We finished all the bagels,” Reva said. Coffee was brewing in a samovar on the counter. Huge pots on the stove steamed. “Chicken, spaghetti, some kind of ratatouille thing,” she said, lifting each of the lids. She was oddly unembarrassed. It seemed like she had dispensed with her usual uppity pretentions. She made no attempt to excuse herself for being homey, folksy, or whatever the word she would have used to describe living in a home like hers—“unglamorous.” Maybe she had just completely shut down. She opened the refrigerator to show me shelves of round Tupperware containers of steamed vegetables that she’d made in advance, she said, so she’d have something to snack on all day. She hadn’t been to the gym since Christmas. “But whatever. Now is not the time. Want some broccoli?” She popped the top off one of the containers. The smell hit me and nearly made me gag.
“Is this the sitting thing? You sit for ten days?” I asked, handing her the bouquet of flowers.
“Shiva is seven days. But no. My family isn’t religious or anything. They just like to sit around and eat a lot. My aunts and uncles drove in from New Jersey.” Reva put the flowers in the sink, poured herself a cup of coffee, tapped in a speck of Sweet’N Low from a crumpled packet she pulled from her pocket, and stirred mindlessly, staring down at the floor. I chugged the rest of the McDonald’s coffee and refilled it from the samovar. The fluorescent lights glared off the linoleum floor and hurt my eyes.
“I really need to lie down, Reva,” I told her. “I don’t feel well.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “Follow me.” We walked back through the sitting room. “Dad, don’t let anyone go downstairs. My friend needs some privacy.”
One of the bald men waved his hand dismissively and bit into a Danish. The crust flaked apart and fell down the front of his brown sweater-vest. He looked to me like a child molester. All those men did. But anyone would, in the right light, I thought—even I did. Even Reva. As her father tried to contain the flakes of pastry on his chest, the women got up and came at him, flicking the crumbs from his sweater onto their plates while he protested. If it weren’t for the specter of death hanging over everything, I would have felt like I was in a John Hughes movie. I tried to picture Anthony Michael Hall making an appearance, maybe as the neighbor’s kid coming to pay his condolences with a pie or a casserole. Or maybe this was a dark comedy, and Whoopi Goldberg would play the undertaker. I would have loved that. Just the thought of Whoopi soothed me. She really was my hero.
Reva led me down a spiral staircase into the basement, where there was a kind of rec room—rough blue carpeting, wood paneling, small windows up by the ceiling, a cluster of half-decent watercolors hanging crookedly above a frowning, wrinkled, mauve vinyl couch.
“Who did those?” I asked.
“Mom did. Aren’t they beautiful? My room’s through here.” Reva opened a door into a narrow, pink-tiled bathroom. The toilet tank was running. “It’s always like that,” she said, jiggling the handle to no effect. Another door led to her bedroom. It was dark and muggy inside. “It gets stuffy down here. No windows,” she whispered. She turned the bedside lamp on. The walls were painted black. The sliding door of the closet was cracked and had been taken off its runner and set to lean against the wall. The closet contained only a black dress and a few sweaters on hangers. Apart from a small chest of drawers, also painted black and topped with a sagging cardboard box, the room had very little in it. Reva turned on the ceiling fan.
“This was your room?” I asked her.
She nodded and pulled back the slippery blue nylon sleeping bag covering the bed, which was just a twin-size box spring and mattress on the floor. Reva’s sheets had flowers and butterflies on them. They were sad, old, pilly sheets.
“I moved down here and painted the room black in high school. To be cool,” Reva said sarcastically.
“It’s very cool,” I said. I put my shopping bag down, finished the coffee.
“When should I wake you up? We should leave here around one thirty. So factor in whatever time you’ll need to get ready.”
“Do you have shoes I can borrow? And tights?”
“I don’t keep much here,” Reva said, opening and shutting her drawers. “You can borrow something of my mom’s, though. You’re an eight in shoes, right?”
“Eight and a half,” I said, getting into the bed.
“There’s probably something up there that will fit you. I’ll just wake you up around one.”
She closed the door. I sat on the bed and turned off the light. Reva was making noise in the bathroom.
“I’m leaving clean towels for you here by the sink,” she said through the door. I wondered if my presence was keeping her from vomiting. I wished I could tell her I wouldn’t mind it if she threw up. I really wouldn’t have. I would have understood. If puking could have brought me any solace, I would have tried it years ago. I waited until I heard her close the outside door of the bathroom and creak up the stairs before I went and looked through her medicine cabinet. There was an old bottle of bubblegum-flavored amoxicillin and a half-empty tube of Monistat anti-itch cream. I drank the amoxicillin. I peed into the running toilet. The underwear I had on was white cotton with an old brown bloodstain. It reminded me that I hadn’t menstruated in months.
I got back under the sleeping bag and listened to Reva’s relatives through the ceiling—footsteps, whining, all that neurotic energy and food getting passed around, jaws grinding, the heartache and opinions and Reva’s pent-up anguish or fury or whatever it was that she was trying to stuff down.
I lay awake for a long time. It was like sitting in a cinema after the lights go down, waiting for the previews to begin. But nothing was happening. I regretted the coffee. I sensed Reva’s misery in the room with me. It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother—complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air. It became denser in the graininess of shadows. The obvious truth was that Reva had loved her mother in a way that I hadn’t loved mine. My mother hadn’t been easy to love. I’m sure she was complicated and worthy of further analysis, and she was beautiful, but I didn’t ever really know her. So the sadness in the room felt canned to me. It felt trite. Like the nostalgia for a mother I’d seen on television—someone who cooked and cleaned, kissed me on the forehead and put Band-Aids on my knees, read me books at night, held and rocked me when I cried. My own mother would have rolled her eyes at the thought of doing that. “I’m not your nanny,” she had often said to me. But I never had a nanny. There were babysitters—girls from the college my father’s secretary had found. We always had a housekeeper, Dolores. My mother called her “the maid.” I could make a case for my mother’s rejection of domesticity as some kind of feminist assertion of her right to leisure, but I actually think that she refused to cook and clean because she felt that doing so would cement her failure as a beauty queen.
Oh, my mother. At her most functional, she kept to a strict diet of black coffee and a few prunes for breakfast. For lunch she’d have Dolores fix her a sandwich. She’d eat just a few bites, and put the leftovers on a bone china plate on the counter—a lesson for me, I took it, in how not to overindulge. In the evenings, she’d drink piss-colored Chardonnay on ice. There were cases of it in the pantry. I’d watched her face bloat and unbloat from day to day according to how much she drank. I liked to imagine her crying in private, mourning her shortcomings as a mother, but I doubt that was why she cried. A delicate puff under the eyes. She used hemorrhoid cream to bring down the swelling. I figured this out after she was dead, when I cleaned out her makeup drawer. Preparation H and Sweet Champagne eye shadow and Ivory Silk foundation, which she wore even just around the house. Fetish Pink lipstick. She hated where we lived, said it was “barbaric” because it was so far from the city. “There’s no culture here,” she said. But if there had been an o
pera house or a symphony orchestra—that’s what she meant by “culture”—she never would have gone. She thought she was sophisticated—she liked fine clothes, good liquor—but she knew nothing about art. She didn’t read anything but romance novels. There were no freshly cut flowers around the house. She mostly watched TV and smoked in bed all day, as far as I could tell. That was her “culture.” Around Christmas each year, she’d take me to the mall. She’d buy me a single chocolate at the Godiva store, then we’d walk around all the shops and my mother would call things “cheap” and “hick-style” and “a blouse for the Devil’s whore.” She kind of came alive at the perfume counter. “This one smells like a hooker’s panties.” Those outings to the mall were the few times we had any fun together.
My father was joyless, too, at home. He was dull and quiet. When I was growing up, we’d pass each other in the hallway in the morning like strangers. He was serious, sterile, a scientist. He seemed much more at ease around his students than with me or my mother. He was from Boston, the son of a surgeon and a French teacher. The most personal thing he’d told me was that his parents had died in a boating accident the year after I was born. And he had a sister in Mexico. She moved there in the early eighties to “be a beatnik,” my father said. “We look nothing alike.”
Pondering all this down in Reva’s black room under her sad, pilly sheets, I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me. I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best—a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body. But that seemed directly tied to my nervous system—a physiological response. Was sadness the same kind of thing? Was joy? Was longing? Was love?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation Page 10