In the time I had to kill there in the dark of Reva’s childhood bedroom, I decided I would test myself to see what was left of my emotions, what kind of shape I was in after so much sleep. My hope was that I’d healed enough over half a year’s hibernation, I’d become immune to painful memories. So I thought back to my father’s death again. I had been very emotional when it happened. I figured any tears I still had left to cry might be about him.
“Your father wants to spend his last days in the house,” my mother had said on the phone. “Don’t ask me why.” He had been dying in the hospital for weeks already, but now he wanted to die at home. I left school and took the train up to see him the very next day, not because I thought it would mean so much to him to have me there, but to prove to my mother that I was a better person than she was: I was willing to be inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering. And I didn’t expect that my father’s suffering would bother me very much. I barely knew him. His illness had been secretive, as though it were part of his work, something that ought not concern me, and nothing I’d ever understand.
I missed a week of classes sitting at home, watching him wither. A huge bed had been installed in the den, along with various pieces of medical equipment that I tried to ignore. One of two nurses was always there, feeling my father’s pulse, swabbing his mouth with a soggy little sponge on a stick, pumping him with painkillers. My mother stayed mostly in her bedroom, alone, coming out every now and then to fill a glass with ice. She’d tiptoe into the den to whisper something to the nurse, hardly saying a word to me, barely looking at my father. I sat on the armchair by his bed pretending to read a course packet on Picasso. I didn’t want to embarrass my father by staring, but it was hard not to. His hands had grown bony and huge. His eyes had sunk into his skull and darkened. His skin had thinned. His arms were like bare tree branches. It was a strange scene. I studied Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. The Death of Casagemas. My father fit right into Picasso’s Blue Period. Man on Morphine. Occasionally he’d jerk and cough, but he had nothing to say to me. “He’s too drugged up to talk,” the nurse said to console me. I put on my headphones and played old tapes on my Walkman as I read. Prince. Bonnie Raitt. Whatever. The silence was maddening otherwise.
Then, on a Sunday morning, my father was suddenly lucid and told me matter-of-factly that he would die in the afternoon. I don’t know if it was the directness and certitude of his statement that rattled me—he was always clinical, always rational, always dry—or that his death was no longer just an idea—it was happening, it was real—or if, during the week I’d spent by his side, we had bonded without my knowledge or consent and, all of a sudden, I loved him. So I lost it. I started crying. “I’ll be all right,” my father told me. I got down on my knees beside him and buried my face in his stale blue blanket. I wanted him to pet my head. I wanted him to soothe me. He stared up at the ceiling as I begged him not to leave me alone with my mother. I was passionate in my supplication.
“Promise me that you’ll send me a sign,” I pleaded, reaching for his huge, weird hand. He jerked it away. “A big sign, more than once, that you’re still here, that there’s life on the other side. Okay? Promise me you’ll come through to me somehow. Give me a sign that I won’t expect to see. Something so I’ll know you’re watching over me. Something huge. Okay? Please? Do you promise?”
“Go get my wife,” he said to the nurse.
When my mother came in, he pressed the button on his morphine drip.
“Any last words?” my mother asked.
“I hope this was all worth it,” he replied. For the rest of his life—around four hours—I sat on the chair and cried while my mother got drunk in the kitchen, ducking her head in every now and then to see if he was dead yet.
Finally, he was.
“That’s it, right?” my mother asked.
The nurse took his pulse, then pulled the blanket over his head.
The memory should have rustled up some grief in me. It should have reignited the coals of woe. But it didn’t. Remembering it all now in Reva’s bed, I felt almost nothing. Just a slight irritation at the lumpiness of the mattress, the loud swish of the sleeping bag whenever I turned over. Upstairs, Reva’s relatives had the television on high volume. The suspenseful sound effects from Law & Order echoed down through the floor.
I hadn’t been to a funeral since my mother’s, almost exactly seven years earlier. Hers had been quick and informal in the funeral home chapel. The guests barely filled the first few rows—just me and my father’s sister, a few neighbors, the housekeeper. The names in her address book had been doctors—hers and my father’s. My high school art teacher was there. “Don’t let this take you all the way down, honey,” he said. “You can always call me if you need a grown-up to lean on.” I never called him.
My father’s funeral, on the other hand, had been a real production. There were printed programs, long speeches. People flew in from across the country to pay their respects. The pews in the university chapel were uncushioned, and the bones in my butt rocked against the hard wood. I sat beside my mother in the front row, trying to ignore her sighs and throat clearings. Her frosty lipstick was put on so thick it started melting down her chin. When the president of the university announced that the science department would establish a research fellowship in my father’s name, my mother let out a groan. I reached for her hand and held it. It was bold of me to make such a move, but I thought we might bond now that we had something so huge in common—a dead man whose last name we shared. Her hand was cold and bony, like my father’s had been on his deathbed just days earlier. An obvious foreshadowing to me now, but I didn’t think of that then. Less than a minute later, she let go of my hand to dig around in her purse for her little pillbox. I didn’t know exactly what she was taking that day—an upper, I thought. She kept her coat on in the chapel during the ceremony, fidgeted with her stockings, her hair, glanced back viciously at the crowded pews behind us each time she heard somebody sigh or sniffle or whisper. The hours felt interminable, waiting for everyone to arrive, sitting through the formal proceedings. My mother agreed. “This is like waiting for a train to hell,” she whispered at some point, not to me directly, but up at the chapel ceiling. “I’m exhausted.” Highway to hell. Slow road to hell. Express bus. Taxicab. Rowboat. First-class ticket. Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors.
When it was time for people to go up and say nice things about my father, she glared at the line forming up the central aisle.
“They think they’re special now because they know someone who died.” She rolled her red, quick-roving eyes. “It makes them feel important. Egomaniacs.” Friends, colleagues, coworkers, loyal students spoke emotionally from the rostrum. The people wept. My mother squirmed. I could see our reflections in the gloss of the casket in front of us. We were both just pale, floating, jittery heads.
I couldn’t sleep in Reva’s bed. It was a lost cause.
I decided to take a shower. I got up and undressed and turned the water on with a squelch, watched the bathroom fill with steam. Since I’d started sleeping all the time, my body had gotten very thin. My muscles had turned soft. I still looked good in clothes, but naked I looked fragile, weird. Protruding ribs, wrinkles around my hips, loose skin around my abdomen. My collarbones jutted out. My knees looked huge. I was all sharp corners at that point. Elbows, clavicles, hip points, the knobby vertebrae of my neck. My body was like a wooden sculpture in need of sanding. Reva would have been horrified to see me naked like that. “You look like a skeleton. You look like Kate Moss. No fair,” she would have said.
The one time Reva saw me completely naked had been at the Russian bathhouse on East Tenth Street. But that was a year and a half earlier, before I’d gone on my “sleep diet,” Reva would go on to call it. She had wanted to “drop weight” before going to a pool party in the Hamptons for the Fourth of July.
“I know it’s just water
weight I’m sweating off,” Reva said. “But it’s a good quick fix.”
We went on the one day of the week the baths were open to women only. Most of the girls wore bikinis. Reva wore a one-piece bathing suit and wrapped a towel around her hips every time she stood up. It seemed silly to me. I went nude.
“What are you so uptight about, Reva?” I asked her while we were resting by the ice-water pool. “There aren’t any men around. Nobody’s ogling you.”
“It’s not about the men,” she said. “Women are so judgmental. They’re always comparing.”
“But why do you care? It’s not a contest.”
“Yes, it is. You just can’t see it because you’ve always been the winner.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. But I knew Reva was right. I was hot shit. People were always telling me I looked like Amber Valletta. Reva was pretty, too, of course. She looked like Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox put together. I didn’t tell her that then. She would have been prettier if she knew how to relax. “Chill,” I said. “It’s not that big a deal. You think people are going to judge you for not looking like a supermodel?”
“That’s usually the first judgment people make in this city.”
“What do you care what people think about you? New Yorkers are assholes.”
“I care, okay? I want to fit in. I want to have a nice life.”
“God, Reva. That’s pathetic.”
Then she got up and disappeared inside the eucalyptus mist in the steam room. It was a mild skirmish, one of hundreds about how arrogant I was for not counting my blessings. Oh, Reva.
The shower stall in her basement bathroom was small, the door clouded, gray glass. There was no soap, only a bottle of Prell. I washed my hair and stayed under the water until it ran cold. When I got out, I could hear the news blaring through the ceiling. The towels Reva had left for me on the sink were pink and seafoam green and smelled faintly of mildew. I rubbed the fog off the mirror and looked at myself again. My hair splatted against my neck. Maybe I should cut it even shorter, I thought. Maybe I would enjoy that. Boy cut. Gamine. I’d look like Edie Sedgwick. “You’d look like Charlize Theron,” Reva would have said. I wrapped the towel around myself and lay back down on the bed.
There were other things that might make me sad. I thought of Beaches, Steel Magnolias, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., River Phoenix dying on the sidewalk in front of the Viper Room, Sophie’s Choice, Ghost, E.T., Boyz n the Hood, AIDS, Anne Frank. Bambi was sad. An American Tail and The Land Before Time were sad. I thought of The Color Purple, when Nettie gets kicked out and has to leave Celie in that house, a slave to her abusive husband. “Nothing but death can keep me from her!” That was sad. That should have done it, but I couldn’t cry. None of that penetrated deep enough to press whatever button controlled my “outpouring of sorrow.”
But I kept trying.
I pictured the day of my father’s funeral—brushing my hair in the mirror in my black dress, picking at my cuticles until they bled, how my vision got blurry with tears walking down the stairs and I almost tripped, the streaks of autumn leaves blearing by as I drove my mother to the university chapel in her Trans Am, the space between us filling with tangled ribbons of pale blue smoke from her Virginia Slim, her saying not to open a window because the wind would mess up her hair.
Still, no sorrow.
“I’m just so sorry,” Peggy said over and over at my father’s funeral. Peggy was the only friend my mother had left by the end—a Reva type, for sure. She lived around the corner from my parents’ house in a lavender Dutch Colonial with a front yard full of wildflowers in the summer, sloppy snowmen and forts built by her two young sons in the winter, tattered Tibetan prayer flags hanging over the front door, lots of wind chimes, a cherry tree. My father had called it “the hippie house.” I sensed that Peggy wasn’t very intelligent, and that my mother didn’t really like her. But Peggy offered my mother a lot of pity. And my mother loved pity.
I stayed home for a week after my father’s funeral. I wanted to do what I thought I was supposed to do—to mourn. I’d seen it happening in movies—covered mirrors and stilled grandfather clocks, listless afternoons silent but for sniffling and the creaks of old floorboards as someone in an apron came out from the kitchen saying, “You should eat something.” And I wanted a mother. I could admit that. I wanted her to hold me while I cried, bring me cups of warm milk and honey, give me comfy slippers, rent me videos and watch them with me, order deliveries of Chinese food and pizza. Of course I didn’t tell her that this was what I wanted. She was usually passed out in her bed with the door locked.
A few times that week, people visited the house, and my mother would do her hair and makeup, spray air freshener, raise the blinds. She got phone calls from Peggy twice a day. “I’m fine, Peggy. No, don’t come over. I’m going to take a bath and a nap. Sunday? Fine, but call first.”
In the afternoons, I took the car out, driving aimlessly or to the mall or the supermarket. My mother left me lists of things to buy, with a note for the guy at the liquor store. “This girl is my daughter, and I permit her to purchase alcohol. Call if you’d like to verify her identity. The number is . . .” I bought her vodka. I bought her whiskey and mixers. I didn’t think she was in any real danger. She’d been a heavy drinker for years. Maybe I did take some pleasure in aiding her self-destruction by buying her booze, but I didn’t want my mother to die. It wasn’t like that. I remember one afternoon, she came out of her room and walked past me where I lay on the floor sobbing. She went to the kitchen, wrote a check for the housekeeper, took a bottle of vodka from the freezer, told me to turn down the television, and went back to her room.
That was the worst of it. I was pretty upset. I couldn’t have described with any accuracy how I was “doing.” And nobody called to ask me. Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty. In hindsight, Reva was a pioneer: she was the only friend who ever really dared to try to know me. We didn’t get to be friends until later that year. For the rest of my week of mourning, my moods trespassed out of the standard categories I’d come to recognize. One moment was silent and gray, Technicolor and garish and absurd the next. I felt like I was on drugs, though I had taken nothing. I didn’t even drink that week until a man from the university, Professor Plushenko, one of my father’s colleagues, came to the house, and my mother attempted to entertain him.
Professor Plushenko had come under the veil of condolence with a store-bought Bundt cake and a bottle of Polish brandy. He was there to convince my mother to give him my father’s papers. I had the feeling he wanted something my father wouldn’t have given to him willingly. I felt a responsibility to watch and make sure the guy didn’t take advantage of my mother’s fragile state. Apparently the man had known my parents for many years.
“You look just like your mother,” he said that night, leering at me. His skin was cardboard colored and matte, his lips weirdly red and gentle. He wore a striped gray suit and smelled of sweet cologne.
“My daughter is barely nineteen years old,” my mother scoffed. She wasn’t defending me against his lechery. She was bragging. By then, I was actually twenty.
Of course there was no dinner—my mother was incapable of providing that—but there were drinks. I was allowed to drink. After a few, the man sat down on the sofa between us. He spoke of my father’s invaluable contribution to future generations of scientists, how blessed he felt to have worked so closely beside him. “His legacy is in his students, and in his papers. I want to be the one to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. It’s precious material. It must be handled very thoughtfully.”
My mother could barely speak then. She allowed a tear to run down her face, leaving a muddled gray stripe through her makeup. The man put one arm around her shoulders. “Oh, you poor thing. A tragic loss. He was a great man. I know how much he loved you.” I guess my mother was too aggrieved, too
drunk, or too medicated to see the man’s other arm snake over from his knee to mine at some point during the conversation. I was drunk, too, and I kept still. When my mother got up to use the bathroom, we were left alone on the sofa, and there was a kiss on my forehead, a finger traced down the side of my neck and over my left nipple. I knew what he was doing. I did not resist. “You poor thing.”
My nipple was still erect when my mother came back in, tripping over the edge of the carpet.
My father had left everything to my mother, including the contents of his study. After she died, I was the one who went in there and packed things up and lugged the boxes to the basement. That colleague of his never saw a single page. What I was bartering for in letting that guy kiss me was still not immediately clear. Maybe my mother’s dignity. Or maybe I just wanted a little affection. Trevor and I had been on the outs for months at the time. I hadn’t called to tell him my father had died. I was saving it to tell him later, so he’d feel terrible.
I called a taxi to take me to the train station the morning after that kiss. I didn’t wake my mother to tell her I was going back to school. I didn’t leave a note. A week went by. She didn’t call. When she “had her accident,” which is how they termed it at the hospital, Peggy was the one to find her.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said on the phone. “She’s still alive, but the doctors say you should come as soon as you can. I’m so, so sorry.”
My knees didn’t buckle. I didn’t fall to the ground. I was at the sorority house. I could hear girls cooking in the kitchen, chatting about their fat-free diets and how not to “bulk up” at the gym.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation Page 11