“Thanks for letting me know,” I told Peggy. She was whimpering and snorting. I didn’t tell anyone at the sorority house what was happening. I didn’t want to deal with the indignity of it all.
It took me almost an entire day to get up there. I wrote a final paper for a class on Hogarth on the train. Part of me was hoping my mother would be dead by the time I arrived.
“She knows you’re here,” Peggy said in the hospital room. I knew that wasn’t true. My mother was in a coma. She was already gone. Once in a while, her left eye would blink open—clear blue, frozen, blind, a terrifying, empty, soulless eye. I remember noticing in the hospital room that her roots were showing. She’d been vigilant about keeping her hair icy blond as long as I’d known her, but her natural color had grown in, a warmer shade—honey blonde, my color. I’d never seen her real hair before.
My mother’s body stayed alive for exactly three days. Even with a tube down her throat, a machine taped to her face to keep her breathing, she was still pretty. She was still prim. “Her organs are shutting down,” the doctor explained. System failure. She felt nothing, he assured me. She was brain dead. She wasn’t thinking or dreaming or experiencing anything, not even her own death. They turned off the machine and I sat there, waiting, watching the screen blip, then stop. She wasn’t resting. She was not in a state of peace. She was in no state, not being. The peace to be had, I thought, watching them pull the sheet over her head, was mine.
“Oh, sweetheart. I’m so, so sorry.” Peggy sobbed and embraced me. “You poor thing. You poor dear little orphan.”
Unlike my mother, I hated being pitied.
There was nothing new to be gleaned from these memories, of course. I couldn’t revive my mother and punish her. She took herself out before we could ever have a real conversation. I wondered if she’d been jealous of my father, at how well attended his funeral had been. She left a note. I found it at the house the night I came home from the hospital. Peggy drove me. I was stoic. I was numb. The note was on my father’s desk. My mother had used a page from a yellow legal pad to write it. Her penmanship started off as bold, capital letters, but by the end it petered out into tight, itchy cursive. The letter was totally unoriginal. She felt she wasn’t equipped to handle life, she wrote, that she felt like an alien, a freak, that consciousness was intolerable and that she was scared of going crazy. “Good-bye,” she wrote, then gave a list of people she’d known. I was sixth on the list of twenty-five. I recognized some of the names—long abandoned girlfriends, her doctors, her hairdresser. I kept the letter and never showed it to anybody. Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and scared and heard a voice in my mind say, “I want my mommy,” I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.
My mother had been like I turned out to be—an only child with dead parents, so there wasn’t any family left to contend with. My dad’s sister flew back up from Mexico over Christmas and took what she wanted from the house—a few books, the silver. She dressed in colorful serapes and fringed silk shawls, but she had my father’s septic attitude toward life. She wasn’t sad to have lost her brother, it seemed, but was angry at “toxic waste,” she said. “People didn’t get cancer a thousand years ago. It’s because of the chemicals. They’re everywhere—in the air, in the food, in the water we drink.” I guess she helped me insofar as she nodded along when I told her I was relieved my mother was gone but wished my father had held on long enough at least to help me take care of the house, put things in order. I tried to keep it together while she was around.
After she left, I spent days in the house alone, poring over my childhood photo albums, sobbing over piles of my mother’s unopened packages of pantyhose. I cried over my father’s deathbed pajamas, the dog-eared biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Josef Mengele on his bedside table, a green nickel in the pocket of his favorite pants, a belt he’d had to drill holes in to make smaller as he’d grown sicker and thinner in the months leading up to his death.
There was no big drama. Things were quiet.
I imagined what I’d say to my mother if she suddenly reappeared now in Reva’s basement. I imagined her disgust at the cheapness of things, the mustiness of the air. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to ask her. I had no burning urge to proclaim any fury or sadness. “Hello,” was as far as I got in our hypothetical dialogue.
I got up out of bed and fished through one of the cardboard boxes on Reva’s bureau. In her senior yearbook, I found only one photo of her, the standard portrait. Hers stood out in the rows of boring faces. She had big frizzy hair, chubby cheeks, overplucked eyebrows that zoomed across her forehead like crooked arrows, dark lipstick, thick black eyeliner. Her gaze was slightly off center, vague, unhappy, possessed. She looked like she’d been much more interesting before she left for college—a Goth, a freak, a punk, a reject, a delinquent, an outcast, a fuckup. As long as I’d known her, she’d been a follower, a plebeian, straitlaced and conformist. But it seemed as though she’d had a rich, secretive interior life in high school, with desires beyond the usual drinking and foosball soirees suburban Long Island had to offer. So, I gathered, Reva moved to Manhattan to go to college and decided she’d try to fit in—get skinny, be pretty, talk like all the other skinny, pretty girls. It made sense that she’d want me as her best friend. Maybe her best friend in high school had been one of the weirdos, like her. Maybe she’d had some kind of disability—a gimp arm, Tourette’s, Coke-bottle glasses, alopecia. I imagined the two of them together in that black basement bedroom listening to music: Joy Division. Siouxsie and the Banshees. It made me a little jealous to think of Reva being depressed and dependent on anyone but me.
After my mother’s funeral, I went back to school. My sorority sisters didn’t ask if I was okay, if I wanted to talk. They all avoided me. Only a few left notes under my door. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this!” Of course, I was grateful to be spared the humiliation of a patronizing confrontation by a dozen young women who would probably have just shamed me for not “being more open.” They weren’t my friends. Reva and I were in French class together that year. We were conversation partners. She took notes for me while I was away, and when I came back, she wasn’t afraid to ask questions. In class, she diverged from the curriculum to ask, in halting, bad French, how I was doing, what had happened, if I felt sad or angry, if I wanted to get together outside of class to speak in English. I agreed. She wanted to know every detail of the whole ordeal with my parents, hear the deep insights I had gleaned, how I felt, how I’d mourned. I gave her the basic gist. Talking to Reva about misery was insufferable. “Look on the bright side,” was what she wanted everyone to do. But at least she cared.
Senior year, I moved out of the sorority house and into a two-bedroom suite with Reva in an off-campus dorm. Living together solidified our bond. I was the vacant, repressed depressive, and she was the obsessive blabbermouth, always knocking on my door, asking random questions, looking for any excuse to talk. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness. Reva’s frequent interruptions probably kept me from jumping out the window. Knock, knock. “Chat break?” She liked to look through my closet, turning over price tags, checking the sizes of all the clothes I’d bought with the money I’d inherited. Her obsession with the material world pulled me out of whatever existential wormhole I’d wandered into.
I never confronted Reva about the fact that I could hear her vomiting when she came back from the dining hall each night. All she ate at home were sugar-free mini yogurts and baby carrots, which she dressed with yellow mustard. The palms of her hands were orange from all the carrots she ate. Dozens of mini yogurt containers cluttered the recycling bin.
That spring, I went for long walks around the city with earplugs in. I f
elt better just listening to the echoing sounds of my breathing, the phlegm roiling in my throat when I swallowed, my eyes blinking, the weak ticking of my heart. Gray days spent staring down at sidewalks, skipping classes, shopping for things I’d never wear, paying through the nose for a gay guy to put a tube up my asshole and rub my stomach, tell me how much better I would feel once my colon was clean. Together we watched little flakes of shit flowing through the outgoing tube. His voice was soft but enthusiastic. “You’re doing great, doll,” he’d say. More often than I needed, I’d get face peels and pedicures, massages, waxings, haircuts. That was how I mourned, I guess. I paid strangers to make me feel good. I might as well have hired a prostitute, I thought. That’s kind of what Dr. Tuttle was years later, I thought—a whore to feed me lullabies. If anything was going to make me cry, it was the thought of losing Dr. Tuttle. What if she lost her license? What if she dropped dead? What would I do without her? Then, finally, in Reva’s basement bedroom, I felt a tinge of sadness. I could feel it in my throat, like a chicken bone caught in my windpipe. I loved Dr. Tuttle, I guessed. I got up and drank some water from the tap in the bathroom. I went back to bed.
A few minutes later, Reva was knocking on the door.
“I brought you some quiche,” she said. “Can I come in?”
Reva now wore a big red fleece robe. She had done her hair and makeup already. I was still in the towel, under the covers. I took the quiche and ate it while Reva sat on the edge of the bed. She prattled on about her mother, that she never appreciated her mother’s artistic talent. It was going to be a long afternoon.
“She could have been great, you know? But in her generation, women were expected to be mothers and stay at home. She gave her life up just for me. Her watercolors are amazing, though. Don’t you think?”
“They’re decent amateur watercolors, yeah,” I said.
“How was the shower?”
“No soap,” I said. “Did you find any shoes I can borrow?”
“You should go up there and look yourself,” said Reva.
“I really don’t want to.”
“Just go up there and pick something. I don’t know what you want.”
I refused.
“You’re going to make me go back up there?”
“You said you’d bring me some options.”
“I can’t look in her closet. It’s too upsetting. Will you just go look?”
“No. I’m not comfortable doing that, Reva. I can just stay here if you want and miss the funeral, I guess.”
I put down the quiche.
“Okay, fine, I’ll go,” Reva sighed. “What do you need?”
“Shoes, stockings, some kind of shirt.”
“What kind of shirt?”
“Black, I guess.”
“Okay. But if you don’t like what I bring down, don’t blame me.”
“I’m not going to blame you, Reva. I don’t care.”
“Just don’t blame me,” she repeated.
She got up, leaving little bits of red fuzz on the bed where she’d been sitting. I got out of bed and looked inside the bag from Bloomingdale’s. The suit was made of stiff rayon. The necklace was nothing I’d ever wear. The Infermiterol seemed to ruin my usual good taste in things, although the white fur coat was interesting to me. It had personality. How many foxes had to die, I wondered. And how did they kill them so that their blood didn’t stain their fur? Maybe Ping Xi could have answered that question, I thought. How cold would it have to be to freeze a live white fox? I tore the tags off the bra and panties and put them on. My pubic hair puffed out the panties. It was a good joke—sexy underwear with a huge bush. I wished I had my Polaroid camera to capture the image. The lightheartedness in that wish struck me, and for a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.
When Reva came back with her arms full of shoes and shirts and an unopened package of flesh-colored nylons from the eighties, I handed her the necklace.
“I got you something,” I said, “to condole you.”
Reva dropped everything on the bed and opened the box. Her eyes filled with tears—just like in a movie—and she embraced me. It was a good hug. Reva had always been good at hugs. I felt like a praying mantis in her arms. The fleece of her robe was soft and smelled like Downy. I tried to pull away but she held me tighter. When she finally let go, she was crying and smiling. She sniffed and laughed.
“It’s beautiful. Thanks. That’s really sweet. Sorry,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She put the necklace on and pulled the collar of her robe away and studied her neck in the mirror. Her smile turned a little phony. “You know, I don’t think you can use ‘condole’ that way. I think you can ‘condole with’ someone. But you can’t ‘condole’ someone.”
“No, Reva. I’m not condoling you. The necklace is.”
“But that’s not the right word, I think. You can console someone.”
“No, you can’t,” I said. “Anyway, you know what I mean.”
“It’s beautiful,” Reva said again, flatly this time, touching the necklace. She pointed to the mess of black stuff she’d brought down. “This is all I found. I hope it’s okay.”
She took her dress out from the closet and went into the bathroom to change. I put the pantyhose on, picked through the shoes, found a pair that fit. From the tangle of shirts I pulled out a black turtleneck. I put it on, and put the suit on. “Do you have a brush I can borrow?”
Reva opened the bathroom door and handed me an old hairbrush with a long wooden handle. There was a spot on the back that was all scratched up. When I held it under the light, I could make out teeth marks. I sniffed it but couldn’t detect the smell of vomit, only Reva’s coconut hand cream.
“I’ve never seen you in a suit before,” Reva said stiffly when she came out of the bathroom. The dress she wore was tight with a high center slit. “You look really put together,” she said to me. “Did you get a haircut?”
“Duh,” I said, handing her back the brush.
We put our coats on and went upstairs. The living room was empty, thank God. I filled my McDonald’s cup with coffee again as Reva stood at the fridge, shoving cold steamed broccoli in her mouth. It was snowing again.
“I’m warning you,” Reva said, wiping her hands. “I’m going to cry a lot.”
“It would be weird if you didn’t,” I said.
“I just look so ugly when I cry. And Ken said he’d be there,” she told me for the second time. “I know we should have waited until after New Year’s. Not like it would have made a difference to my mom. She’s already cremated.”
“You told me.”
“I’ll try not to cry too hard,” she said. “Tearing up is OK. But my face just gets so puffy.” She stuck her hand in a box of Kleenex and pulled out a stack. “You know, in a way, I’m glad we didn’t have to get her embalmed. That’s just creepy. She was just a sack of bones, anyway. She probably weighed half of what I weigh now. Well, maybe not half exactly. But she was super skinny. Skinnier than Kate Moss, even.” She stuck the tissues in her coat pocket and turned off the lights.
We went out the kitchen door into the garage. There was a storage freezer in the corner, shelves of tools and flowerpots and ski boots, a few old bikes, stacks of blue plastic storage bins along one wall. “It’s unlocked,” Reva said, motioning to a small silver Toyota. “This was my mom’s car. I started it last night. Hopefully I can start it again now. She hadn’t been driving it, obviously.” Inside, it smelled like menthol rub. There was a polar bear bobblehead on the dash, an issue of the New Yorker and a bottle of hand cream on the passenger seat. Reva started the car, sighed, clicked the garage door opener clipped to the visor, and started crying.
“See? I warned you,” she said, taking out the wad of tissues. “I’m just going to cry while the car heats up. Just a sec,” she said. She cried on, gently shaking unde
r her puffy jacket.
“There, there,” I said, sucking down the coffee. I was intensely bored of Reva already. This would be the end of our friendship, I felt. Sometime soon, my cruelty would go too far, and now that her mother was dead, Reva’s head would start to clear of its superficial nonsense. She’d probably go back into therapy. She’d realize that we had no good reason to be friends, and that she would never get what she needed from me. She’d send me a long letter explaining her resentments, her mistakes, explaining how she had to let me go in order to move on with her life. I could already imagine her phrasing. “I’ve come to realize that our friendship is no longer serving me”—that was language her therapist would have taught her—“which is not a criticism of you.” But of course it was about me: I was the friend in the friendship she was describing.
As we drove through Farmingdale, I wrote my reply to her would-be “Dear John” letter in my head. “I got your note,” I would begin. “You have confirmed what I’ve known about you since college.” I tried to think of the worst thing I could say about a person. What was the cruelest, most cutting, truest thing? Was it worth saying? Reva was harmless. She wasn’t a bad person. She’d done nothing to hurt me. I was the one sitting there full of disgust, wearing her dead mother’s shoes. “Good-bye.”
* * *
• • •
FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, through the proceedings at Solomon Schultz Funeral Home, I stayed by Reva’s side but watched her as though from a distance. I started to feel strange—not guilty per se, but somehow responsible for her suffering. I felt as though she were a stranger I had hit with my car, and I was waiting for her to die so she wouldn’t be able to identify me. When she talked, it was like I was watching a movie. “That’s Ken, over there. See his wife?” The camera panned over the rows, narrowed in on a pretty half-Asian woman with freckles, wearing a black beret. “I don’t want him to see me like this. Why did I invite him? I don’t know what I was thinking.”
My Year of Rest and Relaxation Page 12