“I don’t know,” I say. The rabbit takes a tentative hop in my direction. Harvey. I draw a bead on him and throw my stone. It goes high and wide and Harvey doesn’t even dignify it with a sideways glance.
“What’s not to know? You’re so busy all of a sudden?”
“I don’t really feel like celebrating.”
Debbie is marrying Mike Sandleman, a former friend of mine, whom she had the great fortune to meet in my house while I was sitting shiva, which was something I hadn’t really intended to do. I’ve never been much of an affiliated Jew—Ben Smilchensky, who sat at the desk next to me at Beth Torah Hebrew School, used to bring Batman comics that we would slide between the pages of our Aleph-Bet letter books, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end for me. It seemed absurd to start being religious now, at the very moment that God had finally tipped his hand and revealed that he didn’t actually exist. I knew because I was there, standing beside Russ at the cemetery, watching from miles above as Hailey’s coffin was lowered on two handheld cloth belts. Even floating way up there, I could hear the creak and scrape of the coffin as it bumped against the hard rock sides of her freshly hewn grave, and then the sharp thuds of the flint-laden earth hitting the dry, hollow wood as they shoveled in the first few mounds of dirt. She was underground. My Hailey was underground, in a gaping wound of a grave in the Emunah Cemetery just past the reservoir, a half-mile from the Sprain Brook Parkway, where we used to drive in the autumn to see the leaves change colors. Hailey jokingly called it “foilage,” and that became our own little word for it. And now she was underground and I knew I would always think of it as foilage and autumn would always hurt, and I’d probably have to move out west, someplace where they had fewer seasons.
So don’t talk to me about God.
But my twin sister Claire insisted that the shiva ritual would be good for Russ, and I may not believe in God, but I believe in guilt and no one wants to dick around with eternity, even if it isn’t there. So we sat shiva, and it was as bad as I’d anticipated, sitting there all day with Russ, asses sweating against the vinyl seats of the low mourner’s chairs provided by the Hebrew Burial Society, nodding and pursing my lips at the endless parade of rubberneckers through our living room: friends, neighbors, and relatives offering lame conversational gambits from flimsy plastic catering chairs, before heading into the dining room to grab something from the buffet. Yes, there was a buffet: bagels, lox, salads, poached salmon, quiche, and gooey Hungarian pastries, all donated by friends of Hailey’s from Temple Israel. Grief can be catered just like anything else.
And there was my kid sister Debbie, treating the shiva like a SoHo bar, dressed to the nines in short skirts and push-up bras that raised the rounded tops of her medium-sized breasts above the horizon of her V-neck sweaters like a couple of rising suns. At the best of times, no one wants to see their sister’s breasts, but there was something particularly offensive about watching her wield them like cocked weapons in my house of mourning. And that’s how it came to pass that she got busy in the den with my buddy Mike, so you’ll forgive me if I’m not terribly invested in their happiness. If Hailey hadn’t died they never would have met, and now their whole happy future together, their marriage, their kids, will all be the result of Hailey’s death, and while I can rationally accept that this doesn’t make them exactly complicit in her death, they’re still reaping the benefits, and it just seems wrong to build your whole life on the cornerstone of someone else’s cataclysm.
“It’s not about celebrating,” my mother says. “It’s about spending time with your family.”
“Yeah,” I say, keeping my eye on Harvey. “I’m not really up for that, either.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say to your mother.”
“That’s why I went with the celebration line first.”
“Ha,” she says. She is one of those people who actually say “Ha” instead of laughing, like she speaks in comic-strip balloons. “If you can be a wiseass, you can come for dinner.”
This is what passes for logic with my mother. “I don’t think so.”
She sighs, and the way she does it makes me picture the word “sigh” in faint print, hanging above her in another comic-strip balloon. “Doug,” she says. “You can’t be sad forever.”
“I think maybe I can.”
“Oh, Doug. It’s been a year already. Don’t you think it’s time you got back out there?”
“That’s right, Mom. It’s only been a year.”
“You never leave your house.”
“I like it here.”
There’s no sense explaining the value of self-pity to someone like my mother. You either get it or you don’t. Everyone deals differently. My mother, for instance, takes pills, little yellow ones that she transfers into a small, faded Advil bottle which she keeps in her purse at all times. I don’t know what they are and she’ll never tell, since to her, medication is like incest, a dark family secret that must be kept from the neighbors at any cost. Claire named them Vil Pills, since the “Ad” had long ago been rubbed off the label from my mother’s constant handling. Back in the day, Claire and I would nick a few Vil Pills from her bag and wash them down with wine to get high. If my mother ever noticed she was short a few pills, she never said anything. And with my father writing the prescriptions, which he could still do back then, she had an endless supply.
“There’s no talking to you when you’re like this,” my mother says.
“And yet, you keep talking.”
“So I’m concerned. Sue me.”
“I’d settle for a restraining order.”
“Ha ha. There’s no authority on this planet higher than a mother’s love.”
“How’s Dad?”
“He’s having one of his better days, thank God.”
“That’s good.”
“How’s Russell?”
“He’s okay. I haven’t seen him in a few days.” Not since the cops brought him to my door, stoned and bleeding and hating my guts.
“That poor boy. You can bring him if you like.”
“Bring him where?”
“To dinner. What are we talking about?”
“I thought we’d moved on.”
“It’s you who needs to move on.”
“Yeah. I’m going to move on right now, Mom. Good-bye.”
“Debbie will be devastated if you don’t come.”
“Somehow, I think Debbie’s perfect life will go on.”
She knows better than to touch that one. “Just tell me you’ll consider it.”
“That would be lying.”
“Since when do you have a problem lying to your mother?”
I sigh. “I’ll consider it.”
“That’s all I ask,” she lies back. She starts to say something else, but I can’t hear her anymore because I’ve just fired my cell phone at Harvey, who has finally wandered out of the shadow of the giant ash tree on my front lawn. I miss the rabbit and hit the tree, and my cell phone explodes on impact, sending plastic shrapnel flying across the lawn. The rabbit looks at me like I’m an asshole. And my mother is probably still talking, even though no one can hear anymore.
3
MY MOTHER WARNED ME NOT TO MARRY HAILEY. She also told me when I was five years old that I would contract an incurable venereal disease from the toilet seats in public bathrooms, and that the exhaust from passing buses would turn my lungs black if I didn’t hold my breath, and that fast food was generally made out of processed rat meat. So by the time I was twenty-six, which is how old I was when I told her I’d be marrying Hailey, there were credibility issues.
“You positively can’t marry her,” she told me over dinner, her thin eyebrows bowing under the weight of her conviction.
I had taken the train from Manhattan up to Forest Heights to see the folks and share the good news that their historically most useless child was actually going to be getting married. They weren’t taking it well.
“It will be an unmitigated
disaster,” my mother said despondently, clutching her wineglass so tightly I worried it might shatter and cut her spa-softened hands.
“You barely know her.”
“I know enough. She’s too old.” My mother had been a moderately acclaimed stage actress back in the day, nominated for a Tony award for her portrayal of Adelaide in Guys & Dolls, and even though the last Playbill in her scrapbook was older than me, like most retired thespians, she had never actually stopped acting. She was always enunciating, always projecting, always selling it to the cheap seats, her eyes wide and expressive, her mouth forever poised to break into some concrete emotion to which she could finally commit.
“She’s only thirty-seven.”
“A thirty-seven-year-old divorcée. What every mother dreams of for her son!” Divorcées were only slightly higher than pedophiles on my mother’s extensive checklist of defective people.
“Her husband was screwing around,” I said, annoyed by my defensive tone.
“And why do you think that is?”
“Oh, Jesus, Mom, I don’t know. Because he’s a dick?”
“Doug!” my father said reflexively, waving his hand demonstratively across the dinner table, in case I’d missed it. “We’re eating.” This would be as much participation as we could expect from him, and you would think the chief urologist at a major New York City hospital could handle the word “dick” with his dinner.
“Sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to wake you over there.”
“Don’t speak to your father like that.”
“Don’t speak to me like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a child. I’m twenty-six years old, for Christ’s sake.”
“There’s no need to be vulgar.”
“I thought the situation called for it.”
My mother downed her Merlot like a whiskey shot, absently holding her glass out for my father to refill. “Stan,” she said wearily, “say something to him.”
My father put down his fork and chewed thoughtfully on his London broil, thirty chews per swallow. When I was a kid, I would count them to myself to pass the time, placing silent wagers that this would be the night he only chewed twenty-nine times. I never won, and that’s as good an illustration of my luck as anything else. Even betting against myself, I could always find a way to lose.
“You’re not exactly known for your sound decision making, Douglas,” my father said.
Okay. Here’s what I’ve learned. You can live your life being nice to everyone, you can be a loving son, a moderately decent student, never do hard drugs or impregnate anyone’s daughter, be an all-around good guy and live in harmony with all of God’s creatures. But crash one stolen Mercedes in front of the police station when you’re fifteen years old and they’ll never let you forget it. My mother was scandalized, terrified about what the neighbors would think, although in this case she was somewhat justified since it was actually the neighbor’s car, but that’s why you pay for insurance, right? If you never file a claim, then they’ve beaten you.
“And you’re not exactly famous for your emotional support,” I responded to my father.
“I take issue with that, Doug.”
Stanley Parker did not get pissed. He “took issue.” He was an Ivy League–educated doctor, trim and fit at sixty-five, with lush silver hair and gold-rimmed spectacles, clinically aloof despite his deceptively warm Mentadent smile. I had no memory of ever being hugged by him. He did shake my hand heartily at my college graduation, though, and I still had the photo to prove it.
“Listen,” I said, wishing I’d paid heed to my earlier instincts telling me to stay home and phone it in. But these were the same instincts that had led me to believe that taking the neighbor’s Mercedes on a joyride would get me laid, and they hadn’t been right then nor had they gotten any wiser in the intervening years, so I’d gotten into the habit of basically ignoring them. “I love Hailey and what we have works. She’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s a great mother, and she’s heads above what I ever thought I could have found for myself.”
My mother let out a horrified gasp and the wine in her glass sloshed over the rim, staining the tablecloth red. She should really stick to Chardonnay when I’m around. “She has a child?” she croaked, placing her hand against her chest, closing her eyes and taking labored breaths, like she’d just been stabbed.
I smiled. “Congratulations, Grandma.”
“Sweet Jesus!” she wailed.
“Yeah,” I said, getting up to leave. “I had a feeling you’d say that.”
The last thing I heard as I fled the house was my mother angrily berating my father, like the whole thing was his fault. “Stanley,” she cried, “it’s going to be an absolute train wreck,” inadvertently proving one of her favorite axioms that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
4
* * *
How to Talk to a Widower
By Doug Parker
I lost something after Hailey died. I’m not sure what to call it, but it’s the device that stops you from telling the truth when people ask you how you’re doing, that vital valve that keeps your deeper, truer emotions under lock and key. I don’t know exactly when I lost it, or how to get it back, but for now, when it comes to tact, civility, and discretion, I’m an accident waiting to happen, over and over again.
Socially, this makes me something of a liability.
I was standing at the prescription counter at CVS the other day, stocking up on more sleeping pills, when I ran into a friend of Hailey’s. “Doug,” she said, coming over and grabbing my forearm, the diamonds on her eternity band scratching at my skin like the teeth of a small animal. “I’ve been meaning to call. How are you doing?”
And I know the script, I’ve studied my lines. I’m supposed to say I’m doing fine, or okay, or some days are better than others, or as well as can be expected, and I swear, I opened my mouth to say something like that, but instead I held up the orange prescription bottle and said, “I take all these fucking pills, and I still can’t fall asleep at night, so I take more pills and then I have nightmares that I can’t wake up from because the fucking pills won’t let me, and when I finally do wake up I’m even more tired than before, and it’s not like I want to wake up, because when I do, I just think about Hailey and I want to go back to sleep again. How are you?”
And she looked nervously up and down the aisle, plotting her escape, and I felt bad for her, but I felt worse for me, so I just shook my head and waved to her like she was across the street instead of close enough for me to see the dark open pores in the skin under her eyes, and I left the store.
That sort of thing happens all the time now.
My sister Claire says I do it on purpose, that it’s my way of keeping people at bay, and I guess there might be something to that, but I swear I don’t mean to do it. It just bursts out of me without warning, like a sudden, violent sneeze.
A few weeks ago, a Jehovah’s Witness or a Jew for Jesus or some other freak on happy pills selling God in a pamphlet showed up at my door, smiling like a cartoon, and said, “Have you let God into your life?”
“God can fuck himself.”
He smiled beatifically at me, like I’d just complimented his crappy JCPenney suit. “I once felt the way you do, brother.”
“You’re not my brother,” I hissed at him. “And you have never felt like this. If you’d ever felt like this, you would still feel like this, because it doesn’t go away. And you definitely wouldn’t be knocking on strangers’ doors with that big, shit-eating grin on your face!”
“Hey!” he said, alarmed. “Let go of me.”
And I realized that I had grabbed him by his skinny tie and pulled him into me, that we were nose to nose and I could see my spittle where it had landed on his chin, that he was barely out of his teens and he was scared. I let go and told him to go away, and he scampered down the steps like a kicked dog. I felt bad for him, but then he shouted “Fucking asshole!” and flipped me th
e bird, and normally that would have been funny, but it’s been a while since anything has been funny. At least he would have a war story to tell the other God reps over coffee and donuts back at their holy headquarters.
And just the other day I was in Home Depot picking up some lightbulbs when I saw a couple around my age looking at paint chips. She was pretty and petite and he was wiry and balding and they were both wearing khakis and they were quietly in love. They were talking about the room they were painting, about the color of the carpet, the couches, and the wood of the armoire that housed the television, and the woman had brought one of the curtain ties with her to match, which is what Hailey would have done, and I watched them, showing each other chips, holding them against the curtain tie, and I pictured them back in their taupe room, sitting on their mushroom-colored couch watching television, tangled up in each other. And I was thinking that they could lose each other tomorrow, that one or both of them could be dead before the fresh paint on their walls had dried, and the woman looked at me with alarm, and I realized that I’d said it out loud. And the husband stepped forward like he was going to start something with me, although I guess, technically, I’d already started it, but then he just reached into his pocket and handed me a crumpled tissue and that’s when I realized that I was crying.
But it’s been a year now, and my family and friends seem to think that’s the shelf life on grief, like all you need is one round through all of the seasons and then you’re tapped like an empty keg, ready to start living again. Time to get back out there, they say. And so my mother calls me regularly, pimping out the latest girls she or her friends have come upon in their travels. But, honestly, what kind of bottom-feeder wants to go out with a depressed twenty-nine-year-old widower with no real career or goals to speak of? I picture strange, skinny women in shapeless peasant dresses, with large glasses and multiple cats that they talk to like children. Or else they’re sad, heavy women, nervously cheerful and self-deprecating, sweating through their foundation as they troll the bottom of the dating barrel in their ongoing quest for an orgasm that doesn’t rely on double A batteries. Or they’re divorcées, damaged, mistrusting man-haters looking for a new spittoon for their bile, or else drowning in fear and loneliness and ready to grab hold of the first man that might possibly share their bed and mortgage payments. And then there are the fetishists, vampires who feed on the blood of grief, who want to lick the tears off my face and absorb my immense sadness into their own swollen hearts, and while that might get me laid sooner than expected, I’ve become quite possessive of my grief, actually, and I’m not really up for sharing it.
How to Talk to a Widower Page 2