by Kim Korson
We would say goodbye to our eleven-room boutique eco-hotel for travelers not tourists, where the only sounds one heard at night were the waves and the faint whir of some weird lemur I was convinced would kill me in my sleep.
• • •
The Hilton Cancun had 426 rooms and 7 pools. The lobby thumped. Clumps of families stood by the gift shop wearing bathing suits and snorkel gear, Cheez-Its and Oreos spilling from their oversized beach bags. Groups of office types gathered in the lobby in their casual attire, checking out one another’s pale legs or arms, which were usually concealed in their air-conditioned offices. Staff was everywhere, smiling, with trays of drinks or maps or ready to mop up some guest vomit. Everything was shiny.
“Go sit on the couch,” Buzz said, as he had business at the front desk. I ambled over, looking like a kidnapping victim moments after being rescued from a chained radiator. I sat on the white leather as small children walked by with curious faces, covertly grabbing a parental hand. The hum and chatter and unnatural lobby light mingled with frosty temperatures gave me the panicky feeling usually reserved for large malls.
Buzz held my elbow and guided me toward the elevator bank, then led me down the long, carpeted hall. He swiped the room key (effortlessly) as I heard kids thumping on the floor above. Housekeeping pushed the large cart past me, and even through my dying haze I peeked to see what there was to steal. Buzz shoved me along even though he swore he wasn’t pushing.
“Get into bed.” His tone was bossy.
The room was small but immaculate. Six pillows on the king-sized bed stood at attention. A dark wood unit (maybe walnut, I don’t know my woods) housed a television. A windowed door covered an entire wall, looking out on one of those slivers of balcony that were just there for show, and a small dining table with two chairs.
The blanket and sheets were facelift-skin tight and I barely had the energy to fight with them to get in. Not wanting to ask Buzz for help, as he was busy reading the room service menu, I managed to get in by myself, then felt accomplished and athletic. I rubbed my legs around the cool sheets, settling into position. Buzz handed me the remote, told me that he was going to stretch his legs and walk around. He closed the door and I could hear his flip-flops smack down the carpeted hall. I pressed all the buttons on the remote until the television turned on. The Cosby Show was on. In English.
“I fucking love Cancun,” I said to myself.
• • •
At sundown, Buzz ordered room service. I was still only gumming saltines, so he ordered dinner for one. He looked small slouching at the table near the sliding door of the nonbalcony, eating room service shrimp fajitas to the sounds of Rudy Huxtable.
• • •
The doctor’s office was in the basement of the hotel.
“It never occurred to me that hotels had basements,” I said, still dying but rested and ready for conversation.
“Mmmmhmm.”
“What, you don’t want to talk?” I said to Buzz.
“I don’t have anything to say.”
The doctor introduced himself as Dr. Alvarez and excused himself for a moment, letting us know he’d be right back. He patted my head before exiting.
“Is that Alfred Molina?” I said.
“I don’t even know who that is, but no.”
“You know, Alfred Molina, the actor,” I said. “He’s in everything.”
“I don’t know who he is, but this guy’s Dr. Alvarez and he is in the basement of the Cancun Hilton. Why would he be Alfred Molina?”
I shook my head. “You’re no fun.”
Dr. Alvarez returned and had me sit on a folding chair.
“What do we have here?” he said, smiling like Santa Claus waiting to hear about the Cabbage Patch dolls I wanted.
I reported my symptoms and when they’d started. As I mentioned the stomach issues, he nodded.
“Sí, sí, sí,” said Dr. Alvarez, explaining the affliction. “Happens to many, many tourists.”
Travelers. I didn’t have the energy to correct Dr. Alvarez. Buzz sighed, because not twenty-four hours earlier he was a traveler and now—well, he was part of the group who felt proud of themselves for shouting hola whenever they could.
As for my face pain, he looked into my mouth and said that indeed something was there but he didn’t know what it was. This was out of his area of expertise. He suggested a dentist and I nodded with interest but there was no way I was hitting a dentist’s office in another basement. Dr. Alvarez spoke in a clipped Christopher Walken–style cadence.
“As for the stomach. I give you. This medicine. So you can. Sit. In the seat up there,” he said, pointing to an airplane in the sky. “And not. In the seat. In there.” Dr. Alvarez laughed as he motioned toward the bathroom, and then went to get me some medicine. After I took the pill, Buzz made me sit by the pool and get real air, convinced that was all I needed to fix this phantom pain hammering my face.
• • •
Three days later, my home dentist explained that although I’d been told I was part of the 1 percent of the population who had no wisdom teeth in her head—which, he joked, didn’t mean I wasn’t wise—he’d found out I did indeed have one and it was growing sideways out of my gums and straight into my cheek. The dentist had never seen anything like it and called in a colleague and three hygienists to see.
“Congratulations, sweetie,” said Paulina the hygienist, touching the ring on my finger. “Did it just happen?”
Had I been in regular form, I would have regaled this stranger with tales of sun and sand and stories of love past and future and way more information than she’d bargained for. But as the dentist poked at the disfiguring and insistent tooth, I just nodded politely, sucking in the nitrous, enjoying the flight above the room without retelling the backward tale of casual sex and shrimp fajitas. That’s your story? she’d say, as I wiped my sweating palms on my jeans, staring at her central-casting white spongy shoes. It is, I’d say.
Maybe I’d say more, because I’d be high on laughing gas. Maybe I’d tell her that I like our story because it embodies us perfectly, that it is at once lovely and ridiculous. That of course there is love and like, but there is also Alfred Molina. Buzz brings so much to our story. He brings humor, he brings intrigue, he brings the plot. He is always willing to go to Ikea, and his charm is mayoral. He explains The Hunt for Red October–style movies to me and knows I have a weakness for celebrity impressions. He is versed in which donuts I like and will always do the talking at a party so I can be uncomfortable in peace. And while he actually believes his dishy good looks might signal to others that he’s been in a bar fight or two, to me his handsome face skews more nice Jewish Colombian drug lord who went to summer camp. He’s man-about-town to my woman-stay-at-home. He’s a gamer and fiercely loyal, and although he is admittedly dead inside, I know that sequestered somewhere in there is a neon—albeit murmurish—heart that flashes and hums when you need it to.
We were married seven months later, in an old movie house in upstate New York. The guests ate Twizzlers and popcorn as Buzz and I walked down the aisle together. Yes, my mother wore pants. Our vows spoke of love and honor and all that, adding in a much worked-on line that promised there would be no situation in which we can’t find laughter.
Buzz still uses this line most days, usually when making fun of me.
“You don’t even understand the vows,” I say.
“You don’t,” he says. “We’re finding laughter.”
“No. You are finding laughter at my expense.”
“Have you met you?”
And so goes the marriage. This is our story.
A Very Special Episode
• • • • • •
The floors of the funeral home were shiny, like Granny Smiths in the supermarket. It smelled like lemons, not dead people, and everyone was mingling and kissing like th
ey were at a bar mitzvah. My mother, all of a sudden, was starring on Falcon Crest, leaving fuchsia, egg-shaped marks on the cheeks of guests, drooping her head at the mumbling of the words sorry and my sympathies.
We were instructed to move operations to a special room earmarked for family members of the deceased, and I watched my parents and Ace excuse themselves from the ballooning crowd. When I felt Buzz’s hand on my back pushing me in the same direction, I rooted my shoes, not wanting to budge, but instantly lost the battle, as my soles were unscuffed and those lustrous floors tricky.
“Stop pushing me,” I said.
He pressed harder. “I’m not pushing you.”
“You’re pushing.”
“I’m guiding you,” he said. Buzz was no abuser but I still contend he’d already shoved me through the revolving door at the airport that morning, no matter what he said. “Just go.”
He slid me closer to the portal of a room I imagined vice presidents were squirreled away to in the event of an assassination attempt. Down the hall of Paperman & Sons, past the bathrooms and a sign announcing the services of Bella Steinmetz and Hershey Finkel and our own Pearlie Segal, I stood outside the Family Room. The lighting was pleasant enough, though that piped-in organ music swirled through my brain, summoning flashes of endless hockey games, and days in Samantha Narvey’s basement, listening to her play “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the electric organ as her father cracked their greyhound for peeing on the sheepskin rug.
I’d read somewhere that when adults return home to spend time with their parents, it’s not uncommon to revert back to the same behaviors they exhibited at, say, thirteen years old. As I sent poisonous darts at my mother’s hairsprayed helmet on the day she was to bury her own mother, I chalked it up to statistics.
The sign on the door said FAMILY ROOM, but clearly the definition of family had a different meaning for all, because the place was packed, mostly with my parents’ friends. Dark-suited men huddled; a knot of women in black outfits showcasing chunky jeweled necklaces whispered about the golf club. My parents were the only one of their group not to join the Club, and I’d spent my entire youth hearing golf gossip at dinner. My mother didn’t play golf or tennis or even really go outside, but it was a gathering place for well-to-do Montreal Jews and she felt left out. She’d lament the summer weekends because all their friends were at the Club, and although I’d never set foot in the place, I hated it.
• • •
The call about Grandma Pearlie came on Wednesday, six a.m., Eastern Jewish Standard Bad News Time. Apparently she’d died the day before in the early afternoon but my parents waited to place the call. I’ve never studied Judaism but am sure somewhere in one of the books it states that all tragic news must be delivered before sunrise. To this day, if the phone rings in the early morning hours, I start calculating who is dead. I remember reaching over Buzz to get the phone and barely hearing my mother’s words but also somehow knowing exactly what she was saying. Her voice was small and far away, and I said “What?” at least twice before I heard the sentence, “Grandma Pearlie died.” I don’t remember hanging up, only Buzz gathering me in as tears dripped onto his white Approved Sleeping T-shirt.
The only death I’d encountered to date was when my brother’s hamster ate his pregnant hamster wife, leaving their unborn children in various stages of chewed up, but I was sheltered from the carnage because no one let me go down to the basement to see. I was six years old; there was no funeral. Somehow, because my parents married young and came from small families, I’d managed to avoid death altogether. Even when our Yorkshire terrier died I was away at college and dodged my father’s misery during the disposal of Milk-Bones and leashes and that full-body navy snowsuit with hood that the dog hated.
I’d seen plenty of dying and funerals in movies, which is how I knew to dig out that pair of black pants from the back of my closet, the ones I’d bought to make me look serious at work. They were called Editor Pants, from Express, and they were kind of a big deal because they cost more than twenty bucks and also came with a name. I was supposed to get them altered but never did, so they scraped the floor as Buzz pushed me along the halls of Paperman & Sons.
When someone died on Guiding Light, all they focused on were oversized black hats and decanters of brandy and revenge. But clearly there were other major parts of death and funerals. Like the toffee-colored guest book I couldn’t stop obsessing over. Who the hell would come to my funeral? I wondered. This caused instant hostility toward my charming and likeable best friend in Manhattan, who would, for sure, have way more people show up to her death.
“You’re still standing out here?” said Buzz, returning from the men’s room. I pretended not to hear him. He guided me again and I kept my head down, thinking it might keep well-wishers at bay. I had a hard enough time making small talk under regular circumstances. I knew I’d earned a get-out-of-jail-free card, being a mourner and all, but I didn’t have it in me to say anything to anyone, and although I didn’t want to discuss my grandmother with these people, I couldn’t bear to hear about their golf game or kids either. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about the weather, which is my least favorite topic, unless I bring it up.
And so I used some of the techniques I’d perfected for pretending I was crazy on the streets of New York if I felt some weirdo following me down Avenue B. It was basically a lot of face acting—alternating looks of concern and surprise, all the while arranging my eyebrows in different stages of ascent. I’d learned some of the moves from a relative who often wore fur coats in June and believed the FBI was tapping her refrigerator. I launched into these maneuvers while facing away from Buzz so he wouldn’t think I was having a stroke. It was just as I was organizing myself at the optimum angle that I saw it. Right there in the middle of the room, minding its own business.
As with most of my death experiences, the only coffins I’d ever seen were in the movies and on TV. Those were usually deep cherry or rich mahogany with satiny interiors fit for the likes of Liberace. Fancy stuff. But the one in front of me, the one that housed Grandma Pearlie, was pale and cheap looking and instantly made me feel the way I do when I catch a glimpse of an old person eating meatloaf alone in a diner. It was so rinky-dink that it looked like my father put it together in the backyard. Well, maybe not my father, since he carried a purse, plus it’s no secret that most Jewish men don’t usually wield hammers. We know better to leave the fix-it stuff to the Gentiles. But a father, in a Christian living room somewhere, might have put this casket together on Christmas morning.
Grandma Pearlie was in a box. Why did my mother choose this Ronco Fantastic Casket kit for her own mother? I imagined the choices at her disposal, all the colors and sheens and snazzy interiors. My mother has never left the house, never even left her room, without makeup. So why box up her mother in this? I overheard someone mentioning that the box was pine, but to me pine was the bedroom set Bonnie Caplan had in seventh grade. This thing wasn’t the smooth four-poster bed and matching dresser with full-length mirror; this pine seemed like it might give you splinters if you touched it the wrong way.
“What’s with the box?” I said to Buzz, who muttered something vague about Jewish law. My family was Jewish a couple of times a year, and mostly that entailed eating roast chicken or a light meal of dairy after my nana made us fast. What I knew about Jews came from that Mordecai Richler book they made us read in high school and from my religious tenth-grade boyfriend. I did recall him once telling me that the reason Jews bury their dead so quickly is to avoid humiliation for the deceased. Clearly whoever wrote that rule never saw the grapefruit crate my grandmother was stuffed into.
And it’s not like Grandma Pearlie was religious. As a matter of fact, when Grandpa Solly occasionally went to shul, she stayed home to watch The Price Is Right or take a bubble bath with the oversized bottle of Fa bubbles that lived on the side of her tub. Did all the Jews at Paperman & Sons
get this box? There were some pretty fancy Jews in Montreal and I couldn’t imagine them choosing this option to send their families off to wherever it was Jews believed in, even if it was the law. My father drove a chocolate brown Jaguar and wore custom-made cowboy boots with his suits, my mother wore sunglasses indoors; they loved being fancy. It certainly was not glitzy to send off one’s loved one for all eternity in something that looked like I’d made it at summer camp.
I wondered what Grandma Pearlie looked like jammed in there. No matter how tight I scrunched my eyes, I couldn’t make out her face. All I could picture was E.T. in the scene where he was dying, all gray and shriveled. I thought of how I was quasi-claustrophobic and had to sit on the aisle at the movies so I could evacuate if need be. I made a mental note not to be put into a box when I died. I decided then and there to be cremated, even though a college friend once told me her uncle was cremated and her aunt got a Ziploc in the mail that said REUBEN SCHLOSS—CREMAINS on it in Magic Marker. His whole body fit into a sandwich bag. If you looked closely enough, she said, you could even see chips of bone.
“I have to get out of here,” I said to Buzz.
“Are you all right?”
“No. It smells like lemons and people are dead.”
I left Buzz alone in the Family Room, seeing as my parents and their friends preferred him anyway, and escaped to the bathroom. It was unnerving how still and squeaky clean the place was. I knew there were two other services taking place that day and yet there wasn’t a person in sight. Except for one man I noticed in the distance, dressed in a brown suit that had seen better days. Grandpa Solly. I had been avoiding being alone with him since I got to town. We were not the kind of family who said I love you out loud, ever, so how could I possibly have the words, or the courage, to speak to my grieving grandfather. Plus, he’d been a little off as of late, as evidenced by his entrance to my parents’ apartment that morning.