But then
Vee has stopped writing. All these months, while we’ve worked on this project, Vee’s been the most reluctant, not to write, but to write about Vee. “Can’t we just skip me?” she asks.
“You have to tell your story,” Delph argues. “That’s how these things work.”
Vee scowls. “Who are you?” she says. “The Emily Post of suicide notes?”
Even this evening, when we started writing about Vee’s marriage to Eddie, Vee sighed with great weariness. “All right,” she said. “Fine. Let’s just get through it fast.”
But now she’s stopped. “What’s the matter?” Lady asks. “Don’t you feel well?”
No, Vee says. It’s not her health. It’s what we wrote. It’s the last thing we wrote, the phrase “but then.”
“‘But then,’” Lady repeats.
“I know,” Vee says. “It’s ridiculous.” The word then. But she’s never really thought about it before, she says. And now she has. The word then. It’s captured her attention.
Lady and Delph regard Vee with a sisterly blend of compassion and contempt. “You’re not suddenly taken with the word then,” Lady says. “You’re just avoiding writing about what we were about to write about.”
“No,” Vee says. “Really, I’m serious. Think about it.”
“Think about what?”
“Think about then.”
“I would like to think about then,” says Lady. “I would like to write about then. You’re the one who won’t think about it.”
“I don’t mean think about the time then. I mean think about the word then.”
“I know what you mean,” Lady says.
“Who’s on first?” says Delph.
“Then,” says Vee. When you think about it, she says, that four-letter word, that most quotidian of adverbs—it’s kind of astounding.
Then as adverb: I married my husband then. Then as adjective: I married my then husband then. Then as noun: I married my then husband then and after then, I was happy.
“I can’t believe I’ve never focused on this before,” Vee says.
“No more gin for you,” says Lady.
Vee is drunk, it’s true. But so are we all. It’s only Vee who’s this animated, gushing, alive. Then! This amazing, enchanting little word. See the adverb then travel in two directions at once! Watch it spin around, encompass both the past and the future!
The past: I hadn’t noticed you then.
In this example, then means long ago and far away, it means a few seconds before I did notice you, it means that fall semester of college, that English class at Columbia where the professor, forced to admit Barnard women for the first time, refused to call on said women, thus reasserting the masculine hegemony, or as we put it back then, his male chauvinist piggery. And this boy on the other side of the classroom, this funny-looking boy with long hair and big ears, he raises his hand, ostensibly to comment on the use of kenning in Beowulf, but instead—ambush!—he goes, “Professor, you just called on me now, the very moment my hand went up, but you haven’t called on that woman over there who’s had her hand raised for half the class. How come?”
The future: And then I fell in love with you.
Here then means “next,” which, by definition, means in the future, means later, as in one breath later, the professor getting hot, growling, “I’ll damn well call on whoever the hell I feel like calling on if and when I feel like calling on them,” and the boy gathering his books, then walking out, and the girl who’s been raising her hand feeling obligated to gather her books too—the sound track to all this: Revolution has come! Time to pick up a gun!” as sung by the perennial protesters outside Schermerhorn—and then the girl chases after the boy, into the hallway, where she says—awkward and stammering, a disgrace to second-wave feminism, or, as we called it at the time, women’s lib—“Thanks, I guess.”
Then the boy proclaims, in a voice that echoes through the empty hall, “The dick-swinging dog shall sleep the sleep of the sword,” thereby doing a little kenning himself, and the two of them walk to their respective registrars’ offices together, first his at Columbia then hers at Barnard, both the boy and girl dropping the English class and signing up instead for an introductory class in pre-Christian religion where they will learn that the Egyptians worshipped the scarab beetle because it laid its eggs in shit.
“From shit!” the professor will exclaim. “From shit came life! And then . . .”
Two phrases of note: and then and but then.
And then, Vee has decided, is positive. It implies something to look forward to: and then the girl went back to the boy’s dorm, and then the girl lost her virginity to the boy in the top berth of his rickety bunk bed while side one of Surrealistic Pillow played repeatedly until the guy in the room next door shouted, I get it, Glod, you’ve got somebody to fucking love, and then the boy and girl blushed and looked into each other’s eyes and made the same gargoylish grimaces of embarrassed horror, and then they began to laugh, eventually so hard they were crying and their faces turned red, and then, when the boy was capable of speech again, he raised himself up on one elbow and looked at the girl’s crimson and blotchy face, and then he said, “Wow, I always thought falling in love took longer.”
Whereas but then has the opposite effect. But then is the treacherous hairpin turn in the road. It terrifies you, and it ought to. You can’t see around it, but neither can you avoid it. You can’t come to a stop or make a U-turn or veer onto a different route. All you can do is hold your breath, steel yourself, step on the gas, and blast forward, even though you suspect that—no, you know that—nothing good lies around that corner.
But you have no choice. You have to lunge forward. You keep your foot on the gas. You have to. This is life. Einstein said that time does not move forward like an arrow, but how can that be true? This life, the one we perceive, which is the one that matters, does exactly that; it goes relentlessly forward in one direction only, taking you with it. You’re twenty-two and you want to be carefree, but then your husband finds a lump in your right breast. You get some treatment and put cancer behind you, but then your mother jumps into the Hudson.
The good news is that with Eddie Glod there’s an and then for every but then. And then he makes you a bowl of oatmeal. And then he holds you in bed. And then he’s willing to put up with your kid sister, your bad jokes, your big sister, your awful moods. And then he says, So what do you think? Are we ready?
And then you say that yes, you think you are, yes. And when you try and you try, but nothing happens, you don’t give in to the dark thoughts and silver, horizontal light that keep coming at you, because, after all, you’re both young and now you’re both healthy and so don’t you have all the time in the world? And it seems to be true, so you keep going on as if there’ll never be a but then again
But then
If Eddie Glod had not gone out for a sandwich in August of 1977, there would have been 1,918 murders in New York City that year. But he did, so there were 1,919. A madman bursting into the old Chock full o’Nuts at 114th Street. A madman mowing down everyone having lunch.
In a fit of Jewishness never demonstrated before or since, Vee decided to sit shiva for him, or at least to do something resembling shiva. She said she did it for his parents, but everyone could see that, aged socialists, they seemed more bemused than comforted. They were nice people, Vee always said, and mindful of their profound grief she tried to forgive them for buttonholing Eddie’s mourners and blaming Eddie’s death on her. She came from a family of drunks and suicides, they said. A family that had for generations also been purveyors of horrible and untimely deaths. “If they’re not killing themselves,” they whispered to Vee’s visitors, several of whom found it necessary to subsequently whisper it to Vee, “then they’re killing the rest of us. Used to be they had to go into a lab and make the poison. Now they are the poison.”
“I don’t know why I did it,” Vee says now of the shiva. “Maybe I just didn�
��t want to follow the Alter custom of burning and strewing. Or maybe I just wanted to keen and rent my garments in a quasi-public manner.”
The shiva was held in our apartment. There was no rabbi, no Kaddish. There wasn’t so much as a cold cuts platter. There was only half-assed ritual culled from a library book the title of which we immediately forgot, but which we ever-after referred to as Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Being a Jew But Were Afraid to Ask: mirrors covered with bath towels, Vee shuffling about in her socks, a torn black ribbon pinned to the sleeve of her gray Barnard T-shirt.
The mourners who were related to Eddie arrived with bakery boxes containing black-and-white cookies, checkerboard cakes. They huddled in the dinette with the Glods. The mourners who were Eddie and Vee’s friends brought green jugs of cheap wine and lids of grass. While Vee sat on an overturned wooden soda crate that Lady had carried up from the basement—later Vee would have to pull a dozen or so tiny splinters from the seat of her jeans—her friends crouched before her and reeled off every sorrowful event she’d endured up to and including that day, as if, without their assistance, she might forget one or two. Christ, Vee, they said, we thought it was lousy enough, your father leaving you when you were a kid, but then you get cancer, which is so ridiculous you figure nothing else bad could ever possibly happen, but then your mom goes and freaking offs herself, so by now you’re thinking all right, these things come in threes, she’s in the clear, it’s all smooth sailing, but then this shit happens.
Cancer, her mother, and Eddie. Her friends had seen her through three but thens in a row. They were just kids in their early twenties, her friends. They couldn’t handle all those but thens, and she couldn’t handle her friends, their lives a series of and thens about to begin. The wedding announcements, birth announcements. She couldn’t find it in her to be happy for them. In a few years she’d be in touch with none of them.
But at the shiva, they all did their best, and Vee, in her own way, was grateful for the effort, even as it made her cringe and fume.
Jesus fucking Christ, her friends said, the whole thing’s like some fucking Shakespearean tragedy.
Jesus fucking Christ, Vee said after they’d left and the three of us passed around a shiva spliff. The friends’ recapitulations of Vee’s personal plagues, the buckets of gooey sympathy—all that was bad enough. Did they have to misuse the term tragedy too?
“These are people who were in Eddie’s fucking classes at Columbia, and they don’t have a clue what a fucking Shakespearean tragedy is,” she said. “If this were really a fucking Shakespearean tragedy, that would make Eddie the fucking tragic hero. So what was his fatal flaw? His fondness for Chock full o’Nuts cream cheese on fucking date nut bread sandwiches?”
“Maybe it’s you they see as the fucking tragic hero,” Lady gently suggested, but Vee said, “Oh, please. I’m clearly a fucking French farce.”
“Theater of the fucking absurd,” Delph countered, and nobody argued.
For a while Vee was active in the gun control community, but when she was diagnosed for the second time, she quit. She and her doctor opted for a bilateral mastectomy and a rugged course of chemo. (A lopectomy, she called the surgery, as in, “I’ll have a lopectomy; make mine a double,” but as per usual, nobody laughed.) She’d been looking for an excuse to leave, and no one could argue with sorry, but I seem to have come down with cancer . . . again.
It was true that the surgery and the chemo made it hard for her to march in the streets with the gun control crowd. She felt wretched about it, and self-involved, but she knew she was justified. The chemo had destroyed her immune system, making hanging out in crowds potentially perilous. But she’d come to understand that even at her healthiest, she had no patience for activism. She couldn’t tolerate the endless political setbacks; she wasn’t able to rev herself up again and again. She hated the futility of the movement, the humorlessness of the members, and the vitriol of their opponents. Because her name had appeared in the paper—the activist widow, the angry surviving spouse—letters kept arriving detailing what people were going to do to her with their guns. Few involved shooting her outright, although some did. Most were just amateur attempts at porn. “Really,” she’d say of their favorite threat, “is that word ever spelled with a k?”
She had tried to write about it. It was her first attempt at memoir. She wanted to explain what the loss of this particular person meant not just to her, but to the world. The vacuum he’d left. The goodness now gone. But she couldn’t get the words right. Everything she wrote sounded sappy. She was ashamed of that failure. The surviving spouses of the other victims all seemed able to get the words right. She heard them use the right words at the Chock full o’Nuts survivors’ support group meetings she still attended for a while. The others stood up and spoke extemporaneously and, if not in heroic couplets, at least in complete, heartbreaking sentences.
He was a brilliant, compassionate physician.
She worked with disadvantaged youth.
You’d think a twenty-three-month-old child wouldn’t remember, but she just stands in her crib crying: Where my mommy go? Where my mommy go?
Vee watched them get the words right on the evening news. On Channel 7 the widower of a secretary who’d been on her lunch break was taped holding their baby in his arms. This was the aforementioned twenty-three-month-old child with the long memory. The widower showed the little girl a framed photograph of her dead mother. The song “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” played in the background. The baby took the photo and gave it a kiss. Close-ups of oil paintings came into view. The music faded, the widower narrated: “She was a secretary, yes, during the day, but she was really an artist . . . she was just starting to get interest from galleries . . . and she’d come home, and I’d hand off the baby and I’d go to work and she’d try to paint . . . and it was all so . . . perfect.”
“It doesn’t sound so perfect,” Vee informed his image on the screen. “It sounds like you were never in the same room at the same time. When did the two of you ever have sex?”
Before the shooting, the widower told the Channel 7 reporter, he’d worked evenings for the animal language acquisition project at Columbia. Vee knew that, of course. He’d mentioned it at the meetings. You couldn’t get him to shut up about it, in fact. But she’d never seen him talk about it with such emotionality. Both the reporter and he had tears in their eyes.
“I loved that job,” the widower said as Jimmy Ruffin sang on, “but I’ve had to quit; I have to stay home with the baby.”
Now they showed the widower on the grounds of the mansion in Riverdale where the famous Nim Chimpsky lived. The widower and Nim were walking away from the camera, man and chimp dressed in jeans rolled at the cuffs, both signing intensely to one another.
The network had phoned Vee too. An intern had asked her all about Eddie. She could hear herself being inarticulate. They thanked her, told her how helpful she’d been, but now she understood it had not been an interview, it had been an audition, and a different devastated spouse—the superiorly grieving widower—had gotten the part. Vee could see why. Eddie and she were not nearly as good-looking as the secretary and the widower. Eddie had not been an artist. She and Eddie had no baby, much less a baby plus a monkey in jeans.
He saw me through cancer, she wished she’d thought to tell the Channel 7 intern. Surely they’d have leaped at that. Surely a young widow’s cancer trumped a young widower’s talking ape.
It was watching the widower signing, watching him communicate with Nim without uttering words, that made Vee think of the blips. They’d been a habit, or maybe the right word is tic, that Delph had developed in about eighth grade. A few years later she stopped, just like that. But until then, each day when she returned home from school, she’d explode into the apartment as if enraged, throw her books and bags down on the chair by the door, then walk energetically up and down the length of the hallway—that is, up and down the length of the entire apartment—her fists clenched a
nd all the while chanting “Blip, blip, blip, blip,” as if she were an overcaffeinated robot. It became so routine, the blips, so expected, that Lady and Vee would go on with whatever it was they were doing as if Delph hadn’t even come home yet. They never greeted her, barely glanced at her, until she was done. If our mother stuck her head out of the kitchen (or, more typically, if Lady stuck her head out of the kitchen) and said, “Vee, what does Delph want for supper?” Vee would say, “I’ll ask when she’s done with the blips,” and that sounded reasonable and routine to everyone.
After the news segment about the secretary and the widower and the baby and the chimp aired, Vee gave the blips a try. Behind her closed door she lay on the side of the bed that still smelled like Eddie. She pulled her covers over her head. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and whispered “Blip, blip, blip, blip,” so softly that even she couldn’t hear herself. She felt like an idiot at first, but quickly she was struck by how effective, how distracting, how enormously calming the blips were. Like repeating a mantra. It was a mantra, wasn’t it, a word repeated until your heart slowed and your fists uncurled and you stopped worrying about making the rest of the world understand things that had nothing to do with the rest of the world. Lady was doing Transcendental Meditation at the time, had paid what was for her a hefty sum so a young man with a stutter would whisper such a mantra in her ear. “You’re a seeker,” he told Lady, “so I’m giving you a seeker’s mantra.” It was the words beginning with m that caused him trouble, his lips pressed together until that first sound exploded forth, followed by prolongation. Mmmmmantra. Mmmmmeditation. The mantra he whispered had sounded to Lady like a hushed version of a cartoon car horn: aa-aa-oo-ga, aa-aa-oo-ga, although, given her initiator’s disfluency, she wondered if her mantra was actually just plain aa-oo-ga. Of course she was too polite to ask him, and she figured it didn’t really matter anyway. Still, the thought that she might be replicating not merely her mantra but also somebody’s speech disorder distracted her until she gave up TM altogether.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 20