But blip, blip, blip, blip, Vee thought, was a wonderful mantra. You repeated it until you stopped feeling competitive with motherless babies. You said it until you were able to remember that life is short and everyone dies and although some deaths may be more dramatic or fascinating or ugly than others—some so much so that they become memorable headlines: “West Side Jumper Son of Death Camp Gas Inventor”; “Woman Pulled from Hudson Identified by Daughters”; “Chock full o’Nuts Massacre Kills Eleven”—that once you’re dead, it’s the same state of nothingness for everyone, unless you believe in an afterlife where the good are rewarded and the bad are punished and loving couples are reunited, which Vee did and does not.
Blip, blip, blip, blip until you also remembered this other important thing that you kept forgetting: that being shot in the back when you don’t expect it and are completely immersed in your date nut bread sandwich and an article in the Post about the Yankees creaming the Mariners (which means you are very, very happy) is probably as swift and therefore as good a way to die as any death can be.
“I was in Korea,” one of the cops on the scene was quoted as saying. “I’ve seen men killed, lots of men killed, shot, blown up, mutilated, but never have I seen carnage like this.”
At first Vee wished the cop hadn’t said this, but now she was trying to be thankful. Like sudden death, carnage was her friend. Brutal, merciless, but above all excessive. An excess of bullets meant no lingering, no suffering, not even any turning around and seeing your fate standing just inside the revolving door.
She was never able to turn all this into prose, though. At the time she tried, but she’d quickly give up. “What’s there to say?” she’d ask Lady and Delph. She knew him, she loved him, he died. When the cancer came back in the last year of the 1970s, our decade horribilis—“Could it have been triggered by Eddie’s murder?” she asked her doctor, who said it was unlikely, but then again, there was so much they didn’t know about complicated grief, and it was the first time but hardly the last she’d heard that belittling term—she thought it would be the end of the story, the end of the romance. He dies, she dies of a broken heart among other, less romantic things. But the bi-lat and chemo had worked, at least for a good long while.
At the survivors’ group meeting she’d attended after the segment on the news, the widower had made fun of himself. “They literally smeared honey on the glass of my wife’s picture to get the baby to press her mouth to it,” he said. “And, you know the footage of me and Nim? You know what Nim was saying? I was saying good-bye, Nim, and I love you, Nim, and he was saying, Me eat eat eat. The minute the camera stopped rolling I had to take him to the kitchen. He didn’t give a shit about me. He just wanted his raspberry yogurt.”
Vee actually wound up dating the widower for a while. It hadn’t worked out. Under his competent and outgoing facade, he was needy, sad, intense. “You know,” Vee told Lady, making a face, “human.”
“Ugh,” Lady said agreeably. “I mean, who needs that in their life?”
What she really objected to, Vee said, was that the widower had smeared the emotional equivalent of honey all over Vee to convince himself he loved her, and he wound up falling for his own cheap trick. His little daughter had been less of a chump. Not much more lingual than Nim Chimpsky, but no dummy either, she resisted Vee mightily, howling whenever thrust into Vee’s arms. The widower asked Vee to marry him anyway. “We understand each other,” he said, “in a way no one else ever could.”
“Do you even love me?” Vee asked, because that had never come up, and he grew abruptly irritated and formal and said, “Well, of course I have the requisite feelings.”
Even then she’d considered saying yes. But ultimately she told him she was pretty sure they wanted different things. He wanted a caretaker for his daughter. She wanted to obsess about Eddie for an unhealthily long time, i.e., the rest of her life. He didn’t take the rejection well. He cried copiously. She tried to cry, but couldn’t manage it. She was pretty sure the reason he was crying was because, once again, he wasn’t getting a proper good-bye. He was giving Vee the chance to utter the perfect farewell, the last line in the movie of their unromantic romance, but she couldn’t come up with it. She could only think of other last lines—I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship; If you talk about this, and you will, be kind; tomorrow’s another day. She looked at him—he was so much better-looking than Eddie—and she couldn’t help it, she got a little mean. She wanted out of his apartment so badly. But then he grabbed hold of her wrist, told her he loved her, that he honestly did, and the perfect last line came to her. She said, “Me eat eat eat,” and his tears dried up in an instant and he told her to go fuck herself and that was that.
Over the years we’ve received calls from biographers and journalists and pushy PhD students requesting information and interviews about our great-grandparents. For the longest time those calls have focused on Lenz. Recently, though, the callers have been asking about Iris. This is especially true of the students, Jewish women who rattle on about their interest in talmudic hermeneutics and their readings of the midrashim and the exegetical commentaries of Rabbeinu Tam vis-à-vis self-death.
“My thesis,” Vee will say, mimicking their tight-jawed, nasal voices sprinkled with a touch of Brooklyn, “considers the degree to which Iris’s suicide conformed with the aggadic laws regarding self-death and apostasy.”
The grad students refer to our great-grandmother by her first name, as if they’re old friends of hers. Speaking slowly, they explain to Vee that Iris was a proto-feminist who killed herself in protest against her husband’s unconscionable promulgation of poisonous gas. With great feeling, they break the news that Lenz was a self-involved bastard who made sure Iris had no career. A bastard who then went off to the Russian front, abandoning his little boy with his mother’s fresh corpse.
Vee never says much in reply. She doesn’t point out that there was more than one abandoning parent in the Dahlem mansion that day. She doesn’t remind them that Lise Meitner and Marie Curie each managed to make a go of their careers, that Mileva Einstein found a less showy way of coping with a difficult husband. She doesn’t share her opinion that Iris was no feminist, no hero, just a mouse crippled by repressed anger and unrequited love for her doctoral adviser.
Above all, Vee doesn’t ask what the hell hermeneutics means. To be honest, we don’t want to know. We’re afraid that if we understand the word, we’ll begin using it, and we’ll start sounding like these women or, even worse, thinking like them.
We don’t want to become analytical or intellectual or nasal. We have no time to read up on which self-deaths this Rabbeinu Tam person considered A-OK and which he considered no-nos. Once you decide to kill yourself, once you make a pact and circle the date on your calendar, you just have to go ahead and do it. You can’t conduct a little scholarly research first. You can’t check in with rabbis or God or your dissertation adviser. Suicide is not for academics.
“I don’t think I can help you” is what Vee typically says to the bubbly women. “We didn’t know our great-grandmother. Who are we—really, who is anyone—to speculate on her motives?” After some concluding politesse, she hangs up and primal-screams. Feeling guilty for never taking a turn on the phone, Lady makes her a cocktail: a sloe gin fizz red as garnets or one of the new martinis made with one of the new vodkas, sugary and juicy and blue. Or orange. Or green. Martinis the colors of New York’s perverted sunsets. We are, after all, the descendants of not only a mass murderer but also a dyemaker. We, too, like batches of liquid color.
“Just wait,” Delph says. “Soon they’ll want to write about us.”
“I doubt that highly,” says Lady.
But you never know, says Delph. It’s seems evident that there are at least a dozen female Jewish scholars born in Brooklyn, studying at universities throughout New York and New Jersey, who are working on dissertations about Iris. Why not a dissertation about us? What did she think, our mother used to say o
f Iris, that the world owed her a parade? Well, maybe the world did.
Vee hasn’t accomplished a fraction of what Iris did, and yet Vee sometimes thinks that even she’s owed a parade. The simple fact that she continued to live after Eddie Glod died—isn’t that parade-worthy? Of course, she’s not imagining a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. She has in mind a Roman triumph; she, the conquering general, waving to the admiring throng as a slave leans forward and whispers in her ear, “You are mortal, you are mortal, you are going to die.”
She is mortal, she is mortal. “Really?” she said upon getting her latest prognosis. “Only six months?”
“To a year,” her doctor said. “And I only provided a prognosis because you pushed. Who can really say, Vee? Prognostication is more art than science. It could be a month. It could be five years.”
“But what is it really?”
“Six months to a year.”
They sat knees to knees in his office. He was drawing a bisection of the new problem area on the back of a prescription pad.
“Breast cancer without breasts,” she said. “You’ve got to admit, it’s impressive.”
“It’s not unheard of,” he said with great and, she supposed, appropriate solemnity. “I’ve read about it in the journals.”
“Huh,” she said. “And here I thought I was special.”
He showed her his illustration, but not being visual, she shrugged helplessly. They’d known each other for almost twenty-five years, she and this doctor, ever since that first lumpectomy, and still they had trouble communicating. He said axilla, she said armpit. He said mediastinal nodes, she said let’s try that again in English. Well, no, she didn’t say that. She said, “I don’t know what mediastinal means.”
“It’s . . .” He pressed his hand against his blue shirt.
“Heart?” she said. “I have cancer of the heart?”
He looked pained, shook his head. “Chest,” he said. “Your chest wall. God, I need a vacation. I’m losing my words.”
“Only the monosyllabics,” she said. “You still have mediastinal.”
As she said it, she thought: Well, look at me, having a conversation as if it were any other day. And she thought: Well, it is just any day. There’s nothing unusual about a person being told they’re going to die. I’m mortal; you’re mortal; he, she, and it are mortal. Well, maybe not it. But definitely he and she. Definitely you and me. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world.
“There are still things we can try,” the doctor said. “There’s an experimental protocol I heard about just the other day that we may be able to get you into.” He launched into an explanation: “If, as research suggests, your tumors are a heterogeneous set of molecular subtypes rather than . . .”
She shook her head. “Don’t go all hermeneutical on me. My body is not a text.”
“It is, in a way.”
“Three times,” she said. “I’ve gotten it three times. What’s to interpret? I surrender. Victory is its.”
He argued, but not as wholeheartedly as she’d expected. She heard frustration and hopelessness. She shook her head again, and this time he nodded. He folded his hands together: here is the church, here is the steeple. There were tears in his eyes, but they never fell. She appreciated both—the tears and the no tears.
He said, “Our goal, then, will be to keep you as comfortable as we can.”
He hugged her good-bye, a hard, tight hug that made her remember how long it had been since a man had held her. Embarrassed by the depth of gratitude she felt at his touch, she broke away. She made her way through the waiting room filled with the ashen and the florid, the hairless and the bewigged, the resigned and the royally pissed off, the old and the much-too-young, all of them engrossed in years-old copies of People and Sports Illustrated, all reading of scandals unhappily resolved, of play-offs already lost, of the princess dead in a tunnel.
Surprisingly, the plan to actually kill herself hadn’t come immediately. Stepping off the elevator, then out of the lobby, squinting for a moment against the sunny June day, making her way to the bus stop, fishing inside her purse for her MetroCard, she’d first imagined she’d simply be passive. She’d wait until her body quit. She imagined herself as one of those witnesses to a violent mugging who never dials 911, who just watches it happen.
It wasn’t until the contemplative state induced by a long, familiar ride on a public conveyance came upon her that she realized true power lay in taking action.
Action—i.e., suicide—was so obviously the right thing to do that the only shocking thing was that she hadn’t thought of it right away. She, of all people. Perhaps it was because she had no symptoms yet. Certainly she had no pain. Cancer was such a strange adversary, the way it hung around, biding its time.
Now she decided that as soon as the symptoms began, at the very first twinge of pain, she would take what people liked to call the easy way out.
But, traveling up Madison, commerce going on that day just as it would go on after she died, she began finding fault with this solution. She found herself turning the prognosis into a math problem:
If x = six months to a year or maybe longer, then what day is x?
It was an equation impossible to solve. On the other hand, how simple to determine x if the problem were tweaked just a little.
If x = precisely six months from today, then x is what day?
The bus made an abrupt stop. Passengers in the aisle lurched, and some—tourists, she assumed—cried out. Vee ignored them. She was not a part of their community: the community of people standing in the aisle trying to keep their balance. She was too busy looking through her wallet for the five-year calendar from the bank. She was too busy solving for x.
It made so much sense. Even the tut-tutters and tsk-tskers would have to agree. If she solved for x—if she determined the precise day on which she’d die—she could quit her job. Why would she need any more income? She could start spending down her savings. She could live off her 401(k) plan, the penalties for early withdrawal be damned. Limit her life to a six-month span, and suddenly even a paralegal is rich.
Nor would she have any need for the other benefits the firm provided, not even her Blue Cross. A person who knew she was going to die on a specific day—Vee’d already decided on New Year’s Eve, a little more than six months hence, true, but she liked the idea of going out at the same time as the century, and it would be so much easier for Lady and Delph to file her final income tax return if she died on the last day of the taxable year—such a person didn’t need health insurance. Such a person wouldn’t have to see any more doctors, not ever.
She wasn’t thinking just of her oncologist. She was thinking of her optometrist, with all his which is better, this or this, and her gynecologist, with the soft sad way she’d say, every goddamn year, “So, are we still not sexually active?” But mostly she was thinking of the dermatologists, the fleet of baffled men and women who, for the past ten years, had been staring at her scalp, trying to figure out why, the chemo long out of her system, her hair had never grown back. All the creams and goos and pills and steroids, the application of thick, smelly tar and ultraviolet light, every intervention doing absolutely nothing.
“This stuff will put hair on your chest,” the latest dermatologist had said, a little alopecia humor as he wrote a scrip, but the stuff had put hair nowhere.
Some sort of emotional trauma was the conclusion they all eventually came to. Unresolved grief, they’d say after they heard her life story. Each one had sent her on her way with the name of a shrink scribbled on a slip of paper and a lifetime prescription for Valium. They made her promise not to misuse the pills, and she promised and kept her promises. She’d never misused a single pill because she’d never taken any. She only stockpiled them.
As for her unresolved grief, for the past ten years she had concealed it with scarves. She wore them Hulk Hogan style, low on her forehead, knotted at her nape, the ends flowing. She tried to femme up the look with earrin
gs, large gold hoops or long feathers dangling to her shoulders.
But this day on the bus, having solved for x and feeling a warm tickling mixture of fear and relief, she abruptly reached up and removed her scarf, which was chocolate brown to play up her eyes, lashless, browless, and as stark as Raisinettes.
The removal of the scarf, the exposure of the pate: it had been wholly unplanned yet completely deliberate. Appalled and excited, she tried to detect her reflection in the dirty bus window, but the filth and the angle of the sun thwarted her. Or maybe—a bald, middle-aged woman—she’d literally vanished. Certainly no one on the bus was paying any attention.
She knew what she looked like without the scarf, of course. She saw herself without the scarf at home every day. This is what she looked like without it: awful. She was not one of those people who could carry off hairless. Bald made her look like some woman just escaped from an institution. Or, more accurately, like some man just escaped.
She turned from the window. She balled the scarf in her fist. Ever since the second occurrence, the one allegedly cured by the bilateral mastectomy and the chemo, she’d been trying to reach a place of serene acceptance when it came to her appearance. Body as narrative. Face as biography. The semiotics of Vee’s recalcitrant scalp. What are they saying, the scars on her chest, the deep nasolabial folds by her mouth? What’s the narrative? The first time Vee noticed those lines, she had thought they were streaks of dirt and tried to scrub them away with a washcloth. Lady caught her at it and laughed. Even unattractive women, even women violently widowed and prone to cancer, feel waylaid and queasy upon seeing—or, more accurately, upon letting themselves finally see—the first, indelible signs of aging. “Congratulations,” Lady said, “and welcome to the land of the invisible woman.”
If her body is a book, it’s a horror story. Chapter 1: I Am Born. Chapter 3: I Get Cancer. Chapter 6: I Acquire Jowls. Even so, it’s her book, her story. So as not to interfere with the unfolding plotline, she’s rejected even the smallest of palliative interventions over the years. No face powder to take off the shine, no contacts to eliminate the red divots on her nose, no padded bras to fill out a blouse. Certainly no implants. She gads about town greasy-faced, flat-chested, and four-eyed.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 21