This Really Isn't About You

by Jean Hannah Edelstein

  Each time I did this I was filled with embarrassment to know myself, but I continued to do it, just as I continued to pronounce my name in the original German, which is not the way that I pronounced it before I lived in Germany. Aydel-SHTINE, I’d say, when people had cause to ask, and they’d say: OK, and how do you spell that? not: Ooh, I can tell you lived in Europe.

  One day, on the train to the airport, I found that I did not have enough cash to pay for the ticket, and the man sitting next to me silently handed the conductor a twenty-dollar bill. I told this story again and again as proof of how wonderful America was: And then, I said, I asked the man if I could have his business card so that I could send him a cheque and he waved me away! He did not even want to have sex with me or try to steal my phone! That is what strangers are like in America!

  I called my parents on my mobile phone without thinking about the cost or the hour, something I hadn’t done in more than a decade. I revelled at being in the same time zone as them. I took the train down to Baltimore for weekends with a white paper bag full of half-moon cookies, because they were my father’s childhood favourite. His appetite wasn’t great by then, so we cut the half-moons into quarter. By then Dad had been prescribed fentanyl lollipops that seemed to make him a little buzzed but also made him feel a bit better, relieved his terrible pain. Better enough to go to the movies, to eat a half a sandwich in the communist bookstore cafe, to go to an orchestra concert: Dvorak, the New World Symphony. It was good to see my father feeling better, but I also wondered if this meant that my father was now dependent on opiates. I wondered if the fact that no one seemed to be concerned that my father was dependent on opiates was a sign of something even more serious.

  Medical marijuana is sort of legal in Maryland, my mother said one time when we were driving somewhere in the car. I just don’t know how to get it.

  We can work on that, I said. I imagined doing the research, getting my mother to drive me somewhere in the city in the Subaru to meet a weed dealer, maybe in the bathroom at the communist bookstore, and then going home and getting high with my dad. I had never gotten high before, but imagined it would be fun. I imagined that it would be a thing to look forward to. A thing that I could do.

  Four weeks after I moved to New York, at half-past midnight I found myself standing in the hallway outside the apartment where I was staying. The door to the apartment was locked. On the other side of the locked door: my keys, my phone, my wallet, my coat. On the side of the door that I was on: a cruel and strange and unhelpful world, the polar vortex.

  My coworker Bob had let me stay in the apartment because he had worn out the amount of time that the co-op board would let him rent the place out. He lived in Los Angeles now, so while he worked on putting the apartment up for sale, he rented it to me, so that I could spend some time figuring out where I really wanted to live in New York.

  It’s actually against the rules for you to be living there, Bob had explained to me before I moved in. He seemed a little bit afraid of the co-op board.

  So if anyone asks who you are, just say that you’re my friend and you’re helping me to renovate the place for the sale.

  Sure, I said.

  But ideally, Bob said, try not to talk to anyone.

  No problem, I said.

  It really was not a problem. I was not there to make friends.

  This is how I ended up in the hallway that night: I was doing my laundry in the basement, I was going in and out of the apartment with my laundry. I was in my apartment with my clean laundry – safe! warm! – when I remembered that I hadn’t locked the door to the laundry room, and I was sensitive to the importance of not doing anything wrong, of not doing anything to draw attention to the fact that I was living in Bob’s apartment. In socked feet I left the apartment to go and lock the laundry room door, overlooking the fact that the laundry room key and the apartment door key were on different key rings. I remembered this fact when the apartment door slammed shut. Of course, this was too late to remember.

  I considered my options. I was not wearing shoes, but there was a pair of my boots in the hallway, in a puddle of melted snow and slush, brown with salt. I did have friends in Brooklyn, but I didn’t know their addresses. I didn’t know their phone numbers, either, of course I didn’t. So, I thought, I could pull on my boots and wade to a bodega – coatless, keyless – and beg to use the phone to call a locksmith. But then I’d be locked out of the building altogether. Or, I thought, I could rouse a neighbour – one of the neighbours who I was not supposed to talk to – and ask for help.

  I could also cry. But I was disinclined to cry: at that point, in general. I didn’t cry in the urine-coloured diner. I didn’t cry when I was rolling on Benadryl. I especially didn’t cry when I was sitting in the living room with my dad and he reached for more fentanyl. Crying didn’t make things better. It just meant that I had some really big problems, and the additional problem that I was crying.

  That’s why, when the locksmith turned up, and leaned close to my face, and said, ARE YOU CRYING? I said: No!

  (Some neighbours were up, thank goodness, I could hear their television, so I knocked and apologized again and again while the woman lent me a cell phone and the man did the sheepish laugh of a man who had been interrupted by a stranger who’d locked herself out of an apartment while he, the man, was about to have sex. Twenty minutes, said the woman who answered the locksmith hotline, and then I sat on the floor of the hallway by the front door and waited and thought about how I had reached a new nadir in my New York life.)

  (At some point, I thought, I will no longer be sitting by this front door and waiting.)

  (I tried to focus on that.)

  I’ve been rubbing my eyes, I said to the locksmith, not crying. I’m tired.

  And he said, I’m so tired! I would not have come except that you are a lady! My wife is angry that I left her to come here to help you!

  And I said, Thanks? and he said, I’m going to try to pick the lock and it will cost $80.

  I said, Fine.

  The locksmith was exceptionally handsome, with a tool belt and an Israeli accent. Both thick.

  You’re from Israel? I said, trying to befriend him while he took his pick out, in case that would get me a discount.

  Yes, said the locksmith. Well, originally from Uzbekistan.

  Tashkent? I said, as if I knew anything about Tashkent.

  Yes, said the locksmith.

  He tried to pick the lock by poking a pick into it several times in a floppy fashion, as if he’d never seen a lock before.

  I can’t pick the lock, the locksmith said, so I’m going to drill the lock and that will cost $120.

  OK, I said.

  He drilled.

  I have to replace the lock, said the locksmith. Do you want the expensive good lock or the cheap bad lock?

  The cheap bad lock, I said.

  OK, said the locksmith. He did some math on a piece of paper.

  All together, said the locksmith, that will be $468.

  I felt sick. How could I know that he was trying hard enough? I couldn’t. He was a lock expert from Tashkent. I was a fucking idiot from America who had locked myself out.

  All right, I said. Because there was nothing else I could do.

  The locksmith replaced the lock.

  I got out my debit card.

  If you pay me in cash, said the locksmith, I won’t charge you tax.

  I don’t have $468 in cash, I said to the locksmith.

  I’ll drive you to an ATM, said the locksmith.

  I should not get in this guy’s car, I thought, and then I got in his car.

  When I first told the story to people I skipped this detail, as it was too upsetting and dangerous and stupid that I got in his car, and then I started thinking that maybe the fact that I survived made it OK that I got in his car, and indeed a kind of important detail, though often when I admitted to people that I got in his car they looked disturbed and uncomfortable as if they wanted to reach
back in time and grab my arm with both hands and cry out: JEAN, DO NOT GET IN HIS CAR!

  The truth is that I was very alone, and the locksmith had a wedding ring and a photo of a baby as the wallpaper on his phone. The truth is that I got in the locksmith’s car.

  The locksmith drove me to one ATM, and then I realized that it’s not possible to withdraw $468 in one go from an ATM, and then he drove me to another, and then I realized that I was a fool, I had gotten in a car with a man who was driving a car full of locksmith tools.

  Take me home, I said, I’ll pay with my debit card.

  We have to wait for the card to be approved, said the locksmith, it’s going to take a while.

  He didn’t have a credit-card machine. He called someone in Locksmith Central and started reading my card details over the phone.

  Now, said the locksmith, we have to wait.

  We sat in the car, waiting.

  He was silent. I was silent. It was about 3 am.

  How do you become a locksmith? I said, to end the uncomfortable silence. Were you just really good at breaking into houses?

  The locksmith did not smile.

  I laughed. Then I stopped laughing.

  Are you Jewish? said the locksmith.

  Kind of, I said, I mean, my father is Jewish—

  Are you married? said the locksmith. Do you have a boyfriend?

  No, I said, I would definitely not be in this situation if I had a boyfriend!

  (At that moment I knew, more than I had ever known anything, that if ever I loved a man again, if ever a man loved me, he would always have a set of my keys.)

  You should meet my friend! the locksmith said.

  Oh? I said.

  Yes, said the locksmith, he is a locksmith like me! He’s the best. If I was a girl I would totally want to go out with him.

  I see, I said.

  If he’s your boyfriend, said the locksmith, the next time this happens, it will be free.

  I don’t think I want to go out with your friend, I told the locksmith.

  I have your number on the receipt, said the locksmith, as if what I wanted didn’t matter, so I’m going to give it to him.

  I never heard from the locksmith’s friend. I wasn’t disappointed by this. Not exactly. After the sting of the $468 passed, I felt happy to have survived the ordeal. Resilient.

  7

  The sofa was the most extraordinary sofa that I had ever seen. It was covered in black chintz fabric with big flowers all over it in shades of mauve and maroon and pink. The sofa was enormous: it ran up the length of one wall and down another. Sixteen people could have sat on it at least, sixteen people in the throes of the kind of sadness that makes your knees buckle, that makes you disregard the comfort of a sofa, the importance of personal space.

  We were in the room with the extraordinary sofa because my father’s body was also there: dead, in a cardboard box, which is to say a coffin, but just a temporary one. It was two days after he’d died, and the day after I’d arrived in Baltimore. Arthur had landed on a flight from California that same evening. Elspeth and her husband were on a plane from the UK, and would arrive later that day. But we had to go ahead with making the arrangements, so the three of us – my mother, my brother, me – went to the funeral home.

  Do you want to go and view the body? my mother had said, after I arrived in Baltimore, the day after he died, after we had cried together for quite some time. I said, Not really, because I didn’t, I did not want my father to be dead at all, but then here we were: my mother, my brother, my dead father and the most extraordinary sofa I had ever seen. Many boxes of Kleenex were distributed on small occasional tables. I guess the funeral home catalogue that sold the extraordinary sofa would also sell those in bulk. I did not want to see my father’s dead body. But that morning I’d woken and felt some strange suspicion that if I did not see the body I might feel some kind of regret, an additional one, and so when the funeral director – a squat man in a suit, who was sorry for our loss – opened the door to the room with the sofa and the cardboard box, I stepped inside the room.

  In the cardboard box my father looked dead – not a state in which I’d ever seen him, so it was hard to imagine, but also to some extent it met expectations. His eyes were closed as if he was sleeping, but somehow strained, not like when he took naps. He was wearing a hospital gown, and that struck me as inaccurate, because he had arrived at the hospital when he was already dead. Of course it was a matter of convenience: the zip-up cardigan he’d been wearing when he died had been covered in blood. And why would we bring in a shirt or a sweater especially for him to wear in this cardboard box? He was going to be cremated. But I didn’t like it, nonetheless. It seemed like in death my father was wearing the jersey for a team that did not deserve his support.

  Someone had tidied his hair and face. Not too much; enough. Whatever you do to a body that will soon go up in flames, which was what my father had said that he wanted. We stood there – my mother, my brother and me – and we all cried.

  Tranquil Choices was the name of the funeral home. If Dad had been there I thought he would have said, What’s the non-tranquil choice? and laughed his distinctive laugh, but he wasn’t there, not really. Tranquil Choices was for people like us who had no religious community to fall back on at the worst times of their lives.

  Like so many other funeral homes it was a family business. This was a family who had been sorry for your loss for many generations, and maybe that’s why after we decided that we had spent enough time with my father’s body, which was at once excessive and insufficient, we were led past the extraordinary sofa into a room that looked like the dining room in an old-fashioned family home.

  There was a big heavy walnut dining table in the middle, with eight big heavy chairs, and at the end of the room a walnut credenza, the kind of thing that you would display vases on, or family photographs, a soup tureen acquired at a great-aunt’s long-ago wedding or even a beloved collection of bowling trophies. But which in this case was being used to display a small range of urns to hold the ashes of a person who you once loved, which the funeral director referred to as ‘cremains’.

  We sat around the table, the funeral director at the head, which I guess made sense since we no longer had a father.

  The funeral director went through a checklist of questions. Did we want a member of the clergy? No, thank you. Did we want a three-hour visitation for a hundred and twenty people with provided drinks and snacks? No, thank you. How did we want to describe Dad in the death notice: did we want to use the word ‘beloved’? Or was he ‘devoted’? Did we want to have the death notice posted in perpetuity on the funeral home’s ‘internet website’?

  (Everyone knows that websites are on the internet! I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue. It seemed best that I not say anything at all.)

  Each time the funeral director offered us another thing that would increase the price of the funeral and my mother said, No, thank you, he would say something like, Oh, you don’t want a three-hour visitation for a hundred and twenty people with provided drinks and snacks, or Oh, you don’t want a rabbi, in a voice that I took to indicate some doubt that my father was someone who we’d loved very much at all.

  Now, said the funeral director, at the end of the checklist, now there will be the matter of an urn for the cremains, and my mother, who was being so astonishing and brave, whose face was set and bright, eyes gleaming with the determination of a woman who was going to get through the worst thing in the world for the sake of her children, said, All right. Mum and Arthur and I all turned to look at the three urns on the credenza, assuming that we’d be choosing from one of them, but then the funeral director stood up and pushed a door open and it turned out that the ones on the credenza were teaser urns. The room next door, as big as the dining room if not bigger, was a funeral boutique. It felt like the time my friend Ian had taken me to our hometown video store, just after our eighteenth birthdays, and said: Are you ready to see something amazing? and then h
e opened a door that said ‘OVER 18’ and revealed that next to the hometown video store was a pornographic video store with an inventory twice the size of the regular one.

  The funeral boutique was full of all the accessories you’d want to buy for your favourite corpse: urns and coffins, yes, but also prayer books and other religious items for someone to bless and press in their hands. Silk and plastic flowers. Shirt and dress fronts to drape a dead person in so that they don’t have to wear a hospital gown in their open casket: for women, a pink dress. For men, a shirt with jacket and tie attached. There were no trousers for sale, I suppose because no one likes to expose the legs of the dead. I looked at the funeral director and thought: Do you ever wonder who you could have been if you hadn’t grown up in a family where you were expected one day to run this funeral boutique?

  Let’s just get the least expensive urn, I said to my mother, because by now I hated the funeral director and wanted to do the thing that he’d find most disappointing.

  My mother refused and selected something tasteful and wooden, something that she could display, if she wished, on a dining-room credenza. My mother’s own father had died fifty years earlier, when she was sixteen years old. My mother knew what kind of mother her children needed at that time, in that moment.

  Back at home, I checked my work email. One colleague had emailed me a selection of photographs of myself: new headshots to use when I did public speaking, or on my LinkedIn profile. On the day of the shoot in the office, several months beforehand in Berlin, they’d hired a make-up artist who put thick make-up on our faces and curled our hair. The photographer had shot us under bright, blown-out lights against a white backdrop. The images were heavily Photoshopped. They weren’t great.

  What do you think? I said to my mother.

  You look like a corpse, she said.

  We laughed.

  I see what you mean, I said.

  Do you want to move back to Berlin? my boss asked, in another email. It was a nice thing for him to ask. I had loved Berlin.

  No, thank you, I said to my boss. My life is here now, I said.