by Una LaMarche
Sexy, right? I can’t explain why the musk ox earned my deepest affections. There are two of them in the museum’s display: shapeless giants resembling supersize, dreadlocked guinea pigs (and, according to the plaque, probably smelling like patchouli). The musk oxen have long snouts, cloven hooves, and moplike brown hair that hangs to their knees. They have thick horns that swoop down and out, thinning at the ends and giving the effect of a handlebar mustache worn as a hat. If you look closely you can see little insects burrowing in the oxen’s matted fur. They look out from their bleak, wintry scene with a mix of apathy and misery, and I imagine that if they had voices they would sound just like Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh: Might as well just keep walking. Nothing to see here. They are not cuddly or sanitary, and yet I treated them like they were my own homely, petrified pets, visiting them as often as my parents let me. I don’t think I internalized that they were, in fact, lifeless skins affixed to plaster casts, but in retrospect I wonder if my obsession with the musk ox wasn’t kind of a red flag that I had inherited my parents’ macabre obsession with death.
I can’t remember what my mother and I saw at the planetarium that day in 1984, but my pediatric clinical depression struck halfway through the show, mostly because I wasn’t paying attention. I was staring up at the vast black “sky” littered with stars when I started to think about how the stars must be feeling. (This was right around the time that I stopped eating Cheerios because I imagined them screaming in anticipation of a horrible death each time I raised my spoon.) It must be lonely being a star, I decided. Lonely and incredibly boring. This triggered what was probably my first existential panic attack. Did being dead mean that you were condemned to float forever in a sea of infinite blackness, the planets revolving around you while you had nothing to do but think about how bored you were and miss Earth and your mom and your friends and Kraft macaroni and cheese?
“How did you like it?” my mother asked after the show as we walked back into daylight.
“It made me think of death,” I reported solemnly. That was our last visit for a while.
By the time I was eleven, I had developed more than a passing interest in the morbid and macabre. I quickly dispensed with the Baby-sitters Club series in favor of Stephen King—my favorite was It, the one in which a murderous clown tears the limbs off children. In the sixth grade I wrote what I thought of as a novel, clocking in at forty-two handwritten pages, which told the story of a detective whose daughter is kidnapped by his ex-girlfriend. After a long, cross-continental chase, the spurned lover leaps off the Eiffel Tower clutching the missing girl. They both die. The end. Quite proud of myself, I gave it to my teacher to read (in retrospect, being a thick-necked, gold-jewelry-wearing Jerseyite with a Welcome Back, Kotter afro, perhaps he was not in my target audience), and he returned it with a look that—while I didn’t recognize it at the time—I now understand is reserved for people on the subway wearing underpants made of tinfoil.
Looking back at my childhood it’s not too hard to see where I got my penchant for morbidity. My parents were lovers of life who talked and laughed loudly, ate and drank with abandon, and kissed in public. But every time a vacation rolled around and they were leaving on a trip without us, they turned into angels of doom.
“We’ll be gone for a week,” my mom would say to me and my sister, zipping up her suitcase, “and we’ll be taking two long international flights over vast expanses of water, probably with inexperienced pilots. So, God forbid, if the plane should go down, we’ve left letters and detailed instructions for both of you.” We received this same speech like clockwork every time one or both parents traveled anywhere that wasn’t immediately visible from our house.
“There’s a blank check in an envelope in my sock drawer,” my dad would whisper to us before getting into the cab waiting to take them to Penn Station. “You can drain my account. There’s not much, but it should keep you afloat for a few months at least.”
My sister and I read the letters the summer we were twelve and eighteen, respectively, while our parents were away on a European trip. His was titled, rather whimsically, “After”; hers was simply addressed to us. In addition to saying good-bye, my father had left specific instructions about his memorial service, including a music playlist. My mother, along with her heartfelt letter, had left contact information for their mortgage broker and how to turn off the boiler.
“What a downer,” I said to my sister, riffling through a sock drawer for loose bills. “I didn’t know we would still have to pay for the house.”
The upper-middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood where we grew up was in many ways a privileged bubble, but it wasn’t impenetrable to death. When I was thirteen, my best friend’s father died of a cancerous tumor. The same year, one of Zoe’s friends’ mothers suffered an aneurysm that killed her instantly; later, another classmate became an orphan when both of her parents met premature accidental deaths. For the entirety of 1993, my sister took to ending every conversation with the plea “Don’t die.” Eventually she stopped saying it, but then she took to putting up posters of George H. W. Bush in her bedroom, which my parents and I found far more sinister.
My first major death was my paternal grandfather’s, who passed away when I was seventeen. I wasn’t especially close to him, but I loved him the way you automatically love the people you’re related to: passively but matter-of-factly. He used to keep Life Savers Popsicles in his freezer for me and my sister when we’d visit, and every summer he’d drive us around in his big white Cadillac and let us wear one of his golf caps from an impressive collection he kept on the dash. In 1991, the day after Christmas, he had an aortal aneurysm while playing cards at the Knights of Columbus. He beat the odds and survived, only to have another aneurysm a few years later on the same day. He recovered yet again, and even though he’d since had a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair, by the time he died I’d started to think of him as invincible.
He passed away just after midnight on New Year’s, capping off a seven-day stretch that would later come to be known in our family as LaMarche Death Week. I had committed to doing a midnight run with a friend in Prospect Park. We ran three miles, finishing right at twelve, and then watched the fireworks. I spent the night at my friend’s house, and my sister called me the next morning to tell me the news. I didn’t cry, although true to form I did try to force it. As I walked home I concentrated hard on feeling grief, but it didn’t work. I felt bad that I couldn’t make the tears happen, not even at his wake or funeral a few days later. When we lowered my grandfather’s body into the ground, into one half of a shared plot, the other half of which was reserved for his extremely Catholic spinster girlfriend, my uncle Jerry muttered, “Phil’s finally gonna get laid by Claire.”
I put a letter into his coffin before we buried it, along with a flyer for my high school’s production of West Side Story, in which I had a bit part as a sassy Puerto Rican gang member. After the funeral, my family and I walked back to the car with my grandmother. We sat silently for a while until Grandma finally spoke. “Zoe,” she said, addressing my eleven-year-old sister, and I anticipated some gentle lesson about death and grief. Instead, she shook her head and said, “Those are the ugliest shoes I have ever seen.”
Eight months later, packing for college, I finally cried. I was listening to, of all things, the soundtrack to Boogie Nights, and “Sister Christian” by Night Ranger came on. Something about the lyrics and the sad, slow melody flipped a switch and I started to sob, collapsing onto my half-packed suitcase. Now, whenever I listen to that song I well up, not just because of Grandpa Phil but also because fucking Night Ranger makes me cry, which is so incredibly lame.
While the oft-threatened plane crash never came, both of my parents (now divorced but no less insane) have continued to fetishize death in their own ways. My father does it sort of unconsciously, in his everyday decision-making. This is a man who is prone to wandering into intersections wi
thout looking up from his iPhone, and who once sent me a video he shot while riding his bike through midtown traffic. He has also been hit by a van while biking, walked into a glass wall at an ATM, and, once, more seriously, developed a lung ailment that led to a year-long investigation that maddeningly yielded no conclusive diagnosis, even after a stay at a specialty hospital in Denver. Despite being the more likely of the two to imminently perish, he has not revised his death letter as far as I know, which worries me, not least because his song selections were made in an era when Hammer pants were still considered high fashion.
My mother is more obsessed, and thus more prepared. Every so often—once a day or so—she’ll remind me that either one of us could die at any minute. For instance, I have a key to a safe-deposit box that she opened at a local bank for the express purpose of my using it to collect her valuables, should she expire unexpectedly. And now that I have a kid, she worries about my safety much more than she used to.
“Didn’t I promise Mommy was going to come back?” she cooed at him after a recent babysitting stint. “Didn’t I?” Then she turned to me, her face darkening. “I shouldn’t promise that,” she scolded herself. “What if something happened to you? Then I’d be lying.”
“I think he’ll forgive you,” I joked.
“It would traumatize him forever,” she said, her eyes far-off with a look I immediately recognized as the somber excitement of a hypothetical funeral arrangement fantasy.
I took a deep breath. I had thought about it, a lot actually. I mainly worried about two things: (1) could my child survive on his own in our apartment for the ten hours or so it might take for someone to find him alone with my lifeless body? and (2) if he did survive, would the experience of being trapped alone with my corpse while Raffi played on an endless loop turn him into a Dexter-style serial killer? But I decided not to take my mother’s bait.
“Actually,” I said slowly, “I take comfort in the fact that if something did happen to me, Sam would be surrounded by family who would love and take care of him. I know he would be okay.”
My mom smiled weakly and put her hand on mine. “Oh, no, dear,” she said. “Trust me. He’d never recover.”
Although I’ve given it a lot of thought since my visit to the planetarium, I still can’t decide what I think happens when we die. I am forced to make it up, seeing as my family has traditionally shunned all religions that might provide some guidance on afterlife expectations. Ideally, I’d like to go to a sort of custom-made heaven that has all the things I like (cable TV, Spanish wine, Tootsie Rolls, fluffy down comforters, Gary Cooper) and none of the things I don’t (fluorescent lights, the Eagles, paper cuts, volleyball). I would be able to hang out with the fellow dead for company and be reunited with people and animals who’d predeceased me, like the grandmother I never met or the stray dog I adopted in 1985 only to have him picked up by his owners a few days later. And then, whenever I wanted, I could peek in on people back on Earth—watch my children grocery shop or browse the latest exhibits at the Met. I hope I get to haunt people, too—people who were mean to me.
Or maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll end up behind glass in a diorama like my beloved musk ox. There should be a Taxidermy box you can check off when you renew your driver’s license, next to Organ Donor. In my will, I’ll demand that some diligent curator set me up on a replica of my couch, the coffee table in front of me spread with Star magazines and half-finished Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles. The television must be frozen on an image of Tim Gunn’s face from Project Runway and in my hand will be a burrito, the contents of which will spill onto my Christmas print pajamas, even though the plaque in front of my diorama will specify that it is actually mid-April. It will go on to say:
A lone Una hunkers down to drink while watching reality television. Unlike more adventurous Homo sapiens, during its life the Una generally preferred to stay within a one-mile radius of its apartment. Its name is derived from the reported (and photographically confirmed) unibrow it was born with and later removed from its squat, woolly body. The Una can weigh over one hundred pounds, but appear much larger because of its oversize baggy pajamas.
Extreme shifts in climate and the cancellation of favorite sitcoms distressed the Una, leading to its extinction in the mid-twenty-first century. The last Una expired after experiencing sudden cardiac death brought on by hysterical weeping to the power ballad “Sister Christian” by Night Ranger, an American rock band that gained popularity during the 1980s and then faded into obscurity.
AFTER
When I Die:
1.Delete my browser history.
2.Send out the news to all my contacts in a classy way, i.e., Paperless Post, not Evite.
3.Start a letter-writing campaign to get Uma Thurman to change her name out of respect.
4.Book an auditorium and a gospel choir with at least a few members who can do backflips. In lieu of flowers, please remind people to bring individually wrapped six-packs of Little Debbie Frosted Donettes to toss into my cremation urn.
5.Prepare a slideshow of flattering photographs of me (nothing between 1992 and 1999—I am serious, Mom) in which I look impossibly fresh and happy and alive with pleasure. So basically a Virginia Slims ad, but without the cigarettes. (Any shots with bongs, joints, or enormous vats of liquor should also be removed.)
6.While playing slideshow, have gospel choir perform “Joyful, Joyful” as seen at the end of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Please retain as much of the original choreography and 1993 wardrobe choices as possible.
7.Once service is completed, please mail the box of preaddressed and stamped envelopes that I have prepared for guests with whom I have unfinished emotional business. (You may have to add extra postage depending on inflation rates. If the Postal Service has folded, please arrange for delivery by drone.)
8.Erect statue in my likeness in a peaceful area unfrequented by pigeons, rats, or mimes. Position my body so that tourists will want to pose with me but not in a lewd way.
9.Check to make sure you really deleted my browser history.
10.You know what, just burn my computer.
HOMEMADE SELF-DEFENSE WEAPONS
“The Wolverine,” aka “The Deadly Janitor”
Materials Needed:
1 ring of way too many keys, half of which open doors you no longer have legal access to
Instructions:
1.Hold key ring in palm of dominant hand.
2.Stick keys in between fingers.
3.Clench fist so that keys protrude like claws.
4.Maul attackers.
“The Freelancer’s Revenge”
Materials Needed:
1 Ziploc bag or unmatched sock
Anywhere from five to sixty dollars in coins
Procrastination
Instructions:
1.Run out of money.
2.Fill a Ziploc bag (or, for purists, a sock) with all the loose change you can find in your house.
3.Put off going to the bank to cash them in, partially out of laziness but mostly out of the shame you will be faced with upon sidling up to the Penny Arcade (or, worse, an actual teller).
4.Beat mugger unconscious with sack of useless legal tender.
“The Abandoned Master Cleanse”
Materials Needed:
Purified water
Grade B maple syrup
Fresh-squeezed lemon juice
Cayenne pepper
Lack of willpower
Spray bottle
Instructions:
1.Resolve to do the Master Cleanse, in which you subsist for days on nothing but water mixed with lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and “grade B” maple syrup—whatever that is—in order to rid your body of a lifetime of accumulated toxins, including but not limited to the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Cheesy Gordita Crunch, grain alcohol
, and swallowed gum.
2.Give up after two hours; eat a hamburger.
3.Siphon remaining Master Cleanse juice into small spray bottle; store in purse or jacket pocket.
4.Upon encountering menace, spray into eyes and nostrils.
5.As you run, remind him/her that the burn means it’s working!
Sissy Fuss
Every single day I set my alarm for seven a.m. And every single morning I snooze for another hour or so—usually until my toddler kicks me in the face to signal the fact that morning has arrived. Why do I torture myself day after day with interrupted sleep? I’m glad you asked. It’s because I believe, deep in my soul, that one day—soon! tomorrow, probably!—I will bound out of bed, fresh and flush with health, and finally do some exercise.
This never happens. I would say that my quest for physical fitness is Sisyphean, but Sisyphus actually pushed a giant boulder up a hill, which, if you take a look at my biceps, is obviously not something I could do. Also, Zeus was punishing him for being a sly and gossipy murderer, and I’m only being punished by myself, for eating too much pad thai. My main problem is that I want to be toned but don’t want to work at it; to paraphrase Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, I am the reason the Ab Rocket was invented.
I have gone to extraordinarily lazy extremes to stave off the letting-myself-go process. I own a pair of phenomenally expensive sneakers that look like orthopedic platforms and are designed to work my calves and butt while I am standing or walking. I think they work, but I can’t actually tell because they are so ugly that I have to wear long pants with them, thus hiding my legs. I also own a Pilates magic circle, which looks like a giant, flexible intrauterine device and which is used to build muscle through resistance exercises. It’s a glorified ThighMaster, but I happily trot it out during commercials, doing pliés until it inevitably springs from my knees and flies across the room and breaks something.