White Hot Grief Parade

by Alexandra Silber

  PERSON 3: Someone make him shut up.

  KENT: I see his point. (Turns to PERSON 2.) Would you be willing to play one old person? (He searches the character lexicon.) “Grandpa Albert’s business partner Norm Katzenblat” as well as “The Husband in the Neighbors Who Moved Away in ’98?”

  PERSON 2: Deal.

  (More PEOPLE begin to swamp the stage from the wings.)

  PERSON 4: Wait! If he gets to pick his part, then I want another part too! I don’t want to just play myself if I can play a crazy cousin or something.

  PERSON 5: Come on. We don’t have time for this.

  PERSON 6: Kent, do I have to wear this costume? It constricts . . . I can’t give what I want to give—

  KENT: OK, look. (To PERSON 4) You can play “Conservative Woman Next Door.” (To PERSON 5) And you can play “Her Husband.” (To PERSON 6) And you can wear anything you want. In fact, go look out in the garage where Cathy keeps all her costumes in order of time period. I’m sure you can find what you’re looking for. Everybody set?

  (A throng of PEOPLE come teeming up the center aisle of the theater.)

  PERSON 7: Not yet, Kent!

  KENT: Where did all of you come from?

  PERSON 8: We just got in from Interlochen.

  KENT. When?

  PERSON 8: Just now.

  (Enter the ADULTS: Theater teachers and husband and wife, DAVID and ROBIN.)

  NEIL: David! (He looks to Kent.) Oh Kent, now that David is here can he play the old people?

  GREY: Neil! Kent and I are playing Al’s grandparents for God’s sake, get a grip.

  (MICHAEL ARDEN enters from the wings in a suit, sheet music spilling from his arms.)

  MICHAEL: Kent, where is my accompanist? If we are doing a full run I need a piano, I’m not singing the funeral number without music!

  LILLY: Good point!

  CROWD: KENT!

  (Bedlam. EVERYONE begins talking at once, crowding both KENT and the stage with their protestations. Then, after a moment, a loud, piercing whistle stops the action flat. It is MIKE, The STAGE MANAGER, who is taking HIS fingers out of mouth, staring at all of them with the first expression we have seen from HIM yet—pure amusement. HE points to the back of the theater, to whomever HE has been nodding to, and EVERYONE looks in turn, trying to make out a figure from the darkness.

  Suddenly, a VOICE booms from the theater’s speaker system, known in theatrical vernacular as the “God mic.”)

  AL: Hello everybody.

  (KENT bursts downstage center, the character lexicon and Show Bible in his arms, his face desperate.)

  KENT: Al! Please sort this out.

  GREY: Yes, we’re dying up here!

  KENT: None of us know what to do.

  AL: (her voice coming from the God mic) No.

  (PAUSE.)

  KENT: What do you mean ‘no’?!

  AL: I can’t help you. Not this time. This time, I need all of you to help me.

  (EVERYONE looks at one another awkwardly. Blinks. Nods. Resolve. EVERYONE agrees to do their best with the mess they’ve all been left in . . .)

  LILLY: (nodding) OK.

  JESSICA: Yeah. You got it.

  KENT: Alright people, you all heard her—places please.

  (EVERYONE moves. Props are placed, jackets decided upon, vocalizing done, crossing and recrossing. Then at last, everyone settles. We’re going to grit our teeth and pray.)

  But that, of course, wasn’t how it happened.

  Instead, on the morning of the funeral—Friday, October 12, 2001—I pressed the snooze button before finally waking at 7 a.m. in a puddle of my own drool with my hair three times the size it had been yesterday, having apparently grown over my face like the evil vines in Sleeping Beauty. On the screen of Kent’s laptop in front of me, I stared at a eulogy I barely remembered writing. And I was suddenly aware that, in a few hours, the tone of the day would be entirely up to me. My dad would either be mourned or celebrated.

  Last night, everyone had arrived from everywhere. Lord knows where they were staying.

  I dashed downstairs in my frightening state and printed the eulogy. It was microscopic.

  I increased the font size and printed again.

  Ink was low. Plus, now the eulogy was fourteen pages long.

  Shit.

  Lilly and Kent were already up, cell phones duct-taped to their ears. Grey had spent the night at the Hausers, where the Interlochen contingent had (apparently) spent the night in their giant basement, and was already on the other end of Kent’s cell phone.

  “Grey,” Kent warned on this, exactly one month after September 11, “you be very careful out there today, we’re on Terror Alert. This is fullout-no-marking Code Orange.”

  “I know,” Grey said. “I know that. It means something might go down somewhere in someway at some point in time.” Because we were all dealing with death, too, without the honor of myopically focused news coverage, we felt we had the right to be this snarky. What other choice remained? “So I will be looking sharp.”

  “You’re damn right. Sharp as cheddar.”

  “So you’re directing the fleets of Interlochen folks from the Hausers?”

  “Yeah . . .” Grey’s thoughts trailed off and his voice grew faint. “How is she?”

  “You know . . .”

  “Right.”

  I ran upstairs, the giant eulogy in my hands, and threw my closet open. Sitting on the edge of my bed, it suddenly hit me that every single detail about this day was going to linger in my memory for the rest of my life. No pressure.

  What lay ahead of me: A temple I’d never even seen before. A ceremony I’d never witnessed. Relatives I didn’t know. Relatives I didn’t like. Relatives that definitely don’t like me. Strangers. Fourteen pages of amnesia-eulogy, plus frizzy monster hair and a face crusted with drool.

  Whatever you do, I thought, don’t wear the wrong outfit.

  Meanwhile, in another part of the house, Lilly appeared in the doorway of the downstairs spare bedroom. Half dressed and clutching Oboe, she approached Kent.

  “Her grandmother just called. I think she wants to have a second funeral reception.”

  Kent stared at her.

  “I’m just bringing you the news.”

  “What?” Kent bit the word—this was not the time.

  “Well, I mean, what’s the difference between one funeral reception and two funeral receptions?” Lilly replied, trying to be conciliatory.

  “What’s the diff—! It’s 100 percent more Silber funeral reception!”

  “So . . . no?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “I can’t do this. I have to play a complicated a cappella oboe solo in my best friend’s father’s funeral in a mystery temple for a crowd of hundreds in about three hours.”

  “I am reading poems!” he wailed.

  “Oh please, you are reading two poems! Furthermore, Kent, I am asking you this because I think you and I have somehow ended up in charge!” Lilly’s eyes widened—blazing and lined with moisture. They stood there on either side of the doorway and stared at one another in silence. Because it was true.

  “Anyone can do whatever they want.” barked Kent. “We are not going. We are all staying in this house unless Al and Cathy decide they want to have 8000 percent more funeral, which I highly doubt. Tune your oboe.”

  Somewhere inside me, I decided that I would not be wearing black to this funeral. This, in fact, is not going to be a funeral, it is going to be a celebration, and a concert and a recital and a reunion and I was going to get glam dammit and I dared anyone to stop me because I was feeling just feisty enough to start hurting feelings.

  My hand grazes my senior MORP dress—hot pink sassiness. Too much, I think. I wouldn’t want the good folks at the Mystery Temple to be put off. Vintage A-line Donna Reed statement? No, too “Hi Honey, I’m home and by the way, Dad is dead.”

  Then there it was. My hand graced the lightest green ball gown you had ever seen. It was mo
dest and elegant, dancing on the cusp of child and fully fledged woman, and made of raw silk. This was the one.

  Heels. The pearls my father bought me for my high school graduation just four months ago. A matching jacket in case the Mystery Temple was mysteriously cold.

  I walked into the hallway and saw my mother dressed in a lavender ball gown of her own.

  “It’s a celebration,” she said, zipping herself up.

  We hadn’t talked about it. It just was.

  “So,” I asked Lilly ten minutes later, “what do you think?”

  “I think you run the risk of alienating—”

  “The homecoming queen?” I interrupt.

  “Your entire family.”

  She was right.

  “Perfect,” I said, and I made my way down the stairs.

  The Mystery Temple was, in fact, Temple Beth Israel of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, located on Telegraph Road, approximately five miles away.

  There was a large caravan of Interlochen kids all arriving in various cars from the Hausers’ house. Midwestern minivans began to fill the parking lot on the Indian summer morning, and someone drove my mom’s Jeep back and forth, packing the car full of teenagers in shifts. People walked at slow paces, people arrived in suits, with fallen faces, and a sea of artistic teenagers all dressed in sobering colors, none of whom knew what to say or do besides hold one another and stay uncharacteristically quiet.

  I don’t remember how I got there, but, once I did, I walked through the main entrance doorway. As I went through the open temple doors, I noticed that the guest book outside was already three-quarters of the way full of signatures and messages.

  I couldn’t look.

  I had a job to do.

  I caught sight of Rabbi Syme, who was standing at the entrance to his private office. He was waiting for me.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “Yes,” I replied, certain.

  Rabbi Syme’s eyes smiled at me and he nodded. Then, gesturing to me to follow, he led me inside the chamber.

  “I will make certain I mention all of the details before I introduce you,” he said. “I will mention the facts. You talk about your father.” He stopped, then turned, and looking into me said, “Just like you did the other day.”

  I nodded, grateful.

  Inside the temple, the ceremony began. Mom and I were on the left side, below the podium; my father’s family was on the right. The aisle separated us like the parting of the Red Sea.

  I clutched my speech as Michael Arden sang in his finest suit, fighting emotion during a song about a man on a baseball field that he had his friend at Juilliard copy down from a recording. Uncle Eli played his guitar. Lilly was up next and played with her eyes locked straight ahead of her, playing it with that signature singing voice that rose in a mournful cry out over the full-to-bursting congregation. The notes wailed long after the piece had ceased and no one could applaud.

  And Kent, of all people, wept as he recited Carl Sandburg—his face filling and turning to the right before collecting himself and finishing, “and my prayers for you, my deep and silent prayers.”

  There were prayers. The cantor sang. And then Rabbi Syme took to the podium and did what he had promised. He greeted us and spoke of death. He quoted scripture and the Torah. He mentioned my father’s date and place of birth, and the names of every member of his family.

  And then he left it to me.

  As I stood and made my way up the steps, I did not look at my mother or squeeze Kent’s hand. This was a journey to the stage unlike any other I had, or would, ever take and I was ready. I placed my speech on top of the lectern and took a breath. I looked out over the congregation—the full and pulsing ocean of faces, those filling every pew and those spilling over the sides and standing in the back, huddled together like anxious, injured sailors at the demise of a captain.

  I looked down at the words I had written and could not bring myself to begin.

  At last I felt a hand upon my shoulder, and a murmur in my ear.

  “Here,” whispered Rabbi Syme, gently lifting my speech and placing the Torah beneath it, “Holy words for your own to stand upon.” He squeezed my shoulder harder. “It will give you strength.”

  And I began.

  You don’t need to read everything I said that day; in many ways, you know already what I would have said, but the ending I will share. It was from C. S. Lewis’s final book appropriately entitled The Last Battle from the Narnia Chronicles. My father had read every single installment to me as a young girl, with the exception of The Last Battle because we loved the stories so much that we didn’t want them to be over. Well, now it was my turn to finish it for both of us:

  The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.

  And as Aslan spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.

  And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world, and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

  And then it was over and the After began.

  No one tells you to be prepared to greet and console every person your father ever knew immediately following a funeral service. The moment the funeral ended, all I recall is standing up and being greeted with an inundation of faces.

  Lilly and Kent touched my hands and nodded as they ran outside to the cars to make it back to our house to prepare 1367 for a stampede of visitors. Grey could not join them; he was a mess, the most earnest, sincere, well-dressed mess I have ever seen him in before or since. With a friend keeping him upward and mobile, he shuffled toward me and could not hide his swollen face. He hugged me. “I love you,” he said, still crying, and moved on.

  The Interlochen gang approached in droves, one by one, in clumps, they surrounded me and cheered me on. “What a speech,” the faceless people uttered, holding and supporting me. “What a thing you’ve done.” The crowd made their way through and out toward the parking lot.

  Teachers. Family friends. Neighbors.

  My childhood best friend Arielle approached. We had been going through a rough patch—the kind growing girls go through and sometimes outgrow and sometimes don’t, though I think I always knew Arielle and I would eventually find our way back to sisterhood. I almost couldn’t believe she had made the trip up from Ann Arbor for the service, but, as she approached me, all I did was hold her hands as she broke down in sobs. Arielle, distraught, showed her love for me, for my dad, and for life itself.

  Strangers. Distant cousins. Business associates.

  David and Robin approached, in their best clothes and smiling sadly. “Your dad would be so proud of what you just did,” said David, in a fragmented voice. They both hugged me and as they left I knew they would look after me forever.

  Teenagers. Children. Men and women from every walk of life.

  And then that was over and I looked over to see my father’s family swiftly exiting the building in great distress. Oh my God. In my eulogy, I had been careful to avoid committing the ultimate crime. With a stage all to myself, I could have used that platform to air every grievance, every malignant word, every oppressive act.

  But I didn’t do that. I did something worse.

  I didn’t mention them at all.

  Reception! Yet Another Farce

  (At rise: A medium-sized 1960s colonial house on a quiet street in a sleepy suburb—the house could be any house, the street any street, the suburb any suburb, anywhere. But this particular house is located in front of a river, the River Rouge to be exact, in Birmingham, Michigan, beside the large fairway of a community golf course. Fairway is, in fact, the name of the
street we see as the afternoon light begins to expose the scene like a vintage Polaroid. The house is the third on the right, between 1373 (the Home of the Gay Couple with the lively boxer) and 1345 (the Family of Four with the two genius boys). This is 1367— home of THE SILBER FAMILY, with a garden in front, a wisteria tree, and a white fence. Just like in all of the movies. But this is not a movie. This is real life. Though it may not feel that way today.)

  (Enter KENT, breathless, from outside.)

  KENT: Where should everyone park?

  AL: I don’t know.

  KENT: (on a cell phone to Lilly, who is herself directing someone on their way to 1367) Are people allowed to park in the street?

  AL: I don’t know.

  KENT: (to Lilly) She doesn’t know.

  AL: My neighbors are all coming over, so I’m sure they wouldn’t mind people parking in their driveways if you ask.

  KENT: (He looks out the window, considers.) OK. I’m on it. (He exits. A pause. He reenters.) Poo, how do I know who is a neighbor versus who is the Evil Brigade?

  AL: You’ll know.

  KENT: OK, I’m on it.

  (KENT exits.)

  (To further the earlier description of the house, 1367 is located on the Rouge Riverbank, along a steep hill that empties into the river itself, a river that threatened several times, and once did indeed flood the lower level of the house entirely, causing CATHERINE to rip up the carpeting and tile the entire downstairs level in a pastel peach granite. Herself. With spackle. That was in 1996. In the autumn and winter months, the tile is very cold beneath one’s feet. As it is October the tile is, predictably, terribly cold today.)

  (GREY enters, his face is swollen and red, his voice is drenched in tears and self-deprecating sarcasm.)

  GREY: I’m here.

  (He is embarrassed, but not embarrassed, at his open weeping. His suit is only slightly disheveled. All of this, in this circumstance, is both elegant and hilarious.)