We don’t know if she is aware of the diagnosis because my father has instructed us not to talk about a timeline or dwell on her impending mortality. The form that she’s wearing in her mastectomy bra is peeking out ever so slightly from the neckline of her knitted top, because she’s never quite gotten it fitted properly, but other than that she looks terrific.
This is not unlike how things ended for her mother. The week before her death, Nanny attended my wedding, where she danced and was in good spirits. Back in Delaware, she was feeling a bit under the weather and went to the emergency room, where it was discovered she had acute leukemia, and she died that night. She had never looked better.
Mom’s health is one of the reasons it makes sense to move somewhere that offers varying degrees of care, but there’s my dad’s health to consider as well. Recently, he got stuck on the commode, nude. He has a slew of persistent health issues, including COPD, which causes bad circulation, and his legs went numb. Unable to lift him, my mother phoned downstairs and one of the valet staff was kind enough to come up and help him. I can’t imagine assisting in the toilette of the elderly was part of the job description when they signed on to park and retrieve cars at a luxury condo building.
The miracle is that he’s lived as long as he has. That my father still smokes isn’t helping. Diabetes and heart disease have been guests at every family function for several generations. He’s outlived his younger brother and is the oldest living Gurwitch but for one distant cousin.
My dad’s voice sounds as strong as ever when we speak on the phone, so his appearance is a bit shocking. My mother hugs my sister first; birth-order privilege holds and she was always my mother’s favorite.
“Did you know,” she says, pulling me in close, “I’m married to a royal asshole?”
Do I know that?
My mother drove me to acting lessons, dance classes, debate tournaments, doctor appointments, and back-to-school shopping, but my dad was fun.
During the halcyon swinging seventies, I was more than willing to serve as his wingman. In the days when home movie screenings were exceptional occasions, I had cachet, inviting friends to his office screening room while my dad got free teenage market research. What could be done for National Geographic outtakes of natives engaging in cannibalism? My dad thoughtfully catered the screening with vats of barbecue ribs but the film never saw the light of day. For the record, the footage looked more like chickenalism.
I was not only my dad’s wingman; I was his beard. The details of these exploits have thankfully faded from memory, but there was one incident that has stayed with me.
Not long after I started college, I received a call from my father. He’d dreamed that he was attending my wedding accompanied by his secretary and then-girlfriend, Loreli, a petite blonde whom I’d met on several occasions. In the dream, he was holding a baby in his arms. His and Loreli’s.
“I felt like an asshole. Do you think I should break it off with her?”
“I guess so, Dad,” I answered. Honestly, I don’t even know why I said that. I’d completely bought into a “your mother’s no fun” narrative. It would be a few months before my college funds would be depleted and he went into chapter 11 again, and thirty years before he’d reveal that he’d blown hundreds of thousands of dollars on this relationship. When I asked him why he’d thought it appropriate to include me in his dalliances, a few years back, he shrugged it off. He’d never thought twice about it; his dad had done the same with him.
I think it’s safe to assume that the bankruptcy would have brought an end to the relationship with Loreli, but I’ll never know how our lives would have been different if I’d answered the phone and said, “No, Dad, it’s a grand idea to shack up with your lady friend and I look forward to babysitting my future siblings!”
These escapades are in our rearview mirror, but do I know that my mother is married to an asshole?
“Yes, I do, Mom,” I tell her, knowing that I’ll never be able to make up for the years of empathy deficiency.
Upstairs, our mother has laid out items she wants to divide between my sister and myself on the dining room table. There are piles of starched linens, a few sterling butter knives, silver iced tea straws, two silver-plated trays, and a collection of the kind of Waterford crystal bowls that people used to regularly give as wedding gifts. I rarely use the ones I have, so what will I possibly do with more? I imagine scores of us who married during what may one day be known as the Waterford Crystal Bubble Years, holding each serving dish close, as recommended by the guru of the anti-clutter cult, asking ourselves if this or that bowl elicits joy. I can’t picture a single one of us mouthing the word “yes.” Nostalgia? Sure. Sentimental memories? Maybe. Minor workout for abs? Possibly. But if joy is the measuring stick, I foresee many more entries to the almost four hundred thousand items that were for sale when I Googled “Waterford eBay.”
The only thing I really want is her collection of Chinese porcelain, and she doesn’t want to part with it. I pocket a piece each time I visit. They’re even less useful than the Waterford; they’re decorative Buddhist altar fruit. There’s a longan, a lychee, a citron, and a buddha’s hand, in cerulean blue, celadon, dusty rose, and goldenrod yellow. Maybe it’s because they are so impractical that I love them.
Mom started calling me Sticky Fingers when she caught on that I was stealing them. Now it’s become something of a game. I have run out of room in my home but keep it up as a way to see how her memory is doing.
My sister would like us to split the assorted sterling pieces evenly, and while she is carefully counting the salad forks, I slide the citron into my pocket.
“Don’t you already have a complete set?” I ask.
“Yes, that I paid for myself.”
“Well, you also got your college paid for,” I say, immediately regretting it. Any mention of how I got the short end of the stick, how she was already out of college when things fell apart, will only make us all miserable. I can’t complain that she got a car on her sixteenth birthday and by the time it was passed down to me there were rust holes in the floor so big that you could see the road and people at school nicknamed it Gertrude. Wait a minute, I liked the name Gertrude, and it was punk and subversive that my car had holes. No. It’s pointless and it’s the past. It’s immature and I promised myself I wouldn’t go there.
“I’m sorry. You’re right, we’ll split it down the middle, but that won’t include the pieces I manage to hide in an internal cavity.”
We sit down in the living room, which is furnished and arranged in exactly the same way it was in the house on Sunset Islands. With the heavy drapes closed, they can keep the illusion they’re still ensconced in their beloved home.
We need to plot out tomorrow’s schedule, but I’ve eaten an orange and my mother is insisting that my father put the rind in a miniature plastic garbage can that has been placed on the kitchen floor by the sink. It’s so tiny it looks like the one we had in my son’s backyard play kitchen.
“Your father needs to bend,” she says, “he’s not getting any exercise. Bend over, Harry. He’s got to bend over! He’s got no muscle tone in his upper body.”
My mother has always been obsessed with our father’s weight. She’s right to be worried, but her nagging can reach a feverish pitch. She claims that Dad tried to stab her in the hand once with a plastic fork because she complained about his salty-nut consumption on a cross-country flight. “That’s horrible, Mom, inexcusable,” I remember telling her, at the same time wondering how many times you would have to hear someone tell you that you can’t eat that tiny allotment of peanuts before you’d want to stab them. Somewhere over Kansas. I think I might be moved to violence as we shadowed Topeka. This is one more reason why I am here to help.
“I don’t think bending over builds upper-body strength,” I tell her, knowing my father will not be able to lower himself enough to open the lid wit
hout toppling over. He would need to crawl on his hands and knees while clutching the orange rind in his teeth.
“Mom, it’s a countertop can, and it’s too small. You must have to keep emptying it. Can’t you put it on the counter?”
“We’re only two people and anyway, he should empty it down the hallway. He needs the upper-body exercise.”
“Mom, you don’t get upper . . . that’s it! I am getting you a new garbage can while I’m in town.” I put the receptacle next to the sink.
“Thank you,” my dad sighs, as if I’ve negotiated a lasting peace in the Middle East. We’ve trash-talked our way through an entire hour. When we kiss our parents good-bye, it feels like we are practicing for some future finality.
Lisa and I roll our baggage to the Sun Harbour hotel. It’s right across the street from their building, next to the Suncoast bank, and down the street from the Paradise Deli. Here, even medical offices contain the words “sunshine” and “beach.” It seems wrong to be staying at a place whose name evokes frolicking in the ocean when we’re on such a serious mission.
The Sun Harbour is more motel than hotel. The rooms open directly onto the busy street, the smell of bad decisions hangs in the air, and the upholstery is shiny in a way that recommends putting down towels before sitting. Our parents are safe in their heavily staffed residence, as if deposited in a bank vault, while we who have saved and budgeted, trying to be responsible, my sister more successfully than me, are stashed inside a Greyhound bus locker, but our parents are fragile and must be protected. We are running an egg-and-spoon relay race. We will have to be especially careful on the handoffs as we try to keep those eggs safe.
Lisa and I trudge through our nighttime rituals. She is ready for bed before I am.
“Are you prepared for tomorrow?”
Am I prepared? I am reminded of how I prepared to become a mother. There were months spent deciding to get pregnant and time spent trying to get pregnant. While I was pregnant, I had my head buried in books about healthy pregnancies, and when the baby actually came, I was already woefully behind. Our son is seventeen and I just made it to the chapter on introducing solids in What Baby Needs.
Even recently, it seemed like my dad might wrangle the extra income that would open up more choices. There was an engineering firm that had patented an innovative sewer monitoring system, but the company imploded in lawsuits and someone went to jail; a scheme to extract minerals out of an old gold mine that was just that—a scheme; a promising pharmaceutical company that even Lisa seemed hopeful about, but it too got mired in legal irregularities. Dad used to associate with disbarred attorneys and CPAs who’d lost their licenses, but his current circle includes poker players and a guy who lost his hairdressing license.
Only I didn’t know that my father has been playing poker several times a week during the last decade.
“When you’d call him and you’d hear announcements in the background, where did you think he was?” my sister asks me.
“Airports? Traveling . . . for business?”
Even Dad says he was taken by surprise by a potential investor at the Texas Hold’em table at the Gulfstream Park Casino, where he has earned a nickname, “the Hammer,”* because “he comes down hard when he has a great hand.” He inquired how much money the gentleman wanted to invest and where he was keeping his capital. “In a duffel bag,” the dude whispered, “and I don’t count my money in numbers, I measure it by the pound.”*
“I am prepared,” I lie. Despite my training as an actress, unlike our father, I’ve never mastered a poker face.
Lisa turns over and tells me to get some sleep, and in no time she’s out. I tiptoe to the bathroom and turn on just enough light to peek into her suitcase. Her clothes are folded into neat piles, bras stacked like Dixie cups.
She should be handling this. She’s decisive and never looks backward. I’m still stewing over a pair of metallic go-go boots I should have purchased in 1981. “You won’t see that kind of thing coming and going,” is something our grandmother Rebecca said when recommending styles that would make you stand out in a crowd.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, my sister and mother set off early enough to make it to our first destination, the Tel Aviv Gardens, for the weekly Saturday morning Shabbat services. I arrive at the condo and Dad answers the door wearing only a towel. He is “finishing” his shower. It takes him over an hour in the bathroom. “Do you need any help?” I call out, hoping the answer will not be yes.
Waiting for our car, I try to make meaningful eye contact with each of the three parking attendants. I don’t want to embarrass my father, so I tell each one in as cheerful a tone as I can muster, “Thank you so much for looking after my parents,” wondering which of them is the one who performed the bathroom rescue.
“Let’s hit the town, Dad!” I say as he lowers himself carefully into the passenger seat with the help of a “car cane,” a $19.99 geriatric lifestyle aid he saw advertised on daytime TV. I hold my breath, wishing, for his sake, that we were on the kind of adventure we used to take back in the day.
The summer of my sophomore year of high school, my dad invited me to accompany him on a business trip.
We flew to Los Angeles and checked into a two-bedroom suite at the L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills. I have no idea what a suite cost back then, but you can’t get a suite in the hotel for less than two thousand a night now. The room had mirrored walls, deep shag carpeting, and wicker furniture with chrome accents. If you ran your finger along any of the smooth glass surfaces, you’d probably have picked up trace amounts of cocaine. It was the opposite of my mother’s home with its tasteful oriental rugs, altar fruit, and crystal sconces.
My dad wanted to show off the offices of his film distribution company, located on a high floor in a glass building in Century City. I remember opening a set of massive wooden doors that led to a vast space where only a few employees milled about.*
My dad also arranged for me to have my picture taken by a photographer he said was tops in the biz. The night before the shoot, I went clubbing on the Sunset Strip with a girl whose family had moved from Miami Beach to Beverly Hills. She knew where the doormen would let in underage girls. I found myself in the men’s bathroom smoking angel dust and then making out with Danny Bonaduce.* I was so stoned that even though I was less than half a mile from the hotel, it was almost sunrise before I stumbled into our suite, only a few hours before what had to be a very expensive photo shoot.
The photographs have a distinct Saturday Night Fever disco vibe and tell the story of a girl who hasn’t noticed she’s gotten just a little zaftig. The face is a bit chipmunky—like she’s storing nuts in her cheeks. I’d just given up my twice-weekly ballet class, but not the post-class chocolate milkshake. I am wearing more makeup than I have ever worn in my entire life, practically a kabuki mask.
In the pictures I am gazing at my own image in the mirror; I am plucking petals from a daisy; I am practicing ballet. Mostly, I am practicing looking intense. And hungover. It seems impossible that I was in the same city I now call home. The city where I had no history, no family connections—all a plus. I had completely blocked these memories out of my mind when I moved to Los Angeles.
I never used those photographs professionally. Would we be heading to these retirement homes if he hadn’t frittered away so much money on that pricey photo shoot? It probably wouldn’t have made a dent, but I feel sure that neither the Tel Aviv Gardens nor the Captain’s Clubhouse, or wherever it is that we’re headed, will be anything like L’Ermitage.
Unlike Princess Meritaten, eldest daughter of Pharaoh Akhenaten of the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt, I made my sheath out of the lining of old drapery I found on a street corner in the East Village of New York in the 1980s.
into the mystic
Everything was going to be perfect, just as soon as I became a Butterfly.
Or a Hollyh
ock.
What kind of hallucinogen do you have to be on to want to be shrubbery or an insect? None. Unless you consider reading an altered state. I was fifteen in 1977, when I cracked the spine of Slapstick, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, and I experienced that kind of “everything makes sense now” ding that went off in Don Draper’s head when he cooked up the Coke commercial in the final episode of Mad Men. Vonnegut spins your typical dystopian future, except that something wonderful has come from the slew of calamities that has befallen society. The world’s citizenry has reorganized into clans: Butterflies, Orioles, Chickadees, and assorted botanically inspired fraternities.
Imagine each of us being instantly linked to hundreds of thousands of cousins spanning the globe, hence the subtitle of the book, Lonesome No More. We’d all be one big happy family. Well, more like lots of big happy families. Or lots of unhappy ones: the Hollyhocks, Chickadees, Orioles, and Butterflies, each unhappy in their own way. This sounded even better than caffeine and wedge heels, both of which I’d also just discovered and still pledge unwavering allegiance to.
Before I picked up Slapstick, it was through the adventures of the crew of the Starship Enterprise that I contracted my first case of family envy. Lots of girls were Marcias or Jans (no one ever admitted to being a Cindy), but I was a Trekkie. In the face of danger, the crew banded together, proffering unconditional support, as did the flattering rompers, precursors to full-body Spanx, worn by the entire Starfleet family. Captain Kirk and the gang were perennially plunked down on hostile planets, where they battled reptilian creatures in rocky amphitheaters.* Every day after school, I’d pack my paisley canvas overnight bag, intending to run away from home, but never ventured more than a few feet beyond the parking lot of our apartment building in Wilmington, Delaware, where I’d re-create scenes from Star Trek among the boulders lining an adjacent creek.*
Wherever You Go, There They Are Page 16