Anthropologists have long puzzled over what caused the cognitive revolution that changed our brains and led to our becoming the dominant species. We had the answer. These alien life forms had sprinkled us with their fairy dust and now they were coming back for us! Van Zandt was receiving transmissions from the aliens, who had been monitoring our progress through computers buried underneath the poles. Delta Phi Epsilon is the name of a sorority founded at NYU, and an epsilon delta is a type of mathematical equation that deals with limits and is beyond my limited brainpower, but Delta Epsilon is also the name of the galaxy that was pinging us. We’d all seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind at least a dozen times, and that’s how we pictured it. It was going to be a family reunion with all the production value of a Spielberg film. Our true celestial home awaited, and this one, unlike my parents’ house, didn’t have three mortgages and a lien from Phil Rizzuto and the Money Store.
Growing up, I was a sprinter, never a marathoner. I ran the sixty-yard dash on our middle school track team. I excel at beginnings and relish the last push toward a finish line, but middles have always been challenging. I run every day for exercise now and I’m not sure I’ve ever broken a twenty-minute mile. The prophecy offered a hop, skip, and a jump to a spectacular finale.
There was never any money exchanged, there was no recruitment, and there was no dress requirement. A few years ago, when that tragic Hale-Bopp cult committed suicide, it was revealed they slept in bunk beds (uncomfortable), ate fast food (bloating), and wore matching ill-fitting jumpsuits (unattractive). I would never have joined a cult that had a restrictive and unflattering dress code.*
We held a party where we all came as ourselves from other lives. I wore a sheath fashioned to resemble garments worn by Meritaten, based on the reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No one blinked an eye as I strolled down the street; it was the 1980s in the West Village, and everybody was dressed as a princess.
There was also an event where I accepted my prophesized Academy Award molded with tinfoil and one of my high school debate trophies. I am eternally grateful that the ceremony predated the Internet and that there is no video footage of my acceptance speech, as that would be more embarrassing than acknowledging that I was FaceTiming with aliens.
When Van Zandt was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1988, we Council members took turns taking care of him, sleeping at his place, mixing up batches of AZT, and accompanying him to doctor appointments. The decline was swift; at that time the HIV virus was sweeping through downtown New York. Before Van Zandt’s health deteriorated so much that he no longer channeled, David told me in no uncertain terms to move to California. He insisted. I was going to land a television series within six months of moving west, and being the kind of father who wants to see his daughter taken care of after he’s gone, he predicted I would meet a tall, slender blond guy and marry him. It’s really a chicken-and-egg question, but I managed to find someone who fit the bill and who, for his own reasons, agreed to marry me the same night we met. Nicholas had made his own Star Trek uniform when growing up in England, so it seemed an awful lot like fate. I didn’t invite my parents or sister to the wedding—we eloped—but I did introduce him to Van Zandt.
Van Zandt died within a few months of my westward move. I was devastated. I’d become totally dependent on his guidance. The group disbanded and we lost touch, but I had a husband to lean on and had scored a TV series, so felt I was still living out the prophecy.
That marriage didn’t last, and when the date for the alien arrival came and went, I barely noticed it. By that time I was so busy with work, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that Los Angeles’s legendary traffic jams render the idea of intergalactic travel moot. Still, I held out the very faintest of hopes that it might still happen one day. Did the date translate differently in their time zone? Delta Epsilon sounded like an awfully far-flung corner of the universe.
When I married my husband of twenty years now, Jeff, he was trying to distance himself from his own quirky family and was a card-carrying member of the clannish comedy world, which I slipped easily into.* A year after we married, our son, Ezra, was born. Prior to the 1960s, children born with his constellation of birth defects died upon birth, and it just didn’t make a lick of sense to me that my son or I, or any other children, had caused this condition through negative thinking or through some karmic debt. Ezra’s health was righted, but his birth swept away my attachment to God and mysticism, and also, as a practical matter, my desire to leave the planet.*
I use the word “cult” to describe this group, because of our deific bonding and the global belief system we adopted, although we don’t fit the accepted definition of a cult. No one was harassed if they wanted to cancel their trip to Delta Epsilon. Van Zandt never trafficked in reverence or encouraged worship of any kind. No fortunes were made or lost based on his predictions, except mine, and by any measure, I came out ahead. No lives were lost, though I do feel a bit wistful about not getting to traverse the Milky Way. I was never going to have to concern myself with long-term care insurance or retirement plans, and it sounded like a glorious adventure. I’m convinced Van Zandt had no ulterior motives; he was a true believer.
My father was also a true believer. More people were harmed by my father’s fantastical dreams of getting rich quick than our close encounter of the imagined kind. I’d never met anyone outside of our family who’d been caught in the undertow of my father’s wake, until a dinner I attended in the early 1990s.
It started as a showmance. An actor and I worked together on an episode of a TV series and fell madly in something or other, and this particular dinner at a fashionable Hollywood eatery was to be my first introduction to one of his intimate friends.
We were spooning our panna cotta when his friend Bobby, a director of independent films and just the kind of dramas I aspired to act in, turned to me and said, “Is your father Harry Gurwitch?” A piercing tone (the kind of thing you hear in movies when a bomb goes off) whooshed through my head and all the sound dropped out in the room. My head was throbbing. I knew by the way he asked that I should say no, but what came out of my mouth was, “Yes.” He told us that when he was just out of film school, he’d directed his first feature and had met with my father at the cavernous Century City office. My father said to purchase a plane ticket and he’d meet him in Cannes, where they’d set up meetings, promote the film, and launch his directing career. Bobby flew to France, but my father never showed.
“That was my first introduction to the shittiness of the film industry,” he said.
“That’s my dad.”
That the actor and I ended up breaking up had nothing to do with this incident, but it might not be a coincidence that I’ve never appeared in one of Bobby’s shows. I asked my dad about this once, but he has no memory of Bobby or his film or the promise he neglected to keep. My father has an uncanny ability to excise the inconvenient.
Really, the biggest tragedy associated with the Council is how appalling it would have been for Princess Meritaten to learn of her incarnation as me. I often dreamed about her life in the palace at Tel el-Amarna, but I hope she was spared the memory of that dinky film festival where I had to sleep on a futon on the floor of my distributor’s damp basement apartment.
“What? A commoner? A mid-list scribe, a bit priestess on the stage, and what is this screen thing? She has no serving staff to help her dress or bathe her? OMSunG, what kind of karmic good deeds must I perform to avoid a lifetime as this Annabelle Gurwitch? What kind of ridiculous name is that, anyway? Well, at least she has cats.”
My father wants to go where there are thin women and thick steaks.
the best of all possible homes
The Tel Aviv Gardens Retirement Home is located in a neighborhood of Miami known as Little Haiti. Many of the residents landed on our shores in small boats during what’s broadly termed the Haitian diaspora. Soon after strongman François Duvalier, known as Pap
a Doc, took power in Haiti, waves of Haitians fled the country and arrived in circumstances not dissimilar to those of my own family. The streets are lined with bodegas where you can purchase candles, herbs, and spiritual baths; carnicerias; and restaurants that serve Creole-style cooking.
My parents are trying to make the most of their waning mobility, but it’s a stretch to imagine them strolling leisurely through this neighborhood, because they’ve never sought out friendships with people of any color other than their own, much less felt comfortable in their company.
My father’s earliest memories of growing up in Prichard in the 1930s include stepping over the bodies of African-Americans who’d been caught out after the curfew, a loathsome prong of the Jim Crow laws, shot, and left for dead on the unpaved streets in front of the family home.
An incident that took place in the early 1970s perfectly encapsulates how ingrained attitudes about race were in our family. My grandmother Rebecca stopped a well-dressed black woman while crossing the street in Atlanta and asked if she could put in a day of work cleaning her home.
“Madam, I am a superintendent in the Atlanta school system.”
“Do you have a sister?” Rebecca inquired.
In Mobile, my mother worked as a social worker with the county government. As the “government lady,” it was her job to deliver assistance checks to the descendants of the Africans who came to the U.S. on the Clotilde, the last slave ship to arrive on American shores, who were living in Plateau, or as it’s also known, Africatown.
In 1860, the Clotilde, a two-masted schooner, set sail from Ghana and headed for the U.S. with approximately one hundred Africans on board, despite the fact that importation of slaves had already been declared illegal fifty years earlier. Mobile holds the dubious distinction of being the port of entry for the Clotilde. Many of my mom’s clients, deeply rooted in West African culture, cooked over open fires and generously shared meals with her. But these weren’t people she’d play bridge with or meet up with for a coffee klatch. When she turned sixty, she got a job at the housing department in Miami, where she worked with people of every background imaginable. Still, she rarely thought to invite them to her home or socialize with them.
Odds are that the majority of the residents at Tel Aviv Gardens are not familiar with the community, so it’s not a surprise to see that the facility is surrounded by high walls.
Driving onto the gated campus, we find ourselves in a pink ghetto. All of the buildings, including a rehab center, a hospital, two residences, a nursing home, and the Alzheimer’s Care Center, are painted shades of pink. Pink is the color that aura readers tell you represents nurturing; a pink skin tone is an indication of healthy circulation or that you were recently on the receiving end of a facial peel; pink is the color Molly Ringwald was the prettiest in when she was a Brat Packer; but since the turn of the last century, pink has also been a color associated with babies. This seems appropriate because of the way age returns you to your youth, but not the youth you might wish for; no, it propels you much further back, to infancy. Pink is most often associated with baby girls, to be precise, which seems fitting as, in keeping with expected life spans, there are more women than men at the Gardens.
My father and I park and walk, slowly and deliberately, as he must do now, toward the residential towers. We pass several geometric statues artfully placed on the grounds, pausing to admire a ten-foot-high ceramic flamingo inlaid with glittering mosaic tiles. The flamingo isn’t the official bird of South Florida, but it is the kitschy mascot.
A plaque lets us know that the bird’s name is Mayim E. Flamingo. “Mayim” is the Hebrew word for “water,” but what does the “E” stand for? “Elder”? We are both stumped.
“Mom will love this,” I say, and my dad nods his head. “Or she won’t,” I say, and my dad nods his head at this as well. In the mid-1980s, Mom happened into a John Waters film festival and for a time, she told everyone who would listen that John Waters was a genius and Pink Flamingos was her favorite movie. She was so obsessed with the actor Harris Milstead, better known by his drag name, Divine, that for years, I’d receive greeting cards featuring an outrageously outfitted Divine with messages like Happy Birthday, Hope it’s Divine!, even when it wasn’t my birthday, and pink flamingo tchotchkes (that’s Yiddish for “junk”) of all sizes and shapes: mugs, pencil holders, figurines, and even a pair of pink plastic lawn flamingos. More recently, her brain has been hijacked by Fox News and she’s taken to repeating things she hears on the network, like, “Gay people shouldn’t have children.” So it’s either good luck or bad luck—one of the lucks—that Water Elder Flamingo is standing watch outside the home.
Palm trees line the driveway, a fountain cools down a plaza in front of the rehab center, and an ancient cypress shades the entryway to the residences. The grounds appear well maintained, with large expanses of grass, but unlike what was pictured on the website, there isn’t an aging marathoner or geriatric lovebirds engaged in a tête-à-tête on a bench. There’s no spry octogenarian and her aide perusing a rose garden—was the older woman winking at the aide? How insouciant of her! There’s no one outside except several nappers nodding off on patio chairs in front of the entrance to the residence.
A couple of snoozers list slightly in their seats. Can’t they put them somewhere we can’t see them? It looks like a tenement. This shouldn’t be the first thing you see. I flash back to the day after we moved into the house that my husband and I have shared for twenty years. The cable guy came while I was out. As I pulled into our driveway, I saw bright blue cables threaded through holes that had been drilled into the white stucco facade. “Can’t they put them somewhere we can’t see them? This shouldn’t be the first thing you see!”
I shouldn’t have yelled this at my husband, and the same words are forming in my head now. What’s wrong with me? Why am I so concerned with appearances?
We enter the building and I’m relieved to see that it’s immaculately clean, brightly lit, and decorated with modern furnishings. It looks like any number of moderately priced chain hotels that I’ve stayed in, except that the hallways are wide enough for a tractor to pass through. The lobby has a list of activities for the week. There is an ice-cream social, bingo, an exercise class, crafts, and a book club. There’s even a cocktail party every Wednesday. It’s the first happy hour I’ve seen that has a start time of three p.m., but most of the residents are in their nineties—some may not live to see five p.m. There are excursions to the local symphony and a performing arts center. This week there are a variety of films: oldies like Paint Your Wagon, Jewish fare like Woman in Gold, and Still Alice, in which Julianne Moore stars as a professor with early-onset dementia, which makes me wonder if any of the staff have actually seen the film and if we should inquire about suicide rates.
My sister appears and swoops in with the kind of manic energy she and I both veer toward when we feel the world sliding out of our control.
“Annabelle, Shula is here.”
“Who?”
“She taught you your haftorah.”*
“I don’t think I remember her.”
“Oh, you will,” she says with a tone that sounds a lot like a threat.
Lisa whisks me into the home’s synagogue, where a woman in a wheelchair waits for us.
“Anne, it’s so good to see you!” Shula says. There was a time when people calling me by my given name bothered me. It also bothered me that for years after I legally changed it to Annabelle, every member of my family added the suffix “-belle” to their name in conversation. I’d pick up the phone and hear, “Sisterbelle, it’s Lisabelle,” or “Hello, it’s your motherbelle.” Now I find it endearing.
“I see all the kids I taught,” she says, bursting with pride. “Everyone comes to see me.”
Everyone is a better person than me. Shula wants to reminisce about Temple Beth Shalom.
“Do you remember when the rabbi
said that Jonathan Spivak and I caused Nettie Goldstein’s heart attack because of our disruptive behavior in Hebrew school?”
“I remember him, but I don’t remember that. Weren’t you the president of your confirmation class?”
“Uh-huh . . .”
I don’t mention that I’m an atheist now, even though I rarely miss a chance to work that into a conversation; it doesn’t seem important. It seems important to politely laugh and look surprised when she begins loading up slices of lemon cake from the Oneg Shabbat (post-services snack tray).
Snacks were served after services at Beth Shalom. As the congregants filed out, you’d hear the sound of purses snapping open. The Hadassah ladies carefully wrapped bread, cookies, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down into paper napkins and secreted them into their handbags. We kids always made fun of this, never stopping to consider how many of them lived through the Depression or that these matrons were the forerunners of the campaign to reduce landfill waste.
Shula doesn’t want to talk about my spiritual failings, she wants to talk about how she’s heard I’m doing so well. I know I am practicing for my future when I look her in the eye, grasp her hands, and affirm that her life had meaning by telling her that any success I’ve had can be traced back to the time I spent with her, and who’s to say that’s not true? With any luck, someone will do this for me one day.
I’m disappointed to learn that she’s only staying at the Gardens until her broken leg heals. It would be so good for my mother to have someone who knows her, even if it’s just tangentially through me, and I’m contemplating breaking her other leg when Lisa spirits me into the dining room.
Wherever You Go, There They Are Page 18