One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  My sister’s death was sudden, out of the blue, and came far too early. I miss her ceaselessly. And in the rare moments when I forget to miss her, it’s simply because I’m not paying attention. The rest of my family misses her in a similar way. She was binding agent, the adhesive, the lover par excellence, and we never were as tightly knit as when she walked among us.

  The loss of my sister changed the way my adulthood turned out. It made me a less trusting person, and it blasted away whatever spiritual core I had at the time. And yet: I experienced a fair amount of success and accomplishment after my sister’s death, and often I have wished that she had been here so that I could have shared it with her and had her perspective on it. Her love and support were things I counted on, and I wish I could talk to her from where I am now about all that has happened since her death. The good and bad, the poignant and funny.

  5. What was her name?

  Meredith Moody

  6. Did she have a profession?

  Photographer, retail salesperson, mother of two.

  7. When/at what age did she die?

  November 1, 1995. Aged thirty-seven. By reason of cardiac arrest.

  8. Where would you meet for lunch? At home? At a restaurant?

  Fishers Island Country Club Snack Bar, Fishers Island, NY, 06390. From 1975 onward, my family summered on Fishers Island, a ridiculous, overwrought, and patrician fantasyland of the WASPy elites of the Northeast, all of them dressed in lime-green shorts and Lacoste with sockless penny loafers. A dreadful place, really. Annihilating and grim. I regret ever having set foot there. But it’s where we spent our summers with my father, and so the legends and stories of the place are numberless, among Moodys. (For example, once we went on a fishing trip, caught nothing, as per usual, but actually managed to catch a lobster trap around the propeller of the boat. We dragged it home and ate the lobsters instead.) Fishers Island was so important to my sister that we scattered her ashes there. The snack bar at the “big club,” as it was known in those days, was hard to love. It was staffed up by college students on weed and foreign exchange students who had no idea what they had gotten themselves into, which was some modern-day equivalent of indentured servitude. The fare was hamburgers and fries, although you can get a salad and a soup there now. The main reason to eat at the “big club” was that the snack bar was right on a beach. Or: the main reason to eat there was that they had a really amazing ice-cream dessert called a “gold brick,” in which the ice cream (usually vanilla) was encased in a chitinous layer of hardened exo-chocolate, a sort of reinforced chocolate exterior. There was also malt involved, and chocolate syrup. The gold brick must have been in the six-hundred-calorie range. A whole childhood was spent eating these confections no matter what else was going on. I think it would be great for my sister and me to have just one more gold brick together.

  9. Would you show up alone?

  I’m sure everyone in my family would like to come to this luncheon, but for the purposes of this questionnaire I’m going to be selfish and say that I’m going by myself.

  10. What emotions do you imagine would be felt on both sides at first seeing each other?

  Here’s what we know about popular culture: we know that in popular culture, the dead family members or deceased honored friends of protagonists invariably come back. They are always resurrected with wisdom from the other side just before a high school dance, or out in front of a baseball stadium, etc. If you watch enough movies, if you drink in enough of this slightly watery popular culture, you could be forgiven for thinking this was inevitable, that your dead sister would return from the other side and give you a hug, the boatman tarrying just behind her. Nevertheless, I have waited now twenty-two years for my sister to come back, other than fleetingly in dreams, to talk again in the easy way of the old times, with her rapturous laughter, and her bounteous care and concern for her parents, siblings, and children. Why, I have often wondered, do I not get to experience this thing that so many people in less fortunate circumstances than mine, namely the somewhat impoverished protagonists of not-very-good films and television programs, do? Why do I still wander around with this ache, as if there is no mitigating force in the universe? My feeling at these moments has often been of envy. Envy of those characters in films, and irritation that death and its finality have been so unrelentingly final in my own life. To see my sister again, for a lunch, even if it were just a snack-bar luncheon, our feet were covered in sand, the sunburn was acute, and it was low tide, and there was no surf to speak of, even under these circumstances, to see her again would be the greatest. If we could just talk through a few things, I would feel so much better about going on with the grief and loss.

  11. Would you embrace?

  Definitely.

  12. What would you both order?

  I think she would probably eat something sensible. You can get a lobster roll there, at the snack bar, which is not sensible at all. It’s expensive. I doubt she would get a lobster roll. She might have grilled cheese, but more likely a salad, and some fries, and a Diet Coke, maybe. While I would have a salad, maybe a corn chowder if available, and some fries. Maybe we’d order a lobster roll in honor of others of our family and pick at it occasionally. And then we’d eat some kind of ice cream afterward. Probably a gold brick.

  13. What would the general mood at the table be?

  Celebration, but colored with the circumstances of our separation twenty-two years ago, and recognition of the wound that this inflicted on her parents and her children, though without blaming her for what was an act of God. I think it would be worth letting her know how much we missed her, how wrecked we were, and what happened to her children since then. That they turned out great, that they are sturdy adults, but that there have been many ups and downs getting there, as is often the case. That all of life is a wobbly parabolic curve, arcing in the direction of grace, and after her death, our own arc has bent toward the type of warmth that she excelled at.

  14. Would you raise questions/issues you’d never expressed while this person was alive?

  I would tell her that I had been concerned about her drinking, and that when she told me, six months or a year before her death, that she was thinking of doing something about her drinking, I didn’t bug her about it, because that is not my way—nobody ever got sober for their sibling—but that I had been worried about some of the decisions she’d made in the later years of her life, and I thought maybe she could have eased the journey a bit if she had pursued sobriety. I would have liked to see the responsible adult she was already becoming without the alcohol.

  15. Would there be laughing? Crying?

  Hard to imagine otherwise.

  16. Bringing this person up-to-date on your life in the interim, how would they respond?

  In a way, it would be more interesting for her to bring me up on her life, by pulling aside the curtain that separates where I am now from where she is. Maybe she could shed light on all of that. To what degree do the dead attend to the travails of the living? Or do they ignore the entire business? Is the self a complete self after the terrestrial period, or is it more a bit of dust in the infinite, a bit of energy (neither created nor destroyed) that unites with the first purpose of the universe? Is consciousness and the linearity of time a thing that is perceptible from a post-biological perspective? And what about ecstasy? Is her ecstasy in the afterlife, an ecstasy that is experiential in the same way that one might experience it in daily life, or is it different? Is the end of bodily decay and the concerns of the body enough for ecstasy to flourish, or does ecstasy require a creator and/or a religious or spiritual space, and/or a decaying body to be activated?

  I would bring this stuff up because it’s embarrassing to talk about oneself all the time. I don’t want my sister on this day to spend all her time listening to my own tales. True, it would be funny to tell her about my all-over-the-place personal life, and how I eventually married the last girlfriend she met of mine, had a child with her and then separated, and t
hen got remarried, had another kid, etc. She, who argued that I would never have a family, might be amused. But more important than a catalog of life events would be the simple joy of being in the company of someone so long gone, and so missed, and for me that joy best expresses itself in wanting to listen. Once my sister asked me what it felt like to make up a short story, and I remember really getting into the minutiae of that question for far longer than was necessary. Like many moments with my sister that I could pursue differently now, in which I more concentrated on feeling lucky about having her around, I feel like I ought to have listened then and I would like to listen now.

  17. Would recriminations be expressed?

  No.

  18. How long would lunch last?

  You are asking about time itself. Does time intrude in a luncheon simply because I, one of the participants, am a time-based creature? Or might it be otherwise because my sister, coming from some other obscurely understood space, outside of time, or from nonlinear, non-Euclidean time, doesn’t need a duration for her meal? Maybe the luncheon doesn’t have a duration because my sister’s effect on things is such as to create a rupture as far as duration goes. In which case the luncheon appears to go on forever, and indeed feels like it goes on forever; is unfolding like a lifetime is unfolding or maybe more, even as it does end at a certain point, perhaps when my sister, having exhausted whatever legacy of feelings are required for her energy to rematerialize, begins to vanish before my eyes, with a solemn or playful or solemn and playful wave, after which time reappears somehow. It’s just a thought.

  19. How would you say goodbye? Tearfully, with relief, with exhaustion?

  Intimacy, and especially the open and honest exchange of feelings among family members, is exhausting. And so one longs for the end of family intimacy, even as one craves it, requires it, in the instants after it goes away. These things are inseparable, the relief, the exhaustion, the longing for the kindness of one’s family. The goodbye is not worth prolonging.

  20. Who would pay?

  We’d charge it to my dad’s account at the country club.

  21. Would the lunch resonate in your mind for very long?

  Definitely.

  22. Would there be things you wish you had said?

  I would leave it all on the table.

  23. In summing up, how was the lunch?

  In a way, the exercise of imagining such a lunch rubs in the pain. Even now, I have to recognize again that no such lunch is going to happen, and that is the way of it, until my time is short here, too. That means the lunch, as a fictional exercise, was great, and funny, but it also means that the exercise makes clear how consistently family members no longer living make themselves felt in life, in a ghostly, almost imperceptible way. They really are the absence that is present. They really are a manifestation of the passage of time while nonetheless outside of time. I miss my sister, that is, and you can’t bring her back, and nor can I, and the memory of her is a place where she is stuck, and I am, too.

  Rick Moody is the author of six novels—including The Ice Storm and, most recently, Hotels of North America—three collections of stories, a memoir, and a volume of essays on music. He writes about music online regularly at the Rumpus, and also writes the column “Rick Moody, Life Coach” at Lit Hub. He’s at work on a new memoir.

  — 35 —

  “I plan to swear a lot at our lunch.”

  DAHLIA LITHWICK (ACQUAINTANCE) AND PAUL NEWMAN

  Lunch would happen, of course, at a long table in the dining hall, at the original Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut. It’s a massive red building at the heart of the camp Newman founded in 1988, for seriously ill children. He wanted the camp to have a Wild West theme; wanted sick kids to have a non-hospital place to, in his words, “raise a little hell.” Our lunch would happen with the campers piled next to him on the long benches—some from this world, who survived their cancer and sickle cell anemia, and a few from the world currently housing Paul Newman; kids still loud, still bald, but no longer in pain.

  He would just materialize into his old laughing self, on the bench across from me, and reach for the Newman’s Own salad dressing—ubiquitous on the camp tables, along with the pasta sauce and the lemonade—and make a joke about how it’s healthier now than it was in the nineties . . .

  The first time I met Paul Newman, my co-author, Larry Berger, and I were trying to scrape money together to write a book about the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, and it was 1990. I was just a few months out of college, Larry and I had been doing creative writing with the campers over the summers, it all seemed like a good book idea—kids, poems, illness, campfires—and a board member from the camp wrangled a dinner to find us some funding, and there, suddenly materialized at the dinner, was Paul Newman. The first time I saw him he was in the kitchen of the host of that dinner, making his own salad dressing from scratch.

  Newman (and nobody called him anything but “Newman” in my experience) wrote a check to fund the first stage of the book project on the spot. Later, he wrote the foreword to the book, something he did painstakingly and with tremendous care, because he kept saying he wasn’t a good writer, except he really was. He wrote the chapter by listening, listening, listening and then creating something deeper than mere sparkly words. I just watched and learned as he wrote that foreword like he made vinaigrette; like he was inventing the form for the first time.

  Newman later helped us promote the book, with a TV hit and radio interviews and lots of time with reporters who wanted to talk about movies and not his camp or his campers.

  I worked at Newman’s camp for four summers. At camp, none of the children knew who Paul Newman was when he visited, which is, I suspect, why he visited so often. I worked on the book for a year. One time I picked him up to visit a sick camper in the hospital and he wouldn’t let me drive because, he said, I drove like a Canadian, trying to ingratiate myself to the mystifying world of high-speed vehicles. Newman was, after all, a seasoned race car driver. I was twenty-two and in possession at that time of my brother’s sweet red Toyota MR2 and drove politely and carefully, eager to let anyone pass and merge as needed. The way I drove that car made Newman so very sad for me. This is a memory I have managed to repress.

  When Newman died, the obituary I wrote for Slate was mostly about how for him, Hollywood fame was purely transactional: He seemed to have used everything he’d ever achieved as a celebrity as a lever to do good things for others. He cared more about kids, and the environment, and addiction, and healthy food, and peace, and dialogue, than some of the people who actually did that work professionally. And in this modern world of the celebrity-millionaire-activist-philanthropist, we forget how much he invented that form as well. Long before it was understood that every actor had a cause and a platform, he had both. And I have no memory of grandiosity. I think he just tended to think, “Hey, I can make some calls, and good people will fall in,” and good people always fell in. He tended to view all of it—the money, the success, the adulation—as a freakish accident that required paying forward. The philanthropy felt like a means of material unburdening, not an imposition of morality on an immoral world.

  I’d open my miracle lunch by asking him how he’d managed to raise money for good causes with minimal fanfare and zero ego. I would glug down camp lemonade (Newman’s) and ignore the small floating bug in it and ask how someone so enormous had led such a contained life. People would follow Newman on any new philanthropic venture because he was always convinced it would be easy. If there was a glitch in any plan, he’d find a workaround that would also save the wildlife and also foster international discourse. All the humanitarian and ecological benefits that followed in the slipstream of his ventures were just more happy accidents. He believed he had simply been lucky, and he shrugged off the possibility that he had earned a thing by hard work. Or something called talent. And that, too, is a rarity, in the modern age of celebrity-philanthropist. I would ask him how he’d come to feel so lucky, desp
ite personal tragedies, so lucky that the world handed him luck.

  One time Newman called me very early in the morning to talk about the foreword for the book. At this point I had been on camp staff for four years, and he woke me from a deep, drooling sleep. I swore like a trucker before I realized it was really Paul Newman on the phone. Eventually, I also repressed this hideous memory. He loved that story. I plan to swear a lot at our lunch.

  Here’s the thing I haven’t yet communicated: I only actually hung out with the man perhaps ten to fifteen times, but he was always ducking out from whatever people expected him to be, and always smiling at it. When I think about our lunch now, years after he is gone, in my head, I am mostly just grieving aloud at him about how everything he and I had believed about the world is upside down now. I am so famished for the optimism and belief that the world is capable of repair that I learned from him, that I would lunch on an IV drip of hope alone. In my head I am desperate to understand how the worldview I learned at his camp and his charities—that you make lemonade and pasta sauce, then give the money away, and the world gets better—went so thoroughly upside down in two decades.

  The detailed lunches I recall with Newman happened at the dining hall in the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. He’d slide in quietly at a long table full of kids who were, in some cases, terribly ill, and he’d just be a guy with white hair they’d never heard of. He’d engage the kid sitting next to him in a lengthy conversation, usually about the food or fishing. The staff would try not to break out in flop sweats. I would for sure expect to have a whole bunch of kids in wigs and prosthetic arms at this lunch. That would make it hard to talk. But he’d be happier. I think wherever he is, the kids he built a home for at his camps are whole.

  Another thing about Newman? He’d come to camp and grab a few kids and take them out on a perfectly safe boat on a fully stocked lake and they would fish and the counselors would be frantic because they were all out there so long baking in the sun, and maybe a kid missed his meds, but they’d all come back laughing, and the kid would be better and happier all summer, and Newman would go back to the real world. Often the kid had no idea who the guy on the boat even was. But you always suspected Newman believed camp was actually the real world for these kids. I think that was why he loved it there. I mostly want to ask him whether the place he is now is more like camp or more like Hollywood. I’m fairly certain there are long tables with ranch dressing and lemonade and very little silicone or Instagram.